When San Francisco’s openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978 by homophobic ex-cop Dan White, a four-year-old Mormon boy in Texas could not have known how those murders would impact his future. But as Dustin Lance Black grew up in a devoutly Mormon military household, struggling to repress his sexuality while fighting to become a writer—mutually self-destructive compulsions that edged him towards suicide—he increasingly identified with Milk’s own struggle for self-fulfillment. Black gradually believed that his freedom to come out of the closet would not have been possible without Milk’s martyrdom.

Black graduated from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. His success writing and producing the documentaries On the Bus, My Life With Count Dracula, and producing and directing the BBC/TLC program Faking It led to a staff writing/producing position with HBO’s Big Love series. Meanwhile, on weekends he’d drive north to San Francisco to research a biopic he felt compelled to write. Black obsessively tracked down every surviving partner, political ally, and foe of Harvey Milk’s. His indefatigable research led to a first draft. Cleve Jones, Milk’s protégé and campaign advisor, presented Black’s screenplay to director Gus Van Sant with this introduction: “Lance has written a fantastic screenplay… it’s about Harvey.”

Richard Stayton: How did you cope with the enormous responsibility of writing a biopic about a gay icon?

Dustin Lance Black: Well, it’s tricky. Gay Icon means different things to different people. To some it means hero, and sadly, to many, many more, it means villain, deviant, sinner, faggot, and all that. I tried my best to just focus on the man. But that had its challenges too. I first heard Harvey’s story when I was a closeted 13-year-old, and I guess I’d always admired Harvey as some sort of dreamlike long-lost father figure, but I truly had no interest in writing that kind of hero-worship story.

Honestly, I didn’t decide to start writing until Cleve Jones started telling me the far more human tales of a failed business man, a guy who couldn’t keep a relationship together to save his life, and a guy who got a late start at doing anything terrifically meaningful with his life. That kind of transformative human story felt so much more American and real to me… that’s when I bit. At the human stuff, not the hero stuff.

Another challenge to that “icon” thing was that Harvey had left most of the drugs and bath houses and 1960s sexual liberation scene behind when he moved to San Francisco. He seemed genuinely dedicated, if not obsessed, with liberating a people. I thought a lot about fictionalizing and bringing some of his dirtier past up to the timeline I was covering in order to avoid making him too much of a saint, but that too would have been a lie, and I thought, Well, he was still a guy having a lot of gay sex, making out on the street with his boyfriend, fighting for the rights of “fags,” and I knew from firsthand experience that for a lot of this country that would still keep Harvey far, far away from any kind of sainthood.

When did you first realize you wanted to write this biopic?

It was 2004 when I first met Cleve Jones, who Emile Hirsch plays in the film, and at that time I don’t believe anyone was working on a film about Harvey. I knew that there had been attempts, but I also knew other projects strictly about Harvey hadn’t made it to the screen. It was also clear that Harvey Milk was vanishing. Most of my friends had never heard of him, and these are politically active openly gay folks who should have. So I felt like an important part of our history was being lost, and in the gay community it’s so important to hold onto our history. We don’t have that many heroes or forefathers, and as a young person growing up in a closeted environment, I know his story was life-saving. And I’m sure there are kids out there today who need to know they have gay and lesbian forefathers and foremothers. So I guess I just jumped in because I felt like somebody needed to save this story from oblivion.

How much research did you do?

There are mountains of research. Mountains. Three years’ worth. This was a spec script. So I had to do all of my own research. I had to track down all of the surviving folks from Harvey’s campaigns, his old lovers, his political allies and foes, all of them. It was daunting, but it was also what I think helped the screenplay work. Without a book or a play I could adapt, there was no opinion or perspective to fall back on… no safety net. I had to discover the story myself. That was the big challenge, so my goal became: get all firsthand stories all of the time. Obviously, that’s impossible when it comes to Harvey and Scott and Jack as they are all gone, but in those cases I tried my best to get multiple accounts from living people who Harvey, Jack, and Scott shared their personal stories with. But I’ll admit, at a certain point, this game plan broke down. It became clear that 30 years later some of Harvey’s folks had clearer memories of what they had read about themselves than what might have actually happened. So I adjusted my approach and started to pair them up. In many cases, such pairings meant they would start asking each other questions I wouldn’t have even known to ask.

There are also binders filled with newspaper clippings, photographs, bags with campaign buttons and posters, all of the usual stuff. When I finally set this script up with Groundswell and Focus, they asked for an annotated draft and the list of sources came in somewhere north of 300. It’s insane to think about now.

How did you discover Harvey’s taped will?

I first heard a piece of Harvey’s will in Rob Epstein’s documentary The Times of Harvey Milk when I was at UCLA. I had always wanted to see the doc, but gay rights documentaries aren’t exactly hanging around Mormon households in Texas! I’m not sure I knew what the recording was when I first heard it in the documentary, but I found the piece Rob had included incredibly intimate and moving. The next I heard of it was a transcript I read of one of the four versions Harvey made that night in the camera shop just after being elected, but it did not include the famous line, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let it destroy every closet door,” so my search continued.

I finally struck gold years later when a man who does tours of the Castro told me he had an audio copy of one of the four versions. He burnt me a CD, and I popped it in my car’s player. I must have listened to it a thousand times. No exaggeration. To my surprise, it was actually more jovial than I had imagined. I think perhaps it was one of the last copies he did that night over 30 years ago, because he sounds really tired in it, and he’s starting to make corny little jokes and he’s alone in his shop and it’s late at night and he’s laughing at his own corny little political jokes and I just fell in love with him.

This is your first experience being a frontrunner during awards season. Is it fun for you or frightening?

Fun because I get to rub shoulders with so many of my filmmaking heroes—and guess what, Brad Pitt looks even more handsome in person. It’s true. But frightening because I’ll be honest, I really want us to win when I’m there. Gay and lesbian people have had a devastating year politically and socially. I get letters from young gay people every day, every hour since the Oscar nominations, saying they’ve put their hopes in this film’s success. That’s a lot of pressure, that’s frightening.

And hell, if we do win anything, that’s pretty damn scary too! I was too scared to play the bongos in the jingle-bell band in my church’s Christmas show when I was a kid. Giving a speech on television in front of all those people? Frightening as hell.