'Milk' screenwriter Dustin Lance Black: Respond to ship renaming order by building coalitions

Yahoo

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Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 2008 Harvey Milk biopic Milk, says the best way for LGBTQ+ people to react to the Trump administration's order to take Milk's name off a Navy ship is to build coalitions with other marginalized people.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk and directed the Navy to consider renaming the other ships planned for its class, all named for civil rights icons, such as Thurgood Marshall, a crusading lawyer and the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice; another justice, women's and LGBTQ+ rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg; labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta; and abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
'This is one of the oldest plays in the playbook … if they divide, they'll conquer,' Black said Sunday on MSNBC's The Weekend. 'If gay people want to react to this the way Harvey Milk would say to react to this is to understand Harvey's gonna be an icon no matter what Pete does. Now it's time to do what Harvey said to do. He said this is not about ego. … This is about the 'us-es' coming together.'
'He didn't mean just LGBTQ folks,' Black said of Milk, the first out gay person elected to public office in California — a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, serving just a year before his assassination in 1978. 'He was talking about the people who he worked for, who he fought so hard for, like seniors in San Francisco who couldn't afford to live in the home that they had grown up in. About union workers who supported Harvey because Harvey had boycotted Coors beer so union workers could have a living wage to raise their kids. For the folks in Chinatown, he said, let's get those ballots in Mandarin so your vote counts.'
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'Those of us who feel and know we are treated differently under the law for who we are, we have to come together, we cannot become myopic, we cannot simply focus on our own needs, we have to lock arms and build those coalitions, and sadly right now we find ourselves in a similar position to where we were back in Harvey's time, when those coalitions were fractured,' he added. It's our work not to fall for this nonsense. It's our work right now to lock arms. So if you're a gay person who's pissed off by this, in Pride Month here in Los Angeles, get out on the streets and stand up for our brothers and sisters who are suffering in the Latino community up here right now. Do that. Show up for our brothers and sisters, not just thinking about ourselves. That's what Harvey would do.'
Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina, who blocked Democratic colleague Adam Schiff's resolution to urge the reversing of the renaming order, claimed the way the ships were named broke with Navy tradition. Budd was 'ill informed, I think at best,' or was 'peddling misinformation,' Black said.
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Before becoming a politician and activist in San Francisco, Milk served in the Navy and was forced to resign for being gay. He also worked on Wall Street and as a Broadway production associate. Milk excelled in the Navy, as he did at everything he set his mind to, Black noted. He was also among 'countless LGBTQ people who served proudly,' the writer said. Black's mother and stepfather were both in the military, so he grew up around people who had to serve in the closet, he pointed out. 'What it's time for is to recognize that,' he concluded.
Last week, Black and Sean Penn, who played Milk in the movie and won the Best Actor Oscar, had blasted Hegseth's order in interviews with The Hollywood Reporter. 'This is yet another move to distract and to fuel the culture wars that create division,' Black told the publication. 'It's meant to get us to react in ways that are self-centered so that we are further distanced from our brothers and sisters in equally important civil rights fights in this country. It's divide and conquer.'
Penn emailed the Reporter, saying, 'I've never before seen a Secretary of Defense so aggressively demote himself to the rank of Chief PETTY Officer.'
Black added, 'Pete Hegseth does not seem like a smart man, a wise man, a knowledgeable man. He seems small and petty. I would love to introduce him to some LGBTQ folks who are warriors who have had to be warriors our entire life just to live our lives openly as who we are.'