KGO: School Wants Jones to
Return Harvey's Bull Horn
Over at KGO-TV's web site, veteran reporter Lyanne Melendez has posted the vid and a text version of her story from Friday night's broadcast, about local school kids trying to get a piece of homo-history returned to them. The problem? The massive ego of Cleve Jones.
I guess because he's been so busy organizing the 435 captains in every Congressional district that he promised would emerge from his October march on Washington, he hasn't had time to properly get Harvey's bull horn assessed, insured and placed in the hands of more than one control queen in Palm Springs. Snark, snark.
Kudos to Melendez for picking up on this story, which was initially written up in the Bay Area Reporter by Matthew Bajko. From KGO-TV:
A fight over a piece of San Francisco history heats up. It started with the filming of the movie about the late supervisor Harvey Milk. [...]
After being elected to the Board of Supervisors, Milk gave the bullhorn to [Cleve] Jones. He kept it at his home for several years until November 27, 1996.
Soon after, the bullhorn was given to a group of students from Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in the Castro District, until it was borrowed for the movie "Milk" and never returned. [...]
Jones told ABC7 from his home in Southern California, "the bullhorn belongs to me, I lent it to the school and I took it back."
Jones added the display case is not a safe place to keep something irreplaceable and meaningful like Milk's bullhorn. [...]
"I certainly understand why he would want it, but I think the reason we at the school want it is just because we teach the kids civil rights, we teach the kids social justice and that bullhorn did represent a call to justice," Harvey Milk Academy parent Heather Bornfeld said.
That real bullhorn, became part of the legend of Harvey Milk's image. It all started on June 6th, 1977, a date that made a lasting impression of Harvey Milk, for gay history... and the reason for an impromptu march caused by Anita Bryant, who provided the spark that gave the early S.F.gay rights movement... movement! Millions of people,young and old, gay and straight, here in America and around the world are aware of Harvey's bullhorn, thanks to the "Milk" movie. However, the real scene, and that image came as a result of one frame from the film in my camera.
ReplyDeleteThe movie was a recreation of events
about Harvey, and the people of that era, who happened to be in the right place at the right time. I would like to recommend a great web-site that houses a repository of photographs, and stories by the real pioneers of gay history.
www.thecastro.net/ and while you are there, you will find that image of Harvey, with a candle in one hand, that bullhorn in the other and a single sign in the background
"SAVE OUR RIGHTS". I can still hear Harvey voice, magnified through that bullhorn, as we marched from the Castro, down Market Street, past
City Hall... "OUT of the bars and into the street!" We finally arrived
Downtown, at San Francisco's Union Square. By the time we left the Castro and arrived there, over 5,000 angry citizens joined in the impromptu march, the result of an election in Dade County Florida,nearly 2,000 miles away, that was led by Anita Bryant, to overturn a gay rights ordinance. That image of Harvey and the infamous bullhorn, is my footnote to gay history...
thanks michael;
ReplyDeletelikewise, Jerry, the school to whom cleve had loaned the bullhorn (and where my daughter attends Kindergarten, and which is very purposefully named Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy), could be using this every day to its full potential as a profound instrument of civil rights.
check out this recent protest (loud with kids chanting "save our schools") at the corner of castro/market and tell me if you think it wouldn't be more powerful if the principal -- if the kids -- were holding harvey's bullhorn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6dRAlqv9Ow
thanks,
-m