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Academy Award nominee Gus Van Sant is directing ”Milk”, set to be released in theatres throughout the US in November, 2008. The film, which is being produced by Focus Features (the producers of Brokeback Mountain), may not match the critical and financial success of Brokeback Mountain and is not the first mainstream queer film. What makes it unique is that it’s the first Hollywood film to address queerness as a civil rights issue.

It will also be the first fictional account of gay rights icon Harvey Milk. Mr. Milk (1930-1978) was an activist and politician, and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America. He and the city’s mayor George Moscone were shot to death by another city supervisor, Dan White in 1979.

The stranger-than-fiction account of Mr. Milk’s political career and personal life was previously the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary feature “The Times of Harvey Milk“. Some people will undoubtedly cringe at the idea of transforming Milk’s life into fiction - biopics are notorious for for reducing history to a few corny plot points and lines of dialogue.

But they also make historical moments accessible to the general public. The success of this film will certainly make his most poignant quote, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door” enter popular lexicon and provide many with that Eureka moment where being queer becomes about more than getting your rocks off.