Harvey Milk: Gay icon's message lives on (Prop. 8 makes new film bio, 'Milk,' timely)

[TechBear_Seattle]

Harvey Milk: Gay icon's message lives on

Thirty years ago, San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, eerily predicting his death, said, "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door." Soon after, he was gunned down by a disgruntled political adversary, but his words have proven prophetic as Milk has become a hero to thousands of oppressed and frightened Americans -- a man many consider their "gay Martin Luther King."

Milk, an activist and Castro Street businessman, was the nation's first openly gay elected official. He refused to back down in the face of a tidal wave of adversity that included the failed 1978 California ballot measure Proposition 6, which would have mandated firing gay teachers in public schools, and Anita Bryant's 1977 anti-gay "Save Our Children" crusade.

Randy Shilts wrote about Milk's life in his uncompromising 1982 biography, "The Mayor of Castro Street," and the 1984 Oscar-winner for best documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk," was heralded for its unbiased look at Milk's quest for equal rights.

Now, Portland-based filmmaker Gus Van Sant has again brought Harvey Milk's political life front and center with "Milk," his stirring and humane new film -- and it has arrived at another tumultuous time for gay rights. Two decades after Prop. 6, Californians this month were faced with another contentious ballot issue to curb gay rights. But this time it passed. Proposition 8, which was approved by voters 52 to 48 percent, changes the state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage (at the time, California was only the second state in the nation, after Massachusetts, to permit it).

The article, which includes a movie review and a retrospective on the importance of Milk to the GLBT rights movement, continues at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/movies/389229_milkfeature25.html

[Auggie]

1. Raves from the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco Chronicle, 11-24-2008:

Penn disappears into Harvey Milk, shown as the leader of an epic, historic struggle for civil rights - and a completely liberated man

With "Milk," a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.

Director Gus Van Sant uses the account of one of the country's first openly gay public officials, who was assassinated in 1978, to invest the gay rights movement with mythic grandeur, as a successor to all the heroic social protest movements in American history. Van Sant's point of view may be a matter of politics, outside the scope of a review, but his success in putting over his point of view is a question of art.

His success is complete. His shaping of the material is seamless, and the images he evokes are inspiring.

At the center of everything is Sean Penn, who disappears into the title role. Gone are his familiar facial expressions. Gone are the pursed lips and the covered, compressed quality. He has Harvey Milk's hair, and from some angles - particularly when Milk is in the public arena - the physical resemblance is uncanny. But what's more striking is the spiritual transformation. Penn gives us a man who was once closeted and now, as if in response, lives his life completely in the open. He's spontaneous as Penn has never been spontaneous. He's emotional, vulnerable and generous with his laughter. Penn plays him as an utterly liberated man, and this liberates Penn as an actor.

LINK: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/25/DDJ91489PF.DTL

[Bluenorthwest]

2. I'm delighted that this film has been made

Overjoyed that Van Sant is directing, and so proud of Sean Penn for the actor and person he has become over the years. Harvey's story will be widley known at last, and that is a wonderful thing. For a million reasons this all makes me happy.

[bluedawg12]

3. Just reading about Harvey Milk -who say's we have no history of struggle?

"all young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.” - Harvey Milk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk

>>However, Milk's assassination has become entwined with his political efficacy, partly because he was killed at the zenith of his popularity. Historian Neil Miller writes, "No contemporary American gay leader has yet to achieve in life the stature Milk found in death"... Randy Shilts concludes his biography writing that Milk's success, murder, and the inevitable injustice of White's verdict represented the experience of all gays. Milk's life was "a metaphor for the homosexual experience in America.

Dan White served a little more than five years for the double murder of Moscone and Milk.<<