It’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and dead gay person Harvey Milk is receiving it! And there will be a ceremony! And Harvey’s nephew Stuart will be there to receive it! At the White House! (Billie Jean King is getting one too!)
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Harvey Milk Scores Special Medal from Barack Obama
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emb
Medals are nice. Harvey would probably have preferred repeal of DADT and DOMA instead, though.
InExile
Does the medal mean that DOMA and DADT will be repealed and Mathew Sheppard Act, ENDA, and Civil Unions with full Federal Benefits will be passed?
prissysissy
Where’s the obligatory anti-Obama reference? .. Don’t disappoint us!
Seriously though, the brevity and tone of the post (so many “!”) makes it look like twisted Queerty’s arm to get this posted here.
unclemike
I love my dead gay icon!
prissysissy
@InExile: Looks like the dependable O-haters will step up to the plate when Queerty is abstaining from the bashing.
Never let a good deed go un-criticized.
InExile
@prissysissy: Yes, sometime the smallest things are the most meaningful.
Peter
“most meaningful” ; or did you mean “most meanful”???
M Shane
@No. 1 · emb It’s questionable, that during Harvey lfe anybody even thought of marriage; most of us liked having sex too much. Indeed it was a relatively rare thing for couples to stay together long. So DOMA is a byproduct of a lot of other events & people’s thoughts Andrew Sullivan HIV guilt etc.
Before DADT, people served and had sex without the problems brought on by Clinton and that immoral act. I had sex with guys who came from the Military post by San Fran. they just had to get home on time.
InExile
@Peter: I kinda meant small things like a few table scraps as opposed to being invited to the meal. Throw those gays a potato chip so they will stop complaining. I would never say someone is meanful, that would not be nice.
schlukitz
@M Shane:
Indeed it was a relatively rare thing for couples to stay together long.
You are so fucking full of shit, that it is coming out of your ears!!! You just took another one of your infamous dumps on LGBT people. Do you have any proof to back up that disparaging statement?
I had already been in a seven-year relationship while Harvey was doing his thing in San Francisco and nearly every one of my friends was involved in a long-term relationship as well.
That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with being single and playing the field. To each his own, as the old adage goes.
I say, speak for yourself, if you must but, please, don’t put the rest of us on your wagon-load of shit and expect us to buy it.
Had my partner not died of AIDS, it is very likely that we would still be together.
Fitz
It’s not reasonable to complain about the GLBT community becoming cynical of the administration. That’s like looking at a family with abuse issues and saying that the problem is Suzzie telling her teacher.
schlukitz
@Fitz:
Excellent analogy, Fitz.
Ricardo
Harvey would have indeed preferred FULL EQUALITY for gays (40 years after Stonewall) instead of a medal.
Sidney Poitier is being honored too. (Did Oprah call in a favor?)
Shelby
@Ricardo: You really have deep seated issues man.It’s too bad you were born gay therefore your kind of people AKA the right wing nutjobs don’t want you either, in fact they despise you for your sexual orientation and you are not invited at their table. So, you hate other people and 3/4 of the world hates you too!!! Try to digest that dude.
LenaD
Nice gesture… but I’d prefer my rights. Somehow I suspect Milk would too.
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
First, to M Shame and his INSANE claim:
Sure! Those some 100,000 gays only got kicked to the curb by the military, after many of them were sent to military mental wards and prisons, because they insisted on wearing pearls with their uniforms.
As to the subject:
This posthumous medal to Milk is TRANSPARENT pandering because the adminisration knows it SHOULD be going to the person who, despite Milk’s accomplishments, deserves it 100 times more, whom Obama has already personally acknowledged twice: FRANK KAMENY who was picketing the White House for gay rights when Milk was still upset that the guy living in it wasn’t Barry Goldwater.
[img]http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/sj1.jpg[/img]
Kameny created the then-questionable-even-to-gays expression “Gay Is Good” and cofounded the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and DC’s Mattachine Society and Gay Activists Alliance, ran for Congress as a gay man, cofounded the unprecedented National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, helped force the American Psychiatric Association to declare gays weren’t mentally ill…before publicly closeted Milk decided to get into politics over something that had nothing to do with gay rights…he simply was pissed that he was asked to pay a business tax early.
Yes, Milk changed and made many contributions, but his resume of accomplishments are dwarfed by Kameny’s, and the President knows it. He said to LGBTs at the White House Stonewall event on June 29th:
But poor Frank didn’t get killed, have an Oscar-winning movie made about him, and lives in a world in which most gays are too lazy to know any better, so he can’t be so easily exploited when Obama has to try to tranquilize the gays still rightfully outraged because the most he’s done since taking office is work against our rights rather than for them.
Class, can you say, “defending DOMA and DADT in court while continuing to discharge gays day after day after day”?
This is the equivalent of trying to be more popular by wearing designer jeans labeled Calvin er Harvey Milk.
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
Now the eggs on my face. This is the picture that I meant to insert [though the case could be made that M Shame is ripe for a straitjacket].[img]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_YGeU2nHmk9U/SjVI_qfdHWI/AAAAAAAACsU/RzKGz6dFdOQ/s400/kameny+white+house+picket.JPG[/img]
M Shane
No. 10 · schlukitz ; I won’t tell you that you’re “full of shit”. I will tell you that I came out in San Francisco just after Harvey died, and most people, even if they were together were more like roommates. There was a plethora of bars and bathhouses, and sex right on the streets.
You may have been somewhere out in the boonies, which like where I moved fromthe midwest which was so tedious and sex was so tedious that people found more approval living together..They never did learn to have inventive or fun sex. or community relations with one another like we had in San Francisco. You can ask most anyone who was there and alive.
Don’t you tell me that you have more of an interest in GLBT issues since I seriously doubt that you have even nearly seen more lived more or studied more about gay concerns. You may be stuck in the popular politics of the time and have an insecure personaliy , but that doesn’t mean that you know what Harveyy Milk was really up to.
There is no experience like engaging yourself with different men in the most intimate forms of friendship , conmmunity and sexuality.
No, I think that seriously you wouldn’t have found one in 10 people who would even think you were serious..
ifonlyHillarywaspresident
@Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com: Loved the comparison to wearing designer jeans, it’s called marketing. Nothing sincere about this.
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
@ifonlyHillarywaspresident:
Thanks.
AND it’s no more admirable than had Lincoln given an award to Frederick Douglas or Harriet Tubman for fighting slavery while still enforcing slavery.
Milk and King are getting “Massa’s Medal of NONfreedom.”
Johnny
By the way everyone – he is also giving a medal to Billie Jean King – an open lesbian is a good thing too.
InExile
@Johnny: Both awards are good but one has to question why now? Maybe to make up for no action on gay equality?
Johnny
Motives – We can speculate and hand-wring all day – and we might never know. Perhaps?
But I think we, as a community, should take the good things that are coming out of the Obama administration with some good grace and not angrily shove everything back in his face.
There is a small place for that (and maybe that’s Queerty’s role?) – it’s called pushing the envelope – but for the community as a whole to pounce on every good thing (no matter how little or small)with accusations of Obama just humoring us is not thinking of the larger picture.
I know it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the end goal of full equality – but we shouldn’t take the attitude (as a whole) -that it’s everything or nothing. It’s not very strategic – and we come off looking very shrill.
This medal issue is probably not the best example, but it will get play in the national media – and the more the larger community again sees us as apart of the fabric of America – and it’s not a big deal – the better it’s for us in the future – at the polling booth and elsewhere. This fight of ours is a large battle with no easy answers – but remember that we’ll need votes and support of others outside of our community – not just our immediate friends and family.
Alot of this plays to so-called middle America (and that could be straight folks in Brooklyn, Iowa, or L.A.) – and as much as we hate it – we need them.
I guess a football analogy is the usable – we want to score – but a long-bomb isn’t always the answer – despite the fans in the stands. A good coach knows that the offense needs to work on gaining enough yardage to stay on the field. If we’re moving forward and we are with this – then let’s take the good yardage/first down and not complain that it should have been a long-bomb. Though that is what’s most thrilling.
It all does add up in the long run.
Ricardo
@Shelby:
you blather bores me. who knows what the fuck you just said?
I liked ‘To Sir, With Love’ as much as the next guy.
Poitier is a wealthy man with wealthy friends.
Obama should be giving his “social change” medals to the children of Hattie McDaniel and honor her — if he wants to acknowledge black Hollywood pioneers.
Poitier’s Bahamian ambassadorial UN duties and former co-chair at The Disney Company doesn’t impress me. I would have picked Cicely Tyson or Diahann Carroll for the honors. As I said, Oprah must have called in a favor to Barry O.
schlukitz
@M Shane:
You may have been somewhere out in the boonies
Wrong: New York City was my home from 1953 until my retirement in 1993 and where I have operated a very successful business catering to the LGBT community from 1965 to the present.
Don’t you tell me that you have more of an interest in GLBT issues since I seriously doubt that you have even nearly seen more lived more or studied more about gay concerns.
Wrong: I have been active in the gay movement since the Stonewal Riots which I witnessed with my friend Craig Rodwell who was also a gay activist and operated the Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street for many years before his early demise of stomach cancer.
You may be stuck in the popular politics of the time and have an insecure personality
Simply a uninformed, personal opinion on your behalf about someone whom you do not know and also know nothing about.
but that doesn’t mean that you know what Harvey Milk was really up to.
Wrong: Harvey Milk was a personal friend of mine for some five years before he left his job in New York’s financial district and moved to San Francisco. He was also the lover of my friend Craig Rodwell for a period of time. Harvey and I remained friends and kept in touch until his untimely death.
So you see, you really you shouldn’t go shooting your mouth off and making spculations about people you have never met and know nothing about.
It only serves makes you look ignorant and foolish.
schlukitz
@Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com:
Excellent post, Michael and a wonderful tribute to Frank Kameny, whom I had the good fortune and pleasure of meeting when for a period of time, I was an member of the NGLTF.
And, I know the perfect place on Christopher Street in NYC to obtain the straightjacket that M Shane is ripe for. ;o)
Pop Snap
Oh Christ. I’m getting sick of my fellows GLBT people ripping on Obama. Yeah, I’m no big fan of his especially since I tend to lean libertarian and dislike his inaction on glbt issues, but for 8 years we had George Goddamn Bush.
Y’know, the same guy who refused to sign a declaration saying that we were human beings. The same dude whose father said atheists aren’t citizens. Yeah that guy.
Or would you have rather had McCain, who would’ve croaked and left the Presidency to a ditzy freak?
I mean, seriously, do you want him to say “Stuff you people and your rights”? He could easily do that tommorrow and still win a re-election by a landslide.
GBM
Girls, Girls,
Just VOTE republican.
At least your comfortable with a non-minority politician FUCKING YOU OVER!
And YES I’m being sarcastic!