For many of my generation, there is one particular life-changing movie that changed their opinion on the gay identity. I was 16 when Brokeback Mountain (2005) entered theaters and started a barrage of “gay cowboy” jokes. It would become one of the most critically and financially successful queer movies to that point and I definitely now consider it a masterpiece. However, as a teenager, I don’t know that I was yet ready to have anything opened up to me. As a student in the late 2000s, where Lil Wayne could open a song of the year candidate with “no homo,” where I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) could feature straight actors pretending to be gay to cheat the system and get the girl, it was a confusing time.
Because of everything, I unfortunately grew up believing to some extent that to be gay was to be performative. The gay best friends™ on Sex and the City were flamboyant. South Park’s handling of transgender issues was even more bastardized and offensive. Elsewhere I watched t.A.T.u. kiss in the rain in a manner suggesting lesbianism was for the male gaze. So much artifice surrounded the issue. It wasn’t “legitimate” because it wasn’t taught in my Catholic school upbringing nor did I go to many places where people waved a rainbow flag openly. People forget that along with having George W. Bush in The White House that California had a conservative Governor in Arnold Schwarzenegger, where gay marriage was still illegal. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t aware of gay culture as a concept, but there was definitely more of a mystique around it – especially as a teenager who could be mocked for merely looking at something, especially male on male affection, no matter how vanilla it ultimately was.
I never rejected Brokeback Mountain, but I don’t know that I processed it as something significant. Again, it was paralleled by hundreds of tired jokes that once again made being gay seem like it was just that. It was inconsequential, “a phase,” something that didn’t exist. I would say that my naivety extended so far that I rejected sincerity when I saw it. I think of the times I watched Mean Girls (2004) and when Janice yelled about having “a big lesbian* crush” on Regina, I thought it was a vindictive joke meant more to humiliate Regina than empower Janice. Somehow I accepted Damian as “too gay to function,” which I guess is… progress?
*There’s an opposing fan theory that the “Janice is a lesbian” joke is more a play on Regina not understanding the difference between lesbians and people of Lesbos descent, though there’s little evidence to back this up.
It should be noted that by 2008, I was 18 and had some personal experience with a wide array of friends. My best friend was a lesbian who upon hearing Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” was quick to take to Myspace and declare how much she related to it. The tides were turning, but my personal understanding of nuance has always been fraught at best. Unless I deeply research, there’s a good chance that I miss context clues. Even if I had dabbled with cross-dressing and joked about “going both ways,” the idea of sexuality was a concept that I never really questioned. As a student of punk, I think the impulse to make a joke instead of let down your guard was an easy go-to. Even then, I remember sitting in a psychology classroom and watching a jock get into a heated fight when he eavesdropped on someone else’s conversation of Samwell’s “What What (In the Butt).” Elsewhere I remember a greaser in an art class claiming that he disliked gay people for what they might do to him in an alley.
There is a lot to unpack and I’m unsure if I remember all of it. Maybe on some level, I’m conflating and elsewhere repressing. However, I think this prelude to discussing Milk (2008) is important. If for no other reason, I wanted to provide context why I don’t have any stories about swelling up with tears when Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger kissed, and why I wasn’t out in the streets when Crash (2005) notoriously won Best Picture. If I’m being honest, none of that was really important to me at 16. I didn’t have a grasp of the bigger world outside of Southern California. I hadn’t really known a world where I didn’t go to parties with my bigoted friends on the weekend, thinking of sexuality as something mystical but not tangible. Everything was so small then.
By Fall 2008, my world had inflated a little. I was a student at Cypress College with a part-time courtesy clerk job and a driver’s license. This was the era where Barrack Obama campaigned on the all-encompassing “Hope,” making you believe that the future was going to be something beautiful. Elsewhere, the calm before the storm started as Lady Gaga encouraged audiences to “Just Dance” for the first time. It was a perfect way to end your teen years, reveling in the sense of independence that your 20s would bring.
At the center of everything was another conflict, and one that feels permanently interlocked with Milk at least in my experience. Even when Sean Penn won Best Actor for his role as Harvey Milk, he brought up the terrible ramifications of California’s hot-button issue Prop 8. At another time, I would say that we are culturally beyond the idea of gay marriage being at risk. However, I write this in 2022 at a time when the dominoes are falling yet again. It’s there in the Anti-Transgender Bills, Florida’s notorious Don’t Say Gay legislature, and even the discussion of women’s reproductive rights being at stake has been tied into this downward spiral. Suddenly rewatching Milk for the first time in 14 years makes it just as emotional, if not more, because of how painfully relevant it still feels.
More than once I’ve lazily and inaccurately called Milk “The Prop 8 Movie.” I think debate has continually been made about whether an earlier release would’ve swayed California voting one way or the other. While critics loved it and the film was recognized for its empathetic portrayal, it still existed in a time when being gay brought with it certain taboos. While Penn did amazing work, rumors of getting an out gay actor for the lead were ultimately stalled for financial reasons.
On some level, Milk is a product of its time while also being arguably one of the trailblazing visions of where cinema could head. Sure The Oscars weren’t yet ready to award a story about an openly gay protagonist Best Picture (let alone one who had a happy ending), but at least they were popping up with more frequency. As much as many could argue that “awards don’t matter,” I remain convinced that there’s some cultural validation in having something like Moonlight (2016) win which says something about the industry that wasn’t true eight years prior. There was tolerance and acceptance, a personal sense of growth that could send a message that the tides were turning, that we are willing to accept different perspectives more willingly.
But that wasn’t why I loved Milk when I first watched it in 2008. The reason was much more complicated. To me, it ties to a time and place so perfectly. “The Prop 8 Movie” followed the story of Harvey Milk who at 40 decided to put aside potential danger in favor of living an activist life. Throughout the film he notes the many boyfriends who committed suicide because he wanted them closeted, to hide their true identity from family and society. The idea of being openly queer even in 1970s San Francisco was a major risk. Still, there was something freeing about watching Milk go about his early activism. As much as it was a call for equal rights, it wasn’t an exclusionary task force. He wanted to make the world a better place and started with things as mundane as sanitation.
I suppose what drew me to Milk wasn’t so much that he was a homosexual who knew how to handle a soapbox moment. While it’s true that I grew passionate as he stood there before a crowd, ready to encourage them to “come out” with the belief that if they knew one of them they knew one of us, there was just something normal about him. Gone was the artifice of your Big Gay Al’s and queerbaiting. Here was a man with a complex inner life that felt real. While he was “The Mayor of Castro Street” who helped outlaw alcohols that funded anti-gay causes, he was ultimately someone who wanted the betterment of everyone. He was an easy figure to get behind.
I think a lot of credit should be given to writer Dustin Lance Black, whose work is startlingly empathetic at every turn. Whereas this could just be another tired Norma Rae (1979) clone, he found ways to tie it to a greater sense of identity, that Milk was ultimately about being proud to be yourself. It comes with risks and sometimes even tragedy, but the results speak for themselves. Every failure is a lesson for next time. Every insult could be used to toughen skin, to focus more on the thousands that you inspired and helped realize the potential of equal rights. Even now, I see the conflict between Milk and Anita Bryant and think about a recent quote from Marjorie Taylor Green saying straight people will soon be extinct. This ideology still exists, just in different packaging.
But the one scene that changed my entire worldview came almost 2/3 of the way through the film. Following news of Prop 6 that would roll back gay rights, Milk took to townhall debates to defend himself. In one scene where he’s asked to address the potential of a homosexual teacher “recruiting” students to their cause, Milk gives this detailed response that he had straight parents and straight teachers while still ending up homosexual. Outside of conservative paranoia, the causality isn’t there. As a closing remark, he gave the infectiously direct comment: “If it were true that children emulate their teachers, we'd have a lot more nuns running around.”
In hindsight, the answer is fairly predictable. However, for someone who grew up being told that you could be gay “just don’t do it around me,” there are certain barriers in logic that I hadn’t even considered. There was the idea that gay sex was sickening and going to spill out into the streets. None of this was true in a majority of situations, but served as a pleasant form of discrimination. Even for those who campaigned for Prop 8, there was this false narrative that gays would still have rights, just not around the subject of marriage and civil rights. The image of parents losing their mind at two women loving each other and a daughter playing with “two princesses” seems comical now, but it was a rampant defense.
Admittedly, there was a lot of negative messaging at the time that made men loving each other difficult to process as a good thing. Even the affectionate gaze into each other’s eyes felt tainted by the sneers standing next to me, of the idea that accepting gayness meant you were gay and that was somehow bad. I still remember when a special screening happened at Cypress College and someone I knew attended left early. He claimed that he couldn’t handle the gay sex. Rewatching it, I can assume he was referring to the first longing gaze between Sean Penn and James Franco where they lay in bed naked but modestly shot. It is by no means graphic, but that was the level of timidness facing Milk at the time, where two straight actors lying together were considered “brave” for what it might do to their careers*.
*Then again, James Franco’s approach to sexuality has always been intentionally confusing as he’s continually done projects that push boundaries and comfort zones, though again I wonder how much of that is sincere.
For me, the greatest accomplishment of Milk, and something that few films from 2008 had achieved, was creating a sense of empathy. Here was a work that didn’t treat gayness as something to be submissive or caricatured. This was very close to agit-prop at times that messages even flash across the screen. However, it was a chance to put into context that Prop 8 wasn’t the first time that California had been at risk. Even before Harvey Milk took office, there was a lot holding the LGBTQIA+ community back. What I learned was that it was okay to be gay and not have it be the worst thing in the world. In fact, it could be an ultimate positive, that finding a community could slowly lead to change and inspire millions across now a half-century.
I think of this at a time when I was a Freshman in college. During that first semester, I was in an Intro to Philosophy class that was largely over my head. While I appreciate the ideology and had customers come into my workplace with new anecdotes, “The Gorgias” meant very little to me. However, this was the type of teacher who on occasion found ways to interweave current events into his lectures. He once gave a speech about why he canceled class last time to take a mental health day with his son.
But the one that sticks out the most to me was one close to the election. To suggest how different the social norms were, he decided to discuss why he was voting for Prop 8 despite having gay friends. I regret not remembering any of his talking points, but the moment was striking because of the importance I placed on teachers. Here’s someone who is supposed to present unbiased information for their students to better their educational experiences, and here he was preaching homophobia. Again, it was more acceptable in 2008 and I use this as the prime example of how discourse has changed. Cut to 2022 where I spent an academic semester studying the queer subtext of authors like James Joyce and William Shakespeare and it helps me realize how being gay isn’t a fad. It’s been here the whole time.
I think of every student from my generation who wasn’t taught about gay history, that it was something to ignore. Given that the internet was much harder to navigate in 2008, chances of finding a community to educate were more difficult. Even The AIDS Crisis which I technically lived through was more of a punchline in Team America: World Police (2004) than anything I took seriously. I envy those who can turn to social media and have open discussions about the past, to tie everything to a greater sense of history. I love that there are way more accessible articles by scholars, where documentaries are streaming right now to inform the masses.
For me, Milk maybe stood out the most because it was a topic that interested me. I was a child who read presidential biographies and consumed presidential elections like an addiction. To this day I’ll sometimes turn on C-SPAN and watch old debates just to see if I can figure out what their appeal as a candidate was. While I could never see myself as a politician nor do I have a strong grasp of the law making process, there is something compelling about the process to watch in real time. My grandparents and mother used to work local elections where I’d wander around doing mock elections to kill time. One of the messages instilled in me was the potential for America to be a land of opportunity, a melting pot building to “a more perfect union.”
Harvey Milk as a figure fits that fairly well. It makes sense that he was my entryway into gay culture as something greater because it was about more than lisping stereotypes. He was doing real work. I see it to this day in politicians like Pete Buttigieg who have an easier time being accepted for who they are – even elected to presidential cabinets. To me, there’s an importance to history because it puts the whole progress into perspective. Do I wish it moved faster? OF. COURSE. But to say that things can’t get better is inherently false. Milk preached hope, and I see that in every march where rainbow flags wave alongside transgender ones, where everyone is more allowed to be open in their expressions. It’s beautiful.
I remember the night that Prop 8 was struck down. Obama had just won and celebration was happening en masse. However, there was a small chiron telling the world that enough people voted ‘Yes’ on banning gay marriage. I mistook it for a victory in the moment, but soon on Myspace, I heard my lesbian friend planning to attend a rally against the verdict. The fight wasn’t over. In theory, it wasn’t really until 2015 which even then was hotly contested.
The world has changed greatly since 2008, including myself. I am more accepting of the LGBTQIA+, even recently becoming the proud owner of a progress flag. To me, there’s something great about something like Target willingly selling flags and shirts, where I can turn on Hulu and watch Crush (2022) where everyone gets to have a typical romantic comedy while joking about being gay. Elsewhere Ariana DeBose becomes the first openly queer woman to win Best Supporting Actress Oscar and gives a speech encouraging everyone to follow their dreams.
I think what makes me relieved now is that there’s a sense of community now. Everyone has a better understanding of what it means to be queer and even on an academic level teachers aren’t shying away from works with gay themes. Many are sharing history and promoting creators whose work deserves to be seen. As much as I feel like this is for the generation after me, I still enjoy listening to Harvey Fierstein talk about how the non-binary conversation thrills him, that Barbie is coming out with a Laverne Cox doll, that there’s enough influence in the media that any potential backlash won’t be met with complete silence. There’s still bigotry, but it feels less of a driving force this time around.
In some respect, Milk has aged well because of how pure its intentions are and that its subject matter remains relevant. Once one looks past his identity, one can begin to notice the power of one man, the ability to endure and inspire even amid intolerance. Much like Milk on a phone call with a wheelchair-bound man on his way to conversion therapy, sometimes having someone tell you that there is hope elsewhere is all that you need. All that one has to do is go out and look for it. I thank Dustin Lance Black for writing such a heartfelt tribute to an important queer figure and Gus Van Sant for interweaving reenactments with archival footage. It shows the ways that the past is connected to the present, and even the future. In a time where it feels like marches happen every weekend, Milk still feels relevant to the greater conversation. Even if the day comes where it doesn’t, it’ll still mean the world to me, if just for how it inspired me to look beyond the caricature and find the humanity underneath.
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