Dec 1st, 2008
Guest Post for World AIDS Day
The release of the movie “Milk” last week — followed by World AIDS Day today — brings the past to the front of the minds of many people in the LGBT community, including the children. We live with these memories all the time, of course, but the movie brings a new awareness to our friends and colleagues who either were too young to remember, or too closeted to be keyed into what was going on.
I’ve asked Alysia Abbott (pictured above with her dad in 1978) if she would be willing to share her thoughts on World AIDS Day 2008. Readers of Families Like Mine will recognize her memories of growing up in San Francisco with a single gay dad.
MILK and My Dad
Alysia Abbott
December 1, 2008This weekend an old high school friend of my father’s came to visit with his wife from Raleigh, North Carolina. We had a really wonderful day together, starting with brunch on Brooklyn’s Smith Street, then a meandering, sunny walk home, followed with chatting and playing with my two kids in our crowded apartment. It was emotional day too. Dale brought with him some old photos of my dad that I’d never seen before (taken when my dad was 17 and wore a crewcut) and a poetry book of my dad’s I had seen before, but that I hadn’t seen in a long time, WRECKED HEARTS. Sitting on the sagging red sofa in our living room, I glanced at the book’s cover, a cartoon drawn by my dad depicting Jesus Christ being assassinated in a gay bar. I opened to the title page to read the pub date: 1978. This is the same year that Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician, was gunned down in SF’s city hall.
With MILK, the movie opening in theaters across the nation this week, our little gay SF of the 70s is hitting the big screen. But since my father died in ‘92, the backdrop of my childhood — gay pride parades in the Castro, politically tinged potlucks, gay bookstores, poetry readings, and the Cafe Flore — seemed sealed in time, lost. This is a period I don’t talk much about, or spend time remembering. After all, without my dad, who’s there to remember it with?
Now with MILK and his world resurfacing in the larger culture, I want to find my way back into these old memories. (Perhaps I’ll even dig up dad’s old journals in the basement.) What would my dad think of the movie? Would it stir up his own lost episodes, maybe more visits and calls from old friends?
I’m particularly thinking of Dad this week with AIDS day (12/1) and the anniversary of his death (12/2). And I want to honor his memory but am not yet sure how. How can we turn grief into action? Maybe the memory of Harvey Milk and his struggle will stir people to act, to hope for the sort of change, and open mindedness that allowed Barack Obama to be elected. It might at least get some attention at the Oscars.
(c) 2008 Alysia Abbott
Posted on “Damn Straight” with permission of the author.
Alysia’s online tribute to her father is here: www.SteveAbbott.org
Alysia and Abigail, thank you so much for this posting.
I too have trouble knowing, year after year, how to best commemorate my father, who also died of AIDS, in 1996. This day always comes too quickly and right after thanksgiving, another reminder of family missed. So I cry a little and laugh a little and remind myself of his love and that he’d want me to enjoy life, be happy, healthy and fulfilled. Sometimes I, too, find it nice to be with or at least speak with people he knew and loved. This is how we remember. This is what we must do I guess.
I saw Milk on Sunday at the Castro Theater with my partner and his family and 1,400 other people. I thought of you Alysia, and my friend Felicia, both of you grew up in SF during those years. My dad died in ‘91, and while we visited SF a few times as a kid, it wasn’t home until I moved here in ‘93. I thought of you because although I only remember the events of Milk’s life from afar, and from a kid’s perspective: I don’t remember his election – i barely remember his assassination when I was 6, but I totally remember not being allowed to drink orange juice for several years because Anita Bryant, the anti-gay crusader, was also the spokesperson for the Florida orange growers. And I really liked orange juice.
Despite not growing up in SF, the movie was so evocative of the sense of that time: the excitement and passion of these young guys, coming out, falling in love, fucking and having passionate friendships – powerful friendships driven by attraction and activism and art and fear and disco and drugs and love – it was a thrilling mixture even though i had a 9pm bed time, 10 if it wasn’t a school night.
I also have my dad’s journals in the basement which I have never read. Not sure I will now…some how Milk the Movie didn’t make it all seem closer as much as the packaging and selling of his story made it seem more distant, especially sitting with my partner’s family who hardly even knew the history, let alone feel connected to it…but also the memories more palatable for the packaging – the grief more containable within a finite, well-told 128 minutes.
Good luck with those journals, Alysia.
i just saw MILK the movie finally tonight (great way to honor dad). it didn’t exactly convey the SF of the 70s in all the ways that i knew it. i certainly spent more time in the playgrounds of golden gate park and the panhandle then i did at city hall. but i did feel the movie captured the excitement of that time, what it meant to be gay and find other men who shared your passion and sense of wonder for the future (preAIDS, of course.) after years spent in the closet as an irish catholic in lincoln, nebraska, my dad was like a kid in the candy store in the liberated 70s sf. there was lots of cruising, even with me at home.
somehow what was most familiar in MILK was the interior of harvey’s apartment. the flimsy drapes, the spider plant in the window, the from the street/second hand furniture– this was like our apartment in the haight.
as for personal memories of the events. i do remember not drinking OJ. and i also remember my school class writing condolence letters to mayor moscone’s wife (i was in 3rd grade) but that’s about it. no memories of the riots. no sense of what it all meant.
still, i was really impressed with the movie — actors, pacing, honestly, artfulness.
cheers,
a