Focus Features

Playwright and activist Tony Kushner is no novice to the cultural intersection of gay politics and drama. His three-play fantasia Angels in America, not only won a Pulitzer and many Tonys, but changed the look of political, and especially gay, theater for years to come. His recent work has expanded both his political horizons and theatrical traditions. For example, 2004 Caroline, or Change was a musical about his own personal experience with race relations. In 2005, he teamed up with Stephen Spielberg to write the screenplay for Munich about the secret Israeli response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics at Munich.

The following is a speech he delivered in awarding Milk the Best Picture award at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner at Strata on January 5, 2009.

I’ve come here tonight to speak not only for myself but on behalf of the thousands of gay men and women, many nameless, faceless and forgotten, who were, over the course of the last fifteen years, hired to write a screenplay about the life of Harvey Milk. I feel fairly certain I can speak for all of us when I say that we loved Milk.

It’s an amazing film, and it’s amazing that it got made. It turns out the subject is not too political, too niche, too unrelatable, too specific, too hard, too San Francisco, too seventies, too Jewish, too gay, too susceptible to any of the million other reasons why for fifteen years it couldn’t get made. It turns out it could get made and it did, thanks to this perfect combination of people who had no interest in why it couldn’t be made and the talent and brains to do it. The remarkable gay-straight alliance of Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (those are the gays) and James Schamus and the actors (those are the straights) (give or take some of the actors).

Milk is obviously a political film; it’s clear and direct, miraculously free of didacticism, smugness or oversimplification, propelled by deep human need. Its politics arrive with a shocking, inarguable immediacy, with the power of truth. But Milk seems to me to be about memory as much as it’s about democracy, perhaps about memory as a political project. “The antonym of forgetting,” according to the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerulshalmi “is not remembering, but justice.” Blending documentary and gorgeously realized fiction, Milk manages both vivid presence and a grieving, mysterious, evanescence, a story so vividly remembered it seems entirely of our moment, and also composed entirely of loss. Epic and interior, empowering and devastating, Milk is an enlightenment that breaks your heart. It is, in other words, entirely true to its subject.

I asked my husband, Mark Harris, my legal-in-Massachusetts-and-legally-recognized-in-New-York-but-not-in-California, at least not for now, I asked him what I should say about Milk. He loved it as much as I did and he reminded me that forty-one years ago, when Bobby Kennedy came to this dinner and presented the best picture award to In The Heat Of The Night, he told that movie’s director, Norman Jewison: “In art, politics and life, timing is everything.” Harvey Milk knew that, and the makers of Milk clearly know it. So, to the artists who wrote, directed and acted in this brilliant film, thank you for your timing, thank you for your politics and most of all thank you for your art. It’s an honor, a really great honor, for me to present the New York Film Critics Circle Award for The Best Film of 2008 to my friends Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks for Milk.

Playwright and activist Tony Kushner is no novice to the cultural intersection of gay politics and drama. His three-play fantasia Angels in America, not only won a Pulitzer and many Tonys, but changed the look of political, and especially gay, theater for years to come. His recent work has expanded both his political horizons and theatrical traditions. For example, 2004 Caroline, or Change was a musical about his own personal experience with race relations. In 2005, he teamed up with Stephen Spielberg to write the screenplay for Munich about the secret Israeli response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics at Munich.

The following is a speech he delivered in awarding Milk the Best Picture award at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner at Strata on January 5, 2009.

I’ve come here tonight to speak not only for myself but on behalf of the thousands of gay men and women, many nameless, faceless and forgotten, who were, over the course of the last fifteen years, hired to write a screenplay about the life of Harvey Milk. I feel fairly certain I can speak for all of us when I say that we loved Milk.

It’s an amazing film, and it’s amazing that it got made. It turns out the subject is not too political, too niche, too unrelatable, too specific, too hard, too San Francisco, too seventies, too Jewish, too gay, too susceptible to any of the million other reasons why for fifteen years it couldn’t get made. It turns out it could get made and it did, thanks to this perfect combination of people who had no interest in why it couldn’t be made and the talent and brains to do it. The remarkable gay-straight alliance of Dustin Lance Black, Gus Van Sant, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (those are the gays) and James Schamus and the actors (those are the straights) (give or take some of the actors).

Milk is obviously a political film; it’s clear and direct, miraculously free of didacticism, smugness or oversimplification, propelled by deep human need. Its politics arrive with a shocking, inarguable immediacy, with the power of truth. But Milk seems to me to be about memory as much as it’s about democracy, perhaps about memory as a political project. “The antonym of forgetting,” according to the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerulshalmi “is not remembering, but justice.” Blending documentary and gorgeously realized fiction, Milk manages both vivid presence and a grieving, mysterious, evanescence, a story so vividly remembered it seems entirely of our moment, and also composed entirely of loss. Epic and interior, empowering and devastating, Milk is an enlightenment that breaks your heart. It is, in other words, entirely true to its subject.

I asked my husband, Mark Harris, my legal-in-Massachusetts-and-legally-recognized-in-New-York-but-not-in-California, at least not for now, I asked him what I should say about Milk. He loved it as much as I did and he reminded me that forty-one years ago, when Bobby Kennedy came to this dinner and presented the best picture award to In The Heat Of The Night, he told that movie’s director, Norman Jewison: “In art, politics and life, timing is everything.” Harvey Milk knew that, and the makers of Milk clearly know it. So, to the artists who wrote, directed and acted in this brilliant film, thank you for your timing, thank you for your politics and most of all thank you for your art. It’s an honor, a really great honor, for me to present the New York Film Critics Circle Award for The Best Film of 2008 to my friends Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks for Milk.