On the eve of Hollywood’s big screen debut of Stonewall, a new film directed by the pre-eminent disaster auteur Roland Emmerich, I thought it might be amusing to revisit the first cinematic tackling of Gay Pride’s explosive 3-day riot. Let’s rewind the tape.
1994. AIDS was still rampaging the community. In 1994, death was still defining the gay experience. Randy Shilts, author of …And The Band Played On, dead. Derek Jarman, dead. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his portrayal of a lawyer afflicted with HIV/AIDS in Philadelphia. Pedro Zamora who appeared on MTV’s The Real World died in November. The UK banned a safe sex campaign by the Health Education Authority for being too explicit. Not all was terror. The CDC reported that 1994 was the first year that AIDS incidence declined from previous years.
In mainstream pop culture, Roseanne Barr kissed Mariel Hemingway. Tim Burton released one of his masterpieces, Ed Wood, about a heterosexual cross-dresser. Reality Bites had a gay character coming out disastrously to his parents. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert took the world by storm. Four Weddings and a Funeral had non-terrible gay characters. Things were looking up.
1995 had far fewer immediate milestones than 1994, oddly enough. Mainstream movies include Boys on the Side, with an unrequited lesbian crush, and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar (aka: the American Priscilla). American AIDS-related death peaked in 1995 at 49k (in a year!), in no small part because America also approved a new aggressive HIV drug, that would start turning back the tides. The Birdcage wouldn’t come out until 1996, and Ellen Degeneres was still playing it straight for another two years. Politically, Clinton would sign the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. While gay culture had thrust itself into the limelight, it was still a long way off from garnering mainstream acceptance.
Into this atmosphere, 26 years after the cops raided a gay bar one too many times, the BBC released Stonewall, a musical docudrama focusing on the atmosphere of 1969 and what led up to the Stonewall Riots. Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the Stonewall Riots are considered to be the watershed moment where the homosexuals finally had enough of their oppression and overthrew their shackles. This event is celebrated annually, on the last weekend of June, as the Gay Pride Protest/March/Parade/Festival. (ed’s note: Many cities celebrate Pride on other weekends in June so that not every parade ever is at the same time, and Southern cities celebrate outside June because doing it in 120 degree heat leads to death)
Based on Martin Duberman’s 1993 book, Stonewall, scripted by black gay author Rikki Beadle-Blair, and directed by Nigel Finch (who died of AIDS during post-production), Stonewall follows the romantic pairing of a tall, just-off-the-bus, corn-fed white boy and a Latino drag queen who meet at the Stonewall Inn. Finch opens with La Miranda (Guillermo Diaz) applying her makeup before launching into The Ad Libs’ “The Boy From New York” where we meet Matty D (Fred Weller) getting off the bus. On this night, Matty’s first night in New York, the cops raid the Stonewall Inn while terrorizing the customers within. The regulars take the treatment as a matter of systemic suffering, but both Matt and La Miranda are defiant in the face of an unjust authority.
After moving in with La Miranda and being briefly shown around town, Matt wants to actually fix the system. He is torn between the conservative political front lines of the Homophile Society (a fictionalized edition of the Mattachine Society and the Homophile Action League) and the radical inaction of the sissies and bar flies in the Stonewall Inn. Just to emphasize the dichotomy, Matt gets involved with a conservative manly man who takes him to the gay fire island where men can’t even dance face to face.
For the entirety of the third act, for half an hour of a 95 minute movie, La Miranda disappears while Matt goes off with the generic white dude. The b-plot comes in with Stonewall Inn’s black drag queen bartender, Princess Ernestine. She’s secretly dating Vinnie, the outwardly heterosexual mob boss owner of the Stonewall Inn. He wants to get her a sex change for marriage, but she’s perfectly alright with being a dude in drag, or a chick with a dick.
Finch and Beadle-Blair are so focused on creating the atmosphere that surrounded the riots, they almost forget to include the riots themselves. It isn’t until 83 minutes into the 95 minute movie (including end credits) that we finally get to the fateful night where queens are arrested, trash cans are thrown, and riots are held. The finale of this movie is wrapped up faster than you can say gay power. Who throws the inciting punch? The drag queen in the frame.
Stonewall gives the final words to a flashbacking La Miranda, who says that this was her legend of Stonewall, and she may have gotten some of the facts wrong. Which, OK. I dunno how this was your legend considering you disappeared for 1/3 of the movie. Fortunately, you were replaced by another minority trans* character, but really…?
And, besides, this edition of Stonewall seemed to avoid the role of the lesbians in the riots. There’s a lesbian at the Homophile Society and a couple on the bus, but the only cis-women in the Stonewall Inn were in the foreground or background of establishing shots. The Stonewall lesbians in this edition were neither seen nor heard, and merely decoration for a gay man’s edition of the tale. Let’s be frank, it’s widely accepted that the inciting incident was a lesbian being beaten with a billy club and thrown in a paddy wagon. Yet, we gay men frequently short change the role lesbians play in gay pride. This Stonewall completely ignores the lesbians so it can focus on the trans* men.
To be honest, this edition of Stonewall seems less to be an accurate depiction of the Stonewall Riots than a reminder for how far the gay community had come since the 1960s. No longer were the gay bars run by a mob establishment and subject to police raids. No longer were awareness marches tiny affairs of maybe 30 people. Sure you may have had to be paranoid if you were in the closet, but gays had come a long way baby and they sure weren’t stopping then. The riots? Merely an afterthought.
1995’s Stonewall will never be as polished as a Hollywood feature. It’s storytelling conceit – the jump between docudrama and Drag-Queens-As-Greek-Chorus-By-Way-Of-1960s-Pop-Hits – seems inspired at first, but becomes jarring and unnecessary by the end. And, it certainly could use some help in the budget department, especially when the riots finally make their appearance. But, it’s short and it served as a reminder of the gay male community’s roots. Now, if only we could get something for the ladies…