Tom and his Boyfriend Dustin Lance Black
Sporty: Tom wore an Adidas hoody with tracksuit bottoms and blue trainers when he and Dustin went cycling in Stratford.
Tom and Dustin went public with their romance in 2013, when Tom spoke about his sexuality for the first time in a video on YouTube; he didn’t say who his boyfriend was, but it soon emerged that it was American screenwriter and gay activist Dustin Lance Black. Dustin is 20 years older than Tom. Most of these photos are informal ones taken in Stratford, East London in March / April 2012. The couple dined at the Ivy Club restaurant in Covent Garden, and the last picture here is of Dustin with Tom in Edinburgh during the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black – Thinking Out Loud and Tom making his 2015 calendar
Milk
Dustin Lance Black won the Oscar for Original Screenplay for “Milk” in 2009.
Milk is a 2008 American biographical film based on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black, the film stars Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White, a city supervisor who assassinated Milk. The film was released to much acclaim and earned numerous accolades from film critics and guilds. Ultimately, it received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, winning two for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Penn and Best Original Screenplay for Black.
Harvey Bernard Milk (22nd May 1930 – 27th November 1978) was an American politician who became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not his early interests; he was not open about his homosexuality and did not participate in civic matters until around the age of 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Milk moved from New York City to settle in San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men to the Castro District. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighbourhood to promote his interests, and ran unsuccessfully for political office three times. His theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and Milk won a seat as a city supervisor in 1977, part of the broader social changes the city was experiencing.
Milk served almost 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On 27th November 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Milk’s election was made possible by and was a key component of a shift in San Francisco politics.
Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the gay community. Milk was described as a martyr by news outlets as early as 1979, by biographer Randy Shilts in 1982, and University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak in 2003, United Press International 1979. The assassin Dan White killed himself on 22nd October 1985 according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2002, Milk was called “the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States”. Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: “What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us”. Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.