Speaking at the George Moscone/Harvey Milk Memorial last night, former city supervisor Carol Ruth Silver talked of having a meeting at the home of famed San Francisco Attorney Melvin Belli, along with Harvey Milk, George Moscone and various members of the Board of Health regarding the fight against AIDS. This meeting was to have taken place sometime in 1978. Both Moscone and Milk were gunned down by former colleague Dan White in November of that same year.
Problem is, the meeting couldn't have happened.
AIDS was first reported on by the Centers for Disease Control in June of 1981. The disease wasn't even know as AIDS until September 1982 (it was originally called GRID, for Gay Related Immune Deficiency).
I don't want to take anything away from Ms. Silver. She certainly wasn't being malicious or anything. I just thought it was strange that she would tell a story that was an obvious attempt to place both Moscone and Milk even higher on the worship alter than they already are by placing them on the frontline of a battle that hadn't even started yet.
It's easy to make mistakes when using just your memory... without notes. I noticed quite a few timeline and location mistakes in the "Milk"movie,
ReplyDeletebut the main fact... the movie introduced Harvey and that era in the gay rights movements to millions and millions of people, young and old, gay and straight, here in the USA and around the world.
In the "Milk" movie, they had Robert Hillsbough murdered in 1974... three years before he died just days before the 1977 Gay Day Parade. Also,
the movie showed events that never happened,too!
Just before the famed impromptu march after Anita Bryant led forces voted to recind a gay rights ordinance in Dade Country Florida, acording to the movie... a young wheelchaired youth called Harvey
from Minnasota... about an article he read about Harvey... and Harvey asks "How did he look in the picture in the newspaper?" The only image of Harvey was my Associated Press image, and that cameout after the midnight rally.
Most respectfully, my memory was not faulty.
ReplyDeleteThe meeting of which I spoke, and as I detailed when I described it, occurred before the source of the malady afflicting so many gay men had been identified, before even its identification as an immune deficiency disorder. Medical experts at this meeting offered disparate views of it, and of its method of transmission.
We, Harvey and I, came away greatly disappointed and resolving to appropriate additional funds to our own General Hospital to engage in basic research on this mysterious thing that would eventually be known as AIDS.
Carol Ruth Silver