In his strong feline manner, he circled us all, saying: “I look at some of you, and I can tell that a few already realize that anything you imagine can be made real. I look at others of you, and I can see that you don’t know your own power, but that you’re already exercising it, out of instinct. The rest of you, you don’t know your own power at all. You’re not using it. And we’re going to fix that.”
I immediately worried about which group he felt I was in—and I knew that this worry probably landed me in one of the latter two.
The following Monday, he padded into the theater lobby carrying a big silver boom box and a cassette tape. I don’t remember anyone’s having said anything homophobic, but perhaps one of us had used “gay” as a pejorative. Or maybe he could tell that at least two of us in his group might personally benefit from the words we were about to hear. Who knows? But he plugged that boom box in under the bench in the lobby, had us circle around, and before he played the tape, he offered this context:
“This! This is a speech by a man from New York City. But this was given in San Antonio. Texas! Ten years ago, when you were all just tadpoles.”
That got my attention. I had once been a tadpole in San Antonio, a terribly confused tadpole swimming in Tim’s aboveground pool. San Antonio had been my home when this very speech was made.
Our director hit Play. Through the static of his third-generation tape, we heard a voice:
Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio, there is a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out, they will be tossed out of the house; their classmates will taunt the child; and the Anita Bryants and John Briggs are doing their part on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open up the paper and it says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco” and there are two new options. One option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight….You’ve got to elect gay people, so that thousands upon thousands like that child know there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow.
I swallowed my tears so they wouldn’t be seen. In so many ways, I was that kid. This man was talking to me, about me, and from a stage in my own hometown, no less. I had already realized I was gay back when he’d delivered his speech, but with no way to hear his words, I had lived with the terror of losing my few friends and my treasured family. I had considered suicide and imagined being chased from my house. And until this moment a decade later, I had never heard someone be so confidently “out,” or dared imagine there was such a thing as an “out” gay politician who had actually been elected to public office. I had always believed that being “out” was something AIDS did to gay men before they died. I thought being “out” was an unbearable situation brought on by accidental exposure or vicious attack. This man sounded downright proud about it.
Sitting there on that orange community theater carpet, the taste of salt burning down my throat, I trembled inside as my world cracked open.
I had just heard a man leading with love, not division or hate, with hope, not fear or terror, and for the very first time in my life, someone’s brand of hope actually included me. The man’s name was Harvey Bernard Milk. And on that day, ten years after his assassination, and thanks to this third-generation cassette tape, he had just given me hope.
Now, he didn’t give me enough hope that morning to run go wrap myself up in a rainbow flag and start kissing boys, but it was enough to stop considering ending my life. And with that, I began to hide a bit less, to shrink a bit less, to start working toward my dreams again, and to quietly grow brave enough to believe that one day I might be seen as I truly am, and that when that day in the spotlight arrived, it might not be a tragedy. Harvey Milk’s story was that powerful for me, and that it had taken so many turns of luck for me to finally hear it—that was a true tragedy.
III
A film project about Harvey Milk wasn’t a new idea. By the time I was a writer on Big Love, I had watched from afar for years as a film about Milk based on the book The Mayor of Castro Street struggled to get made at Warner Brothers. In my film school’s archive, I had also found a documentary from 1984 called The Times of Harvey Milk, but it was tough to locate in the real world. Few people outside of San Francisco, and almost no one my age, had ever heard of Harvey Milk. At that time, even when I’d ask LGBTQ activists and organizers, I would most often get blank stares.
It was frustrating to watch Milk’s story slowly vanish. It seemed as if other minority communities knew their heroes and had seen at least some of their histories in libraries and on movie screens. They had a foundation for inspiration and hope. But save for a handful of books and films in scattered queer bookstores or niche film festivals, popularized versions of our own proud history seemed to have been stymied, buried by centuries of laws banning our lives, by the fear of repercussion for creating such work, and by concerns that shame and fear might keep gay stories from proving commercially viable.
Then something magical happened. In 2006, a composer friend of mine told me he’d been searching for a man named Cleve Jones and had just found him in Palm Springs. I was thrilled to hear that Cleve was still alive—although he was only in his fifties, many, if not most, of the great activists of his generation were dead now thanks to AIDS. While watching his friends all disappear, and battling AIDS himself in the 1980s, Cleve had conceived the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—a massive folk-art quilt made out of grave-size panels sewn for those whose lives had been taken by AIDS. It would eventually fill the entire National Mall in Washington, D.C. The quilt helped render this plague undeniable, and opened the hearts of Americans to their dying family members and neighbors. My friend wanted to do a rock opera about Cleve’s powerful quilt. He would write the music; I would build the story.
But I had a secret secondary interest in meeting Cleve: I knew that he had been one of a handful of scrappy young Castro kids to intern for Harvey Milk in the 1970s. He had become Milk’s political protégé. He knew the real Harvey Milk, and I wanted details and personal stories about this man I’d never met but whose story I felt could save and inspire more lives. A week later, we were in my friend’s car headed to Palm Springs.
When I walked into Cleve’s sparsely furnished home, I was struck by the smell of cigarettes and the pale gray skin of a man who looked far older than his age. His face had been ravaged by AIDS. His hands shook uncontrollably from his medications. But he wasn’t weak. He was a tough, wizened survivor who spent our first hours together sizing me up. Was this blond kid up to the task of telling the story of his generation and the quilt?
Cleve pulled a chair into the living room, set an ashtray down on the floor beside it, lit up the first of dozens of cigarettes, and began answering my questions about the NAMES Project. Occasionally he would turn the tables and ask me something: where I was from, what my politics were, and what I understood about the movement. His questions weren’t superficial or easy to answer, but his wasn’t the first research interview of my career. I knew that the smart ones took caution with what they shared, with whom, and when.
An hour into this tennis match of an interview, the sun finally set, and my composer friend got up to pour himself a glass of wine from the three-dollar bottle we’d picked up on the way there. I seized the opportunity to ask Cleve what I really wanted to know. I asked him about Harvey Milk.
Cleve’s tired eyes lit up like a boy’s. “You know who Harvey Milk was?” I told him that I did. I told him how I had first heard Milk’s story and the effect it had had on me. He laughed, but there were tears in his eyes. He sprung up then and there, marched into his garage, and returned with a box filled with objects and images that held his Milk memories. In the stories that followed, Cleve transformed back into the determined teenage boy who first met Harvey Milk on a street corner in the Castro in the 1970s. He
began to answer all of my questions, freely and with personal detail. I was in heaven. My composer friend gave up on his quilt questions and finished one bottle of wine alone. Then the three of us went out for margaritas, and the stories kept flowing.
On our second research trip to Palm Springs, I passionately argued to both my composer friend and Cleve what was becoming patently obvious: that we ought to write a rock opera about Milk first. They both agreed.
In the research that followed, I learned a great deal about the real Harvey Milk—a very human man, not a legend: a man who failed more than he succeeded but never gave up on his dream that an openly gay man could be elected to public office. I also began to learn about what a real civil rights movement looked like: the value of diversity, of coalition building, of agitation and theatrics, and why asking for crumbs was a pathway to less than crumbs. But as I got more and more excited, my composer friend slowly stopped returning my calls. On the rare occasion I could get him on the line, he sounded faraway, strange. Eventually he would be found dead in a hotel room from a methamphetamine overdose—a brilliant, beautiful mind extinguished.
I couldn’t keep moving on a rock opera without him. Despite years of Mormon-mandated piano lessons, I could hardly tap out a tune. I gazed at our half-finished outline and the two songs my friend had managed to compose, and I knew that this dream was done for.
Then a chance turn: come that winter, Bryan Singer, whose goatee was now shaved but who still donned far too much flannel, somehow landed the job of taking over Warner Brothers’ Milk project. I swallowed my pride and invited Bryan to dinner at a Japanese steak house. It happened to be Valentine’s Day. To be clear, Bryan was not my Valentine; I just desperately wanted to write a movie about Harvey Milk. I laid out my pitch. Bryan seemed to respond to it, and he sent me to Warner Brothers where I pitched my take again. They were interested, so they sent me to their project’s longtime producers. I gave these two gay men the same spiel, but with even more details and heart. Still, despite the tears in their eyes, and my growing résumé, they told me I was too green. “The truth is, we’re looking for a writer with an Academy Award, Dustin.” I didn’t bother offering them my more familiar name as they showed me the door. Nine months of meetings and maneuvering for nothing.
I got in my car, drove off the lot, and headed to nowhere in particular—an L.A. version of a thoughtful hike, but without the sweat. And somewhere on the 101 Freeway, with little clue as to where I was going or what it would take to go head-to-head with two of the biggest producers in Hollywood, one highly self-possessed director, and a powerful, celebrated movie studio, I told myself, “Forget those producers, screw Bryan Singer (not literally), and to hell with Warner Brothers.” My rage and tears had turned into my mother’s favorite brand of foolish courage. Thanks to Cleve and my research, I had now befriended many real people from Harvey’s life. I still had the credit card I’d used to finance my first documentaries, and if I needed more money, I now had a home I could leverage. If I knew where an inspiring, hope-filled, lifesaving story was buried, didn’t I have a responsibility to excavate it, no matter what the personal cost? Isn’t that what my mother, with her broken leg and all her brave young soldiers, had taught me?
By the time I pulled into my garage, I had made a decision. I would go to war with Warner Brothers. I would quietly create a competing project—not because I felt slighted, but because thirty years after Milk’s assassination, we were living in a time when the push for LGBTQ rights felt like it was stalling in the same corporate equality culture that so many other movements had gotten stuck in. This story didn’t just feel hopeful and personally inspirational; it felt like a timely, necessary kick in the ass.
That Friday, production wrapped on Big Love and I drove to San Francisco with Cleve. We camped out in the rough and restless Beck’s Motor Lodge on Market Street so we could interview more real-life folks who’d known Milk. It took a while to get most to open up: I was a new kid, and they had been let down time and time again by people from Hollywood promising to share Milk’s story. I bought them dinners and wine and, hesitantly, some agreed to share their often painful memories of their friend, mentor, and father figure. I made this trip weekend after weekend, and each time, more wizened faces stepped forward with more memories. I was winning trust; now it was my job to make sure it was well placed.
Within the year, I had completed a first draft of a script. But I knew I had to be careful who saw it. I had to keep it hidden from those producers and Warner Brothers for as long as possible or risk them trying to shut me down. In that time Cleve insisted there was one person I had to show it to before anyone else: the director Gus Van Sant. Gus had directed one of my favorite movies, My Own Private Idaho, and a few years earlier, I’d been lucky enough to meet him at a large group dinner. Cleve had met him in the ’80s when Gus was briefly hired to write a version of the Warner Brothers Milk project. Cleve found his number and called him up, and it turned out that Gus remembered me from that big dinner: “Oh. You were the blond angel who bummed smokes off Matt Damon all night.” (I didn’t even smoke. I just wanted to get as close to Matt Damon as often as possible that night.)
I did one last polish of the script, and drove it into the hills above Griffith Park to hand-deliver it to Gus’s house. He was home. I didn’t know Gus well yet, so I didn’t understand that he’s a man of few words. I just knew that his long silences doubled my nerves. Maybe he didn’t like me. Maybe I made him uncomfortable. And as I sat at his kitchen counter, watching him flip pages in my script, saying nothing, I grew sure that this was a mistake. Then he closed the script, looked up, and said, “Yeah…it’s good.” He was in.
When the news broke in Variety that some young writer on Big Love had landed Gus Van Sant for his Milk project, I had to forward some scary emails from Warner Brothers’ legal department to my tough-as-nails lawyer. But I also got a congratulatory call from the openly gay, Academy Award–winning producers of American Beauty, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, whom I’d met at the Outfest LGBTQ film festival pool party they threw each year. When I told Dan that my only producing partner thus far was a Visa card, he and Bruce jumped on board.
Gus and I began making a wish list of actors who could play Harvey Milk, and in that search, we found several YouTube videos of none other than Sean Penn, the impossibly good-looking (and of course talented) actor from that Madonna music video that had once marked my darkest day in the closet in junior high. Sean was now giving passionate political speeches of his own, and after watching some online, we had our clear first choice.
Together with Bruce and Dan, we got the script to Sean, who it turned out called the Bay Area, Milk’s old stomping ground, his home now. Sean already knew a bit about Milk, and after looking at the script, he was willing to meet. Still on our own dime, Gus and I drove up to Sean’s home just north of San Francisco, where we watched a cut of the film Sean had just directed called Into the Wild. When the conversation turned to whether or not its star, Emile Hirsch, would make a good Cleve, Gus and I realized that this meeting wasn’t about whether Sean would play the role but about what he needed to do the job right. He wanted all of my research. He wanted to meet the real people. He was 100 percent in from the start.
Last and certainly not least, we needed a brave studio to sign on. In 2007, networks and studios weren’t terrifically interested in hearing pitches for LGBTQ-themed shows, films, or even characters. But Focus Features had just hit it big at the box office with a little gay film called Brokeback Mountain. We thought they might get what we were trying to do with our film, and equally important, they’d know how to get people to come watch it. So after attaching Emile Hirsch and James Franco to our cast, we sent our package Focus’s way. They bit. After years of wanting to see Milk’s story shared widely, after watching others try and fail, we were about to make it happen. And now it was happening incredibly fast.
EXT. SAN FRANCISCO / THE CA
STRO - DAY / 2008
Set to silent, a CELL PHONE buzzes in the Writer’s pocket. With plenty of time before the DIRECTOR rolls camera, the Writer checks his phone. The call is from the same number as before, a 703 area code, but again, the Writer doesn’t take the call.
* * *
—
We shot Milk in San Francisco on the very streets where the real story had unfolded. The city’s residents showed up en masse to support our efforts. Thousands poured into the streets when we called for extras. Bruce Cohen, who had experienced a meteoric rise and unheard-of success with American Beauty, put his arm around me on set one night and said, “Enjoy it. It’s not always like this.” I’ll forever be grateful to him for reminding me to soak in every moment of this experience. But Gus was more of a realist. “A happy set doesn’t mean a good movie,” he told me. He and Sean wanted me to stay focused on our work.
They were right. Even with a studio’s backing, nobody was getting rich on this. I was still in credit card debt up to my ears from research trips, and with too many at Warner Brothers waiting for our film to fall on its ass, I needed to avoid distractions to complete this improbable feat. Wearing my producer hat, I needed to focus on casting sessions, location scouts, visits to our production and costume design studios—doing all I could to help Gus keep our film as authentic as possible. And with a green light came more of Milk’s contemporaries ready to share their stories. I was eager to hear them, and thankful that a writers’ strike ended in time for me to incorporate some of their memories into the film.
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