By IANS,
London : Sean Penn believes that fewer gays would have died of AIDS if San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk hadn’t been assassinated in his prime.
Penn, who plays Milk – America’s first elected gay public official – in Gus Van Sant’s new biopic, thinks former US president Ronald Reagan would not have been able to ignore the AIDS epidemic if Milk had lived. Milk was killed in 1978.
Contactmusic.com quotes him as saying: “I think less people would’ve died of AIDS. I think Ronald Reagan would’ve been forced to address AIDS. It was a tragic loss. Milk wouldn’t have stood quietly. He was a leader and he happened to be focussed on the gay movement. Because the popular notion was that AIDS was a gay disease, certainly huge numbers of homosexuals died. I think he would’ve advanced that argument. I think people are dead because he died too soon.”