Miami Blog

In movies, Miami gets a bad rap. It's always cocaine smuggler this, and mafia murderer that. It's like come on, Hollywood. You're making us look bad.

 So when Riptide heard Dade County got a cameo in Gus Van Sant's new film Milk, we bought some trans fat-soaked popcorn and got comfortable next to two cute, twinkish, super-excited gay dudes this past weekend. The flick, which tells the story of the martyred gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, was spliced with actual footage from the gay rights movement in the Seventies.

But as it turns out, the 3-0-5 got a pretty embarrassing historical shout-out. Second in line for the film's most loathed antagonist was smug-faced, orange-plucking bigot Anita Bryant, who lead Dade on a moral crusade to prevent gay equality in the late Seventies. The goody two-shoes pop singer/actress normalized the motto "no special rights" and convinced voters that homo perverts aimed to recruit our children.  Our innocent children!

In the film, a map of Dade flickered, followed by a few clips from Bryant's vomit-inducing speeches. In them, she lobbied against legislation that would have prevented gay people from being fired based on sexual orientation. (The cute couple next to Riptide scoffed loudly.)Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn, then rallied the hippies and the queers in the the Haight and the Castro against the "Anita Bryants everywhere."  Check out New Times' movie review here.

Just one question: Thirty years from now, who's gonna direct the flick about how gay people couldn't adopt in Florida?

--Natalie O'Neill