Breaking the Closet

Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s new biopic (allmoviephoto.com)

Can a movie be both significant and not particularly memorable? Gus Van Sant’s Milk, a biopic of the first openly gay elected official in America, Harvey Milk, certainly is. Milk, played by Sean Penn, served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (the city’s legislature) from 1977 until he was assassinated in 1978. In that brief period of time Milk carved out a legacy that transcends any bill or ordinance and echoes to the present day.

Through his career as an activist and a city official, Milk sought to rip homosexuality out of the closet. He opposed the homophobic straight public and the self-loathing homosexual establishment, affirmed sexual freedom, and railed against discrimination. Milk’s vision was noble, and deserves to be heard. The film itself is a large-scale Hollywood production, designed to tug at a mainstream audience’s heartstrings and present a history that most Americans are in dire need of learning. Van Sant’s take on Milk’s life is sometimes as exhilarating as all big-budget blockbusters are, but the result is merely adequate, and reveals none of the complexity and infighting in the LGBT movement that is still present today. Milk himself is presented less as a fully-fleshed out human being and more as a valiant hero, who moved a Great Cause forward and was capable of doing no wrong.

In its quest for mainstream acceptance, what’s lost is nuance. The film shirks complexity. At one point, Milk’s long-time lover Scott Smith (played by James Franco), criticized Milk for outing some gays against their wishes. Should the closet be opened—forcefully if need be—to make public life better for all gays? It’s an interesting question in need of further consideration, but after Smith’s one moment of protest, the subject is never broached again in the film.

The movie begins with Milk’s life in the early ’70s in New York City, where as a forty-something businessman he took the much younger Smith home with him. The two began a love affair that took Milk out of New York City and to the Mecca of gay life, San Francisco. This is not the San Francisco of today; Milk’s San Francisco is a city still reeling from the tectonic cultural shifts of the previous decade. The hippies and the gays are there, but so are some of the far more conservative white ethnic groups.

Milk, a longhaired, bearded Jewish homosexual, opened a camera shop in the Castro, a well-known gay neighborhood located near San Francisco’s business district, but he was not welcomed with open arms. Instead, the straight businessmen across the street shunned him. Gays in early ‘70s San Francisco were frequently the targets of violence we would now refer to as hate crimes. One of Milk’s most effective scenes showed Milk nervously darting away from shadows on a night street; he feared he was about to be attacked.

Tired of the threat of violence, Milk slowly built a political coalition. He started with simple, practical solutions to significant problems. He created a program that encouraged gays walking at night to wear whistles, so they could call attention to themselves if they were attacked or threatened. He formed an alliance with labor unions, working with the Teamsters to dump the anti-union Coors beer out of gay bars; the Teamsters, in turn, agreed to hire the first openly gay truck drivers. Milk’s political successes made him the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro.”

His title was later validated when he became one of the city’s supervisors. He ran for office three times, losing the first two times before at last winning the race for supervisor. When he wins, the beard is gone, as is the long hair. Here, again, is a pivotal question reduced to a momentary mention: Can queer politics win without acquiescing to the demands of the American mainstream? Milk provocatively implies that it cannot. But the film moves on from this question as quickly as it is asked.

Milk’s career in elected office was brief. Outside of gay politics, his most notable piece of legislation mandated dog owners to clean up their dog’s messes. Yet his contributions to gay politics as an elected official were considerable. In a parallel to today, California was the principal battleground in the fight for gay rights. Forget gay marriage—in the late ’70s, popular singer Anita Bryant led a nationwide campaign against homosexuality itself. In California, she promoted a bill that would have fired all gay schoolteachers, as well as the straight teachers who supported them. As a legislator, Milk was on the front lines in this fight and ultimately saw the defeat of the bill. His moment of triumph was cut short, however: Dan White, a fellow councilmember, assassinated Milk, as well as San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

It’s not clear why White did it. His lawyers got him off with the first application of the so-called “Twinkie defense,” which argued that White’s consumption of junk food damaged his mental capacity. The movie hints that White was a closeted homosexual, envious of Milk’s sexual candor. But the film, with its characteristic lack of depth, only suggests White’s potential motive, never fully explaining it.

Other parts of the movie feel strangely hollow. The film has fleeting moments of intimacy between Milk and Smith, and later, Milk and another boyfriend, Jack Lira (played by Diego Luna). For a movie about the radical affirmation of homosexuality—about the need to bring homosexuality in front of the public eye—there’s a remarkable lack of sex. At the moments when the audience might expect to see a sex scene, the camera turns away, as if ashamed. Even in our putatively enlightened age, we rarely see sex scenes that breach conventional standards—those that depict interracial or same-sex couples are few and far between. One hopes that Milk doesn’t mark the problematic emergence of a rule for gay-themed films.

Milk is a useful history lesson and less than a good movie. It is a close cousin to the spate of films made in the late ’90s about the Civil Rights movement. Think Ghosts of Mississippi or The Hurricane, Hollywood versions of a rich and noble history. These were competent, occasionally inspiring pieces of pedagogy. But competence is not excellence, and pedagogy is not art. At a time when gay rights have been undermined in California, we ought to rejoice that the cause is nonetheless deemed popular enough to merit a Hollywood-style epic. But this rich history of the struggle for gay rights deserves a more nuanced movie.

Ethan Porter is an associate editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He graduated from Bard College in 2007.

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