Dustin Lance Black wasn't yet born when Harvey Milk was shot dead in 1978.

But Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor who was the first openly gay man to hold major elective office, became a hero to Black as a high school kid, raised in a Mormon family and first realizing he was gay.

"I had a theater director [in my high school] who I guess could tell that I was a little damaged," Black said during a recent visit to Salt Lake City. That theater director told Black about Milk. "I thought you must be crazy to come out … Not only was this guy not persecuted, he was celebrated by his community and allowed to run for office."

"That story gave me a great deal of hope, and probably helped me survive before I came out," Black said.

Now Black, a writer on the HBO polygamy drama "Big Love," tells Milk's story -- from his arrival in San Francisco through his transformation into a political player and ultimately his assassination by a political rival -- in his first movie, "Milk," which opens in Utah theaters today.

Black's journey to write "Milk" began when a friend asked him to write the book for a proposed rock opera about Cleve Jones, the activist who started the NAMES Project -- the "AIDS quilt" that honors the victims of HIV.

When Black met Jones in 2004, "he started pulling out all these dusty boxes from his garage," Black said. "He showed me pictures of him with the real Harvey."

"I started to learn about this guy, not this legend," Black said. "He really didn't figure out what he wanted to do until he was 40-something. … It's even more inspiring that he was this real guy."

After meeting other Milk associates and doing more research, Black wrote a "spec script" without trying to sell it to Hollywood first. (Efforts to make a Milk biography, based on Randy Shilts' book The Mayor of Castro Street, had foundered for years.)

Black eventually approached Milk's friends to secure the rights to their stories. Most approved without a fee, but Jones was a holdout.

Jones said he had a filmmaking friend he wanted to direct the movie. "I had all these horrible images of some San Francisco State University film student he knew," Black said. "He said, 'Oh, relax, my friend's name is Gus Van Sant,' " the openly gay director who made "Good Will Hunting" and "My Own Private Idaho."

"Gus and I clicked immediately," Black said. "Even before I handed him the script to him, we were talking about the same movie."

The first actor they approached to play Milk was Sean Penn. Playing the always-smiling Milk is a departure for Penn, known for brooding, sullen characters. But Penn, Black said, "inhabits the soul of Milk."

Penn's portrayal of Milk was so spot-on, Black said, that Jones once had to walk off the set. "It was way too eerie for him," Black said. (Jones had a similar reaction, but more visceral, when he first saw Josh Brolin made up as Dan White, the conservative City Supervisor who shot Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone dead in City Hall.)

"Milk" arrives at a strange time in the gay-rights movement, just after California voters approved Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage. The campaign was expensive and brutal, and in the aftermath, many in the gay community blamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members ponied up millions to support the ban.

"The gay movement lost the message of Harvey Milk," Black said of the failed campaign to stop Proposition 8. "Over $20 million was spent, and not a single gay person was seen in an ad in California."

Looking at the protests after the vote, as thousands picketed LDS temples across the country, Black said, "I think Harvey would be thrilled with this new energy and new vibrancy."

Black chooses not to get angry about Proposition 8's defeat, because it's not helpful.

"When you find a people who are voting against you, it might be because they don't know you yet -- or they don't know they know you," Black said. "That is the message of Harvey Milk."

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