In Which Sean Penn Ruins My Future Viewing of Milk and Wins My Asshole of the Convention Award
Hi folks. In case you missed this fact somehow: I am a lesbian. Hello. Also? I support this thing called Equality! That includes Marriage Equality! Maybe you also missed it, but last weekend I was in SF for the wedding of some very dear friends. I go so far as to have even written my grad school thesis around the media messaging bit of marriage equality, and I worked in the MA State House to make gay marriage law in that first state ever.
So, you know, it matters to me.
Also? I politically grew up in San Francisco, more or less literally in that town’s beautiful City Hall. That’s the building where Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in this country was assassinated.
If you don’t know the story of Harvey Milk, well, you should. Rent the brilliant documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and I promise you that you will be a better person for it.
So there is this actor dude, Sean Penn, and he plays Milk in a Hollywood biopic due out soon. I hear this guy Sean Penn is into the politics. In part, I was under this impression because, a few months ago, we were both at the Harvey Milk Political Club Anniversary Dinner, and he was kind of going on and on about the upcoming election.
Last week at my day job, I hosted a call on the top and most recent communication strategies on the topics of immigration rights, affirmative action and marriage equality.
Pause.
I should mention that a key moment in the life of Harvey Milk was when he fought a CA-wide ballot initative that would have made it legal to fire any gay or lesbian folk from being public school teachers. It didn’t look like CA would support rights in that case, but at the last minute, the voters came through. This is a prominent storyline in the doc, and maybe in the upcoming movie.
Sean Penn, it should be noted, looked OMG damn like Harvey Milk while playing him in the movie. It’s scary.
So last week I started thinking: Why is Milk being released in late Nov?! Maybe, just maybe, if it were released prior to the election, it might just help push a necessary percentage or two of CA voters to keep marriage equality as the law in CA. It could also be argued to the production house, Focus Features, that there is additional money to be gained from releasing a political film during an election season, rather than post a very long one. I know from my days at MTV that such conversations with production houses are not uncommon. Only, I don’t know if such a convo has been had regarding Milk and the timing of its release. But I decided such a conversation needed to be had. I just haven’t been able to figure out who should initiate it. I told this idea to the lawyer who argued the recent CA Sup Ct case, who presented on my call last week. I was trying to think of who else to approach.
The joys of Denver included the fact that Every Fucking Person is here. And so, shortly after running into Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, I found myself in the same lobby, chilling a few feet away from an also chilling Sean Penn.
Now, I’m not really a fan of celebrities, as a general policy. In fact, I never recognize them, and had to ask someone if it was, in fact Sean Penn. Alas, it was.
I also secretly am incredibly shy and generally am mortified by the idea of randomly bothering people I don’t know, and I have absolutely no understanding of why anyone would ever ask for an autograph.
And yet, I looked at this actor chilling there, and thought about the fact that if I could get him to engage this idea, the marriages of so many folks I love might be saved. I walked my shy lil’ self on over to him. I apologized for disturbing him and told him I was a kid of SF politics who grew up with the history of Milk and had worked on marriage equality for years. And then I asked whether there had been any discussion around the release date of the film and whether releasing it before the election might, just might, help the cause.
Sean Penn looked at me, kind of glared, and said:
“I am an actor for hire. That is all I have to do with the movie or the cause.”
Wow.
I mean, okay, like, I could have handled: “Hey lady, leave me the F alone, I don’t want to talk to strangers!” Really, I could have.
But. Wow. The actor who plays a political person in his real life image, who plays Milk in a soon-to-be-historic movie, told me that he didn’t want to engage at all on the role the movie would play in the political discourse of his home state and the marriage rights of those who he joined at the political dinner just a few months ago. Wow.
At the recent Harvey Milk dinner, Penn asked that all us gays there fuck some sense into the Log Cabin Republicans (we) come across. That’s actually a quote. You know, like he was into gay issues and, I don’t know, elections or something.
Whatever. I know he could have just been having a bad day and felt like being an ass to a stranger. But, wow. Also? I seriously am mad that now I won’t be able to watch him portray Milk without thinking: dude said he didn’t care about the political implication of Milk’s life in the form of that film’s effect on today’s culture!
Asshole of the Convention award goes to: Sean Penn.
I’m still gonna ask around to less asshole folks to see whether this conversation has been had. It may be a silly idea, it may make no difference, but at the very least I owe it to Milk and everyone else who did so much for the movement to see if we can at least talk about releasing the film about his life before CA voters go to the ballot to considering removing more rights from the LGBT community.
Screw what prickly actors think about that idea.
(Can you tell his response got to me?! Damn angry lesbians!)
