Milk and ... Twinkies?

Yesterday was World Aids Day. I wish I had posted this in a more timely fashion. I'm also not quite sure this is going to come together the way I want it to so please excuse the fractal nature of this post.

On Thanksgiving, a day of mythology itself, I awoke and began the tradition of making not-so-great mushrooms stuffed with Polly o mozzarella and Ritz crackers while listening to Michael Pollan speak rather calmly about the country petitioning him to the Office of Secratary of Agriculture. Alive with my contradictions I chopped, I mixed, I stuffed. I can hardly focus in silence needing some other thing to nudge my brain into the desired direction. The Pollan rerun on NPR ended and Brian Lehrer turned his voice to something far less engaging so I turned the radio off. I thought a bit about cheap food as I crushed and sprinkled the Ritz over my cheese capped friends before the quiet in the empty apartment froze my knife mid celery like a sword in the stone.

Shuffling through Netflix discs I found the only one I hadn't watched yet was called "The Times of Harvey Milk." A gay documentary. It seems I had a moment when first learning to "flix" where I didn't quite know how to navigate their tricky suggestion boxes and ordered up two weeks worth of gay docu-dramas including such classics as Lesbians of Beunos Aires and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

So on goes Harvey Milk. I had seen his name in the New York Times entertainment section and also new about the school in Manhattan named after him but aside from that I didn't know much. The opening scene is the press conference in which they announce his death and someone says "Jesus Christ" they way people do only when they experience great pain and I trade cooking for concentration. An hour later I'm sitting on the couch still clutching the spatula and, well, tearing up.

The documentary is great because Harvey Milk was great. Enigmatic and whip smart the man who came out at forty to become the first openly gay elected official encouraged every gay person to come out so as to ease the suffering of living a life in fear.

Harvey Milk and Mayor George Mescone were shot in the City Town Hall of San Francisco by Dan White on November 27, 1978. In his 11 months as City Supervisor Milk passed the first gay rights ordinance in San Francisco and among many other things made sure teachers couldn't get fired for being gay.

Dan White was Milk's conservative contemporary on the board of city supervisors. He was caught and charged with murder but got off with voluntary manslaughter and was released in five years. His defense? Depression. His proof? He ate lots of Twinkies.

There is nothing trivial in this story but there is tragic comedy. Milk was a great man and leader. Cheap food played a role in his killers defense. It seems like a stretch but it is history. But then it seems like a stretch that anyone would eat A foamy, fuzzy, sickly sweet Hostess. David White killed himself a few years after being released from prison.

In one of the most heartbreaking moments in the film is a blurry eyed friend speaking of Harvey Milk asking all gay people to come out. He ends by looking into the camera and saying in a way that makes you feel as though he is standing in front of you, "Imagine how many more people would have lived through AIDS if Harvey Milk was still alive."