Remembering Harvey Milk
by Denny
Meyer |
A review of the musical
play
A Letter to Harvey Milk
playing through June 30th at the Acorn
Theatre in NYC
I'm a
pretty cynical grumpy old gay veteran, so I
didn't expect much when I got tickets to this
play. As a gay rights writer, activist,
and national spokesman, I occasionally get
invitations to plays and shows in hopes that I
might rave about them. All I got was two
complementary tickets with no strings attached;
I don't owe these folks anything. So, my
raving, here, is of my own volition. I
loved it.
I served
in the US Navy and Army Reserve for a total of
ten years and left as a Sgt First Class; I don't
cry much, but this show moved me to tears,
simple as that. The play's premise seemed
a bit dubious: a retired old Kosher butcher gets
lonely, missing his long deceased wife, and goes
to his local Jewish Senior Center in San
Francisco, looking for something to do. He
sees a bulletin board notice about a writing
class even though, as he put it, he's "never
written anything longer than a check." The
young teacher turns out to be quite inspiring
and, after a few practice writing efforts,
assigns him to 'write a letter to someone who
meant something to him,' or something like that.
He decides to write 'A letter to Harvey Milk.'
So, how the hell did we arrive at that unlikely
eventuality as the premise of a play?
Well as it
turns out, he knew Harvey Milk before he was
assassinated, they'd become friends. I'm
not going to tell you the whole story, its too
good to spoil, see it yourself. Its just a
really clever story. What got me gripped
by the tale is the fact that I actually knew
Harvey Milk back in the day. Everyone did
who was there in San Francisco at the time.
How did a straight old man become Milk's friend?
Well, I can tell you, Harvey had that affect on
anyone he met. He was both intensely
charismatic and at the same time totally down to
Earth and unassuming. You could walk into
his camera shop on Castro Street for a roll of
film and spend the next two hours there absorbed
in his political vision of a future of full
equality. Its just the way it was there
back then.
In the
late 1970s in San Francisco, the gods of the gay
revolution walked the Earth like ordinary
mortals. After spending time listening to
Milk in his shop on a balmy Saturday afternoon,
I could stroll up to Castro and 18th and end up
standing there on the corner and chatting with
Leonard Matlovich for another two hours.
When I got home four hours later and my lover
asked, "Where the hell have you been?!," all I
could say was that I was "waiting for Gedot."
I couldn't have said that I'd been chatting with
gay gods; at that time we couldn't have imagined
that they would become our most inspirational
martyrs.
I lived
there for some twenty years in the 1970s trough
the 80s, through the Era of Harvey Milk and the
horror of his assassination; and through the
horror of the AIDS crises that horribly killed
everyone I knew and loved. So, the
portrayal of the shooting of Harvey Milk and the
candlelight vigil that followed, in which I
participated, all in a memory flashback of the
play's protagonist, an old retired Jewish Kosher
butcher, well I suddenly burst into tears
remembering the real candlelight march down
Market Street.
But wait,
there's more. It turns out that the play's
old protagonist is a Holocaust survivor and the
play portrays his flashback memory of his time
in
Auschwitz.
Well, in fact, my parents were Holocaust
Refugees to America whose families had been
gassed in Auschwitz.
So all that is a part of my archetypal collective memory
too. So, the play pushed all of my
buttons.
So, after my having said all
that you might think that this play is to
horribly sad to see. In fact, its
incredibly deliciously wonderfully clever.
First of all, every single word is sung; its an
English language opera with great fully
understandable enunciation. Where could
they find actors I never heard of who are such
good singers? The play is showing in New
York City, the line for auditions must have been
wrapped twice around the block. Also, the
play is chock full of Yiddish words and humor.
It helps to be be gay and Jewish (as Harvey Milk
was) to get every
line and joke; but its written cleverly enough
for you to both come away thoroughly entertained
and also a bit enlightened. I liked it,
last word.
Oh wait, I almost forgot:
What has any of this got to do with advocacy for
LGBT military veterans, the mission of this
website? Well, Harvey Milk was a gay
veteran. He was a LT in the US Navy during
the Korean War.
Sgt Denny in theatre lobby
wearing USNS Harvey Milk cap
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