Televisions are on everywhere. The news is bad. A crowd is gathering in the street. A telephone rings. And also how he can sustain, in the face of multiplying frustrations and complications, his dogged, impish, upbeat attitude. His forays into local electoral politics have led him, so far, to a series of defeats.
Harvey Bernard Milk May 22, — November 27, was an American politician and the first openly gay elected official in the history of California , where he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Although he was the most pro- LGBT politician in the United States at the time, politics and activism were not his early interests; he was neither open about his sexuality nor civically active until he was 40, after his experiences in the counterculture movement of the s. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighborhood to promote his interests and unsuccessfully ran three times for political office.
Also benefiting from that systemic change was a new supervisor named Dan White, an ex-firefighter voted onto the board to represent an old-school working-class district. Less than a year after these men took office, White assassinated Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and turned a local political squabble into a national tragedy. The idea of a film on these horrific events has been in the works for more than a dozen years, with directors including Bryan Singer and Oliver Stone expressing interest. The current film, featuring a strong and convincing performance by Sean Penn, was directed by Gus Van Sant in the kind of bland heroic mode that has been a Hollywood staple forever.