very interesting....

I always liked the documentary about Harvey, and it's really a shame how the city not only screwed up prosecuting a 2x murderer, but also had no problem bringing down the hammer on the gay community.

remind me again how supposedly liberal this town is?

@Greg:

The City wasn't liberal. It was controlled and run by Republicans up until the 1980s.

One reason that the hippies started buying property and moving to Marin (other than the fact that it was cheap, imagine that) was that SF was seen as too conservative and too controlled by the very powerful Republican Party. And those on the Left were still dominated by the Old Left -- the old school Irish and Italian labor unions. They had not been replaced by the New Left, the social policy new Left.

Moscone and Milk's election was a lot about the kind of changes that were happening in SF in the late 1970s, where the new Left was changing the face of the City and developing political power (District elections were eliminated originally to put a stop to this change, especially the Gay vote.)

The Bay Area in general was reliably Rebuplican until the 1980s as well. It was a military area, with a lot of industry. People voted toward low regulation and low taxes. The Proposition 13 movement began in the Bay Area for instance. (I know someone out here in DC that grew up in Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s and she remembers that the Bay Area was too conservative, too militaristic. She couldn't wait to leave.)

The change politically is pretty astronomical and the assassination of Milk and Moscone is one such violent bump in that history. There were many others.

Zodiac was outstanding. A criminally under-appreciated film.

I'm looking forward to faux-marching on Monday too. I happened to be in the Castro last night when they were shooting crowd scenes and a brief confrontation between police and angry, grieving San Franciscans. It will be so wonderful to bring Harvey Milk's story, and the story of our neighborhood, to a national audience with this movie.

As for Zodiac, I have to side with JT. I found it to be slow, plodding and occasionally homophobic. But I loved the performance of John Carroll Lynch as the presumed killer. I've enjoyed JCL ever since he played Marge's doting, duck-stamp-contest-winning husband in Fargo.

I'm so glad this movie is being made. I read Shilts' book and it made me truly sad for what might have been.

However, I must say Penn needs some prosthetic ears. If Nicole Kidman can don a fake nose for authenticity, the least Penn could do is put more authentic ears on.

I walked right next to the Penn (like 2 feet away, how special!) while trying to figure out how the hell to get in the muni station on castro this morning. A half dozen staffers informed me that I should be going across market to the other one post-haste. That's after i got told it was open and could head right in there after the shot by a few different staffers.

It was pretty cool seeing a scene get filmed, all like old timey 70s cars crusing up and down the street while a bunch of dudes with big collars meandered around. I felt kind of bad for the production assistants that were tryign to keep everybody out of the shot, it seems like wrangling that stuff in a public location is pretty hard, herding a bunch of onlookers around etc.