By John Norris

Add one letter to "MLK," and what do you get? That's right — "Milk."

And rightly so. Harvey Milk is the middle-age mensch from New York who moved to San Francisco, opened a camera shop and set about changing the world. The first openly gay elected official in America became a martyr in 1978, when he, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, was gunned down by a deeply disturbed colleague. Milk has earned his place alongside those other M's: Martin, Malcolm and Mandela. And if you have a problem with that — if you think that gay rights are something apart from other civil-rights struggles — I suggest you see the movie "Milk." I'll front you the 10 bucks.

This long-overdue dramatization of the life of a hero who so richly deserves it is opening now, against the backdrop of the passage of California's rights-stripping Proposition 8 — and on the 30th anniversary of Milk's death — is the sort of surreal convergence of events that only a screenwriter could dream up. (Milk's story was also told in 1984's excellent documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk.") Read more...