With clean, economic storytelling, an efficient script and wonderfully grounded performances from its impressive cast, the film on the surface might not feel like anything special. Like dozens of awards-season projects before it, Milk is a competently-made bio of an extraordinary individual that pulls all the right heartstrings and hits all the right notes.

It’s not until you take a step back from the film that it hits you: This is the gayest major motion picture ever made.

From its sobering opening montage (news footage of gay bars being raided in the 1960’s) to the humbling final moments when thousands march in the deceased Harvey’s honor through San Francisco, Milk is an unapologetic, beautiful and affecting testament to the strength, warmth and complexity of gay men and women at a landmark time in gay rights history.

Sean Penn as Harvey Milk

The screen is rarely without a gay character. We see gay men cooking, lounging in bed, working, dancing, loving, squabbling, joking, driving one another nuts and supporting each other in the wake of tragedy. Though the conversations are overwhelmingly about discrimination against gays, there are numerous tender moments when we see these men not marching in the streets or shouting through bullhorns, but simply living their lives.

The anticipation leading up to the highly-buzzed film has mostly been about the fact that the story of Harvey Milk, a gay rights leader who was assassinated along with Mayor Geroge Moscone by a fellow city supervisor, was actually — impossibly — making it to the screen after nearly 40 years. But its real accomplishment is something different, and to me, unexpected: it gently but without hesitation takes the audience into the world of gay men in a way that no film ever has before.

Equal parts sweetness, melancholy and rage, it’s a wonderfully immersive, warts-and-all journey. Harvey and his friends aren’t perfect, but they’re not out to hurt anyone. They just want what’s fair. And it would be near impossible to walk out of this film without understanding that.

The approach works thanks mostly to the stellar performance of Sean Penn as Milk, a brassy New York Jew with an infectious grin and a rascally but harmless sense of humor (it’s not just any guy who can turn a line like “My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you” into a campaign catchphrase, least of all in 1974). Penn’s Milk is aggressively flirtatious, obnoxious, stubborn and shameless … which, by many accounts, is probably historically accurate.

He is also gentle, caring, intelligent and braver than you could imagine. He says “Here I am, and what of it?” There’s never a moment of hesitation, not a second that you don’t believe that he is doing what he truly believes to be right, and not a moment when Penn feels counterfeit or uncommitted to the role.

This isn’t about a gay man struggling to come to terms with himself, it’s about a gay man struggling to get the world to come to terms with him. And for that fact alone, this film is like no other that has come before it.

It was fired from the gun of Dan White, an ex-cop who’d gone to Milk’s City Hall office after killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who had refused to re-appoint White to the Board of Supervisors from which he’d recently resigned.

Harvey Milk was San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor, swept into power in the same neighborhood revolution that gave White his victory in 1978. It was Milk’s fourth run for office, and the first successful one, although he was the recognized leader of San Francisco’s large and growing gay population.

Milk was a newcomer to politics. He’d blown into town when he was in his 40s and disrupted the existing gay power structure with his in-your-face grassroots activism and refusal to cower and apologize for being gay.

His watchword was “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and he used tactics those who recently watched Barack Obama’s campaign would easily recognize: register voters, get out the vote, organize relentlessly, empower your volunteers and supporters, and spread a message of hope. He became an acknowledged power broker, and many observers believed he was on track to being the nation’s first openly gay mayor.

But just as it was violence and police brutality at New York City’s Stonewall Inn a decade before that had given birth to the modern gay rights movement, it was violence and police brutality that marked the end of its first wave. Dan White was convicted of nothing more than second degree manslaughter for the killing of Milk and Moscone. (White later gave himself a harsher sentence, and took his own life after being released from prison.)

The gay community came together in fierce sorrow after Milk was killed, with a miles-long peaceful candlelight vigil stretching from the Castro district to City Hall.

But it erupted in rage at White’s sentence, burning a dozen police cars and the basement of City Hall in what became known as the “White Night Riot.” The police retaliated the next night, hiding their badges while beating patrons during a raid of the Elephant Walk, an upscale gay bar in the Castro.

Next page: “Harvey Milk lives!”

This weekend I went to see the new movie Role Models.

I was excited. Paul Rudd is adorable and has an amazing movie track record and Jane Lynch might be the funniest woman in the world. The theatre was sold out and we were lucky to get seats anywhere near the middle and all the buzz in the theatre made it that much more exciting.

But within five minutes the first faggot joke happened. It was one in a long, long line of homophobic cracks throughout the movie. Every time one of the characters used the word “gay” or talked about being sodomized the entire theater erupted into laughter.

The high school couple three seats down were actually crying from all the hilarity.

The homophobic jokes were so common I have to assume they were purposely put there to make a point. And almost all of the offensive jokes were said by characters other than the two main “role models.” But if it was intended to make a point, I can personally promise that no one in the theater I was in got it.

The truth is that I am fed up with movies and television shows thinking it is ok to use homophobic language to get a laugh. While education programs are trying to teach high school and middle school students that using the word dyke is offensive, Paul Rudd (who co-wrote the movie) has a blockbuster where small children draw pictures of people anally penetrating a robot and anyone weird or different is “gay.”

If the purpose of Role Models was to expose the way we use homophobic language the writers and actors should have taken more care with the execution.

This is the humanity of an entire group of people they are playing with and their work made this viewer want to disappear once the lights came up and the credits rolled.

Breakfast With Scot

As you may have heard, an all-new, gay-injected adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited is currently opening across the country. John Polly recently had a chance to sit down with the film’s young star Matthew Goode (Charles Ryder) as well as director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots) to ask them about the film’s making the character of Sebastian Flyte explicitly gay, and his relationship with Charles more overtly romantic.

AfterElton.com: In this Brideshead Revisited, the Sebastian character is presented as more overtly gay. So, did you have think about how you approach the relationship between he and Charles? Were you concerned about Charles just coming off as a sexual opportunist, that he may just be taking advantage of Sebastian?
Matthew Goode: Given the social climbing aspect, you mean … No, I thought Charles and Sebastian’s relationship was more interesting for showing the idea of what male love is, and the complications of that. I thought of them as two people who had quite comparable loveless childhoods gravitating towards each other. And I think what Ben [Whishaw, who plays Sebastian] did with it was so much more interesting — not in comparison to the original TV series, but in general.

Charles’ Cousin Jasper does say [of Sebastian and his flamboyant friends at Oxford], “Sodomites — steer well clear of them!” So there’s obviously something much more than just youthful exuberance going on there, which sets them apart. So to have something definitive to play against is great.

For Charles, it’s more a question of platonic love, and then you bring Julia in and … Charles does bang on about how [she and Sebastian] are so alike, in manner and look, that it would be an easy transference for someone to go, “Well … as much as I love you and as much as I love this extraordinary living out our childhood now at the age of 18…” as he and Sebastian do during their long summer together … It made sense for me for Charles to have that switch…

AE: And if Charles had met Julia first, would he have later been attracted to Sebastian?
MG: Obviously, Charles’ friendship with Sebastian was the main love affair of his life, and I think that’s one of the reasons he has such guilt at the end. Nothing’s black and white in this, really. And I never saw it as he was so hugely in love with Julia, but again I never saw him as a social climber. I just don’t think that Charles understands love. And if you look at that line when Charles finally sleeps with Julia, he says it was like taking possession of the keys for the freehold. Which makes him look like a definitive social climber, but I think his personal ambitions only come on in the second half of the film.

I think the main love of his life was Sebastian, but in that way that they were linked.

AE: Making Sebastian’s character more explicitly gay this time around … How did you approach that —and why make him more directly gay?
Julian Jarrold: I thought it was a very interesting part of the book and his character, and although people have discussed the sort of homoerotic relationship and how explicit it should be, it’s a very important key part of Sesbastian’s conflict within himself. It’s about the fact that he wants to behave in a certain way but his mother and his upbringing and all the pressures of society are telling him to do something else. It’s such an important factor in his development as a character.

AE: And now is an easier time to tell that story?
JJ: I think it’s a resonant aspect of the book, and at the time it was extremely brave and difficult and unusual thing to put in a book, written in 1945. And there are autobiographical aspects to it, in terms of Evelyn Waugh’s own history. But I think it’s one of the reasons why people are fascinated by the book. There’s a certain ambiguity because I think it’s more of a “love” really between Sebastian and Charles — from Charles’ point of view anyway, and maybe Sebastian would like it to go further.