Harvey Milk Postage Stamp

Getting one's image on a postage stamp is, I reckon, a bit like the Nobel Prize.  Whenever I hear about someone being honored with one or the other, I have one of two responses:  "What were they thinking?" or
"What took them so long?"

I had the first response when Obama got the Peace Prize.  (For that matter, I was even more perplexed when Henry Kissinger got it.)  But I had the latter reaction today, upon finding out that the US Postal Service is issuing a stamp with Harvey Milk's image. 

As many of you know, he was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States.  His career was tragically cut short--along with that of his boss, then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone-- by Dan White, who had recently resigned from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, on which Milk served at the time White shot him.

A number of motives have been ascribed to White.  The one with the most empirical evidence is that White, a former San Francisco police officer and firefighter and a Vietnam veteran, represented a conservative district on the southeastern edge of the city.  Residents there were said to be resentful toward the city's growing homosexual community whom, of course, they--and probably White himself--saw embodied in Milk.

Another plausible explanation--implied in the 2008 film in which Sean Penn played Milk--is that White was a closeted homosexual who was jealous and resentful of the accomplishments and accolades that came Milk's way.

Whatever the explanation, I'm glad to see Harvey Milk so honored.  Even though his political career spanned only a few years, his work gained a lot of momentum.  I wish that he could have lived to see--and perhaps partake--of some of the fruit it is just starting to bear.

Why Anti-Discrimination Laws In San Antonio Matter

In Milk, a gay teenager calls on the film's eponymous subject--Harvey Milk--for advice. He's isolated in a small town in Minnesota. This young man asks Milk--the first openly gay elected offficial in the US--what he should do.

"Get on a bus and go to any really big city," Milk counsels the young man.  What Milk doesn't--can't--know is that the boy can't walk.

At least there's a happy ending to that story within the film:  A few months later, the young man calls Milk to tell him that he's in Los Angeles with a new-found circle of gay friends. 

At that time--in the 1970's--it seemed that every young LGBT person wanted to move to L.A., San Francisco or New York--or, perhaps, Miami.  Some gay men I knew at the time--the first I would ever know--also mentioned Minneapolis as a "gay friendly" city.  Ironically, the young man in the film didn't move to St. Paul's "twin" city--which, I would think, is much closer than L.A. to his home town.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of that as I read an article someone passed on to me.  I never would have thought of San Antonio--or, for that matter, any place in Texas--as places for enlightened thinking about law and social policy related to LGBT people.  (I'll concede that I've never been to SA, and that my experience of Texas is limited to Houston and Galveston.)  But the good folks of San Antonio not only passed a truly progressive (even by SF or LA standards) anti-discrimination ordinance in September.  The best thing about the law, though, is the process that led up to it.  

That the battle to enact such an ordinance began after other cities adopted, or were in the process of adopting, anti-discrimination legislation may have been a blessing:  From the outset, the law contained language that protected gender identity and expression as well as sexual orientation.  Here in New York, it took more than two decades to get gender identity and expression included in non-discrimination laws that already covered sexual orientation as well as race and ethnicity.  Other jurisdictions had laws that protected racial or ethnic discrimination but endured protracted battles over whether or not to protect LGBT folk.

From reading the article, and doing some other research, I have learned that San Antonio may actually be more left-leaning than I'd realized.  Even so, I think the value of such a city passing such a broad anti-discrimination law is immense.  After all, it's in Texas, which much of the rest of the country--and the world--views as more prototypically American than, say, New York or California