“If you want to send a message,” the oft-quoted Samuel Goldwyn is alleged to have said, “use Western Union.” Goldwyn, who created Gold­wyn Pictures, which later became part of MGM, was talking about the commercial viability of political or socially conscious movies, but he could just as easily have been referring to their real-world impact. Norma Rae may have stirred populist hearts, but how many people went out and fought for unions because of it? And how many demonstrators took to the streets against the Iraq War after seeing The Hurt Locker? The obvious answer is what makes the political ripple effect of Milk since it snagged Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay Oscars last year so remarkable.

Timing is everything, and Milk opened serendipitously in November 2008, says Kip Williams, a young San Francisco LGBT activist and videographer. “The first African American president was elected in an unlikely campaign with a message of hope—yet Proposition 8 also passed that same day. All of a sudden, people felt like their rights had been taken away.” But then, says Williams, “Milk came out to inspire us.”

It also galvanized a new generation of protesters, many of whom coalesced around the person who, more than anyone else, inherited Milk’s legacy: Cleve Jones. Jones’ major effort after the making of Milk was to spearhead the National Equality March, the massive Washington rally for LGBT rights that took place last fall, and he’s absolutely unequivocal about his muse: “This march would have never happened if not for Milk,” he says. “The younger generation was yearning for change, and Milk showed them how to fight for it.”

Even before the movie was released, the activist spark was ignited. “When we were filming in front of city hall,” says Jones, “Kip Williams came up to me with a little pocket recorder and just started talking.” Williams was so moved by see­ing Milk and talking with Jones that he became a codirector of the National Equality March and is now teaming up with LGBT activist Robin McGehee (also a March codirector) to create a nationwide gay-rights campaign.

“But there are thousands of Kip Williamses,” Jones says. Consider 26-year-old Tanner Efinger, another National Equality March organizer. Efinger has been openly gay since college, but he had never felt compelled to take a political stand about it. Then he saw Milk. “I walked straight from the movie theater to West Hollywood city hall to ask for advice on my idea for a letter-writing campaign about gay rights,” he says. Thus began his project, called Postcards to the President, which eventually delivered more than 15,000 postcards from 30 states.

And Milk didn’t just spur action. One day, Danny Nicoletta, the San Francisco photographer who was a protégé of Milk’s and whose character is prominent in the film, got a phone call from a woman in Alabama. Her teenage son is gay, she said, and he felt isolated in their conservative community. So the boy’s grandmother gave him a copy of Milk to watch, and for the first time, the woman reported, her son felt that he wasn’t alone. He was too shy to call for himself, so he asked his mother to contact Nicoletta, whose character in the film he identified with.

Jones is convinced that Harvey Milk has practically become a household name. “Before, whenever I traveled and asked people ‘How many of you know who Harvey Milk is?’, it used to be that two people would raise their hands. Now, everyone does—and not just the gay people, but the straight folks as well.”