Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

Richard Rosendall has a column in Metro Weekly that looks at the movie Milk and ideas that modern day activists need to perhaps again re-focus upon in order to change the debate on gay rights. We need to keep in mind that our Christianist and Mormon enemies will never willing give us any rights and that the key to winning is to win over the undecided middle, many of whom may not even know that they have gays that touch their lives. In this area, with DADT and far too many LGBT individuals who prefer to go to their discrete dinner parties and less than visible fund raisers, it is particularly difficult to find people who by their own lives will work to dispel the negative stereotypes that James Dobson, Peter LaBarbera and other professional haters work to generate. Here are some highlights from the Metro Weekly column:

*

If you freeze-frame the Milk movie trailer on YouTube, you can see the ''1051'' atop the streetcar used in a scene portraying an angry demonstration. The car from San Francisco's Municipal Railway (''Muni'') is now a ''moving museum'' dedicated to Harvey Milk, with informational panels on Milk's career. In a larger sense, we have much to learn from Milk and other gay rights pioneers -- not just how to fight for ourselves, but how to change the terms of the debate.

*

The film shows Milk (in an extraordinary portrayal by Sean Penn) quoting Glinda the Good Witch: ''Come out, come out, wherever you are!'' Milk refused to accept the more closeted approach favored by David Goodstein of The Advocate. He understood that gaining power required public engagement. In contrast to this year's unsuccessful ''No on 8'' campaign, Milk debated John Briggs, sponsor of 1978's Proposition 6, which would have banned gay people and their supporters from working in public schools. Briggs lost.

*

Professionalizing the movement and hiring experts is fine and necessary to compete with well-funded adversaries, but we must keep in mind what pioneers like Milk and Kameny understood decades ago: that we are the authorities on ourselves. If we win establishment access but forget why we sought it, the greater movement is reduced to personal ambition.It's not enough to find the right messaging to reach particular demographics. We must make personal connections to ensure that voters know individual GLBT people. After losing an expert-guided initiative battle that cost us $40 million, perhaps it's time to take fresh inspiration from our forebears in claiming our fundamental American right to ''the pursuit of happiness'' and rebuking fundamentalists who invoke sectarian dogma to deny us this right that they take for granted.

*

For my own part, I will continue to live my life openly and try to set an image at odds with those fostered by our enemies. I hope more and more LGBT residents of Hampton Roads and Virginia as a whole will do the same. It is far more difficult to vote against people that one knows.