Big Gay Glass of Milk

I finally watched Gus Van Sant's Milk last night. It's actually a really smart, well-done film, as anyone who is familiar with Van Sant's work would expect. In case you've been living under a rock, it tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to a major office. Milk was a pretty interesting and engaging character (in the sense of a real human being having a character), but he had the great misfortune of living for 40 years mostly closeted and in fear of himself, and only having a few years to really blossom and be himself before being assassinated by Dan White.

The film's plot is pretty unremarkable...gay man turned activist galvanized the gay community in San Francisco in the 1970s, ran for office several times before being elected and served one year before being murdered, along with Mayor George Moscone, by fellow city supervisor Dan White (who served nearly no jail time, thanks to his now-infamous "Twinkie defense"). But, I think the fact that the plot is so unremarkable is the reason it works; it allows Milk to be a real human being. This is not to say that there were not remarkable events in Milk's life or that he didn't do remarkable things because neither would be true. It's just a very simply told story without any sort of sensationalism.

Van Sant was very careful, since many of the people portrayed are still alive, to use as many of those people who were there as historical resources, even casting some of the more peripheral characters (like Teamster Allan Baird) as themselves in the film, and including everyone they possibly could in the crowd scenes or as extras. I think this prevents the film from becoming an epic, overblown series of mythologies about Milk (see Ray if you don't get what I'm saying) and really grounds the film so you can identify with Harvey Milk. Unfortunately, now that I've seen the film, I can definitively say Mickey Rourke deserved the best actor award and Sean Penn shouldn't have beaten him. I had hoped I wouldn't.

What the film does for me, however, is what so much controversy about gay rights always does; it causes me to wonder why. Why is what other people do so important to so many people? How does someone else's sexuality or race or religion or whatever affect another person so deeply that they have to stop them from living their own lives? Who really cares?

Obviously, this is not to say that everyone should be able to do whatever they want. Murderers, rapists and pedophiles, for example, should probably not be allowed to wander around doing their thing. But how does one person's sexuality affect another person? What business is it of anyone else's if someone doesn't want to marry a person of the opposite sex and have a bunch of babies? Is your morality compromised by allowing other people to have their own moral code? Is your own soul somehow damned if you don't tell another person that your god damns them? It's not as though gay people run around recruiting like the Marines.

I just don't understand. There's no reason for people to be so interested in what other people do in their private lives if it doesn't affect you. And who other people choose to spend their time and their lives with doesn't affect you.