Ze Harvey Milk Day

Michael Sam just became the first openly gay football player to be drafted in the NFL and he is getting media attention whose questions are seldom related to his play skills, game knowledge, and sporting attitude. It is his sexual orientation that gets the attention.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician elected into public office in the U.S. There are 45 assassinated American politicians in the history of the nation by 2010, elected or appointed to office, or were candidates for elected office. Mayor George Mascone and Board of Supervisors’ member Harvey Milk in San Francisco were gunned down by Dan White in 1978, the latter also a member of the board who earlier resigned in protest but wanted to be reinstated. When the mayor refused, White pulled the trigger, and went out the door to the hallway where he bumped into board member Milk. White took Milk to another room and pumped another five lead trajectories into his body.

The story retracing Milk’s life featuring Sean Penn in an award-winning feature film Milk encouraged in 2009 then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a state legislature law that he vetoed the year before in declaring a statewide Harvey Milk Day, now of special significance for public schools and the city of San Francisco, an avant garde and cutting edge city of social change and radical behavior.

I use “ze” for what I routinely write as “s/he” to denote a third person singular pronoun, not to deny gender difference but to allow those who prefer a designation on psychology rather than biology their own pronoun. (Not original to me, “ze” word was started and promoted by a high school student who noticed that many languages do not have gender distinctions.) I am no expert on the world refereed to as the “third kind” but I am no stranger to it either, and though, I, too, sometimes mirror reflexively the homophobic social milieu of my upbringing, I tend to be more sensitive and responsive to their downtrodden plight in our still prejudiced society.

Two score years before this visit to the city by the Bay I was introduced to the North Beach district of the city by a bisexual guardian who started my education on the grey side of the sexual divide. A maritime sailor who waited on our ocean liner table when I first crossed the Pacific, he had been to Polynesia and had a life-turning jolt among the Fa’afafine, biological sons deliberately raised as females. I saw this in Samoa, Tonga, and Hawai’i, not only among families who only had boys, but also as a social acceptance of males who felt, thought, and acted as females. (The regions’ challenge was in dealing with females who acted similarly as males, or preferred the intimacy of their “own kind”!)

It was in the Bay area where I learned of matinee idol Rock Hudson who managed to make a woman out of tomboyish Doris Day in the screen but, like midnight-voiced Johnny Mathis, preferred pillow talk with his own bio-gender, frequenting dives along Geary Street that were illegal but tolerated in the mid-’60s! But all these then were kept hush-hush, as they were routinely cop-busted when a moralist voice among the populace is raised.

Not in 2010. Four years ago, I bunked for a week at an old colleague’s apartment in the Castro District of San Francisco, where Harvey Milk opened his camera shop with his partner, now home of the GLBT, etc., community. Of great creativity in film and the visual art, my host was a sonny-come-lately emergent from the closet on his sexual orientation, sharply intolerant against those who made fun, to say the least, of the third gender. The reflex is understandable. He grew up in a foothill of the Appalachia where the distinction between genders is kept sharp and any dissenting voice is best muted.

Anyway, nothing in Castro District was out of the ordinary. The shops, the bars, and the grocery stores appeared like that in any Main Street, USA save the community had and has a high and active “third kind” population who did not, nor does it still, take too kindly to being discriminated in any form because of sexual orientation.

A crude joke is that the medical profession was lucky that I did not turn out to be an M.D. since I would have been a disastrous gynecologist! Not too accurate, the same bias is now leveled against Michael Sam as he joins a high-contact male sport. My photographer brother has always been partial to Club Meds, though he does not covertly click his camera on unwary sunbathers, but the spirit of Club Med has come to the NFL shower rooms. It may finally confirm what many head shrinks have long expressed: that the gender of any one is ultimately not what is between the legs but in what is between the temples in the cranium of the mind!

That’s where the gay (the adjective, not the noun) ambivalence of the day lies. We shan’t remember Harvey Milk as a human being but as an assertive gay rights political activist. Not that important. At least he would not countenance anyone who refused him full membership in the human race where he rightly and proudly belonged.