Notes & Queeries: Yes I Am

Sometimes it seems as though the only LGBT stories in the media are coming-out stories, and after writing about coming-out for what seems like the thousandth time, it can become a bit tedious. That’s why Milk was such an inspiration to me. The film wasn’t about coming out, and yet it showed me exactly why it is still so important.

As Harvey Milk argued in the film — and in real life — coming out is the way that we will make this LGBT movement a human one. When straight folks personally know gay people, they are less likely to discriminate against us.

I knew the bare bones of Milk’s story, but the movie brought it home to me. You know the feeling: When you are totally surrounded by the world in a movie or TV show or book, and there’s nothing between you and the story.

In Milk, the hard facts of history became a three-dimensional, lived-in world. Like any queer resident of San Francisco, I’m familiar with the Castro District, but seeing it on screen and dressed up in the 1970s gave me the feeling you get when looking at photos of a good friend in her youth. It’s a kind of double perspective: Here’s your friend now, and though time has changed her features, you can still recognize the younger person she was, there, in those photos.

Seeing the Castro peopled with Harvey Milk and his cohorts was both strange and familiar. His shop, Castro Camera, closed long before I ever came to San Francisco, but I have walked down the block it was on countless times. The corner where Milk stood on his soap box and exhorted others to join his cause is different now — it’s dominated by a Diesel store — but I recognized it with a lurch in my stomach. Oh, I thought. Here we are.

I was at first startled by how young Milk’s supporters were, and yet I shouldn’t have been. They possessed the same youthful passion that lighted up the feminist movement and the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most surprising element of Milk’s story is that he didn’t run for office until he was 43 years old.

Several critics have noted the parallels that Milk has to this fall’s heartbreaking loss of the right for same-sex couples to marry in California. But I think the clearest parallel might be the rise of a generation of young gay rights activists.

Right now we are at a moment in our struggle for equality where youthful voices and leadership are breaking through the ranks of what has become a somewhat entrenched LGBT movement. For everyone who has been involved in the post-Prop. 8 activism, Milk must surely be an inspiration and an eye-opener: We can do it.

The movie also made me feel a bit ashamed at how I have grumbled over having to write — again — about someone coming out. It’s understandable, of course, that those of us who have already come out might be more interested in what happens after coming out. But living in the bubble of San Francisco — or the online bubble of AfterEllen.com — allows us to forget that if we want to have the same rights that straight people have, we have to connect with straight people.

The only way to do that is to come out — all of us — so that they can see that LGBT people fill every category of human being. Every shape, every size, every age, every color — just like them.

That’s why Wanda Sykes’ recent coming out has been so meaningful. There has been a dearth of out lesbians of color — or out LGBT people of color, period — and we need more of them. We exist, too.

When Sykes was a guest on The Tonight Show on Dec. 10th, she told Jay Leno that she hadn’t planned to come out at that Las Vegas gay rights rally in November. But “once I got there in front of all these people … I felt like I had to say something,” she said.

She explained that she had been with her partner for a long time, and though she was out in her comedy, she hadn’t felt the need to speak publicly about her private life until Prop. 8 took away her rights to be like everyone else.