I’ve been having trouble articulating this one. It’s difficult to describe the physical feeling that hit me on seeing some of the news stories and emails this past week. First there was coverage of the Jonestown disaster – that word isn’t accurate but there is no word for that event, is there? The Seattle Times ran a story about some of the survivors and what their lives are like now, the intense survivor guilt, the holes left in their lives. I don’t suppose it gives me any “special” meaning but I do think those of us who were living in the Bay Area, some of whom had probably voted for Leo Ryan feel it just a little differently. For me, there is a huge hole in the center of me, as if someone blew up a big balloon in my midsection, then sucked all the air out of me and left the vacuum. I see the pictures and I react almost, almost the way I did when I first saw them, 30 years ago. It will never be resolved, never answer our endless questions and astonished disbelief, that hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of people died at the behest of an on beyond crazed paranoid charismatic, lying, addicted at times do-gooder at times, abusive human being. Who died, taking 918 people with him. Jesus, the horror of that time. The images are seared in my brain like nothing else I can recall.

Then the email came from the movie theater chain, a mailing which we get weekly letting us know about this week’s upcoming films and that’s when I saw that “Milk” the film by Gus Van Sant that opens this week, on November 26.

Thirty years ago, on November 27, Supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered. Of course, if you remember it does not matter where you lived but....but....

Again, if you were there, revisiting that time might be beyond ghoulish, so beyond sad, so freezing, numbing, acutely painful and wrong. Maybe not. i don't know yet. I know of course no one can forget. It’s not possible to forget that day, not even a little. It changed life in an instant. Both of these events did, changed the home I was growing to love. One was distant, one so very close. Nothing was the same. And I think people do need to remember, and possibly to know. Thirty years is a lifetime, isn't it?

I moved to Oakland in 1976. I grew up on the east coast, went to college in Connecticut and then graduate school in Albany, New York. My graduation prosent from my sister Pat was the plane fare to visit her in Northern California where she’d settled a few years before. 'd had to delay the post-graduation trip as i had back surgery the summer after college. But i got there in '75 and I was there two days and knew I had to move there.

I was married and living in Oakland with Alva when these events happened. It was a sign that I wasn’t exactly with the right person when he expressed confusion and a sort of befuddlement when I said I wanted to be at Harvey’s funeral. Why? He asked. And why not Moscone’s?

I lived for 10 years in the east bay, Oakland then Berkeley and it defined much of what and who I am today. In later years, as I moved back east, I realized that I was definitely a west coast person. Seeing some of the names listed in the cast list, actors playing folks like John Briggs, Art Agnos, and some real people, like Frank Robinson, a long time friend and one of Harvey’s closest friends and advisors brings it all home. (Frank, an author and book collector whom many of you sf folks know, is apparently in this film. He was one of Harvey’s closest friends.)

I recently came across the name Carol Ruth Silver (another supervisor) in a book about the Freedom Riders. Silver was a Freedom Rider. Isn’t that amazing? Think about that courage for a second, why don’t you? Wow, huh?

Just….wow. And just a day or two ago, Stu and I were snarking about Di Fi, about how Dianne Feinstein really needs to change that hairdo of hers. We were watching her on tv, talking about the scum who are trying to scalp Inauguration tickets and I did flash back on the first time I saw her in front of the cameras and microphones. That horrid, wretched, hellish moment when, stunned and shaken, peering into those lights, she told us, her city, her neighbors, her friends – as well as the nation - of the murders in City Hall.

Jesus, it’s not to be borne. Even now, in the glow, the enormous high of the election, buffered by the weirdness of the Ted Stevens loss, the Minnesota recount , as I go out of the house every day still wearing my Obama button (I might not be able to stop wearing it for the next few years, I have to confess, it feels SO good) and the shadow of ugliness and hatred beyond measure still haunts us. In the face of the historic election, we get this crap about marriage, this insanity that causes people to believe that in order to “protect” marriage (and I still refuse to get what that means – what of it needs “protections?????) we deny gay men and women the right we straight folks take for granted. WHO FUCKING CARES? Why does your marriage affect mine? Or my lack of one since I am not married. What difference does it make? What is there we gotta protect? Is it that we still have to have someone to hate?

In 1978, in the name of god, hundreds of people died. In 1978, in the name of who knows what demons, Dan White murdered two good men, one who was openly proudly gay and one of the first openly homosexual politicians to serve in America.

It’s 2008. We still don’t understand what happened 30 years ago. We never will. We can’t, we simply cannot understand what drove those men to do what they did, to damage things so badly. It still leaves a huge enormous hole in our lives, in our history, in what it is people do to each other.