MILK

 Hannah Crouser 


This film focuses on the life of Harvey Milk, his journey to becoming a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and his political activism. This film focuses on gay rights, which is a topic that has and continues to affect many people. The main issue people have with gay people in this film is them trying to recruit and convert children. Teachers were fired from their jobs for being perceived as homosexual. Many of us could not imagine something like that happening today, but it does. Many LGBTQ+ people’s lives are still under threat and are denied basic rights. In one of my classes, we had a guest speaker named Dharma Mirza who shared her experiences of navigating the medical field while being HIV-positive and transgender. She talked about how she was denied a urine test because she is transgender and there was no procedure around that. She has also been denied from many health services because she is HIV-positive. Every day LGBTQ+ people’s lives are put in danger because they are continuously denied from services. Even if we are not seeing their lives threaten in such a public manner as we did in the seventies their lives are still at risk.




Comments

  1. Catherine BolzendahlMarch 11, 2023 at 2:17 PM

    The points you raise about the continued salience are great and thanks for sharing the insights from the guest speaker. There were/are a lot of negative stereotypes and dehumanizing beliefs that are promoted among those campaigning against LGBT+ rights.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

El Norte

Image
El Norte is a film about a brother and sister’s journey from a small Guatemalan village north to the US, where they hope to have a better life. While there they face many of the problems Latin American immigrants face in the US. To migrants, the US provides the opportunity of work and some degree of safety while at the same time the US actively creates barriers for immigrants. This was displayed in the movie by Enrique and Rosa not having official documents which greatly limited their job opportunities and limited where they could live. ICE was also a constant threat to Enrique and Rosa along with the people they worked with, such as Enrique’s coworker who reported him to immigration. Later generation migrants tend to contribute to an idealized version of the US that was portrayed by the villagers’ more positive description of the US. In this idealized version, immigration to the US is an easy process and once in the US wealth is abundant for those who try hard. In reality, living in t...
Read more

Dr. Strangelove- Havlyn Ehrich

Image
  Dr. Strangelove is a very interesting movie. We see a satirical stance of politics addressing the Cold War at the time the movie was made. According to one of the readings posted by The Atlantic, it is noted that audiences laughed at this movie back in 1964 when it was produced. However, things became more serious as time went on and nuclear war terminology soon became the norm in public entertainment. The movie Dr. Strangelove tells the story of an individual who has gone insane and launched a nuclear missile attack on the Soviet Union. The movie highlights the incompetence of the president in the movie as well the other governmental officials. They were all acting in fear that the Soviet Union would send nuclear missiles on them too. Such a case would be considered mutual destruction: each party terminates the other. Though this was meant as a comedy, this idea became very real to the people at the time and still flourish in the lives of Americans today. The US president is a...
Read more

Norma Rae - Natalie Sharp

Image
  As demonstrated in the movie Norma Rae, without a regulated market or government regulation, labor workers are easily abused. The film did a great job of highlighting the difficulties the workers face in the textile industry in a town where that was the only job for almost everyone. The fear of standing up and being fired raised the stakes for many people and created a divide in who was willing to risk it all for better conditions. It was interesting to see that the black workers and most of the women workers were the ones pushing for the union the most. We can see that these groups are already being so oppressed that they might have less fear of getting fired than pushing for a union because they are already extremely taken advantage of. When in reality everyone wins if they can all come together. Another thing we have seen portrayed in the film and other films we have watched so far is the division of identities to separate the levels of oppression so each group feels like the...
Read more