It's 1978: Do you know what your children are?

[bcholmes]

the_siobhan and I saw Milk last night. Afterward, we were talking about our different perceptions of queer activism of that time frame. In 1978 in Sarnia, I had very little exposure to queer activism. Sio, having grown up in Toronto (which has a visible queer community), could cite a number of LGBT-related activities.

I was 12 in 1978, and didn't tend to have much exposure to "the news". So maybe it was happening, and I missed it. Mind you, the Iran hostage crisis from a year later was very visible to me, and the Polish Solidarity strikes from 1980 stick in my mind (although I didn't really understand what was going on, it was front page news for a while).

I thought that Sean Penn's Oscar (for Mystic River) was undeserved. (I was rooting for Ben Kingsley, whose performance in House of Sand and Fog was amazing, but I would have been happy with Johnny Depp or Bill Murray). But Penn's Milk is an Oscar-worthy performance.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. I was 26 in San Francisco, and the edge of my world was also a different edge of Harvey Milk's. So the movie was almost like a walk in history.

abostick59, wordweaverlynn and I saw Frost/Nixon yesterday and one of the threads running through my brain throughout the entire (excellent) movie was that while the interviews (which I barely remember) were happening, Harvey Milk was making his final, and first successful, run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

I agree; I'd love to see Penn get the Oscar for this one.

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

I was not much older (I turned 16 that year), but stuck in the outback known as Alamogordo, NM - little exposure to queer activism; little exposure to it on the news, even; no visible queer community - little wonder I didn't know. Or that it took me until 1993 to figure out I was part of the community, or that there even *was* a community.

[rosefox]

I was born in 1978, so the movie had rather a different impact for me. I was thinking about how history repeats itself in some ways; watching them color in those counties as the Prop 6 results came in was tremendously reminiscent of sitting on a friend's couch in Los Angeles as the Prop 8 results came in. The message I walked away with was twofold: Anyone sufficiently pissed off can be an activist, and the road to success is paved with a lot of failures. I knew those things, but it's good to have such concrete reminders.

Everyone I know who has seen Milk has said something about Sean Penn winning an Oscar for it. I really hope he does. I don't tend to care very much about such things, but I'll cheer for any movie that gets the stuffy, mainstream Academy to remember that queer people exist. Hilary Swank managed it. I think Penn can too.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

I remember it being reported and the later Twinkie defence.

I was 18 in Sarnia in 1978 and almost all of what I knew about gay life came from SF so I was pretty neutral.

What the movie "Milk", which has yet to come to Sarnia, taught me was that Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person elected to public office. I had not assumed he was first when I heard he had been killed. I guess at the time I thought there were other openly gay people in office.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Hm. That's an interesting data point.

I took a high-school law class in 1982/83, and we discussed the Twinkie defence in that class, but there was really no discussion about who Milk was.

[deepforestowl.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1978....

[kat-chan.livejournal.com]

I was about 6 or, maybe 7, at the time of the events in the film. I vaguely remember when Milk was killed, and not really knowing what the importance was. But I was growing up in the hills of Connecticut, and didn't really have any exposure to who gay people were or anything like that. I do want to see this movie, though.