“Look seans an old friend of mine and i didnt buy his performance at all—thought he did an average pretend acting like he was gay besides hes one of the most homophobic people i kno" —Wrestler star Mickey Rourke's supposed text message to friend about Sean Penn's performance in Milk
Yesterday we saw New Yorker writer George Packer miffed that Sean Penn would dare to go to Venezuela, hang out with his good friend Hugo Chávez, and then come back and call what he wrote in The Nation "reporting."
Said Penn in his article, "It's true, Chávez may not be a good man. But he may well be a great one." The only problem? As Advocate James Kirchick points out, the Milk actor is praising a dictator with a known history of putting alleged homosexuals into concentration camps.
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Today is International Human Rights Day and while gay teens remain four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers, hate crime is rising across the globe (especially in the UK and Germany) and only 12 countries include LGBT people in their hate crimes laws, we are making progress.
QUEERTY REPORTS — "A new step" in gay cinema is how director Gus Van Sant described his Harvey Milk biopic last night at a Q&A following a screening at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Queerty attended, if only to see if Van Sant was as charmingly handsome as he seemed in his Entourage cameo. (Answer: He most certainly is.) Fielding a handful of questions after Milk's credits rolled, Van Sant was lauded by the audience. A 25-year-old blonde New York transplant, who says he is still harassed daily, even in New York, and saw new hope in the film, gave the director a tearful "thank you." An executive from the Hetrick-Martin Institute, home to New York's gay-friendly Harvey Milk High School, attended with some of his students, and commended Van Sant for perfectly capturing Milk's "legacy." And of course, somebody asked the director how he felt the film could have impacted Proposition 8, if only it came out before the election. And that's where he surprised us:
Poor Focus Features.
The film company hit gay gold a few years back with Brokeback Mountain, a love story about gay cowboys. Well, the company will tonight premiere its latest lavender adventure, Milk, a biopic about slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. While laymen may assume Focus would want to build the hype, they're eschewing a big hoopla over the homo-tinged feature.
There is a scene of the chortle-worthy Tropic Thunder, where Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. discuss Sean Penn's Oscar-baiting performance in I Am Sam as "going full retard."
Unfortunately, Penn already booked his new role playing revolutionary gay icon Harvey Milk by the time TT came out, so now you're going to have to survive a couple of months with hearing the term "going full homo" thrown around a lot. Milk trailer, after the jump:
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