The Times of Harvey Milk (1984 Documentary)

Harvey Milk was too good to be true, too unaffected as a debater, too approving of silliness, too capable of laughing at himself, too serious about equality, too angry about inequality, to endure on this plain of existence as a leader. Time has thanked his bravery in running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and becoming California's first openly gay public official. Why was that so brave? Because that conquest may well have been at his own peril.

Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning documentary illustrates the life and death of not only Milk but odd one out Mayor George Moscone, who both were killed by Dan White, one of Milk's fellow supervisors. It also depicts the political and social atmosphere in San Francisco, which throughout the 1960s and '70s began to be a magnet for emergent quantities of gays owing to its customarily accommodating viewpoint. Milk was one of them, and in old photographs we see him in his beatnik days before he ultimately shaved and opened a camera store in the Castro District. It was from Castro that Milk ran for office and was beaten three times before at long last winning in the same election that placed the first man of Chinese extraction, the first black woman, and the first declared feminist on the board. Milk was a virtuoso self- promoter, and this Harvey Fierstein-narrated opus embraces first-rate TV news footage showing him campaigning on such matters as people not picking up their dogs' poop, and stepping, with accurate measure, into a tactically located pile of such at the culmination of the interview.

There is a whole heap of great footage of Milk, Moscone, and White, who disliked gay people. It is interspersed with later interviews with many of Milk's loyal comrades, including a seasoned leftist who confesses that he was bigoted against gays until he met Milk and began to appreciate the political concerns implicated. There is immeasurably touching, volume- speaking footage of the two demonstrations motivated by the deaths of Milk and Moscone: a noiseless, candle-lit procession of 45,000 people on the night of their deaths, and an outraged night of rioting when White got what a compassionate sentence.

This is an enthralling piece, as the light it casts on a decade in the life of a great American city and on the lives of Milk and Moscone, who made it a better, and unquestionably more appealing, location to live.