Although the events depicted occurred thirty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels culturally fresh and politically relevant—a new film for a new American order about a community organizer preaching for hope and change. Milk is a bio-pic but it avoids many if not all of the genre’s pitfalls by focusing on an eight-year period in Harvey Milk’s life, specifically narrowing in on the anxieties and community tensions surrounding the controversial 1978 vote for the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6, a law that, if passed, would ban gays and lesbians and anyone who openly supported GLBT rights from teaching in the California public schools. This, if you are old enough to remember, was one of orange juice fascist Anita Bryant’s (the Ur-Sarah Palin but also one of the first celebrity voices of the nascent American culture wars) efforts to rid America of degenerates in order to “Save Our Children†from the “homosexual agenda.†Now there’s a bio-pic worth making, but I’ll leave that to John Waters. Continue reading MILK