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Written by Felipe Tewes
It is not every high school graduation that each and every keynote speaker breaks into tears at the podium. The ceremony for the Harvey Milk High School class of 2008 was a truly emotional experience for the two hundred and fifty crowding the McGraw-Hill auditorium in midtown Manhattan. As the eighteen students from the school’s fifth graduating class strutted across the stage—beauty pageant wave expertly executed –everyone present was keenly aware of the great struggle both the students and the school have endured. The Harvey Milk High School (HMHS) was originally a small GED retrieval school founded in 1985 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a gay-rights youth advocacy group. Rumor has it that the students themselves chose to name it after the slain San Francisco city supervisor. Upon its expansion in 2002 into a four-year accredited NYC Department of Education high school, the school faced criticism for being an exclusively “gay high school” – in reality ...Read More
Tagged with: harvey milk, sean penn, gus van sant
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Written by Peter Bowen
[The following article originally appeared in Filmmaker Magazine to commemorate Gus Van Sant being honored at this year’s IFP Gotham Awards.]
In the early ’70s as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gus Van Sant made a momentous decision. He changed his major from painting to film. But Van Sant didn’t leave painting behind. Rather he brought to film a painter’s concern for the materiality of the image. In his latest feature, Milk, a historical portrait of the slain gay San Francisco politician, Van Sant does not simply reconstruct a chronology of events but breathes life into a series of tableaux from another time. Milk lives in this strangely real world from the past as well as in our imaginations. He is a figure who still speaks to us.
As an artist, Van Sant makes moving pictures––moving both in the sense that he animates the frozen composition of photography and in the way he invests those images with emotion. In Milk, this becomes an alm...Read More
Tagged with: harvey milk, sean penn, gus van sant
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Written by Joshua Gamson
Midway through Milk, Harvey Milk is celebrating his victorious campaign for City Supervisor after many failed attempts. One of the people he greets at the party is Sylvester, the gender-mixing, falsetto-singing, black, openly gay man-diva who would pop into international disco stardom the next year with his hits “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat).” Sylvester and Milk were often at the same parties and gay parades—Sylvester performed at Milk’s last birthday party on earth, and also at his last Gay Freedom Day Parade, where a t-shirted, beaming Milk waved from a convertible. If Milk was the Mayor of Castro Street, Sylvester was its undisputed first lady, a cultural icon and the source of the movement’s most recognizable soundtrack. Sylvester and Milk were very much part of the same movement, and not just because they shared a home base. Their affinity illustrates just how integral music—and dance music in particular—was to gay movemen...Read More
Tagged with: harvey milk, gus van sant, sean penn
