In the 50's, you didn't "understand" gays, you just mocked them, even if homoerotic play and fleeting, barely perceptible homoerotic feelings were hardly alien to many of these same young men. My friends and their peers were primed to "be distanced" by Harvey Milk and his ilk.
But, then there's this fact: A far more sexually graphic movie, also heavy with awards and other accolades, Brokeback Mountain, pulled in over $85 million domestically and cost $l1 million to produce compared with Milk's $20 million production costs. Clearly gay sex was not a major audience deterrent for Brokeback Mountain. Why would it be with Milk-if it was?
Maybe artistic sensibilities are more complex than disliking gay sex per se? Conscious and unconscious bias against gays is socialized in, there from the get-go, no matter how much one may try to transcend or overlook it. It must be offset by other, more positive observed traits. Among my friends, many had seen Brokeback Mountain and didn't like its sexuality either. But they got past it. They liked the movie.
The lead roles were easier to identify with and they weren't portrayed as effeminate or assertive and caustic, as was Harvey Milk. Brokeback's cowboys also struggled with their sexual attractions as Milk seemingly did not-at least onscreen. Penn's Milk
was also borderline homely, sexually very active, a high-risk sexual "player" during the opening of the AIDS era. Do straights really want their gay protagonists to epitomize promiscuous gay stereotypes?
Milk's character was, for the most part, in stark contrast to those of the handsome cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. There was a love between them that both straights and gays might envy, if not openly, then in the privacy of their hearts, without guilt or shame.
In the end, then, maybe the audiences for Milk were thin for more reasons than onscreen gay sex. Think about it. If you don't like someone or are uncomfortable with things they do or are, you tend to be more critical, less tolerant, more readily dismissive with them.
Conversely, if you like someone, you are less dismissive, more tolerant, less easily put off -- because you don't want to be put off! You more readily seek to understand or perhaps even empathize with their life dramas, as movies often try to get us to do with film leads, especially complex leads like, say, Pacino's Michael Corleone, in the Godfather saga. It may look something like this: "Yeah, they're gay but, well, I just think I understand what these two cowboys were dealing with...maybe if they hadn't been stuck out there on the range..."
In other words, in movie tastes, as in life, fortunes depend as much on the singer, as the song. Perhaps the movie, Milk, was playing the wrong song and Harvey Milk as portrayed was the wrong singer.
But then there's this zeitgeist consideration: Adapting a real life figure like Milk in today's more assertive, activist gay/lesbian era makes air brushing prickly or controversial gay or lesbian traits to enhance a film's mass appeal a dicey proposition. It's likely to satisfy no one. Look at the two biopics of Cole Porter, the early, Porter-hetrosexualized, very successful one, Night and Day, with Cary Grant, and the later, very unsuccessful, gay warts-and-all Porter, It's De-Lovely, with Kevin Kline.
Or, consider this: What would a biopic of the life, lives and lies of Truman Capote look like if made for a mass or Peorian audience? The two recent, critically received, Capote-centered movies, Capote and Infamous, centered on his chronicling of two mid-western murderers in his book, In Cold Blood. They easily portrayed his lisps and effeminate traits as well as his sharp tongue. But as for his sexuality, nada, zip, zero. But would mass audiences be ready for Truman in the raw?
Portraying gay love and affection is one thing and they go down most easily when in a comedic genre garment, like The Bird Cage or In and Out. But is Peoria ready for explicit reality in homosexual-themed films as they are for heterosexual films, whether fact-based or fiction?
Drama is the serious genre. It casts the action in a more serious light. When heterosexuals are not laughing many are likely also to be less forgiving of gay "kiss, kiss, bang, bang, bad behavior," unless, maybe, your film is about two likable cowboys... and one of them dies.
