That is one of the things that I found rewarding about what I’ve seen so far. It is very inclusive and that unfortunately, hasn’t always been the case. No, it hasn’t always been the case. There was criticism around Milk for being so “gay white male.” I also knew that I needed to tackle the fact that the gay movement in the Castro in the ‘70s was very racist and that gay men and lesbians did not work together. I was excited to finally tell the story of how we became LGBT. How we came to understand the necessity of working together and how we became so diverse, is all there. You see LGBT people fighting for our combined rights, but you also see how we fought each other along the
way. I think that’s an important lesson for young activists to learn as they enter this fight—to expect not only to get heat from the people you perceive as your opposition—but also from your best friends and heroes. We’re all feeling our way through this, it’s all new ground and people aren’t likely to agree all the time. The LGBT movement is incredibly diverse and it was only right to show it that way. It took about a year to decide who to portray, because we wanted them all to be true stories. But, it was not impossible, clearly, to find that diverse group. The LGBT people who built those makeshift families in the early ‘70s and then follow them from then until today.
It’s a way to show people who may not know, how much of a fight it was and what was sacrificed to get us here. I say that not because I think that the younger kids aren’t paying attention, I say it because there hasn’t been enough information out there for them. That is due partially to the fact that so many of the generation who would impart that information on to them—those that would have mentored—are dead. The AIDS crisis left a deep void in that process. For many reasons, it is true that LGBT activism
and our history have not been passed down to those who so desperately need to know it, so they can draw power from it. We lost our forefathers, those who fought so hard for us because of a plague. But, I believe too, that unlike almost every other minority, we are born “behind enemy lines.” We aren’t born into gay families for the most part, so our parents don’t know our history and aren’t passing down the steely resolve to survive as a minority, we must find that outside ourselves. It’s something many other minorities benefit from, because they are born to parents who understand the struggle.
FEBRUARY 2017 | RAGE monthly 31
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