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“[After Milk] many people?straight and gay?had to adjust to a new reality he embodied: that a gay person could live an honest life and succeed.”
John Cloud

Milk is a recent movie starring Sean Penn as the legendary activist Harvey Milk, he was the first politician who was openly gay.

He was elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He had a very short career in politics. On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned and wanted his job back. Harvey served as supervisor only for 11 month. Nevertheless he became an icon in San Francisco and “a martyr for gay rights”. In 2002 he was called “the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States”.

Of course this is not the first movie focusing on gay rights and homosexual people, but apart from the highly acclaimed Brokenback Mountain, Milk focuses more on gay rights activism than on feelings. Canada has also a long history of activists fighting for gay rights.

In Canada this year the gay people will have the 40th anniversary of decriminalization of homosexuality. It was the famous Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69 or the Bill C-150 that changed the status of homosexuals in Canadian society and basically allowed them to live normally. This decision was opposed by Catholic Church and various religious organizations, but in 1969 beliefs and prejudices stood back and rights stood forward. Canada today is one of the countries with very democratic position concerning gays and lesbians. Same sex marriages are allowed and the age of consent is specified with certain law.

The first major conflict was the Egan v. Canada in 1995. The cased revolved around James Egan and John Norris Nesbit, who were a gay couple and lived in a conjugal relationship since 1948. Upon reaching 65 Nesbit applied to the Department of National Health and Welfare for a spousal allowance. He was refused on the basis that spouse, defined in section 2 of Old Age Security Act, did not include a member of the same sex. Today it is a landmark Supreme Court case which established that sexual orientation constitutes a prohibited basis of discrimination under Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Only in 1999 the case labeled M. v. H. became a second landmark decision for the gay rights activists. The Supreme Court of Canada stated that same-sex couples should be treated equal under the Constitution of Canada. One of the in the case described this decision as: “This important decision found that it was constitutionally imperative under the Canadian Charter for laws to provide equal treatment of same-sex common-law couples and opposite-sex common-law couples. . . . [The Supreme Court] called upon the lawmakers of Canada to rectify all Canadian laws, rather than force gays and lesbians to resort to the Courts”

In 2005, Canada has offered civil marriage rights nationwide to same-sex couples.

It is great that modern society is becoming more and more democratic in questions concerning gay and lesbian rights, same-sex couples and homosexual people, and Canada is standing at the front line of this conflict.