You’ve Got to Give Them Hope

By Lawrence Gibbons

Just two months before Harvey Milk was assassinated, I moved near San Francisco to attend uni in Berkeley. Like many of my generation, I came out of the closet kicking. The year was 1978, the same year Mardi Gras’ first protestors were rounded up and jailed in Sydney, and in California, born again bigots backed Prop 6, a voter referendum that would have made it illegal for gay men and lesbians to teach school. The poster girl for homophobia was Anita Bryant, a Christian gospel singer and right wing zealot. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. As San Francisco City Supervisor, he urged all gays and lesbians to come out publicly to defeat Prop Six. Harvey’s message was that straight people would be less likely to support laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians, if they know a gay person.

The night Harvey Milk delivered the No on Six victory speech to a cheering crowd, I was in the room. Sean Penn brings Harvey back to life in the new biopic Milk, which I caught while I was back in San Francisco for Christmas. The Castro Theater is just up the road from Harvey’s old camera shop and is one of those grand old movie palaces where the organ still burst into “San Francisco open your Golden Gate” after all these years. Less than three weeks after Prop Six was defeated, I was also among the tens of thousandswho carried a flickering candle down Market Street the day Harvey was slain.

Harvey Milk’s favourite line was, ‘you’ve got to give them hope.’Thirty years later, on the same day Obama won office, California voters followed Australia’s lead and succumbed to homophobia, also passing a constitutional ban on gay marriage. And still hope thrived: one month later, in early December a historic vote was taken in the United Nations to end discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgendered people. Sixty six nations including Australia(whose constitution openly discriminates against gays) voted to pass a resolution calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. A number of Islamic nations, the Vatican and George Bush’s morally corrupt government voted against the non-binding resolution.  Appropriately enough, the theme of this year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade (on Saturday March 7) is Nations United.

Nowadays, of course I am an Aussie and like any good Sydney migrant, I funded my discount flight back to the old country with the jackpot I won from a Taylor Square pokie machine I happened to play the day after Sleaze Ball. As it turns out the cheapest flight anywhere in the US is on Jetstar to Honolulu. As a goodwill gesture, I also donated $100 of my winnings to the Obama for President campaign. Within minutes of making my online donation, my bank called to confirm the transaction. ‘You’re kidding,’ I blurted out to the concerned bank executive, ‘I just spent more than ten times as much on a ticket to that hot bed of black political activism, Obama’s home state of Hawaiiand no one called.’ In Honolulu I missed my connecting flight and boarded the next flight to San Francisco. ‘Attention passengers,’ the United Airlines attendant announced, ‘you may have noticed that there are only eight of you on this entire aircraft. Yesterday President Elect Obama flew on this United Airlines jet from Chicago to Honolulu and we are now returning it to the mainland.’ Since Air Force One was still at the service of Bush, Obama chartered a commercial jet. Rumour has it Barack flew in seat number 1A.

While the Hawaiian press praised the return of the island’s native son, the New York Times was scathing. The Nobel Prize winning columnist Paul Krugman commented, ‘surely I wasn’t alone in wincing about the luxury beach house the Obamas rented, not because there’s anything wrong with the first family-elect having a nice vacation, but because symbolism matters.’ What Krugman failed to mention was that Obama went back to the island of his birth to grieve the passing of his grandmother, who died in Honolulu in the last weeks of the campaign; and god forbid to rest before attempting to clean up the mess Bush made of the global markets and world peace. Unlike the Clintons, who repeatedly took holidays at Martha’s Vineyard free of charge and who later flew onprivate jets courtesy of wealthy benefactors, Obama rented an executive house on Oaha and chartered a jet from United Airlines, which is majority owned by its employees. Symbolism does matter.

Shortly after Milk won office, he said, ‘Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the us’es give up hope. I know that you can not live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. And you and you and you got to give them hope’ Three decades after California elected the first gay man to public office, Americans have elected the first black man to the Presidency. One of the more enduring symbols of the final moments of the Bush presidency has to be ex Vice President Dick Cheney being pushed through the US Capital in a wheelchair. The shadowy figure had thrown out his back trying to remove boxes, no doubt filled with top-secret documents and had to be carted to Obama’sinauguration. One US news commentator said Cheney looked like the Doctor Strangelove. Standing before a cheering crowd of several million, Obama urged Americans to put hope before fear and pledged ‘to do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government’Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.’ Finally hope has come back to America.