<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;"><font size="4">Ze Harvey Milk Day</font></b><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="4"> </font></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">Michael Sam just made
the first openly gay football player to be drafted in the NFL and he is getting
media attention whose questions are seldom related to his play skills, game knowledge
and sporting attitude. It is his sexual
orientation that gets the attention.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">Harvey Milk was the
first openly gay politician elected into public office in the US. There are 45
assassinated American politicians in the history of the nation by 2010, elected
or 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, the
latter also a member of the Board who earlier resigned in protest but wanted to
be reinstated. When the Mayor refused,
White pulled the trigger, and went out the door to the hallway where he bumped
into Board member Milk. White took Milk
to another room and pumped another five lead trajectories into his body.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">The story retracing
Milk’s life featuring Sean Penn in an award winning feature film <i>Milk </i>encouraged in 2009 then California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a State legislature law that he vetoed the
year before in declaring a statewide Harvey Milk Day, now of special
significance for public schools and the city of San Francisco, an <i>avant garde</i> and cutting edge city of
social change and radical behavior. </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">I use “ze” to what I routinely
write as “s/he” to denote a third person singular pronoun, not to deny gender
difference but to allow those who prefer a designation on psychology rather than
biology their own pronoun. (Not original
to me, <b>“ze”</b> word was started and
promoted by a High School student who noticed that many languages do not have
gender distinctions.) I am no expert on
the 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 milieu
of my upbringing, I tend to be more sensitive and responsive to their downtrodden
plight in our still prejudiced society.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">Two scores before this
visit to the city by the Bay I was introduced to the North Beach district of
the city by a bi-sexual guardian who started my education on the grey side of
the sexual divide. A maritime sailor who
waited on our Ocean liner table when I first crossed the Pacific, he had been
to Polynesia and had a life-turning jolt among the <i>Fa’afafine, </i>biological sons deliberately raised as females. I saw this in Samoa, Tonga, and Hawai’i, not
only among families who only had boys, but also as a social acceptance of males
who felt, thought and acted as females.
(The regions’ challenge was in dealing with females who acted similarly
as males, or preferred the intimacy of their “own kind”!)</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">It was in the Bay area
where I learned of matinee idol Rock Hudson who managed to make a woman out of tomboyish
Doris Day girl in the screen but like midnight-voiced Johnny Mathis, preferred
pillow talks with his own bio-gender, frequenting dives along Geary Street that
were illegal but tolerated in the mid-60s!
But all these then were kept hush-hush, as they were routinely
cop-busted when a moralist voice among the populace is raised. </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">Not in 2010. Four years ago, I bunked for a week at an old
colleague’s apartment in the Castro District of San Francisco, where Harvey
Milk opened his camera shop with his partner, now home of the GLBT, etc.,
community. Of great creativity in film
and the visual art, my host was a sonny-come-lately emergent from the closet on
his sexual orientation, sharply intolerant against those who made fun, to say
the least, on the third gender. The
reflex is understandable. He grew up in
a foothill of the Appalachia where the distinction between genders is kept
sharp and any dissenting voice is best muted.
</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">Anyway, nothing in
Castro District was out of the ordinary.
The shops, the bars, and the grocery stores appeared like that in any
Main 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 being
discriminated in any form because of sexual orientation.</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">A crude joke is that
the medical profession was lucky that I did not turn out to be an MD since I
would have been a disastrous gynecologist!
Not too accurate, the same bias is now leveled against Michael Sam as he
joins a high contact male sport. My
photographer brother has always been partial to Club Meds, though he does not
covertly clicked his camera on unwary sunbathers, but the spirit of Club Med
has come to the NFL shower rooms. It may
finally confirm what many head shrinks have long expressed: that the gender of
any one is ultimately not what is between the legs but on what is between the
temples in the cranium of the mind!</font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4"> </font></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="vertical-align:baseline"><font size="4">That’s where the gay (the adjective, not the noun) ambivalence
of the day lie. We shan’t remember
Harvey Milk as a human being but as an assertive gay rights political activist. Not that important. At least he would not countenance anyone who refused
him full membership in the human race where he rightly and proudly belonged.</font></span></div>
<br>
<div style="font-size: 18px; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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