clipped from E! Online
Sean Penn’s Man-on-Man Disco Kiss
Categories: movies, gay, music
Sean Penn does more than pay lip service to his role as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s movie about the slain gay rights activist.
Just ask Mark Martinez, the performance artist who plays the late cross-dressing disco singer Sylvester in the movie. He got to lock lips with the Oscar winner.
Martinez’s one-day shoot centered around a birthday party for Milk, in which Sylvester performs his 1978 hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Martinez did the scene dressed in a purple, blue and silver kimono with a matching turban and black bell-bottoms.
Now back to that kiss.
“All of a sudden, Sean’s pointing at me, and he’s talking to the assistant director,” Martinez says. “The AD comes up to me and says, ‘Just to let you know, you are now going to break up Sean and [costar] James Franco’s conversation. You’re going to grab Sean, and Sean’s going to be really excited, and he’s going to kiss you.’”
And that he did. “I’m performing, and he comes onto the dance floor,” Martinez explains. “He grabs me, and he just slaps the biggest kiss on me…It felt like the kiss was forever. I’m like, Is he going to stop? I had to close my eyes. I couldn’t believe it.”
Martinez, whose professional name is Flava, tried to convince Van Sant to do another take. “I’m thinking, We gotta do this thing again. We just didn’t get it right,” Martinez says. “But Gus was like, ‘It’s perfect, perfect, perfect.’ I said, ‘No! It’s not perfect!’ Sean was laughing at me.”
Milk (above) was the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor assassinated by fellow city supervisor Dan White in 1978. Van Sant’s Milk will be released in November or December.