Dustin Lance Black

Dustin Lance Black (born June 10, 1974) is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and LGBTQ rights activist. He is known for writing the film Milk, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. He also wrote the screenplay for the film J. Edgar and the 2022 crime miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven.

Black is a founding board member of the American Foundation for Equal Rights and writer of 8, a staged re-enactment of the federal trial that led to a federal court's overturn of California's Proposition 8.

Black's father walked out on his mother, who had polio, Roseanna, and his two brothers, Marcus Raul and Todd Bryant, when he was young. They grew up in a Mormon household, first in San Antonio, Texas, before moving to Salinas, California.

Growing up in his family's Mormon culture and living on military bases, Black worried about his sexuality. When he found himself attracted to a boy in his neighborhood at the age of six or seven, he told himself "I'm going to hell. And if I ever admit it, I'll be hurt, and I'll be brought down". He says that his "acute awareness" of his sexuality made him shy and at times suicidal. He came out in his senior year of college.

While attending North Salinas High School, Black began to work in theater at The Western Stage in Salinas and later worked on productions including Bare at Hollywood's Hudson Main Stage Theater. Black graduated from Pasadena City College in 1994 before transferring to University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theater, Film, and Television (UCLA) while apprenticing with stage directors, taking acting jobs, and working on theater lighting crews. He graduated with honors in 1996.

In 2000, Black wrote and directed The Journey of Jared Price, a gay romance film, and Something Close to Heaven, a gay coming-of-age short film. In 2001, he directed and was a subject in the documentary On the Bus about a Nevada road trip and adventure at Burning Man taken by six gay men. Raised as Mormon, he was hired as the only such writer on the HBO drama series Big Love about a polygamous family. He served on season one as a staff writer, executive story editor in season two, and was promoted again, to co-producer, for season three.

Black first visited San Francisco in the early 1990s, while AIDS was devastating the city's gay community. Black said that, "Hearing about Harvey was about the only hopeful story there was at the time." He had first viewed Rob Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk when he was in college, and thought, "I just want to do something with this, why hasn't someone done something with this?" Researching Milk's life for three years, Black met with Milk's former aides Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg, as well as former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, and began to write a feature film screenplay encompassing the events of Milk's life. The screenplay was written on spec, but Black showed the script to Jones, who passed it on to his friend Gus Van Sant, who signed on to direct the feature. Black is an old friend of Milk producer Dan Jinks, who signed on to the biopic after he called Black to congratulate him and discovered that the project did not have a confirmed producer.

Black's film Pedro, profiling the life of AIDS activist and reality television personality Pedro Zamora, premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.