"Milk," and That Irritating Little Voice in the Back of My Head

I saw Milk yesterday. It's very, very good, making me by turns tearful, inspired, devastated, resilient, etc etc etc, for hours after I finished watching it. It is so nice to see a movie that is about progress and its adversaries, and for viewers to have compassion for everyone on screen--to take a movie about a gay icon and to turn it into a broadly appealing movie about humanity. Josh Brolin's Dan White--a character that in less talented hands could have easily been one-dimensional, the Badly Coiffed Evil Enemy--is someone that most moviegoers, certainly me, felt some sympathy for. And even Denis O'Hare's John Briggs inspires a little bit of patronizing empathy. The film is endlessly gorgeous and infectiously aspirational, everyone should see it, and though it would have been nice if the film came out after Proposition 8 was shot down, it is nonetheless a very good reminder of how long it takes for the mechanics of change to set into motion. (Guys, we need to hit the streets.)

However.

OK, here's my problem with big, commercially successful movies that are about gay people: They always star straight people. Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain, Robin Williams in The Birdcage (yes, yes, I know: Nathan Lane), Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica--oh, and hahaha, Will & Grace--and I haven't confirmed this one yet, but maybe Angels In America, too (I know about Patrick Wilson and Al Pacino, but not Justin Kirk, Jeffrey Wright, and the other guy whose name I can't remember). I know that this is one of those tenants of the Hollywood-Industrial Complex, that big star means big proceeds, and maybe I wouldn't even be writing this right now were not James Franco in it--I have nothing against us indulging our celebrity fantasies--but before we get too celebratory, it might be worth examining what all this means.

And what it means is nothing that you've not heard before: Is there a gay equivalent to Sean Penn and James Franco (stop dreaming, you did the same thing with Jake Gyllenhall and look who he's now frenching with) that would have commanded the same box office numbers? Could this movie have been as enthusiastically embraced if the actors were out in real life? It's like audiences want to be impressed by straight actors who can portray a gay person who they actually like. I don't know, something about this reminds me of white actors in blackface. Also the gay guys in Milk are, for the most part, very straight acting. There's not a lot of camp, and that's kind of strange. Even though too much camp would be strange, too.

Here's the question: For a movie about gay people to reach the widest possible audience, do the leads have to be A-listers, or do they have to be straight? So far, in terms of serious dramatic feature films, those categories appear to be mutually exclusive.