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The opening credits of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk, play out against black-and-white archival footage of police raiding a Miami gay bar. As Danny Elfman’s elegiac strings swell on the soundtrack, patrons are hustled out by the cops, covering their faces, oppressed by their own shame. One of them, frustrated by the camera’s glare as he sits at the bar, hurls his drink at the lens; outside, men are jammed into the paddy wagon like cattle. It’s a moving sequence that efficiently communicates the emotional and political dynamics of the pre-Stonewall era. It’s also highly reminiscent of the opening-credit sequence in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), which pairs grainy, slow-motion video footage of the Rodney King beating with an audio recording of Malcolm raging against white supremacy.
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No one could accuse Milk of being one-dimensional. In his closeted early years he held down corporate jobs in New York City and even campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964. After he and his lover moved to San Francisco in 1972, they opened a camera store in the city’s heavily gay Castro neighborhood, earning him political bona fides as a businessman. Milk forged an alliance between the gay community and the macho Teamsters by enlisting gay bars in the union’s boycott of Coors beer, and in his quixotic campaigns for the city’s board of supervisors, he assembled an unlikely power base of gays, hippies, seniors, union members, and small-business owners. Amid the cynicism of the post-Watergate era, Milk urged gay men to get involved in politics, yet in his own community he ran as an insurgent, rejecting the counsel of established gay leaders who hedged their bets with straight liberal candidates like Dianne Feinstein. When Milk finally won his seat on the board in 1977, he became the state’s first openly gay elected official.
Before leaving New York, Milk had flirted with the theater, working as an associate producer with the scandalous Tom O’Horgan (Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Lenny). Once he got into politics, he turned out to be a master media manipulator with a flawless instinct for political theater. During the battle over Proposition 6, Milk decided he needed a popular issue to raise his visibility and, responding to the public frustration over dog mess, sponsored a pooper-scooper law. Black and Van Sant faithfully re-create Milk’s outdoor press conference announcing the bill, where he delighted reporters by “accidentally” stepping in a dog turd planted by one of his aides. Yet his understanding of how to use political spectacle extended beyond publicity stunts. When Castro residents flood the streets, raging over Anita Bryant’s success repealing a Florida gay-rights law, Milk tries to prevent an eruption of violence by funneling their anger into a street demonstration. “Give me permission to march them,” he implores a policeman. When the cop asks where, Milk replies, “Anywhere!”
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