A still from the 1984 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk.” Sean Penn plays the slain gay rights leader in the new biopic “Milk.”
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By Christopher Wallenberg
Sunday, November 23, 2008
In the wake of Proposition 8, former San Francisco city supervisor and slain gay rights icon Harvey Milk is delivering a message to today’s LGBT activists, and it sounds something like this: Never stop fighting, and never give up hope.
For the filmmakers behind the biopic “Milk” (starring Sean Penn), there’s a lesson to be learned in what, for many, amounted to a major set-back in the fight for gay rights—the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California, which ammended the state constitution to recognize marriage as only between a man and a woman.
“Milk”’s gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black believes that Prop 8, unfortunately, parallels what happened in Dade County Florida in 1977, when Anita Bryant and her conservative religious zealots [cronies] successfully repealed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Bryant and Co.’s victory in Florida led to similar repeals of gay rights ordinances across the country and then to the infamous Briggs Initiative, a law that would have prevented openly gay teachers from serving in public schools in California. Milk’s spearheading of the fight to defeat so-called Proposition 6 in 1978 was one of the great victories of the then-burgeoning gay rights movement and provides one of the dramatic high-points of the film.
“I think gay people need to know their history,” said Black during a press conference last week to promote the film. “They need to understand that, in 1978, in a far more homophobic time, with a great wave of the religious right coming, with Anita Bryant on top of it, we were winning. We won. We beat Proposition 6. So what are we doing wrong now? We have gay prides in our own little gay ghettos, but we’re not being proud with our neighbors. I hope this loss motivates the gay and lesbian community to start that outreach and education and have some pride and get us to meet our neighbors again and put a face to who’s being hurt [by the passage of this ammendment]. I think that will help in future fights.”
While many people are angered and frustrated at the results of the Prop 8 vote in California, “Milk”’s Oscar-nominated and openly gay director Gus Van Sant has been encouraged by the passionate reaction and mobilization that the vote has spurred from young gay activists. Many large-scale protests sprang up in the days following the election, including a coordinated effort to rally at City Halls in major cities across the country.
“The younger gay community has really taken to the streets. It’s their time,” said Van Sant. “I think there’s new energy, and it’s inspiring. And it’s interesting because our film is about a new energy of a different time.”
Since Proposition 8 passed in California, there has been a dramatic rise in the escalation of tensions between the gay community and religious organizations like the Catholic and Mormon churches. Many gay activists angrily blame the passage of Proposition 8 on the amount of money raised and spent by the Mormon Church and the outsized role that religious organizations played in the debate. Gay activists have specifically targeted the Mormon Church in their anti-Prop 8 post-election protests.
The always-outspoken Sean Penn, who seems certain to capture his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance, argues that gay marriage is being used by the ultra-conservative right as a cultural wedge issue to divide people and write discrimination into the law.
“I think it’s important to remember that the tensions are between a gay community, which in fact really is gay, and a pseudo-faith community that has nothing to do with God, love, or anything to do with faith,” Penn said during the press conference. “It’s really just hypocrisy and hatred. Any faith community that deserves the title ‘faith community’ really won’t have a problem with these issues.”
For many years, Hollywood big-shots like Oliver Stone and out director Bryan Singer sought to bring the story of Harvey Milk to the big screen. Many of the planned adaptations were based on Randy Shilts’s acclaimed biography of Milk, “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Still, it was Black’s screenplay that ended up getting off the ground. A boyish 29-year-old blonde who was raised Mormon, Black discovered Milk’s story from an influential theater director who mentored him during high school.
“He told me all about Harvey,” Black said. “It was a really hopeful story. it got me through many a dark day because I was still closeted for quite some time. It changed my outlook on what it [being gay] might have meant.”
While the documentary film “The Times of Harvey Milk” won the Academy Award in 1984, Black felt that the younger generation of gays and lesbians weren’t aware of Milk’s story.
“I don’t think gay people know their history,” Black said. “They think Harvey was some sort of dairy salesman. So we’ve got to get the lessons that we learned in the ’70s back out into popular culture. You have to self-represent. That was Harvey’s message.”
Black, who is a writer and producer for the HBO series about polygymists-in-suburbia “Big Love,” spent several years interviewing and getting to know Milk’s close confidants from his days as the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street.” Black based his screenplay on the material he gathered while hanging out with Milk’s friends and associates such as Cleve Jones, Danny Nicoletta, Anne Kronenberg, and Frank Robinson. In fact, Jones, in particular, became a mentor and friend to Black, just as Milk had taken a young Jones under his wing some 30 years ago.
“The moment that I met Cleve and started hearing the stories of the real Harvey Milk, the real man, not this legend—that’s when you really fall in love with someone and figure out just how flawed they are and how they overcame their own personal issues and accomplished something great,” Black said.
The film was shot almost entirely on location in San Francisco, and Black attests that the cast exhibited zero sqeamishness about shooting the film’s love scenes.
“That’s a testament to Sean,” said Black. “I don’t think he would have allowed anyone to act like that. We have respect for these people and these characters. That’s why these people wanted to play these parts. So why would you be squeamish when it comes to playing it? I actually had other cast members saying, ‘Wait a minute! I’m in a gay movie playing a gay character—in the Castro in 1978. Why don’t I have a love scene?’ So it became quite the opposite, in a way.”
Said Penn of playing the gay sex scenes, “Cleve Jones said something really great early on. He said, ‘You know, one of the myths is that [gay and straight people] are all just the same, it’s just the sex that’s different. But in reality, we’re very different, it’s just the sex that’s pretty much the same.’ The difference, of course, is that [gay people have to live] with bigotry and oppression and all of that shit. And that was how we approached it. For some people, a guy gives them a boner. For somebody else, it’s a woman. The sex is the sex is the sex. The other part was really the heart of the picture.”
If Milk hadn’t been assassinated, Penn offers his sobering assessment that less people would have died of AIDS, which emerged a few years after Milk’s death. “I think Ronald Reagan would have been forced to address it,” Penn said. “[Harvey] wouldn’t have stood quietly. He was a leader. I think he would have advanced the argument a lot earlier that AIDS wasn’t just a gay disease. I think people are dead today because he died too soon.”
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