Episode 6: Milk, Starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk

This is a re-recording of an episode that originally dropped on June 4, 2024, as the first film in our 2024 Pride Month series. We are re-releasing it because the original version sounded like we recorded it inside a wind tunnel on board a submarine. It sounded that way because we didn’t know that we needed to turn off the air conditioner before recording an episode.

Kicking off Gay Pride Month with a masterpiece, Rena and Sara discuss Milk, the 2008 film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black. Sean Penn won an Oscar for Best Actor for his outstanding, joyful portrayal of the late San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who shattered closet doors while battling the Christian Coalition, Anita Bryant, and the mediocre white schmuck colleague who would assassinate him between bouts of allegedly eating too much junk food and complaining about the need for traditional family values. That colleague sucks, but Harvey Milk – and this film – do not. 

There’s also plenty of discussion of San Francisco’s local political scene, the development hell of the Harvey Milk biopic that went on for nearly two decades, the astonishing number of  problematic actors in this film, a hair-raising encounter between Sean Penn and activist and film hero Cleve Jones, and why Allison Pill should be president. Rena and Sara also both noted that at no point in Milk is that unspeakably mediocre colleague who assassinated Harvey Milk shown eating a Twinkie.

Milk stars Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Allison Pill, Denis O’Hare, Diego Luna, Joseph Cross, Stephen Spinella, and Lucas Grabeel. The film was directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black. 

Visual Aids: milk-biopic-podcast-story-episode-6-n9 nOkia 

Mediocre White Male Bonus Content: https://imgur.com/gallery/dan-whites-got-issue-patron-saint-of-mediocre-white-dudes-ftAS3UX

References and sources mentioned: 

“Everything Milk Doesn’t Tell You About the True Story,” Looper.com 

“Remembering Jonestown, Dan White, and the two weeks that ate San Francisco,” by Paul Krassner, San Francisco Guardian, November 23, 1993 

Season of the Witch by David Talbot 

 

The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilts

When We Rise, by Cleve Jones

The Times of Harvey Milk (documentary)

 

LGBT Equality Index

https://www.equaldex.com/equality-index

Spoiler Warning: We spoil everything. And we enjoy it.

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