Could Milk Have Helped Defeat Prop 8?

Gus van Sant’s new biopic on Harvey Milk, the gay activist and politician assassinated in San Francisco’s City Hall in 1978, opened just three weeks after voters passed a constitutional amendment undoing California’s legalization of same-sex marriage. “How does Proposition 8 change the meaning – the symbolic significance as well as the real-world function – of Milk? And if the film had found an audience early enough, could it have made a difference?”