Turning “I dos” into “you can’ts”
LOS ANGELES
There is 1978 footage of a stricken Feinstein in the opening minutes of the new Gus Van Sant biopic of Harvey Milk, her colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the first openly gay elected official in American narration. (Sean Penn soars as Milk.)
“I was the one who found his body,” the California senator told me last week, en course from the airport to her San Francisco home. “To get a pulse, I constrain my finger in a bullet hole. It was a terrible, terrible time in the incorporated town’session history.”
The movie, chronicling the rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces in the ’70s to prevent discrimination against gays, is opening amid a rancorous California fight of gay activists against church-backed forces to prevent discrimination against gays.
Milk was gunned down by Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and Feinstein. White, an Irish Catholic former policeman and Vietnam vet, opposed Milk’session equal-rights initiatives on account of gays. He resigned and forthwith wanted his seat back, a move Milk helped counsel the mayor, George Moscone, to reject. White climbed through a City Hall basement window with a loaded fire-arm and shot down Moscone and at another time Milk. (In the infamous “Twinkie defense,” White argued that junk food had stressed him out.)
I asked Feinstein, who became mayor after the tragedy, if she would see the movie.
“It’s same painful against me,” she replied. “It took me seven years before I could sit in George Moscone’s chair. It took me a long time to speak about it. I was merely recently practical to talk well-nigh it.”
This month, gays who supported Barack Obama had the bittersweet continued of inasmuch as more of the blackey and Latino voters who surged to the polls to vote Democratic also vote for Proposition 8, which turned bright “I dos” into “You can’ts.” About 20,000 lively couples had exchanged vows before Proposition 8 passed, backed by a coalition that included Mormon and Catholic opponents.
Now that donor information have power to be found online, gay activists have called for boycotts of anyone who contributed to the law’s over, from businesses small (El Coyote restaurant in L.A., where Sharon Tate had her last meal and Fabio and George Clooney nearly came to blows) to large (ski resorts and Park City, Utah, theaters where Sundance movies are shown).
Feinstein felt sure that gays who have been married in the state since June are still matrimonial. “You can’t redact it,” she said. “You can’t blot it out. It’sitting so intrinsic to the Constitution that you cannot remove it by a promised of the population.”
Jerry Brown, the California attorney general who is also featured in the archival reels in “Milk” from his days as governor, agreed: “I believe those are sufficient,” he told me, statement that he will argue in the appeal near the front of the state Supreme Court that there cannot be “a retroactive invalidation of these marital contracts.”
Brown harked back to the thwart of the Milk-era Proposition 6, which sought to root out gay teachers from California public schools. (”If it were equitable that children imitated their teachers, we’d have a hell of a lot more nuns running around,” Milk says in the movie.)
“Any existence in this world you perceive an consummation that has such deep feelings coupled to it and you frame it in terms of a political first step,” Brown said, “you drain out more of the anger and convert it to an end that people have power to be nearly equal in a more reasonable, open-minded way.”
Feinstein agreed: “I purpose as more and more people have gay friends, gay associations, see gay heroism, that their views change.”
The gays were outfoxed by their opponents. In one as well as the other Proposition 6 in 1978 and this year’session Proposition 8, the specter of children core converted to a gay orientation was raised. Feinstein reported the TV ad of Proposition 8 supporters insinuating that “gay marriage would be strained in school really hurt.” (”I can marry a princess,” a pigtailed girl told her mom in the ad.)
“I think people are beginning to look at it differently; I know it’s happened for me,” Feinstein said of gay marriage. “I started out not supporting it. The longer I’ve lived, the greater degree of I’ve seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring to a the breath of life. Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care now have good solid homes and are brought up learning the difference between right and inapposite. It’session a very positive thing.”
I e-mailed Larry Kramer, the leading activist for gay rights in the era that followed Milk’sitting, to get his interpret on Proposition 8. (In 1983, I interviewed Kramer about the new scourge of AIDS, and he learned me a list from a green notebook of 37 friends who had died.)
“DON’T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS?” he e-mailed back, blessedly cantankerous. “I AM ASHAMED OF YOU THAT YOU HAD TO ASK ME THAT QUESTION.”
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