Earlier Milk Release Might've Killed Prop 8

If Milk, the film on San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, had opened earlier, might it have swung the Proposition 8 vote? Maybe, writes Dennis Lim in Slate—but in light of the passage of the California gay-marriage ban, Milk becomes both a poignant “look-how-far-we-haven’t-come” tale and a roadmap for the gay-rights battle ahead.

Harvey Milk’s success as a politician points to the importance of homosexuals acting as their own advocates—rather than the anti-Prop 8 campaign’s use of straight spokespeople—and of getting up after you’ve been knocked down. Milk would have wanted the film earlier, but the “Proposition 8 result has, for now at least, redefined Milk as a cause,” Lim writes. (More Harvey Milk stories.)