Toward a New LGBT Biopic
Politics and Reflexivity in
Gus Van Sant’s Milk
JULIA G. ERHART
I
AM NOT A CANDIDATE, I AM part of a movement. The movement
is the candidate. There is a difference.” Spoken by Harvey Milk’s
character in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), these words emblematize a
critical tension in a film that both is and is not a conventional biopic.
Appearing to advance a key theme in the movie, these words downplay
the significance of the individual in favor of a collective movement, and
in so doing express an idea of group identity that runs counter to the
conventional privileging of the individual in the generic biographical
form. At the same time, the fact that they are spoken by a blockbuster
Hollywood star chosen to play an “exceptional” individual within a movie
bearing a one-man title makes it difficult not to view the film as a biopic
(Custen 1992). The tension between the individual “Harvey Milk” and
the gay political community disturbs—in interesting ways—the movie’s
compliance with generic conventions. In what follows, I will explore
how, because of its downplaying of the individual in favor of a focus on
politics, the movie both is and is not a conventional biopic. Because it is
not a mainstream film but a movie targeted at a presumably guaranteed,
albeit niche, audience, Milk can elevate a different set of priorities than
is normally seen. Yet, because of the film’s fortuitous resonance with
topical issues and the foregrounding of these issues by critics, Milk is
able to exceed its non-mainstream boundaries and potentially reach a
wider audience.
261
“
262 Julia G. Erhart
While there has been no shortage of critical scrutiny of single,
isolated biographical films, there are surprisingly few long studies of the
biopic as a media genre. George Custen’s foundational Bio/Pics: How Hollywood
Constructed Public History (1992) remains the only single-authored,
book-length resource on the biographical film of the studio era.1
Focusing
on films created in the heyday of the studio system, Custen investigates
how the practices of the studios (including the work of producers
and directors, and the value of stars) circumscribed from the inside the
versions of lives and histories that were able to be told. Hardly authentic
versions of people’s lives, the films Custen scrutinizes fashioned contents
from refurbished and fictionalized plots, largely through the vehicle of
studio stars. While Custen did publish a follow-up essay (“Mechanical”)
on more recent biopics (1961–1980), his claims are limited by his exclusion
of made-for-TV movies and movies released after 1960.
The media landscape in which the current-day biopic is located
has grown vastly more complex. Biographical works, as several scholars
including Custen have noted, became staple TV fare during the eighties
and nineties (Custen 2000; Anderson and Lupo 2002; Rosenstone
2007). In cinemas, there is robust evidence that the biopic has survived
the studio system’s demise (Anderson and Lupo 2000 and 2008; Mann
2000; Rosenstone 2007; Welsh 1993). And biographical and autobiographical
material currently comprises an enormous amount of bandwidth
on social networking sites and on the realityTV–oriented world
of television. What is clear is that the number of smaller-budget, independently
funded films is on the rise (Anderson and Lupo 2008) and the
conventional subject of the biopic as outlined by Custen has changed.
The studio-era preference for heroic white men has made way, in this
post–civil rights, postfeminist era of diversified marketing, for interest in
a greater range of subjects. If, as Custen sensed, “we no longer [believe]
in an old-fashioned idea of greatness” (2000, 131), our fascination with
celebrity culture has opened up new representational opportunities. Heidi
Fleiss, Harvey Pekar, Eugène Terreblanche, Ed Wood, the non-famous
and the infamous, the ordinary and the unpopular, are all suitable biopic
subjects (Lupo and Anderson 2008; Bingham 2010).
Dennis Bingham’s Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary
Film Genre encompasses both recent auteurist works by directors
such as Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Tim Burton, and Jane Campion
and outliers from the studio era such as Citizen Kane and the British
film Rembrandt. Taking up where Custen leaves off, Bingham positions
Todd Haynes as emblematic of the twenty-first-century biopic director,
who, Bingham claims, is drawn to the genre in “postmodern times”
(Bingham 2010, 20). The book is organized into two major sections,
263Toward a New LGBT Biopic
“The Great (White) Man Biopic” and “Female Biopics,” both of which
chart the positioning of various films within cycles in the genre. The
cycles include the classical, celebratory biopic form, the “warts and all”
biopic, parody, minority appropriation, and finally what Bingham terms
the “neoclassical” biopic (17–18). In spite of both his self-declared interest
in openly gay director Haynes and in biopics about queer historical
figures, Bingham laments that a section on “queer appropriations” had to
be omitted from Whose Lives due to time and space constraints (ibid., 27).
Because of the recurrence of a number of themes—an ambivalence
toward public recognition, that is, the state of being out; the link
between visibility and social value (positive as well as negative); the
relevance of sexuality and other intriguing “private” matters; a degree
of exceptionalism (a lack of fit with the status quo)—LGBT lives have
made and continue to make apt biographical subjects whose figuration
shifts depending on prevailing cultural expectations and available commercial
forms. The dramatic changes in social and political capital that
many (especially middle-class, developed-world) LGBT individuals have
enjoyed since Stonewall and particularly into the twenty-first century,
make possible a commercial interest in “other” historical LGBT lives,
lived elsewhere and/or under more challenging circumstances than current-day
audiences experience. While there is no single unified LGBT
biopic, and films about LGBT lives conform to the newer biopic cycles
identified by Bingham (mentioned above), their forms are also contoured
by LGBT subject matter and targeted marketing campaigns. In so being,
they share qualities that set them apart from non-LBGT biopics. What
are these qualities and at what point—and in which ways—do the LGBT
lives depicted in contemporary biopics become visible on-screen?
The LGBT Biopic
The suitability of LGBT lives and gender nonconformity as themes
for the commercial biopic became apparent as early as 1933, when
Queen Christina, the historical costume drama about the eponymous
seventeenth-century Swedish queen, opened at the box office. Subject
of considerable interest to contemporary LGBT media scholars, the film
has been touted as an early example of lesbian screen visibility because
of the drag attire and manly swagger adopted by Greta Garbo (as the
queen) and the single mouth-on-mouth kiss between the queen and
her court favorite, Countess Ebba Sparre (Russo 1981, 63–66). While
the film makes clear the protagonist’s historically documented gender
nonconformity—her disdain for marriage, preference for male attire, and
affectionate relation with her female friend—subsequent biopics did not
264 Julia G. Erhart
enjoy such openness. For example, although there is historical evidence
of Cole Porter’s many liaisons with men inside of his long marriage to
Linda Lee Thomas, Night and Day (1946) presented a sanitized version
of the composer’s life from which all signs of same-sex relationships were
absented (Purdum 2004).
In the post-Stonewall period, and after the 1968 demise of the
Motion Picture Production Code, biopics began to appear telling stories
that more straightforwardly spoke to gay liberation struggles. Set in the
nascent proto-gay communities of 1930s and 1950s United Kingdom
respectively, both The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and Prick Up Your Ears
(1987) take place in perilous times when gay sex was illegal. Dealing with
issues of criminalization and homophobia and emphasizing the courage
of their respective protagonists, these films set the stage for Milk and
other contemporary biopics in ways which I will later discuss. In addition
to Milk, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a burst
in films about historical LGBT personalities. Focusing on significant
characters in cultural and political histories as well as on victims of
homophobic violence (The Laramie Project [2002]; The Matthew Shepherd
Story [2002]; Boys Don’t Cry [1999]), contemporary LGBT biopics are a
corrective against both the industrially sanctioned repression of images
of “sex perversion” (the actual wording in the Production Code) and the
spectrum of religious prohibitions that continue to make many forms of
gay representation commercially unprofitable. Visionary in their depiction
of LGBT pasts, such biopics supplement community historiographies,
which recognize the significance of gay historical figures but have not
always possessed resources to create visual depictions of them (Waugh
1996, 5).
Many contemporary LGBT biopics choose to show subjects that
are not easily embraced as heroes within LGBT communities; in so
doing, they qualify hegemonic conceptions of queer relations. As
the biopic has seen a decline in celebratory storytelling and a move
toward a “warts and all” approach (Bingham 2010), the contemporary
LGBT biopic is likewise witnessing more complex matters both in the
stories that get produced and in the aspects of a person’s life that are
revealed. Challenging themes are depicted in J. Edgar (2011), about the
powerful, closeted, and sometimes capricious long-term director of the
FBI. Disclosing Hoover’s homoerotic relationship with colleague Clyde
Tolson to audiences who previously may not have been aware of it, the
film also asks gay audiences to accept people on the “wrong” side of
history as part of the historical gay past. If Hoover is an ambiguous figure
for contemporary LGBT communities to adopt, other films give shape
to yet more controversial stories. Child killing, attempted murder, and
265Toward a New LGBT Biopic
serial killing are some of the events dealt with in Swoon (1992), I Shot
Andy Warhol (1996), and more recently Monster (2003). Embodying links
between criminality, sexuality, and violence, the subjects of such films
present fundamental challenges to the conventional image of community
worthiness. A manifestation of anger felt by lesbians and especially gay
men toward an indifferent political climate during the heyday of the
AIDS crisis, the experimental biopic Swoon, about convicted child killers
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, demonstrates the power and potency
of New Queer Cinema to feature images of provocation and overtly
queer desire. With their depictions of homicidal women, I Shot Andy
Warhol, about radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas, and Monster, about
convicted serial murderer Aileen Wuornos, are likewise disturbing in their
breaking of taboos on women and violence. Because the agents of the
crimes are lesbians, the films recycle well-worn conventions associating
female violence with sexual deviance (Hart 1994). In so doing, they may
also serve to deconstruct such conventions, demonstrating violence to be
a “last resort” for the protagonists living in repressive societies.
While the above-named biopics trouble somewhat the convention
of the “acceptable” biopic subject, the majority of LGBT biographical
movies depict well-known individuals associated with more or less positive
contributions to society and culture. In the twenty-first century, biopics
and biographically oriented screen works have shown the lives of literary
legends Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls [2000]), Truman Capote (in
both Capote [2005] and Infamous [2006]), Allen Ginsberg (Howl [2010]),
Virginia Woolf (The Hours [2002]), Hart Crane (The Broken Tower [2011]),
and Christopher Isherwood (Christopher and His Kind [2011]); artist Frida
Kahlo (Frida [2002]); composer Cole Porter (De-Lovely [2004]); entertainer
Liberace (Liberace: Behind the Candelabra [2013]); film critic Vito Russo
(Vito [2011]); and actor Sal Mineo (Sal [2011]).2
Common to most of
these films is the idea that same-sex attraction and/or unconventional
gender attributes are central to the biopic subject’s identity, significantly
impacting his or her life and work. For example, in Infamous, Capote’s
research into the events of the Clutter family murder develops alongside
his feelings for one of the convicted murderers, Perry Smith. These
feelings both impede Capote’s distance from the story he is researching
and enable, it is suggested, the development of a new literary style, in
what ultimately became the blockbuster novel In Cold Blood. While the
1930s Woolf is not shown herself with a lesbian lover in The Hours, the
lesbian attraction felt by one of Woolf’s characters (the moment when
Mrs. Brown shares a kiss with her buxom neighbor) is the precipitant for
a chain of important movie events, namely the abandonment of the child
who grows up to be the protagonist Richard in the contemporary story.
266 Julia G. Erhart
Concerning an obscenity trial, on the one hand, and state-sanctioned
antigay persecution, on the other, the story lines of Howl and Before
Night Falls are given shape in both cases by their respective protagonists’
sexuality. Sidestepping conventional “coming out” story formats, such
films track lives lived within and against historical practices of intolerance.
In telling these histories, many post-2000 LGBT biopics refashion
the celebratory biopic, espousing postmodern, revisionist storytelling
styles. Generically, many are marketed as highbrow, award-attracting
films in the “arthouse” genre. Crosscutting between live action and
animation; interweaving scenes of the literary personality with scenes
about characters from the writer’s work; incorporating cutaways to mock
interview subjects; inserting obviously anachronistic material in the form
of contemporary songs, are a few of the tropes that animate Howl, The
Hours, Infamous, and De-Lovely, respectively. The anachronistic framing
device in De-Lovely, where an older Cole Porter looks back and comments
on his life as a younger man, typifies how the past may be framed in
these biopics—as something worth knowing yet also worth maintaining
distance from. At the same time, audiences (especially LGBT audiences)
are not slow to condemn films that they perceive to have manipulated the
facts, especially if the story is well known. Indeed, audience expectations
of historical fiction films, and biopics in particular, are my next topic.
Historical Fidelity and the Biopic
Most scholars looking for serious history have ended up being disappointed
by what the biopic has to offer. Reminding us that the biopic is first
and foremost a “fictionalized or interpretative treatment,” Glenn Mann
(2000, v), for example, has claimed that “certain patterns of this genre
dictate departure from historical accuracy” (ibid., vi). Putting the case
more strongly, James Welsh has cautioned us that in the medium of
film “even more than on the printed page, history and biography are
likely to become imaginative exercises, perhaps not intentionally designed
to confuse the viewer, but resulting in mass confusion none the less”
(Welsh 1993, 59). Custen’s comments on the subject have been the most
unequivocal. Comparing Hollywood biography’s relation to history with
Caesar’s Palace’s relation to architectural history, the biopic, he writes, “is
an enormous, engaging distortion, which after a time convinces us of its
own kind of authenticity” (Custen 1992, 7). In spite of critical agreement
about the lack of conventional factuality in the biopic, audiences have
come to the movies with a different set of expectations. Regardless of
what Custen and others acknowledge to be the case, historically themed
movies, which, of course, include biopics, have often been judged on
267Toward a New LGBT Biopic
factual grounds. As Custen puts it, the biopic has provided “many viewers
with the version of a life that they held to be the truth” (Custen 2000,
2); audiences have wanted to know which movie elements are “accurate”
and which ones are not.
A good deal of the paratextual materials that emerged over
the course of the making of Milk and around the time of its release
seemed to cater to audience demands for factuality. For example, that
the makers took pains to recreate original locations (such as Harvey’s
and Scott’s shopfront, recreated on the site of the original camera store
[Marler 2008; McCarthy 2008; Lee 2008; Maupin 2009]) and events
(such as the candlelight march [Cleve Jones 2008]) was well publicized.
Preproduction consultations with historical advisors such as Cleve Jones
and Jim Rivaldo (Black 2008, 107) added to the sense of historical
fidelity. Postproduction praise from well-known gay people who lived
in San Francisco in the seventies testified to the historical faithfulness of
the project (Maupin 2009). The film was judged in the light of Robert
Epstein’s 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, with one critic
claiming that the similarity between the two films lent credibility to Van
Sant’s project (Tueth 2009, 31). Lance Black’s “enormously researched
script” received praise (McCarthy 2008, 39; Holleran 2009, 19), while
cameos by historical personalities from the period such as Tom Ammiano,
Allan Baird, and Frank Robinson suggested approval of the project from
those in the know and promised a film that would be true to life.
A considerable amount was written about the lengths the actors
went to research their characters. Sean Penn’s “metamorphosis” into Milk
attracted positive press (Ansen 2008; McCarthy 2008; Travers 2008),
while Emile Hirsch spoke on several occasions about his research for
his role as Cleve Jones (Rosenblum 2008; Cleve Jones 2008). Actors
discussed the advantages and challenges of making a film on a subject
about which there existed a great deal of archival imagery. The presence
of such imagery was deemed a mixed blessing: though it helped actors to
get an understanding of the subject, it also created demands in viewers
and critics for the actors to get things right (Tueth 2009, 32; Cleve Jones
2008, 36). As Armistead Maupin, speaking to Van Sant, put it: “You had
such a responsibility to a number of living people who remember the
characters and the events that are shown in the film” (Maupin 2009).
Although much of the affirmative commentary circled around the
issue of historical fidelity, not all of the commentary was positive. What
few negative reviews the film received (and there weren’t many) generally
tracked the film’s success in capturing and honoring Harvey Milk’s life—
and found it lacking. In a scathing review, Michael Bronski took issue with
the film’s politically naive and ahistorical representation of the period in
268 Julia G. Erhart
question, criticized the film for depicting Milk’s radicalism as sui generis,
and lamented that Milk was portrayed as a “singular hero who triumphs
almost entirely as a result of his own will” (Bronski 2009, 72). Bronski
then went on to bemoan the film’s failure to show that “San Francisco
in the mid-Seventies was a hot bed of grass-roots organizing that had
existed for over a decade” (ibid.). While the target of Bronski’s attack
was the film’s portrait of historical San Francisco politics, other critics
found fault with the events and characters that the film left out. Nathan
Lee queried the film’s decision not to show the White Night Riots,
which occurred after Dan White’s sentence was announced, suggesting
that to leave that event out told “only half the story” (Lee 2008, 20).
Hilton Als criticized the paucity of female voices in the film, noting it
was out of step with the facts of Milk’s life and, indeed, with Epstein’s
1984 documentary (Als 2009, 9). Preferring the more honest, prefatory
images of the men being rounded up at the film’s beginning, Als also
noted the film’s downplaying of Milk’s “outsider” status. And, as I will
go on to discuss in greater detail, numerous writers took issue with what
they saw as a desexualizing of the San Francisco gay community and
Harvey Milk’s life in particular (Simpson 2009; Holleran 2009; Klawans
2008; Bronski 2009).3
Apart from their adjudication of the film’s factuality, there is one
further thing to note about negative reviews of Milk: nearly all of them
appeared in the gay press and/or in articles by self-identified gay writers.
Of the relatively few negative reviews I unearthed, one appeared in the
gay press (in The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide) and five were by
self-identified gay writers (Hilton Als, Nathan Lee, Andrew Holleran,
Michael Bronski, and Mark Simpson); only one appeared in the nongay
press by an apparently straight-identified writer (Stuart Klawans, writing
in The Nation). Within these reviews, there was a propensity to expound
on the facts of Milk’s real life. While some writers included a paragraph
of details expanding on what the movie showed, other writers, such as
Hilton Als, wandered away from the subject of the film altogether,
spending nearly one-third of his review amplifying the events of Milk’s
life. Taken together, these points are evidence of ownership claims,
declarations of authority on the part of various writers about the subject.
What the attacks on Milk’s faithfulness to history evidence are the high
stakes in the story of Harvey Milk’s life and in the film’s representation of
it. Clearly, Milk’s links to current political movements and communities
amplify the pressures on the movie to be accurate beyond what would
ordinarily be required for a biopic. Likewise, the critical attempts to
augment the facts of Milk’s life evidence an anxiety that Milk might have
left something out or misrepresented key historical aspects. Reviewers
269Toward a New LGBT Biopic
with links to the gay community obviously had high stakes in the movie;
and when it failed to live up to their expectations, they were not slow
in pointing this out. Does this make Milk a “specialized audience film,”
as Todd McCarthy has called it (McCarthy 2008, 39)? In a short while
I will consider how the film managed to transcend this category and
achieve crossover appeal for nongay community audiences. But first I
want to show that, ironically, while a number of gay community critics
approached Milk as a “specialized” product, the movie itself makes use
of many rhetorical tropes from the generic, studio-era biopic.
Harvey Milk as Biopic Subject
In many ways Harvey Milk’s life is an ideal subject for a biopic. A
naturally colorful, theatrical personality with celebrity credentials,
Harvey Milk found his calling as a gay activist when he migrated to
San Francisco in 1972. The film tracks Milk’s move from his repressed
New York City life to the more liberated San Francisco on the eve of
that city’s transformation into a gay mecca. The film opens on the night
of Milk’s fortieth birthday, when Milk meets and picks up his future
lover and eventual fellow activist Scott Smith and takes him back to
his apartment. In spite of the somewhat risqué subject matter, the film
enlists a number of stereotypes from the studio-era biopic. The movie
presents an individual who is charismatic and stands out from the crowd
but who is humanized and whose uniqueness is contained. Visually, for
example, Milk is frequently shown standing apart at the front of a crowd
(typically with a bullhorn), but over and over the narrative positions him
as another regular gay guy from the Castro. As a two-hour-long movie,
the film condenses and abbreviates Milk’s life, presents his personality as
a seamless package, and makes his motivations and personal goals clear
and comprehensible. For example, where the real-life Milk had been in
the Navy and had spent many years working in the insurance industry
and on Wall Street, the film focuses on the symbolically straightforward
and politically more consistent aspects of Milk’s life after his move to
San Francisco. The film simplifies the story of the development of Milk’s
political consciousness by beginning not just in the middle of Milk’s life
but literally in medias res, inside a subway station as Milk is making his
way home from work.
According to Custen, the trope of in medias res was a staple of
the studio era, through which the hero’s personality could appear as an
effect of self-invention rather than family (Custen 1992, 149). In Milk,
such a trope allows the film to gloss over, all at once, Milk’s Jewish
heritage, the politically awkward facts of his corporate life in NYC, and
270 Julia G. Erhart
the more messy and ambivalent aspects of Milk’s attitude to sexuality
that existed prior to his “out” San Francisco life.4
To show these aspects
would confuse viewers and would be, in narrative terms, uneconomical.
Instead, the film promotes a fairly one-dimensional understanding of
character motivation, a reading of the political landscape in terms of
“good guys” and “bad guys,” and a vision of “coming out” as the single
practical political answer (evidenced in interactions with minor characters
such as the gay publisher and the young staff member to whom Milk
hands the phone).
In narrative terms, a number of aspects make the real-life Milk’s
life biopic-worthy. Although Milk spent only ten months in elected
political office, his career in San Francisco contained a number of highly
dramatic points, including not one but four runs for political office,
a high profile referendum fight (touching on the hot-button issues of
sexuality in schools), numerous TV appearances, and finally his death
by assassination at the hands of conservative onetime fire fighter and
fellow supervisor Dan White. As a historically real individual, Harvey
Milk and the events of his life have been heavily documented and
many artworks have been inspired by them. For example, there are the
aforementioned Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, a
popular biography by San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts, interviews,
television footage, photographs, other materials held in the Harvey
Milk archives, and even an opera (Holleran 2009, 18). The film makes
liberal, dramatic, and poignant use of archival materials: for example, the
candlelight vigil after the murders, and, most notably, a tape-recording
of Milk’s personal testimony, which he made several months before
his death, and the reconstruction of which serves as a dramatic frame
structuring the movie.
As in the studio-era biopic, characters in Milk are introduced and
positioned to showcase personality traits of the movie’s main subject.
According to Custen, the “friend” in the biopic may chronicle and
showcase key qualities of the famous person; his or (less frequently) her
normality may act as a foil to draw attention to the extraordinary qualities
of the hero. The friendship is frequently asymmetrical; in most cases,
the friends are the “helpers” (Custen 1992, 164). In Milk, Cleve Jones
functions as precisely such a friend to Milk, managing his campaign,
providing unequivocal support, and facilitating his manipulation of crowds.
Jones acts as a stand-in for audience members who would like to be close
to the main charismatic character. The significance of the Jones character
as chronicler/witness/enabler of Milk’s life story is further secured by the
character’s attachment to the real-life person Cleve Jones, who acted as a
historical consultant for the film (Cleve Jones 2008; Black 2008).
271Toward a New LGBT Biopic
Sex and Romance in Milk
If Milk conforms to the studio-era biopic in how it introduces and
constructs its main and supporting characters, where the film breaks
ranks is in its positioning of a life partner for Milk. In studio-era films
generally, a romance line was nearly ubiquitous, and the biopic was no
exception. Often supplemented or ameliorated where the factual partner
was insufficient, the heterosexual romantic partner had the effect of
lightening the otherwise serious stuff of the biopic. In some cases, where a
romantic figure was altogether lacking, one was added—sometimes against
the will of the subject in question (Custen 2000, 160). The overall effect
of the heterosexual partner on the subject of the biopic, according to
Custen, was a stabilizing or “humanizing” one. Writing more recently
about the function of the romantic partner in two contemporary celebrity
biopics, Walk the Line (2005) and Ray (2004), Glenn Smith argues that in
each film romantic love helps repair psychological traumas stemming from
deprivation and disadvantage. In so doing, Smith claims, romantic love
displaces more controversial issues of classism and racism and works to
distract viewers from the more challenging issues in the story (Smith 2009,
236). Romantic love, it would seem, both domesticates the male lead and
contains the more controversial issues introduced elsewhere in the films.
From a brief look at movies such as Boys Don’t Cry, Swoon, and
Monster, mentioned near the start of this essay, it is clear that conventions
of romantic love indeed do animate some gay or queer biopics, albeit
in nonheterosexual forms. Yet, unlike the lives depicted within those
stories, the historical facts of Milk’s life pose a challenge not just to the
heterosexual component of the framework outlined by Custen and Smith,
but to the convention that the partnering be life-long and more or less
monogamous. Because of its subject’s well-documented commitment to
non-monogamy (Shilts 1982), Milk cannot help but put pressure on the
generic conventions outlined by Smith and Custen. How does the film
deal with the subjects of sex, love, desire, and coupling?
Although publicity around Milk made much of the fact that the
movie would open with a “really big sex scene” and be faithful to Milk’s
life (Maupin 2009), the movie garnered criticism from some quarters for
its tepid and inaccurate representation of 1970s gay sex and Harvey Milk’s
sex life in particular. The film devotes precious little screen time to gay
sex or gay sex cultures, containing but one explicit sex scene (between
Milk and Scott Smith) and virtually no anonymous, casual sex scenes of
any sort. And while Milk waxes positive about the beauty of having “many
lovers” to Cleve, he is shown coupled sequentially with only two—Scott
and Jack Lira. The misrepresentation of Milk’s life and gay sexuality more
272 Julia G. Erhart
generally was not lost on critics. Writing for the Guardian, Mark Simpson
blasted the film for its domestication of gay sexuality and, in his words,
“castration” of its hero. Simpson writes: “Far from ‘destroying every
closet door,’ it instead builds a brand new bullet proof one around its
subject’s sex life. Van Sant’s film is, in fact, living a lie” (Simpson 2009).
Indeed, considered in generic terms, the film contains considerably fewer
sex scenes, for example, than the aforementioned Prick Up Your Ears,
about the United Kingdom playwright Joe Orton. Made at the height of
the AIDS pandemic, Prick up Your Ears stresses the centrality of sex and
desire to gay male culture, featuring scenes of sex in a public toilet and an
industrial estate, a threesome, and a sex tourism holiday in North Africa.
Other gay-oriented biopics from this period and after are not as explicit
as Prick up Your Ears, but focus centrally on themes of male longing.
The Hours and The Times (1991), about Brian Epstein’s relationship with
John Lennon, and Gods and Monsters (1998), about Hollywood director
James Whale, are organized wholly around the themes of desire (albeit
frustrated desire).
Appearing in a post–AIDS activism climate, Milk, it would seem,
is a different film altogether. Does the film “domesticate” its lead, along
the lines of how the lead males in Walk the Line and Ray are contained,
as discussed above? I think not. In simple terms, the representation of
each of Milk’s two partners is not sufficiently fleshed out to permit a
domestication of Milk. Neither of Milk’s boyfriends is developed with any
real depth; several scenes of emotional intensity with each are resolved
inconclusively. For example, the aftermath of the scene where Jack locks
himself in a closet is not shown; audiences are given no indication of
how the closet episode wraps up. While this scene succeeds in conveying
Jack’s instability, it conveys precious little about the overall relationship
between the two men or about Harvey’s feelings for Jack. Moreover,
Scott’s “return” to Harvey and the normally histrionic Jack’s response,
are likewise not fleshed out, again leaving viewers uncertain about the
significance of either man to Milk (and about the significance of romance
to Milk in general). Finally, there is no fallout shown from the aftermath
of what ought to be a major narrative event, that is, Jack’s suicide. While
we might expect a few scenes showing Milk coping with finding Jack’s
body, we hear simply Milk’s voiceover telling us he “had to keep on,”
as the image switches abruptly to scenes of the Proposition 6 campaign.
Milk and Politics: Toward a New LGBT Biopic
Although it is possible to dismiss the above examples as poor character
plotting, I believe they are an indication of the film’s ambivalence
273Toward a New LGBT Biopic
about the convention of monogamous romance. Largely uninterested
in casual sex, profoundly ambivalent about romantic love, the film is
driven overwhelmingly by an interest in the mechanisms of gay politics.
In Milk, the space (usually) occupied by romantic love gives way to the
hustle and bustle of the world of politics. This is narratively the case with
Jack: the film barely takes a breath after Harvey discovers Jack’s body
before launching into the next political event. And this is no less true
of Milk’s relationship with Scott, whom the film depicts as moving out
on the occasion of Milk’s renewal of his political ambitions. In narrative
terms, Scott’s departure from the center of the story makes way for the
campaign to resume. In the cases of both Scott and Jack, politics literally
displaces romance. So what is the status of politics in the movie?
The film draws strong parallels between Milk’s self-fashioning as a
political entity and the growth and maturation of the gay community as
a political force in its own right. Milk devotes nearly all of its story arc
to the political goings-on of the time, which eclipse all other plotlines,
including any serious probing of Milk’s psychology and/or his sentiments
about sex, romance, family, aging, and the like.5
In spite of the one-person
title and Penn’s Oscar-ready performance, Milk throws its investigative
energy into the story of the 1970s San Francisco gay rights movement,
which is conveyed far more compellingly than are the conventional
biographical issues of psychology formation and emotional development.
Even Milk’s recurrent exhortation—for individuals to “come out”—yields
little in terms of character exposure, in Milk or other major characters
(who are essentially already “out”). Instead, “coming out” is a rallying cry,
a symbol of the political aims of the period, and a fully depersonalized
theme with consequences for only minor characters.
Generally speaking, there is virtually no dialogue or scene in the
movie that is not about politics to some extent. Commentators made note
of this fact, including the film’s director, who acknowledged both the
novelty and indeed risk of such an approach (Black 2008, 118). As Van
Sant says, “One of the weird things about Lance’s [Black’s] script was that
it seemed to be entirely political. . . . I kept asking Lance to put in some
more ancillary dialogue that just wasn’t at all about the political side of
the story . . . and it was something that Lance COMPLETELY avoided”
(ibid.). Other commentators expressed anxiety that the film would come
across as “agenda-driven agitprop,” though, like Van Sant, they came to
the conclusion that their fears were unfounded (McCarthy 2008, 39).
Arguably, the film is less a biopic per se than a film about a
gripping, dramatic political era, which happened to have a charismatic
leader at its center. In so being, Milk breaks rank with earlier gay biopics
such as The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and Prick Up Your Ears (1987).
274 Julia G. Erhart
About the legendary gay personality Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil
Servant shows Crisp’s coming of age at a time (the 1930s in Britain)
when effeminacy was the target of near-universal hostility, a jail sentence
was an ever-present threat, and violence at the hands of street thugs was
routine. The most open depiction of homosexuality that had yet been
seen, The Naked Civil Servant emphasized the singularity and courage
of its fiercely and flamboyantly “out” protagonist at a time when most
men gathered surreptitiously in coffee shops or danced fearfully with one
another in private. Set primarily in Britain about twenty years after The
Naked Civil Servant, Prick Up Your Ears depicts a world less obviously
perilous than Crisp’s but dangerous and discriminatory nonetheless.
Successful evasion of the police is a strong theme in the film, which
highlights both the pleasures and risks of gay life in a world where
homosexuality was still illegal. Because of their settings in emergent gay
communities, The Naked Civil Servant and Prick Up Your Ears emphasize
subjects of antigay discrimination and heterosexual panic rather than the
formation of an organized political movement. They are thus blueprints
for a more contemporary film such as Before Night Falls (mentioned at
the beginning of this essay), set in revolutionary Cuba, which likewise
features aspects of antigay violence and harassment. While each of these
films focuses on the life and achievements of a single individual, as does
Milk, the protagonists are cut off from all but a tiny community of
like-minded outcasts.
In contrast, Milk depicts the birth and formation of a well-structured
political movement in its own right, and picks up where earlier biopics
leave off by depicting the transformation of its gay characters into
organized, successful, powerful political actors. In so doing, the film
differs from the aforementioned films because it represents the complexity
of political formation and prioritizes that process rather than character
development. A new kind of gay-targeted biopic that focuses on a process
not previously seen, Milk thus marks a departure from both the generic
studio-era biopic and the earlier gay biopics. Moreover, it does so while
succeeding both critically and at the box office. How an essentially
non-mainstream, gay-targeted film was able to achieve this is a matter
to which I will now turn.
Milk and Current Events:
Topicality, Reflexivity, and the Box Office
Rarely does a film come along that resonates so strongly with current
events. The film’s release, it must be recalled, came a mere three weeks
after the 2008 U.S. federal election, an election that provided liberal
275Toward a New LGBT Biopic
voters with both extraordinary pleasure (on account of the election
of Barack Obama) and unanticipated pain (because of the passage in
California of Proposition 8, which defined marriage as a union between
a man and a woman). Apparently at the forefront of many writers’ minds,
these two events rated a mention in most critical reviews of Milk. The
topic of California’s Prop 8 generated the greatest amount of commentary.
Many writers remarked on the ironic timing of the events, lamenting that
debates and discussions that appear in Milk to be over and done with
were still largely unresolved. Overwhelmingly, most critics saw the film
as amplifying the cause for gay rights, crediting it for raising awareness
and inspiring a new generation of activists. Even writers who otherwise
criticized the film, generally praised it on this account.6
One review went
as far as to say that activists should “learn” from the film, the activism of
which was more successful than current-day political strategies (Holleran
2009, 20).
Almost without exception, throughout the gay-authored as well as
the mainstream press reviews, writers remarked on the similarities between
Harvey Milk and the newly elected U.S. president. Ryan Gilbey, for
example, said that the film would “epitomize” Barack Obama’s presidency
(Gilbey 2009, 44). Frequently, reviewers cited Milk’s and Obama’s shared
identities as “community organizers” and “outsiders.” “The election of
Barack Obama proved what a band of outsiders could achieve in support
of an unlikely, charismatic candidate,” wrote Richard Corliss (2008, 63).
Writers repeatedly cross-referenced the significance of the trope of
“hope” in the respective campaigns. Stuart Klawans’s reference is perhaps
the most intricate, in metaphorically mapping Harvey Milk’s words on to
the persona of Barack Obama. Klawans concludes: “Here is the story of
a successful community organizer—the first member of his social group
to rise to a certain office—who continually tells his supporters that they
are the true source of change, and whose final words of the film are,
‘You gotta give ‘em hope. You gotta give ‘em hope. You gotta give ‘em
hope.’ Think of the audacity” (Klawans 2008, 44).7
In another mashup of
current politics and popular culture, Peter Travers blends the identities of
the two men. Elevating Harvey Milk to the status of the 2008 Democratic
candidate, Travers concludes his article with the words “John McCain,
meet a real maverick” (Travers 2008, 132).
What is the function of these relentless and recurring references
to current events in reviews of a historical biographical film set in the
1970s? I believe these rhetorical ploys work to update the 1970s story
and make it relevant for present-day audiences who ordinarily would
have little interest in history. While it is not possible to definitively prove
the box-office relevance of such references, we know that liberal media
276 Julia G. Erhart
tend to do well in conservative times (as voters would have felt with the
passage of Prop 8); from this we can at least hypothesize a box-office effect.
Two writers remarked as such, noting the film’s opportunism (unwitting
or not) in relation to current events (Klawan 2008s; Holleran 2009).8
Andrew Holleran, for example, directly attributed Milk’s critical and box
office popularity to the dislike for Prop 8. “It’s Harvey Milk, but also the
gay rights movement itself, that reviewers are responding to, I suspect”
(Holleran 2009, 19).
In an article about historical fiction films, Marita Sturken explains
that our relationship to images of the past goes beyond questions of
“accuracy.” For Sturken, that relationship is complex and paradoxical.
On the one hand, we view historical images (such as those we see in
Milk) as evidence of what actually took place and endow them with
empirical truth. As I have tried to show, these are the terms by which
many gay writers engaged with and evaluated the film. On the other
hand, continues Sturken, we may be engaged by the fantasy of popular
films “to feel as though we have acquired an ‘experience’ of a particular
historical event” (Sturken 1997, 66). By referring over and over to
contemporary topical circumstances, critics link the past of Harvey
Milk’s time with events of the present day and in so doing solidify an
audience’s feeling of understanding toward past discontents, anxieties,
and satisfactions. Repeated references to material in the news—Prop 8,
Obama’s election—add value to the film, assist audiences to overcome
any potential uneasiness brought about by the film’s subject matter, and
open up, for mainstream as well as minority cultural audiences, a possibly
esoteric subject. Such commentary has the effect of projecting on to the
film a reflexive quality, which, had it been released two years later, it
perhaps would not have had.
A number of contemporary historical films, including biographical
films, strive for such reflexive qualities. Malcolm X (1992) is often cited
in this regard, for the way it switches back and forth between the past of
Malcolm X’s time and contemporary images, which include the videotaped
beating of Rodney King and Nelson Mandela speaking to a classroom.
Flags of Our Fathers (2006), which problematizes what happened at the
flag raising on Iwo Jima, likewise offers a reflexive take on its subject. In
that film, audiences are asked to reflect on what occurred in the past and
what the legacy of the past is now in the present. The film cautions us
against too much certainty about historical events, suggesting that it is
always possible to make mistakes. While Milk does not self-consciously
set out to be a reflexive film in the ways that Malcolm X and Flags of Our
Fathers do, it nonetheless functions to draw attention to commonalities
277Toward a New LGBT Biopic
between and among past and present eras, politics, and political figures.
Because of how critics responded to the historical confluence of events
surrounding the film’s release, resonance is added to the film that was
not otherwise there. And in so doing, critics both secured their own
inroad to the non-mainstream movie and also made Milk accessible for
general audiences.
Acknowledgment
A somewhat different version of “Toward a New LGBT Biopic: Politics
and Reflexivity in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008)” was originally published,
under the title “The Naked Community Organizer: Politics and
Reflexivity in Gus Van Sant’s Milk,” in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 26,
no. 1 (2011).
Notes
1. A/B Studies, Biography, and Journal of Popular Film and Television have
featured special issues on the biopic.
2. Furthermore, films about Freddie Mercury and James Dean are reputedly
in production.
3. And there were general criticisms that the film was “conventional”
(McCarthy 2008), the framing device “regressive” (Lee 2008), and that the film’s
generic requirements as a biopic resulted in a lack of emotional complexity (McCarthy
2008; Als 2009).
4. Prior to his move to San Francisco, Milk worked for the financial
securities firm Bache and was a onetime supporter of conservative politician
Barry Goldwater. See Shilts 1982.
5. Proof of how little is known about the historical figure in such areas
is evidenced in an article in The Advocate, where friends and observers speculate
about what Harvey would be doing now had he not been killed. To take just one
example, the discrepancy of opinions about Milk’s stance on the current debate
about gay marriage is indicative of how little is actually known about Milk’s
feelings in a range of areas (Martin 2008, 43–44).
6. The exception to the praise was Mark Simpson, who used the film as
a platform to criticize the gay marriage campaign as tame and apology-ridden.
7. The phrase “audacity of hope” emerges in Barack Obama’s keynote
address to the 2004 Democratic Convention and is the title of his second book.
8. Only one writer viewed the question of the film’s release date with
scorn. Criticizing Van Sant’s decision not to release the film prior to the
U.S. election, Henry Barnes suggested that an earlier release date could
have “tipped the vote in the anti-prop-8 camp’s favour had it arrived before 4
November.”
278 Julia G. Erhart
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