Penn’s love of Castro threatens his Oscar

Sean Penn is being strongly tipped for an Oscar for Milk, in which he plays Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual man to be elected to public office. However, this could all come unstuck following an attack on the actor by the influential gay magazine, The Advocate. Penn's crime? His admiration for two well-known anti-gay dictators, Cuban leader Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela.

The trouble stems from the cover story Penn (pictured as Milk) wrote for the December issue of the US periodical The Nation, in which he sang the praises of both men at a time when gay rights are again a big issue in Hollywood following the controversial passage of California’s Proposition 8 in November, which banned gay marriage.

"That Sean Penn would be honoured by anyone, let alone the gay community, for having stood by a dictator that put gays into concentration camps is mind-boggling," says film producer and human rights activist Thor Halvorssen. He calls the Castro brothers “thugs and murderers”.

Halvorssen made his remarks in an article in The Advocate by James Kirchick, who reminds his readers: "Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labour camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their ‘counterrevolutionary tendencies’. Over the gate of one of these camps were the words ‘Work Will Make Men Out of You’, an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that ‘Work Will Make You Free’."

Kirchick, who is an assistant editor on The New Republic, describes Penn’s article for The Nation as a “love letter” to Castro and Chavez, comparing it to "the dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers' paradise". He adds that Raul Castro was notorious for executing political opponents, whose only crime in the eyes of the Cuban regime was their homosexuality.

As reported here, Penn travelled to Cuba and Venezuela with the British writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, although only Penn was permitted to meet Raul Castro, interviewing him over a seven-hour period. In the course of their conversation, Castro revealed that he would like to meet the president-elect Barack Obama to discuss future relations between America and his country.