Knowing Our History

[Shana A]

Knowing Our History
Filed by: Michael Crawford
January 4, 2009 10:00 AM

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/01/knowing_our_history.php

An intense discussion is being played out over the film Milk and whether or not it offers a sanitized version of Harvey Milk's life and gay movement history.

In the Huffington Post Nancy Goldstein says:

    Was Van Sant afraid that audiences wouldn't be sympathetic if 70s-era gay activists were people who suffered, swore, fought back, and ->-bleeped-<-ed like they meant it? If the street kids actually looked like dirty, starving, broke-ass teen hustlers?

    Gay history -- unedited -- is ugly, angry, and violent. It's police dragging us out of cellar bars and down to the station to gang ->-bleeped-<- the femmes and face-rape the butches, queens, and ->-bleeped-<-s. It's military witch hunts; suicides and "experimental therapies," from lobotomies and electro-shock to Christian boot camps. It's Stonewall, where we showered raiding police with bottles, locked them in the bar, and set it afire. It's ACT UP and chaining ourselves to pharmaceutical companies' fences to protest AIDS drugs price gouging.

[tekla]

I thought it was unfair to Dan White also.  It painted him as a homophobe, when that was not the issue at all.  But hey, its a movie.