Dustin Lance Black

Dustin Lance Black (born June 10, 1974) is an American screenwriter, director, film and television producer and LGBT rights activist. He has won a Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for the 2008 film Milk.

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

Early life

Black was born in Sacramento, California and grew up in a Mormon household, in San Antonio, Texas, and later moved to Salinas, California, when his mother remarried. His natural father had earlier been the Mormon missionary who had baptized Black's mother.

Growing up surrounded by Mormon culture and 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 dark, shy and at times suicidal. He came out in his senior year of college.