[Oe List ...] Jaime for Monday

[wangzhimu2031 at aol.com]

Ze Harvey Milk Day


 
Michael Sam just madethe first openly gay football player to be drafted in the NFL and he is gettingmedia attention whose questions are seldom related to his play skills, game knowledgeand sporting attitude.  It is his sexualorientation that gets the attention.
 
Harvey Milk was thefirst openly gay politician elected into public office in the US. There are 45assassinated American politicians in the history of the nation by 2010, electedor 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 1978, thelatter also a member of the Board who earlier resigned in protest but wanted tobe reinstated.  When the Mayor refused,White pulled the trigger, and went out the door to the hallway where he bumpedinto Board member Milk.  White took Milkto another room and pumped another five lead trajectories into his body.
 
The story retracingMilk’s life featuring Sean Penn in an award winning feature film Milk encouraged in 2009 then CaliforniaGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a State legislature law that he vetoed theyear before in declaring a statewide Harvey Milk Day, now of specialsignificance for public schools and the city of San Francisco, an avant garde and cutting edge city ofsocial change and radical behavior.  
 
I use “ze” to what I routinelywrite as “s/he” to denote a third person singular pronoun, not to deny genderdifference but to allow those who prefer a designation on psychology rather thanbiology their own pronoun.  (Not originalto me, “ze” word was started andpromoted by a High School student who noticed that many languages do not havegender distinctions.)  I am no expert onthe 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 milieuof my upbringing, I tend to be more sensitive and responsive to their downtroddenplight in our still prejudiced society.
 
Two scores before thisvisit to the city by the Bay I was introduced to the North Beach district ofthe city by a bi-sexual guardian who started my education on the grey side ofthe sexual divide.  A maritime sailor whowaited on our Ocean liner table when I first crossed the Pacific, he had beento 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, notonly among families who only had boys, but also as a social acceptance of maleswho felt, thought and acted as females. (The regions’ challenge was in dealing with females who acted similarlyas males, or preferred the intimacy of their “own kind”!)
 
It was in the Bay areawhere I learned of matinee idol Rock Hudson who managed to make a woman out of tomboyishDoris Day girl in the screen but like midnight-voiced Johnny Mathis, preferredpillow talks with his own bio-gender, frequenting dives along Geary Street thatwere illegal but tolerated in the mid-60s! But all these then were kept hush-hush, as they were routinelycop-busted when a moralist voice among the populace is raised. 
 
Not in 2010.  Four years ago, I bunked for a week at an oldcolleague’s apartment in the Castro District of San Francisco, where HarveyMilk opened his camera shop with his partner, now home of the GLBT, etc.,community.  Of great creativity in filmand the visual art, my host was a sonny-come-lately emergent from the closet onhis sexual orientation, sharply intolerant against those who made fun, to saythe least, on the third gender.  Thereflex is understandable.  He grew up ina foothill of the Appalachia where the distinction between genders is keptsharp and any dissenting voice is best muted. 
 
Anyway, nothing inCastro District was out of the ordinary. The shops, the bars, and the grocery stores appeared like that in anyMain 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 beingdiscriminated in any form because of sexual orientation.
 
A crude joke is thatthe medical profession was lucky that I did not turn out to be an MD since Iwould have been a disastrous gynecologist! Not too accurate, the same bias is now leveled against Michael Sam as hejoins a high contact male sport.  Myphotographer brother has always been partial to Club Meds, though he does notcovertly clicked his camera on unwary sunbathers, but the spirit of Club Medhas come to the NFL shower rooms.  It mayfinally confirm what many head shrinks have long expressed: that the gender ofany one is ultimately not what is between the legs but on what is between thetemples in the cranium of the mind!
 
That’s where the gay (the adjective, not the noun) ambivalenceof the day lie.  We shan’t rememberHarvey Milk as a human being but as an assertive gay rights political activist.  Not that important.  At least he would not countenance anyone who refusedhim full membership in the human race where he rightly and proudly belonged.


j'aime la vie
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!


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