Eleven Gay Historical Figures Worthy of the "Milk" Treatment

Potential film plot points: His love affair in the 1930s with fellow leftist and actor Will Geer, who would go on to be best known as TV’s Grandpa Walton . . . Hay’s amorous relationship in the 1950s with fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who was also a founding member of Mattachine … During the Vietnam era, Hay worked with gay men seeking to avoid the draft, just part of his lifelong commitment to activism . . . His study of Native American cultures and their embrace of the “two-spirit” (queer, androgynous) people . . . Hay’s final years, at the turn of the 21^st century, where he was tended to in hospice care by members of the Faeries as well as his longtime companion John Burnside.

Dream director: Paul Thomas Anderson, who could add to his repertoire of California epics.

Dream actor: Liev Schreiber

Harveys: 1. Even if you could get an Oscar campaign off the ground, the issue of Hay’s support of NAMBLA’s right to march in gay pride parades would come up and would kill the whole thing.

Gad Beck

Gad Beck pictured far left

Who he was: He was a gay German Jew born in 1923. At age 17, he joined the anti-Nazi underground in Berlin. In 1945, a Jewish spy turned him in to the Gestapo, and Beck was put in a prison camp. After the war, he helped Jewish settlers emigrate to Palestine. In 1979, he returned to Berlin and became a vocal gay activist throughout the ’80s and ’90s, eventually sharing his story in the powerful documentary Paragraph 175 (2000). If that’s not a movie, I don’t know what is.

Potential film plot points: Teenage Gad loses his virginity by seducing one of the coaches at his boys’ school . . . To liberate his boyfriend from a transit camp, Beck disguises himself as a Hitler Youth; while the ruse was successful, the boyfriend insisted on staying with his family and Beck never saw him again … Beck finds food and hiding places for Jews during his years with the resistance; he’s imprisoned, but not long thereafter the Russians liberate Berlin . . . His post-war work with Ben-Gurion, leading the transfer of displaced Jews to Palestine, where he moved in 1947 … His elder statesman status as a gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.

Dream director: Rolf Schübel, director of the sexy and suspenseful Gloomy Sunday (1999).

Dream actor: Daniel Radcliffe 

Harveys: 5. Oscar does love a Holocaust movie — how else could that yawn-fest The Reader have made the final five this year?