Real-life Stars of “Milk” Reflect on the Film
Interview with Cleve Jones, Danny Nicoletta, Anne Kronenberg

Cleve Jones (above left) poses with actor Emile Hirsch who portrayed him in the film. Harvey Milk’s campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, stands along her stand-in in “Milk,” actress Alison Pill.


By Jaime San Felippo

When Harvey Milk won the seat of District 5 Supervisor in 1977, he had the help and support of many people including his campaign manager Anne Kronenberg, activist Cleve Jones, and Danny Nicoletta, who worked both in Castro Camera as well as on Milk’s campaigns. Each of them is portrayed in Gus Van Sant’s biopic, “Milk.”

The Courier had a chance to sit down with them and discuss their thoughts on the film and the struggles of the LGBT community.

Courier: How do you feel about the historical accuracy of the film and how it represents that time period for the gay community?

Kronenberg: I think it was very historically accurate. I was nervous ahead of time when Cleve first called and said he knew this young man who had written a script, because we had read so many horrible scripts before that. But after meeting (director) Gus Van Sant and (screenwriter) Dustin Lance Black and reading the script, my comfort level became great. The movie is right on.
Nicoletta: There’s a real tenderness for the period in terms of the art direction. The crew really loved working on this and that really comes through.
Jones: I think it’s remarkable and wonderful that the political story line remained intact. With Hollywood films, it’s usually about the personal relationships, and that’s in the film of course. But the political struggle is there: the campaign against Prop 6, the campaign for the gay rights ordinance, Harvey’s own campaigns, his efforts to build coalitions with minority communities, even the desegregation of the police department is in there. So I’m real pleased that the political content was not abandoned.

What did you learn from Harvey Milk and what did you learn about yourself during the time that you knew him?

Jones: For me it was about learning to move beyond my own heterophobia, which was… I really hated straight people when I came here. I came here to live in a ghetto. I wanted to help build the walls around and Harvey showed me I didn’t need to be afraid of straight people and that I would be able to reach them. That was a really important lesson for me.
Kronenberg: I learned to be a stronger woman than I was. We were all very young when we met Harvey. I learned I could do anything I set my mind to because Harvey taught us and gave us the framework and just let us go.
Nicoletta: In addition to confidence he taught us self-love because he himself came from a self-hating context, as did I. That was very short lived because of meeting that man. He was one of a series of people that very gently coaxed me out of confusion about my sexuality and I’m very grateful for that coming so early in life. I was 19.

What was it like being a woman on Harvey’s campaign?

Kronenberg: Harvey was all about reaching out to the disenfranchised, not just lesbians and gay men but African-Americans and women, feminism. He really got the connections there, it was about human rights.
Long before I came on the campaign, Harvey was a crusader for women’s rights. I didn’t change him in any way, but he was smart enough to see bringing new blood into the campaign and bringing a woman would change the dynamic. I think it definitely did.
There was a lot of suspicion when I came in and I think those walls were up, but I think we were able to play together well. We had lots of fun. My being involved in the campaign naturally brought more women into the campaign. Had Harvey lived, I think that would have just continued, but how do we know?

Do you think young gay men and women have the same passion as the three of you did in the 1970s?

Jones: Things are only new once and all of us participating in the movement and being there on Castro Street were keenly aware we were participating in something that had never before been seen. You didn’t have to be political or educated or even that smart to get that this was brand new. We were all very conscious of that.
I can even remember the first dance party where gay men took off their shirts. And we all looked at each other and asked, “Are we allowed to do that?” It was just an amazing time and everything was new: the first marching band, the first gay synagogue, the first gay film festival. All of the institutions and structures that we all now take for granted were new, brought forward my men and woman that had these ideas and made them happen.
I don’t agree that young people are apathetic. I think young people are very concerned about the world and frightened and confused about how to take action against many complex issues that they are facing.

How can we make Harvey Milk relevant to LGBT youth and not just be something that happened before they were born?

Jones: I think they need to be encouraged to find what it is that they are going to do that will be new and exciting and that will change the world. They need to be comforted and included and allowed to do that for themselves. But I worry about them because despite all of the communications technology, I see them as becoming increasingly isolated and disconnected. So my first advice to them would be to turn off their computer, go outside and make contact.

How does the campaign against Proposition 6, featured in the movie, compare to the campaign against Proposition 8 we are seeing today?

Kronenberg: Prop 6 was about the basic, fundamental right of gay men and woman being allowed to teach in our public schools. It was based on a morality that gays would be recruiting the kids and trying to turn them into homosexuals. Which is so bizarre. I think the same right wing, Christian, born-again factor certainly plays a big role in Prop 8 currently. But we’re talking about an equality issue here. In 30 years we’ve gone from the paranoia of “my teacher is a lesbian and she’s going to turn me into a dyke” to now talking about marriage. I don’t know what you guys think, but I think Harvey is smiling that we’re even there. That is a huge issue. I firmly believe we are going to defeat it
Jones: I think we’re going to win, but I don’t feel the level of fear that I felt then. We have history on our side. We are moving in the right direction. If we do lose, it will be a setback, and I will be angry and disappointed, but I won’t feel the same gut-level fear as I felt then.
Had Prop 6 passed, we would have been going down a slippery slope right to fascism. How would they have determined who was homosexual. How would we be tested? It also included language for people who advocated for homosexuals. There was a much more acute sense of real fear in the pit of your stomach and the violence that could be unleashed.
If we lose this one it will be a minor and temporary setback.

Were any of you at the White Night Riots?

Jones: I led the mob down there.
Kronenberg: We all were. I’m the most chicken of the group. We had so much anger and the verdict was so unfair. How could Dan White kill the mayor and a supervisor and receive that verdict? It was beyond rational thought. We were all so angry. I got in the middle of that crowd and I was terrified. It was scary.
Jones: It was exhilarating though. At one point the cops came at us gladiator style and they shot tear gas into the crowd and everyone started to stampede down Market Street. That’s when I got scared and I thought people were going to get hurt and trampled and die. By then we had no way to communicate to the crowd. We just started shouting “slow down” and people got what we were trying to do and people started chanting in unison: “Slow down, slow down. Don’t run, don’t run. Turn around, turn around. Fight back, fight back!” And that crowd, which was madly panicking and running and dispersing, slowed down, stopped running, turned around and threw themselves at the cops, whose own line had dispersed by that time. We pushed them all back and then we burned all of their cop cars.
Kronenberg: That part was cool.

How do you feel about the way Dan White was portrayed in the film?

Kronenberg: Things are not black and white in real life. Dan White was a complex person; he had a lot of stuff going on for him. He was wound really tight. He was not an easy person to work with. I saw him everyday at City Hall. I think the portrayal of him in the movie (by actor Josh Brolin) was the right way to do it.
He was not born an evil person. He grew up in an Irish working class neighborhood. He was a firefighter and a cop. Just the pressures of life, for whatever reason… I like the scene where he is at Harvey’s birthday party and he clearly had been drinking. He’s somebody who had to have control all the time and that was the only time you saw him loose it. I just thought there were a lot of good touches there.
Jones: Over the years I’ve read, maybe, 40 or 50 different treatments and outlines for scripts, musicals and operas and in many of them there were attempts to explain Dan. And it was all fictionalized because we don’t know. No one was in his head and if there was anyone out there that had some insight into his childhood, they’re not talking. I think any attempt to come up with an explanation of how this human being, not a monster, did this, is futile. I think the way it turned out is perfect. It shows you what happened and how conflicted he was.
I just remember how uncomfortable he was in his skin. He was weirdly uptight. Many of us wondered if he was a closet-case. I think Harvey expected that.

How much input did the three of you have on the film?

Kronenberg: Cleve had the most. He was involved from the inception to the end. But I think each of us were a little different. Gus welcomed us on the set and kept asking, “Is this the way it happened?” He really wanted to get things right. And he changed things if we said it happened differently. It was really amazing. I feel like I was consulted a lot. They hoped to get it right and I believe they did.
Nicoletta: The whole team was very interested to know what we thought.

What does each of you hope that audiences will take away from this film?

Nicoletta: Hope.
Kronenberg: Hope.
Jones: Hope and the knowledge that ordinary people can, in fact, change the world.

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