Milk and the pride of speaking up

Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco, Alison Pill. Biographical drama. USA, 2008

In 2008 Gus Van Sant made a film that does not want to be just the biography of a man. Milk is the chronicle of a decision, the decision to stop asking for permission to exist. At the centre is not the death of Harvey Milk, San Francisco city supervisor murdered in 1978. At the centre is his pride. Not pride as vanity, but as a civic force. That pride which in the United States is called pride and which means: I am here, you see me, and from today on, I count too. For myself and for other people.

The film begins when Milk is already forty. He works on Wall Street, he has a life that from the outside seems fine. And yet he leaves everything behind, takes a train and arrives in San Francisco, in the Castro district. The first image that strikes him is not a speech, but a simple gesture: two men holding hands in the street. For him, it is a revelation. Until that moment, he had lived learning how to hide. In Castro, he understands that there is another way. You can walk with your head held high. You can love without looking down. And from that moment on, Milk no longer wants simply to live in Castro. He wants to build it.

He opens Castro Camera, a camera shop that immediately becomes something else. A switchboard, a job placement office, a living room where anyone can come in and talk. Milk immediately understands something that will drive all his actions: pride cannot remain private. If it stays behind four walls, nothing changes. It has to come out, it has to make its way, it has to spread. That is why he turns every conversation into politics, every customer into a potential volunteer. His voice is everywhere. We hear him addressing the crowd from a van, we hear him persuading an undecided customer, we hear him arguing and laughing. It is a voice that does not apologise.

The highest point of this idea comes with the Hope Speech, delivered on June 25, 1978, on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, at a rally celebrating California Gay Freedom Day. Milk is actually speaking to young gay people across the USA who, in those years, are growing up in small towns where they know no one else like them. He tells them to resist, not to give up, to keep going. But above all, he tells everyone that young people must be able to see someone who made it. “You have to give them hope,” he repeats. And hope does not come from proclamations. It comes from faces. If a teacher is gay, if a mechanic is gay, if a city supervisor is gay, then a seventeen-year-old boy or girl in Nebraska understands that they too can have a future. Pride thus becomes an act of teaching. Coming out is not only about freeing yourself, it is about opening a door for other people.

A few months later Milk will be killed. Van Sant does not, however, create a hagiography. He also shows us Harvey’s failures: his first three electoral campaigns are failures. People call him, mockingly, “the Mayor of Castro Street”. He loses, gets back up, changes strategy. He learns to negotiate with trade unions, learns to talk to people who hate him, learns that politics is also about compromise. When he is finally elected in 1977, the first openly gay person to win public office in the United States, the swearing-in scene is filmed in silence. No triumphalism. Just a raised hand. And yet that gesture carries all the weight of a community seeing itself represented inside an institution for the first time.

From there begins the hardest battle. In California, Proposition 6 emerges, championed by John Briggs, which would have allowed all gay teachers to be fired. This is where Milk’s pride becomes responsibility. He can no longer speak only for himself. He has to speak for everyone. He has to explain to parents, workers and citizens that fear is born of ignorance and that the only way to fight it is through knowledge. He confronts Briggs on television, goes door to door, never raises his voice but never takes a step back. Because pride is also this: demanding to be treated as a legitimate interlocutor.

The film does not hide the personal struggle. Milk loves, gets jealous, makes mistakes. His relationship with Jack Lira reveals the crack between the public figure and the man. Having political pride does not mean having no fear, it does not mean not suffering. It means deciding not to turn back anyway, not to go back into the closet even when it would be more convenient.

On November 8, 1978, Dan White – a former city supervisor backed by a conservative platform, a proponent of civic pride and the traditional family – enters City Hall and kills Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Van Sant does not linger on the blood. Instead, he lets us hear the tape Milk had recorded in case he was killed. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” he says, “let that bullet destroy every closet door”. It is the sentence that sums up the entire film. Violence can stop a body, but it cannot stop an idea. In fact, it pushes it to spread. The ending is a march. Thousands of people take to the streets of San Francisco carrying candles. It is not rhetoric. It is proof that pride is contagious. A man who decided to live out loud pushed thousands of other people to do the same.

Years later, Milk speaks to an issue that keeps coming back: how much public space are we willing to give to those who are different. The film answers clearly. Space is not given. It is occupied. Through presence, through words, through politics. Harvey Milk did not have time to see the results of his battle. But he left a method. Come out, speak, organise, run for office. Transform shame into dignity. Sean Penn plays him with a warmth and stubbornness that prevent the character from becoming a marble icon. He is human, sometimes irritating, often tender. And that is precisely why his pride concerns us.

Milk does not tell the story of how a man died. It tells the story of how a human being chose to live. Out loud, in the streets, within institutions. At a time when many people are still being asked to lower their voices, that choice remains revolutionary. The film received eight Oscar nominations and won two: Best Actor for Sean Penn and Best Original Screenplay for Dustin Lance Black. Chapeau.