Today, Friday, at 4 pm on the City Hall steps, there will be a community commemoration for Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.  

Performances will include the Gay Men’s Chorus, the Lesbian/Gay Chorus, the Freedom Band, the Glam Youth Choir, and Holly Near.  Reflections of these slain heroes will include Tom Ammiano, Harry Britt, Willie Brown, Cleve Jones, Carol Ruth Silver, representatives of the Milk and Moscone families and others.  

The City Hall event will be followed at 5 p.m. by a march up Market Street to the place where it all began more than three decades ago, Harvey’s camera shop on Castro.   See you all there.

In a press conference held Tuesday, former San Francisco Mayor and current U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein recounted the terrible day 30 years ago when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down by former Supervisor Dan White. A video stream is avaialble here via ABC Channel 7. A few things stood put for me.  

1. She said that White and Milk were friends. The accounts I read said that while they were collegial in their professional setting, they were definitely not friends.

2. She cited White’s motive as the fact tha Milk did nothing to help him. I thought Milk actively lobbied the mayor to not re-appoint him for the obvious fact that he was unstable.

3. When asked if Prop 8 would have passed if we had a figure like Milk today, she said yes. I disagree. Milk and Tom Ammiano were the primary agents behind the defeat of Prop 6 in 1978 and if the LGBT community had Milk instead of the gloating Gavin Newsom, the good guys might have won.  

4. The senator, visibly shaken by recalling the killings, made it clear she will not go to the movie “Milk”.

I will be going to the movie when it gets into some more theaters. I’m sure it will be hard to find a ticket this weekend. Feinstein, however you may think of her as mayor or senator, managed to hold the city together during an awful time and I think we owe her that much.