Attending the press conference for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, I had a Eureka moment that revealed my own naivety. A woman had asked Van Sant about his creative casting decisions, not just in choosing straights to play all the major gay characters (including a stunning Sean Penn as the gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk), but also in selecting the talented and out Denis O’Hare to embody homophobe extraordinaire John Briggs (the face behind the Proposition 6/Briggs Initiative to kick gay and lesbian teachers out of California’s public schools). I waited anxiously for the director to expound upon what the press notes referred to as “sexual-preference-blind casting,” a subversive twist that relates to Milk’s own modus operandi of rejecting divisiveness regarding sexuality in favor of bringing people together (or as Milk protégé Danny Nicoletta puts it in the notes, “It doesn’t matter what side of the fence you fall on. In fact, just tear the fence down; we all live in the same world.”)
Instead I was taken aback by Van Sant’s candidness. The point wasn’t to use O’Hare in some sort of queer jujitsu to sidestep criticism from the likes of Harvey Fierstein (who’s compared the casting of straights in gay roles to blackface), but simply to get as many homos involved as possible. Thus he wasn’t casting O’Hare so much in a straight role as in a small role. Or as the director so delicately put it, no gay actors have the “box office stature” that was required to get the film made. O’Hare either played straight or he didn’t play at all.
In other words, one of the few industries left in which gay white men (actors) don’t make pay (i.e., wield power) equal to that of their hetero counterparts has churned out a movie about a gay white man who demanded equal rights. Which is ironic enough. And yet even while homo thespians don’t make the serious money in Hollywood some of the biggest box office draws have been allowed to play gay!
To wit:
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Even as the champagne was still flowing across the nation in celebration of Barack Obama’s historic victory, protests were raging in California after Proposition 8, defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, passed with nary a hitch. By chance this was also the week I finally got around to watching Fatih Akin’s stunning follow-up to his rightly lauded Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, recently released on DVD. It’s hard to believe Akin, the biggest talent to come out of German cinema since Fassbinder, is only 35 years old. Indeed, the depth of the script, the subtlety of the Turkish score, the nuanced camerawork and self-assured editing are that of a master director. As is the poignancy with which Akin invests the breathtaking lesbian love story, which both connects the first and last parts of his international trilogy, and is the beating heart of the film. If those same-sex marriage advocates are ever in need of a cautionary tale that could serve as a Prop 8 teaching tool, “Lotte’s Death” (as part two is titled) is it.
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Are you a supporter of gay marriage?
“I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.”
Why doesn’t it interest you?
“The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.”
–From Questions for Gore Vidal in The New York Times Magazine, 6/15/08.
Amen, sister. One of the perks of being queer is that you’re not expected to engage in unnatural acts like high school proms and monogamy. So in honor of the hedonistic right to our own guilt-free, queer Mardi Gras, here are some subversive suggestions that will get you in the mood and take you back to that more innocent, less commercial “Over The Rainbow” time.
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