Will Harris on an over-looked period of history
There’s a viral doing the rounds at the moment. It’s called The Gay Rights Movement and it purports to be a potted history of gay rights from the 1950s – when homosexuality was classed as a mental illness and everything including the moral code was served up in black and white – right through to the present day.
As virals go, it’s pretty good. Creator Ryan James Yezak, a film maker by trade, knows exactly which buttons to push. Gay men are strapped down for aversion therapy sessions. Suits grip the sides of podiums and say things like, ‘If we catch you with a homosexual, your parents are going to know about it first’. Charlize Theron pops up in an inexplicable yet heartfelt cameo, and Lady Gaga over-compensates for being juxtaposed against Martin Luther King by punching the air and shouting a lot.
“But look again and you may notice something missing.That something is the 1980s.”
Large chunks of the ‘90s too. It’s as if between the death of Harvey Milk and the birth of the Clinton administration, the gay rights movement ceased to exist altogether. This is simply not true. The extraordinary sea change the western world has seen with regards to gay rights over the last ten years would not have happened had it not been for thousands of dedicated campaigners quietly pushing, for decades in some cases, against the tide.
Where, for example, are the Stonewall riots, singled out by many as the moment the gay rights movement as we know it was formed? Why no footage of the Gay Liberation Front, or its rambunctious New Yorker offspring Queer Nation? Where, for that matter, is the AIDS epidemic, a period when the LGBT community faced some of its greatest challenges?
Hard as it is to believe, the gay rights movement did not spring, fully formed, from the head of Ellen DeGeneres. The civil liberties LGBT people have today were born through years of painful labour, delivered by a rag-tag army of street kids, hippies, dissidents and drag queens who organised meetings, launched newspapers, lobbied politicians, marched, picketed, and frequently got themselves arrested for the right to love who they wanted to love.
It is not hard to understand why Yezak has jumped prematurely to the ‘money shot’. It is money he needs; $50,000 of it, crowd-sourced to finance a planned documentary. But by ruthlessly excising the grass roots activism that helped win us the rights we have today, the picture he paints is flawed, incomplete. Even worse, the message it sends out to younger generations of gay men and women is one of complacency; that those in authority can be trusted to keep pushing the envelope for us. In reality, however far we’ve come over the last half century, some of them will always need a little push themselves.
The gay rights movement was never dead since the times of Harvey Milk(who was a friend of mine) and that era. I was involved and seen the progress made. Yes, it moved at a snails pace… but no one had to remain in their closets. There has been a steady progress at many levels. Sadly, too many religious groups have tried to stop that progress in non-religious forums such as public schools. I have to admit, that the movie “MILK” introduced Harvey and that era to millions of people, young and old, gay and straight, here in America and around the world. There is still a long way to go to get equal rights for gays, but looking back the fight has been worth it… and until we obtain equal rights… the fight will never be over. I recommend a great web-site called http://www.thecastro.net
Unlike the “Milk” movie, it is not a recreation, but actual images and stories from the early San Francisco Gay Rights Movement… look for my images there,too.