Movie on the Martin Luther King of gay civil rights dodges the bullet

To be young and realise you were gay in 1970s America — or 1980s Ireland — was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows. No one person could change all that, and not all the changes are complete, here or in America

IT’S not hard to find fault with Gus Van Sant’s film Milk, which opened here at the weekend. Biopics, no matter how acutely observed, have a dated feel about them.

Is this a product of the late noughties or the late 1980s, viewers might wonder? And while Sean Penn puts in a completely convincing performance as the San Franciscan gay activist-cum-politician Harvey Milk, how true to life really is it? Where is the infamous Milk bad temper, for instance?

Has distance from the events in California 30 years ago lent them a rosy tinge? Above all, isn’t it the ultimate in non-gay gay movies?

Harvey Milk the man — not the film character — urged gay men and women to come out of the proverbial closet and demand acceptance for who they are. No matter how sympathetically a gay character can be portrayed these days, isn’t it ironic that Hollywood still shies away from what it perceives as unpalatable truths in the search for mass market approval?

In short, hasn’t a gay director done precisely what Milk excoriated his liberal allies for doing, pretending that being gay is scarcely a bigger deal than having red hair? Down the ages what has provoked disgust — terror even — is what gay men might get up to in private, and Milk the movie studiously avoids confronting the issue.

“No sex please, we’re gay” might be a winning formula in the American film industry — a reflection of how little attitudes have moved on (or regressed) Stateside — but it’s hardly pushing the boundaries, is it?

So Milk is not the once-and-for-all movie about what it means to be gay — or even a very realistic depiction of The Castro, the US’s most notorious gay neighbourhood in San Francisco where gay sailors began to congregate after the Second World War.

But, as already noted, it’s easier to be cynical than to laud solid achievement.

For all the flaws, the movie does effectively capture the homophobia of Milk’s time, like the opening sequence of vintage footage of police raids on gay bars. Archival newsreel is also used to recreate the legend of Anita Bryant, the former Miss America finalist/gospel singer/orange juice spokesperson who led a national campaign to “save our children” from the evil of equal rights and wanted the law to be God’s law as she saw it.

Swap the Oklahoma drawl for an Antrim rasp and you could imagine you were in Northern Ireland in 2009 — without a solidly liberal media to poke fun at such hate-fuelled antics. But while we are looking for warts, despite what all the publicity materials for the film say it’s worth noting that Harvey Milk was not the first gay man in America to be elected to significant political office. That award — if award it is — probably goes to Allan Spear who served nearly 30 years in the Minnesota state senate.

First elected in 1972, Spear admitted all the rumours were true in 1974 and was reelected again and again, rising to become senate president for a whole decade. By contrast, Harvey Milk was a city supervisor — a county councillor, if you like — for a mere 11 months.

Few outside Minnesota have ever heard of Allan Spear, though. He was a liberal Democrat elected for a liberal Democratic district who just happened to be gay and died last year during heart surgery at the respectable age of 71.

Harvey Milk, by contrast, was elected on an explicitly gay rights platform at a time when 2,800 gay men a year in San Francisco were being arrested for supposed ‘crimes’ and was assassinated for his trouble by none other than an erstwhile fellow supervisor.

Allan Spear was mourned by his family; when Harvey Milk’s killer avoided the electric chair because his victim was gay, 3,000 gay rioters torched the city’s police cars. Of such things, history is made. Even Ronald Reagan sent his condolences.

When he began public life, Milk was a preposterous figure — an “avowed homosexual”, in the embarrassed language of the time, who was running for office.

Many psychiatrists back then still called homosexuality a mental illness. A year before Milk’s killing, the US Supreme Court had upheld the firing of a teacher who made the mistake of telling the truth when his principal asked if he was homosexual.

To be young and realise you were gay in 1970s America — or 1980s Ireland — was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows. No one person could change all that and not all the changes are complete, here or in America.

But a few powerful figures gave gay individuals the confidence they needed to stop lying and none understood how his public role could affect private lives better than Milk.

He knew the root cause of the gay predicament was invisibility. Milk suspected emotional trauma was gays’ worst foe. That made the election of an openly gay person, not a straight ally, symbolically crucial. “You gotta give them hope,” Milk always said.

The few gays who had scratched their way into the city’s establishment blanched when Milk announced his first run for supervisor, but Milk had a powerful idea: he would reach downward, not upward, for support. He convinced the growing gay masses of “Sodom by the Sea” that they could have a role and they turned out to form human billboards for him along major thoroughfares. In doing so, they outed themselves in a way that was previously unthinkable.

A registered Republican for most of his life, Milk didn’t discover discrimination until his lack of equality as a gay man became obvious. While his first three tries for office failed, they lent Milk the credibility and positive media focus that probably no openly gay person ever had. Not everyone cheered, of course, and death threats multiplied.

MILK’S killing probably awakened as many gay people as his election had. But while assassination offered Milk something then rare for openly gay men — mainstream empathy — it would have been thrilling to see how far he could have gone as a leader. He could have guided gay America — possibly the western world even — through the confused start of the AIDS horror, for instance. Instead, he remains frozen in time, a symbol of what gays can accomplish and the dangers they face in doing so.

Milk the movie is a cop-out in some ways but, for all its shortcomings, it should be celebrated for bringing to the masses the story of a tragically overlooked hero, the Martin Luther King Jr of gay civil rights.

One last thought: the newsreel in the film of local referenda during the 1970s should be sobering to those who believe that people are currently trying to stall the march of full legal equality because gays and lesbians ask for “too much, too fast”. The forces of conservatism will always be with us.

True, no one believes we can win a constitutional referendum at this time in Ireland. But nor can ‘separate and unequal’ ever be the settled position. Ultimately, the battle will be won — one closet door at a time. The question is: can we do it without an Irish Harvey Milk in the Dáil?