Dustin Lance Black’s Moving Acceptance Speech. Its time to be a nation that accepts all as they are born, without judgement.
Milk’s screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, just gave the most incredible acceptance speech after being awarded Best Original Screenplay tonight at the Academy Awards. glaadBLOG is proud to present it here in its entirety.
Oh my God. This was, um. This was not an easy film to make. First off, I have to thank Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg and all the real-life people who shared their stories with me. And, um, Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, James Franco, and our entire cast, my producers, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, everyone at Groundswell and Focus, for taking on the challenge of telling this life-saving story. When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.
(He chokes up, audience begins to applaud.)
I want to thank my mom who has always loved me for who I am, even when there was pressure not to. But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches or by the government or by their families that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours. (Wild applause from the audience.) Thank you, thank you, and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk.
I am raising my kids to believe that it appears to humans as though god has many faces, that people believe in many different aspects/faces of god. I believe that God is Love and that he/she did not create any ‘mistakes’ or ‘aberrations’. We as a nation have stumbled over and over again, when we try to carve out groups of people that are ‘different’ from a norm. There is no norm, though, except that we are all part of the global family of man. Its time to live in peace, letting each blossom into the unique person they were born to be. That way, no other young man or woman needs to die alone in the dark of night tied to a cattle fence in Wyoming, like Matthew Shepherd did just a few years ago.
Prejudice kills.
Kindness and love heal.
Its time to heal. Time to allow equal rights for ALL.
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