All About Milk

 Sean Penn as Harvey Milk

Let’s use up all the journalistic clichés at once: For gays and lesbians it was a relatively slow news week, but they say, no news is good news.

In the national mainstream press, Milk, the biopic of the San Francisco gay rights hero Harvey Milk starring Sean Penn, continued its run of heavy coverage and positive reviews.

The hand-wringing what-ifs wondering if Milk could have helped defeat California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 had it been released earlier have been swept aside for more straightforward reviews of the movie itself -- along with the features that accompany any popular film. Publications as diverse as People,Newsweek,Esquire, and The New Yorker reviewed Milk (what, you mean there were other movies out this week?), a signal, perhaps, that the flick is likely to be an Oscar favorite.

In addition to Owen Glieberman’s A-minus review, Entertainment Weekly ran another piece about screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s struggle to get Milk’s story right -- a feat made more difficult by the fact that he couldn’t use the most exhaustive bit of research, the biography The Mayor of Castro Street, because the rights were sold to a different set of moviemakers, and had to rely on good, old-fashioned reporting to get his own version of the tale. Said Black: “'We spent hours going through boxes. I got to know the real Harvey, a man who was deeply flawed, a failure in his business life, a failure in his love life. It was all the stuff you never learn. I thought, Wow, now here's a story.''

In other entertainment news, lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel is retiring her 20-year-old strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” an event that coincides with the release of a compilation book, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. New YorkMagazine paid homage to her on its website with a short interview. Said Bechdel of her decision to end the column: “The longer I wrote about these people, the fewer possibilities were open to everyone based on the choices they made. Everyone’s lives started to narrow.”

TheNew York Times’ Dwight Garner wrote a review of Bechdel’s book collection, heaping high praise on it. He noted that the strip is highly sexualized -- “There are a lot of naked cartoon women here -- gloriously naked cartoon women”; “literate” (“In the stacks of a library, one character confesses: ‘I’ve always fantasized about library congress. Let’s do it in the HQ 70s.’”); and shows that lesbians are actually “on the cutting edge,” about environmentalism, vegetarianism, and everything else (“Ms. Bechdel’s very first strip mentions a “seaweed-avocado pâté.) Reported Garner: “Ms. Bechdel began her strips all those years ago, she writes here, partly to provide 'an antidote' to the culture’s image of gay women as “warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.” Boy, has she succeeded. Her crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful.”