In recent years, San Francisco has been synonymous with gay and lesbian pride, and the various achievements of the gay and lesbian community are personified in the city by the bay. The tumultuous and ongoing struggles for this community's civil rights from the 1950s to the present are well documented, but queer culture itself goes back much further than that, in fact all the way back to the California gold rush.

Award-winning documentary focusing on the life and times of San Francisco's first openly gay politician. After having run unsuccessfully for office on three occasions, Harvey Milk was finally elected a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, when the growing political and economic power of the city's gay community heralded sweeping social changes. After serving eleven months in office, Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone, was assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor, desperate to be reinstated. The film traces Milk's rise to prominence and election, his assassination, and the aftermath, when a miscarriage of justice allowed White to receive a unjustly short jail term, provoking widespread condemnation and rioting.