Smash hit

With Milk still under wraps when I meet Van Sant in Hollywood, we catch up on the phone a few months later. Now I have seen the picture for myself, and the director is back in his home town, Portland, Oregon. While the lion’s share of praise should go to Penn, and to Van Sant’s tender re-creation of 1970s San Francisco, it’s fascinating that the film refuses to demonise or portray as homophobic Dan White (Josh Brolin), who shot dead Milk and Mayor George Moscone. “It became pretty clear that Dan was not particularly a demon,” Van Sant explains. “Part of his frustration came with feeling left behind by the political system. Other supervisors were getting stuff done that they were proud of, and he was having a hard time making headway. Harvey’s sexuality was connected, but it wasn’t a blind act, it wasn’t, ‘Kill the gay guy.’ ”

Van Sant agrees that it’s an odd time for Milk to be released. Proposition 8 has just been passed in California, making same-sex marriage illegal there and reviving memories of Proposition 6 — the bill Milk is shown fighting in the movie, which sought to sack all gay teachers — but this is also a period of optimism after the election of Barack Obama. Van Sant is thrilled, but confesses to wondering what effect the presidency will have on his films.

Although he is preparing an adaptation of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s paean to the counterculture, he notes that a Democratic administration has traditionally coincided with a less adventurous artistic tenor. “Art tends to get quite good when the regime is oppressive,” he says. “The films I’ve made under friendlier leaders, like Clinton, have become less challenging. With Bush in the White House, my films got darker and more extreme.”

Milk is being released after the American people said “Yes, you can” to Obama’s bid to be president. “Yeah,” Van Sant drawls. “That suggests I’ll get more conventional — which Milk certainly is. So I guess I’m right on track.” C

Milk will be released on January 23

How Milk shook up politics

Becoming a civil-rights leader was not uppermost in the mind of Harvey Milk, a 42-year-old Jewish New Yorker, when he moved to the Castro district of San Francisco in 1972 to open a camera store with his boyfriend, Scott Smith.

By 1973, however, Milk was running for city supervisor, motivated by anger at the police force’s anti-gay bias and by what he saw as San Francisco’s general bureaucratic inefficiency. On his fourth attempt, in 1977, he was elected. By this time, he had overcome resistance from the gay-rights establishment, which believed he had yet to earn his stripes, and was admired not only as a gay leader, but as a campaigner on other issues, including rights for senior citizens. One of his key campaigns — against Senator John Briggs’s Proposition 6 bill, which sought a ban on openly gay teachers to prevent them becoming “role models” — ended in victory mere weeks before he was murdered in November 1978.

Death threats abounded throughout his political career. His assassination came at the hands of an ex-colleague, Dan White, who shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White’s attorney claimed in court that these acts were committed partially under the influence of junk food, a line that became known as the “Twinkie defence” and contributed to White’s manslaughter conviction — a verdict that led to San Francisco’s “White Night” riots in May 1979. White was paroled five years into his seven-year sentence and committed suicide less than two years after his release. Meanwhile, Milk’s legend and influence bloomed. Van Sant’s film follows the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and Randy Shilts’s 1982 biography, its title inspired by Milk’s nickname for himself: The Mayor of Castro Street.

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