Rose-Colored Milk
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Rose-Colored Milk A sexual liberationist gets the sainthood treatment. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Sean Penn is no sweetheart. As an actor, he goes farther and deeper than any American performer...
...And as one of Hollywood’s most peculiar political journalists, he feels no compunction shilling for such worthies as Saddam Hussein and Hugo Ch?vez, perhaps because he has spent so much time humanizing monsters on the big screen that he feels compelled to do the same for real-life monsters...
...In point of fact, Milk’s opposition was insignifi cant...
...We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it...
...Harvey Milk is already one of the most famous American politicians of the past halfcentury, and now he will be even more so, particularly when Penn wins his second Oscar in February...
...He despised rival leaders of the gay community in San Francisco he deemed insuffi ciently revolutionary...
...For much of the movie, Penn wears a beatifi c smile that is so warm, kind, and unshadowed that he is almost unrecognizable...
...The thing is, the Harvey Milk of Milk is not the real Harvey Milk, and Milk the movie is a sham...
...The movie turns an incendiary, mau-mauing, take-no-prisoners radical of the 1970s into an ingenuous teddy bear...
...He went from being a Goldwater Republican to a hard leftist in a few years, and from being an insurance executive to a long-haired, bearded pseudo-hippie in less time than that...
...The movie might win, too, even though it is really little more than a socially conscious television fi lm of the 1980s, down to a late-night scene on the telephone during which Milk’s former boyfriend tells him, “I’m proud of you...
...In the telling of the late gay journalist Randy Shilts—whose biography, The Mayor of Castro Street, is the unoffi cial inspiration for the movie—the real Milk was a smart, aggressive, purposefully offensive, press-savvy attention hound who believed the cause of gay rights would be advanced if there were riots in the streets of San Francisco...
...Who could have known that inside Penn’s breast secretly beats the heart of a politically correct sentimentalist...
...In an effort to make Milk seem like a central political player in the United States, the movie suggests he was at the forefront of the effort to defeat a California referendum that would have required the fi ring of all openly gay teachers...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Sean Penn is no sweetheart...
...Milk was murdered three years before researchers identifi ed the AIDS virus, which was the horrifying natural refutation of his doctrine (and which took the life of Scott Smith, the man with whom Milk moved to San Francisco from New York in 1970...
...Milk was an extremist, far more comfortable on the margins than in the center, and committed to the proposition that the center should move to accommodate him...
...They no longer represent the vanguard of the effort to expand gay rights, which is now focused almost solely on the institution of marriage...
...Whether Milk was a fi gure of any real signifi cance during his lifetime is hard to say...
...This is the kind of transformation that separates genuinely great actors from their peers, and Penn is nothing if not a genuinely great actor...
...He was always on the hunt for a casus belli...
...He was one of the fi rst openly gay elected offi cials in the United States, though the offi ce he fi nally won—as a San Francisco supervisor, one of the city’s 11 legislators—was not an important one...
...It is understandable that screenwriter Black and director Gus Van Sant do not want to muddy their iconographic portrait with the inconvenient truth about Milk’s polyamorous views or behavior...
...The real Milk was a sexual liberationist of a very specifi c 1970s type...
...No matter...
...The Milk myth is now set...
...His three fi lms as writer and director are portraits of obsessive selfdestruction...
...There’s no reason you can’t love more than one person at a time...
...He was one of the early users of the reductio ad Hitlerum, throwing the F?hrer’s name around to discredit and disqualify those who might have the temerity to disagree with him...
...By contrast, the cinematic Milk convinces the San Francisco police to let him organize an impromptu march to prevent a riot...
...As an actor, he goes farther and deeper than any American performer of his generation in his meticulous depictions of fl awed, unlikable, and darksouled men...
...He spent much of his time in offi ce threatening Moscone with the loss of the “gay vote” if Moscone refused to do his bidding, which is the act more of an agitator than a legislator...
...But it is a distortion, and a signifi cant one...
...Shilts adds: “That ultimately was what his politics were all about, Harvey decided...
...His performance as Harvey Milk, the 1970s gay rights advocate who was murdered by a political rival inside San Francisco’s City Hall, is an unblemished portrait of a martyred saint...
...Milk’s contrarian nature does not suggest he would have made a particularly effective working politician...
...the referendum was crushed because it was opposed on all sides, from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter...
...As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model,” Shilts quotes him as saying to one boyfriend in San Francisco by way of explaining why he had another boyfriend in Los Angeles...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...We should be developing our own lifestyle...
...He takes the Harvey Milk that was conjured up by tyro screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and lets that Harvey Milk take him over...
...He was the nicest, sweetest, most caring, kindest, and most well-meaning man on the face of this earth...
...He was killed 11 months into his tenure by Dan White, one of his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, and only after White had shot Mayor George Moscone dead...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 13
