There’s a scene in Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk in which San Francisco gay-rights leader Harvey Milk and his followers formulate a response to Anita Bryant’s antigay “Save Our Children” crusade. Aside from the middle-aged Milk, who’s played by Sean Penn, the group consists mostly of young men in their 20s and early 30s, so it’s hard to miss the grizzled old guy wearing the Greek sailor’s cap and sweater emblazoned with the slogan anita the hun. Though he doesn’t have any dialogue, he adds gravity and authenticity to the scene. His name is Frank Robinson, and he’s representing himself.
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In Chicago Robinson was a behind-the-scenes player in the gay liberation movement that arose in the wake of New York’s Stonewall riots. When I met him in 1971 he was a gruff but friendly fellow with a hearty laugh, and even then his trademark was a Greek sailor’s cap. Most of us in gay lib were college students, but Robinson, a veteran of both World War II and Korea, was in his mid-40s and still in the closet to his family and at work. He was writing the Playboy Advisor column at the time, and I got a huge kick out of knowing that Hugh Hefner’s young, horny, straight urban male audience was getting its sex and lifestyle advice from a middle-aged closet queen.
Robinson’s first passion as a writer (and collector) is science fiction, fantasy, and adventure. He published his first short story in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950. Six years later, while pursuing a master’s in journalism at Northwestern, he wrote his first novel, The Power, about a man with telekinetic powers, which producer George Pal later turned into a movie starring George Hamilton. His nonfiction books include Science Fiction of the 20th Century, a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome, and Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines, a compilation of cover illustrations for such publications as Weird Tales, The Shadow, and Popular Detective.
In another moving piece of oratory, written for San Francisco’s 1978 Gay Freedom Day parade, Milk declared: “We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions…. I am tired of the conspiracy of silence.” In Milk Sean Penn delivers the speech almost verbatim, standing before hundreds of thousands of people in front of City Hall—just as Milk did 30 years ago. Robinson’s there, too, standing in the crowd—just as he was 30 years ago. “When I heard Sean say those words that I had helped write, I was so proud,” Robinson says.
The moment ended up on the cutting-room floor, but it could show up as bonus footage on the DVD. At 82, Frank Robinson is finally coming out to the world—just as Harvey Milk wanted.v
