I saw the film about a week ago and was moved to tears. I was only in my teens when Harvey Milk was active in San Francisco but did hear a lot about him through the mainstream media and leftist communities while I was in theatre school in Montreal. I am Jewish and my grandfather was a union organizer, so I also heard a lot about Harvey through the union movement.

In the late 1990s, I received some production funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to travel throughout Canada and the US, making a radio art work entitled “Radio Pride” about Pride Days across North America including the history of this annual event. In San Francisco, with the help of generous gay men, I uncovered one of Harvey Milk’s “recycled – “I am Harvey Milk and I am here to recruit you” speeches at the GLBT archives. This recording was going to form one of the structural beats of the program and I was in touch with Dan Nicoletta, a lovely man who managed the rights to Milk’s estate. He was kind enough to donate the rights to me for the work. I did an enormous amount of research on Milk’s life. Van Sant’s film was very accurate. Cleve Jones was on set for most of the making of the movie and helped the film-makers keep it authentic.

As part of my little radio art piece, I was lucky enough to go up to Prince George, BC – a very small city in the northern interior for a truly activist and angry Pride Day march which I audio-taped, along with interviews with the courageous activists, etc. I went to New York City and interviewed some of the original queer activists that were at the Stonewall Riots. I travelled throughout Canada including Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver, taping Pride Day celebrations and interviews with their original organizers. In 1998 and 1999, when I tried to find an artist-run post-production studio in Vancouver that had the necessary equipment to edit and complete my radio art work at reasonable or free rates, I was confronted with rejection by the local video art studio, film co-op and radio co-op. The most I was offered was 2 hours a month at the local radio co-op. All time slots and grants went to radio art projects by straight people or closeted queers making purely formal artistic work. So as late as 1999, when I thought we had achieved so much with our international activism, I was confronted by homophobia/heterosexism in a local art world that I foolishly thought accepted queer people and GLBTIQ art. Up until then, there were so few representations of queer history in mainstream culture and I am afraid to say, that this problem still exists.

Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is so important for GLBTIQ communities internationally for so many reasons: 1) as queers, we need more mainstream representations of our history and community; 2) as fags, we need more mainstream representations of GLBTIQ people that are not hyper-glamorized as in “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” – representations of queer activism(!); 3) as swishes, we need to educate the younger members of our communities because they do not know our history, our struggles, etc. I am always shocked but not surprised, I guess, when queer youth tell me that they do not know that our local GLBTIQ bookstore, Little Sisters, was bombed and received bomb threats by local homophobes.

In the queer community, there is quite some debate about whether a straight actor such as Sean Penn should have been cast as Harvey Milk and that the role should have gone to a gay actor, even if he is unknown. I have mixed feelings about that. I understand a little about how Hollywood works, how stars help finance movie-making. As someone that directs and trains young actors, and that used to act professionally myself, I thought Penn did a marvelous job and was completely convincing as Harvey. As a director, I most likely would have tried to cast a gay actor and built the film around him with other stars. However, it’s unlikely someone like me would ever be in that position. That said…

There have been mainstream documentaries and feature films about the tragedy of Jonestown and Jim Jones as well as other political and social milestones of the late 1970s era, but nothing out of Hollywood about our queer communities until Gus Van Sant’s “Milk.” I wonder if Van Sant really had to situate the film any more historically than he did. In my community, we hear about the raids on our bars in that era, queer people’s faces being bashed by cops, gays and lesbians losing their jobs, careers, houses because they were outed by some homophobe at their workplace, etc. In this era of Proposition 8, you can talk about getting married in California in the 1970s amid all the activism and turmoil and beauty but I see the emails and blogs of my friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco that still, in 2009, cannot get married. Therefore, a film such as “Milk” is crucial. It does not need to situate itself in the straight world’s history of itself. This film did what it needed to do – focus on the story of GLBTIQ people and our activism, put it front and centre, loudly, proudly and queerly.

Take care,
Elaine Carol
Artistic Director
MISCELLANEOUS Productions
elaine-c@mdi.ca
http://www.miscellaneous-inc.org