Word: gayness
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...Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay activist who was murdered 30 years ago tomorrow, has a New York City public school, a Georgia rock band and, as of this week, a Bay Area civil-service building named for him. The first openly homosexual city supervisor in the U.S., he organized gays into a potent political force. Then there are the movies. Bryan Singer, director of X-Men and Superman Returns, is completing a Milk documentary, The Mayor of Castro Street. Today we get Milk, a hurtling, minutely researched, close-to-irresistible biopic starring Academy Award winner Sean Penn, whose performance...
...kids today, especially the most conservative, may think of gays as belonging to some vague outlaw culture. But they might be surprised to learn that when Harvey Milk was a young adult, gays were outlaws. The new movie begins with newsreel clips of men hiding their faces from the paparazzi's flashbulbs as police remove them from some furtive gay bar of the 1960s - the decade when practically every underclass of society but theirs got liberated. Vicious assaults of gays were common, and the law rarely pursued the perpetrators. If, as you watch Mad Men, you wonder why the gay...
...needs little Hollywood embellishment; it's already the perfect outsider fable. A Manhattan investment banker raised on Long Island, Milk arrived in San Francisco in the early '70s. He opened Castro Camera in the run-down Castro district, which was fast becoming an enclave for the not-yet-outspoken gay culture. With the aid of an unlikely ally, the Teamsters, he organized a boycott of Coors Beer, which at the time refused to hire gays. After three losing runs for a city supervisor seat, he won in 1977, and a year later he helped defeat Proposition 6, which would have...
...work with than he did as George Bush in W. This is a portrait, from the inside, of a man who fought the validation of homosexuality because his Catholic faith and his constituents wouldn't stand for it - and because, the movie suggests, he was roiled by unresolved gay issues of his own. ("I think he's one of us," Harvey whispers.) As a performance, it's Brolin's best since No Country for Old Men, which means very good indeed...
...Designated a "gay politician," Milk was at least as much the latter as the former - a genius in convincing people that what he wanted was what they needed. So is the movie. It revels in showing how Milk built his campaign staff from the lovers and locals who wandered into Castro Camera; how he fought the city's gay establishment, until then discreet in identifying itself; how he debated John Briggs, the sponsor of Prop. 6, to a standstill and was instrumental in having the initiative defeated by more than a million votes. You've never seen this before...