Some of you will have heard that a film about the 1969 Stonewall riot, often cited as the beginning of the gay rights movement, is being made. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have seen a barrage of tweets denouncing the film as a total work of fiction. I figured I should do a post explaining what really happened at Stonewall.
The problem with the film is that Hollywood, being Hollywood, has found it necessary to re-write the events at Stonewall so that they center around a white, cis-normative gay man. The reality was quite different. The New York police targeted the Stonewall Inn precisely because it was a known as hangout of trans people of color. As this article in Huffington Post makes clear, what followed was at least as much a race riot as it was a gay rights riot.
Here are some of the actual heroes of Stonewall: Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major and Stormé DeLarverie.
Stonewall did involve some cis-normative white gays and lesbians, and that is doubtless why it is remembered as the first such protest, despite the fact that similar riots took place in Los Angeles and San Francisco years earlier. The Cooper’s Donuts riot (1959) and Compton’s Cafeteria riot (1966) both involved primarily trans women of color, and so are quietly erased by the white-dominated and cis-normative gay rights movement.
As for the beginning of the gay rights movement, that more properly belongs in Europe in the 1860s with men such as Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, both of whom spoke out against homophobic laws being put before the Prussian parliament. Kertbeny actually invented the term “homosexual”. Before him there wasn’t really any concept of a binary divide between “gay” and “straight” people. It was more a question of what one did, rather than who one was.
Thankfully Hollywood no longer has a monopoly on movies these days. There are films in production about the lives of Miss Major (who is still alive and I have had the honor to meet) and Marsha P Johnson (who, like so many trans women of color, died in unexplained circumstances). There is also a documentary about Marsha available on YouTube.
Miss Major has done an interview for Autostraddle about the Stonewall film. It is a lot of fun.
Meanwhile I eagerly look forward to the Hollywood film about the black civil rights movement which shows how Martin Luther King and Malcolm X owed everything to a brave white man…
As a white, cis, het onlooker I’ve been baffled by what I’ve seen about this new film – since it really doesn’t fit in the least with what I remember of the 1995 Stonewall film – which was my introduction to those events in particular and trans issues generally.
I’ve not seen that, but the publicity for it makes it look like it was much more about drag queens.
Also Candis Cayne has a small part in it, so there was at least one actual trans person amongst the cast.
On the other hand, there’s no attempt to portray the real people who led the riot.
From what I recall, from one viewing decades ago, yes, there was a great deal of focus on the drag queens, also ‘Gay Man Pain’ got its fair share of coverage.
And it made no bones about being a fictional comedy-drama, hence being a starting point for making me curious about the real events.
So when a new film looks to me like a sanitised version of what I already know to be a fiction from one particular viewpoint, I get very dubious indeed.
A friend of mine from years ago (who I knew as a big old bearded bear 20-some years ago) was one of those cisnormative white guys who was there. Of course, he was a cheap street hustler at the time.
I don’t think Hollywood is ready to research and do a proper story on Stonewall, and I doubt it would ever be. As JP described things, Marsha and Sylvia (pre- and at-Stonewall) were a lot more complicated than even the best accounts say. A lot of accounts try to insert them into a modern trans/drag/gay narrative that just doesn’t fit.
…and the riots were more complicated than the best accounts say. I loved the stories about “lipstick lesbians from NYU and the Black Panther Party hanging out” across the street in Christopher Park the afternoon after the first riot, strategizing. The Black Panthers will deny they were ever there, but pictures don’t lie.
It is worth noting that trans culture can be very different in different ethnic groups, even within the same country. The USA has at least three cultural ideas of how to be trans.