Stonewall: Getting History Right, and Wrong

Outside the Stonewall Inn, June 1969.
Used with permission of the Estate of
Fred W. McDarrah,
All rights reserved © 2015

The new film Stonewall has become the object of ridicule and preemptive boycotts over claims of misrepresentation of the pivotal riots in June 1969 that are credited with unleashing the civil rights movement for homosexuals. But that story in itself varies, and some harsh critiques have quickly become strident and shortsighted.

As an author and journalist who has balanced facts and fiction for nearly three decades, with a mostly gay focus, it's been fascinating, and distressing, to see this near sacred event turned upside down to fit differing agendas, all based on a two-minute trailer.

First, some facts. The Stonewall riots emerged when drag queens, gay men, some white, some Black, some Latino, and some simply self-proclaimed 'queens,' were harassed by New York City cops as yet another raid on the small gay bar in Sheridan Square faced more harassing intimidation. People refused to get into paddy wagons, and violent reactions ensued.

One person, Sylvia Rivera, is credited with tossing coins at the police, as a symbol of her disgust with the well-known payoffs owners of gay bars had to pay to keep the cops off their backs. Bribery kept gay bars, many Mafia-owned, open. 

Marsha P. Johnson, an often homeless sometime hustler, is also one of the "queens" who were there. She and other patrons could have kept up the charade of enduring oppression. But on that hot June night, people had had enough. But who was really there?

On apartment stairs near the Stonewall Inn, June 1969.
Used with permission of the Estate of Fred W. McDarrah,
All rights reserved © 2015

Who led the rebellion is the arguable point. A lesbian reportedly complained about her handcuffs being too tight. This is a different lesbian than Stormé Delarverie, a butch dyke, drag king, bouncer and performer who was also there at pivotal moments.

Anyway, arrests were made and shouting ensued. Police reports show only nine people were arrested. Four cops were injured. But even that's specious, as the report says, "RES ARREST [obscure words] injured officer in that he did strike officer with rolled newspaper causing him to fall to ground fracturing wrist."

The mafia/police/gay bar connections are thoroughly documented in Philip Crawford Jr.'s new book, The Mafia and the Gays.

Whether Rivera threw a brick or a bottle, or coins, is debated. Historian David Carter claims that Johnson said Rivera didn't show up until days later (Wikipedia biography).
But she had been an activist, and was for decades after, so the argument at this point is useless.

The point is, it happened, for all of us.

To paraphrase one author, "If everyone who claims to have been at the Stonewall riots were really there, there wouldn't have been room to throw anything."

The authentic photos of those days and nights, documented by Village Voice photographer Fred W McDarrah, show a diverse array of young queers, happy with their new revolution (www.fredwmcdarrah.com)

from the new Stonewall film

While gay and lesbian activism had already taken place in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco in varying forms years before, the riots turned the tide forcefully, and violently. 

The first anniversary led to the first "Gay Freedom March," which spawned dozens and later hundreds of annual marches and celebrations held, usually the last weekend of June.

We certainly can't rely on the straight media of the time for unbiased reporting.The infamous "Homo Nest Raided" headline in the New York Times proves the scathing hatred from the mainstream media of the day.

How much of that truth will be portrayed in a film based around the life of a young white gay man who flees the Midwest for New York City, only to quickly become swept up in the surging response to entrenched homophobia?

Even though the trailer depicts trans and non-white characters, that the main character is young, white and cute has been pre-judged as biased whitewashing. Garance Franke Ruta's great essay for The Atlantic recounts the bar as a refuge for rejected, homeless runaways, just like the freshly rejected once Midwestern twink.

Reel Lives  
But what really happened, and how accurate should a fictionalized film version be?

NY Post coverage of the riots

Historian and veteran ACT UP and Queer Nation pal John Winkleman had this to say on Facebook, where the debate rages:

"If you read the actual historical accounts there is no question that People of Color and drag queens played a role. However, the actual Stonewall had a white and cisgender majority of patrons. The most reliable accounts suggest it was a male presenting woman who threw the first punch and not Marsha Johnson nor Sylvia Rivera. David Carter pretty much proves that the story that this person was Storme DeLavarie is also probably not true. 

"The homeless teens living in Sheridan Square did play a large role in the outside agitation leading to the riots, as arrestees were brought out of the bar which the film does portray. Later in life, Rivera was a prominent leader on trans issues. 

from the Marsha P. Johnson doc 'Pay It No Mind'

"However, in 1969, both Johnson and Rivera were homeless and sleeping on the street, they were street prostitutes, were unwashed and frequently very fragrant and were incoherent at many of the early Gay Liberation Front and GAA meetings due to serious drug problems.  Both women were important, as they did try to challenge trans exclusion in those early groups. But because of their problems, at the time neither were viewed as movement leaders, and frankly the current movie protestors do not want to see a historically accurate portrayal of either woman in the film.

The movie will obviously be a fictionalized drama and will be upfront about that. However, those protesting the movie are also guilty of historical revisionism and are not being honest about that."

Stonewall Inn, June 1969.  Used with permission of the
Estate of Fred W. McDarrah,
All rights reserved © 2015

The website TransAdvocate has a different take in its critique of the "ciswashing" of the riotous events. An expansive oral history (also reposted here) with Roy McCarthy includes descriptions of high heels flying and the riots being very much in accord with the Vietnam era. The violence and injuries are described in great detail (the website won't allow copy/pasting, so please read it there).

Veteran journalist Duncan Osbourne disagrees, however, saying that McCarthy's account is exaggerated at best. McCarthy's account had been polished into a solo show in Houston, so embellishments are understandable. Still, the singing "Stonewall Girls" and other accounts attest to the vibrant transvestite presence.

I had a most unusual beginning — an initiation to the riots. I was asleep! I was across the street… my childhood sweetheart was fixing to start his first year at Columbia University — he was a psych major. I was spending the summer with him, and I was upstairs in his apartment – sound asleep; and his apartment was right across the street from Stonewall Inn. He comes running upstairs saying “Roy! Roy! The queens are rioting across the street! The queens are rioting!”
So I go running down, following him…. By the time we got down there, the paddy wagon had just pulled up. The queens were just starting to come out and someone had just thrown a high heel. There may have been coins or whatever, but I was there within a couple minutes after the festivities started. I did see high heels flying! The queens — the transgenders or the crossdressers — were yelling something from across the street by the paddy wagon; they were yelling at the cops. We were cheering on the transgenders — the crossdressers — it just sort of snowballed from there.
- See more at: http://www.transadvocate.com/interview-with-an-actual-stonewall-riot-veteran-the-ciswashing-of-stonewall-must-end_n_8750.htm#sthash.zq29ScVP.dpuf

I had a most unusual beginning — an initiation to the riots. I was asleep! I was across the street… my childhood sweetheart was fixing to start his first year at Columbia University — he was a psych major. I was spending the summer with him, and I was upstairs in his apartment – sound asleep; and his apartment was right across the street from Stonewall Inn. He comes running upstairs saying “Roy! Roy! The queens are rioting across the street! The queens are rioting!”
So I go running down, following him…. By the time we got down there, the paddy wagon had just pulled up. The queens were just starting to come out and someone had just thrown a high heel. There may have been coins or whatever, but I was there within a couple minutes after the festivities started. I did see high heels flying! The queens — the transgenders or the crossdressers — were yelling something from across the street by the paddy wagon; they were yelling at the cops. We were cheering on the transgenders — the crossdressers — it just sort of snowballed from there.
- See more at: http://www.transadvocate.com/interview-with-an-actual-stonewall-riot-veteran-the-ciswashing-of-stonewall-must-end_n_8750.htm#sthash.zq29ScVP.dpuf"

Those who swear to boycott the film for "cisgendered bias" won't find out how much is 'true,'  except to agree that it looks like a musical, so it probably won't be.

Yet they have every right to dismiss what they see as a warped "white hero" version of our collective history. Decades of abuse, avoidance, and ignorance about the struggle of non-white and transgendered people justify this critique.

And despite his efforts toward LGBT homeless youth causes, a GLAAD Award, raising millions for LA's LGBT Center, and even a benefit for Pussy Riot, director Roland Emmerich's films carry a bit of baggage.

 
Film Phallusies
Let's take a look at some of his prior projects, which include strangely overt and sometimes subverted takes on homosexuality – perceived and actual– and trans identities.

from Moon 44

The almost forgotten Moon 44, a dark claustrophobic science fiction film, includes a perceived gay character who is raped by a man. Granted, he gets his revenge, violently. But the pervasive sexual tension is unsettling, and the pseudo-gay hunky rapist is portrayed as evil.

In the Emmerich-produced remake of Godzilla, we are presented with an asexual/transgender reptilian behemoth who destroys Manhattan while in search of a safe place to spawn eggs.

Stargate features a transgender Egyptian alien (played by Jaye Davison) as an evil shapeshifting nemesis.

Jaye Davison as an evil alien pharaoh in Stargate

The massive blockbuster Independence Day is rife with heterosexist perspectives. Despite the inclusion of the great gay actor and writer Harvey Fierstein, he is portrayed as weak, and like many others, dies.

Harry Connick's single male character, a copilot of star Will Smith's, makes a few kidding romantic gestures toward Smith's character. He, too, dies. Every speaking character that isn't married or heterosexual dies.

Harry Connick's crypto-gay in Independence Day

Even Randy Quaid's eccentric pilot dies while sacrificing himself. Why? He had been anally probed by the aliens, and is portrayed as less than a man due to that. His final moment of revenge is to fly up into the "back entrance" of the massive alien mothership, achieving revenge via a form of symbolic anal rape.

So it's understandable that many people are nervous about Emmerich and screenwriter  Jon Robin Baitz' take on Stonewall. This is despite Baitz' numerous acclaimed plays, TV and film writing (which includes gay characters), and the fact that the two men are gay.

But Emmerich has only recently sort of come out, and, as anti-cisgender "activists" claim, isn't informed enough about the full aspects of the riots to make an accurate film version. Oh, and also, there already is a 1995 film (sort of) about and titled Stonewall. That film included openly gay actors and its director Nigel Finch was gay, but he died of AIDS before its release.

"Some made history" Some got edited out.

Another complaint is the casting. How many, if any, of the actors playing gay characters are gay? Many of them aren't even American. Is that a valid complaint? How much of fictional narrative and performance needs to be "true" to satisfy us?

Emmerich has been quoted as saying that he did "extensive research" and that Sylvia Rivera and other transgender people –along with characters based on real gay male people like Frank Kameny and Ed Murphy–  are included in the film. The two-minute trailer includes a variety of people (including Jonny Beauchamp, who's brilliant in another trans role in Penny Dreadful). 

Yet this is not enough for critics who have yet to see the film. The website Aazah includes a critique of the film's trailer with information about Johnson, Rivera and others.

But what's disturbing are some comments, such as:

"Gay white middle class men don't understand the evil they wreak upon the world. They just don't fuckin' get it. They don't get it because they have never been erased from their own history."

OutWeek #3 cover

Stonewalliversary
Haven't you also lost hundred of friends and acquaintances from AIDS? Haven't you also felt forced into a gay ghetto, under a pink ceiling, or the target of gender bias for part of your life? How many times have you been arrested for fighting for gay rights? I lost count. Or assaulted in a street? Five. How much is enough to qualify?

Is this a case of outrage gone so overboard that it verges on the very form of intolerance we've endured and fought against?

This is where I need to bring up a favorite quote. "Don't you know who I was?"

The third issue of OutWeek magazine included coverage of the violent turn of events at the Radical Faerie commemoration of the  20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. 

I was there in Sheridan Square, with hundreds of people, many of them white gay men, and almost got pummeled by a cop, and almost run over by a car. The tour of the then-not-a-bar Stonewall included a House of Horrors-styled living exhibit of the worst anti-gay moments in queer history. I still have a commemorative "gold" brick made of foam, which we gleefully tossed back and forth before things got out of hand and cars tried to ram through the blocked off Sixth Avenue.
 

OutWeek article about 20th anniversary protests

That issue of OutWeek even includes a feature with Stonewall era veterans on Page 24. I later worked for that publication and am proud to repeatedly proclaim my small part in the late 1980s and early 1990s AIDS activism and Queer Nation movements.

Sylvia Rivera at Stonewall 25

Here is my photo of Sylvia Rivera when she marched in the New York City Pride March that celebrated the 25th anniversary of Stonewall in 1994. I also witnessed the 7th Avenue funeral march after Marsha's death.

So, while I was not at Stonewall, I knew people who were, and lived most of my New York years as an activist, inspired by the stories of my elders, which are cherished and memorable.

And yet, another comment on the Aazah website:

Martin Duberman's Stonewall book

"There has long been so much deliberate myth-making about the Stonewall riots that Martin Duberman in his eponymous 1993 book on the subject found it virtually impossible to trust most of his informants. While some of the people involved would have called themselves "drag queens" or "transvestites" (I don't think "transgender" was a word used) there were also, by many accounts, a fair number of a type of gay man that has almost ceased to exist: i.e. out and out fairies, those men who would wear "face" (i.e. powder, eye-make up, lipstick), perhaps use henna, but who would not otherwise try to erase their maleness. "

Everybody has a different take on a chaotic series of days. But people half the age of those who lived through that era have decided that their take on these events are the only story.

Sorry. No. If you want a documentary about Marsha P. Johnson, it's HERE.  Johnson died in 1989, presumed a suicide, but only acknowledged as a possible murder in 2012, when her case was reopened by the District Attorney.

Marsha P. Johnson

David France, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, about the Treatment Activist Group of ACT UP, is developing another film, about Johnson and Rivera. Here's the film-in-progress's Facebook page.

Also, seven other films offer Stonewall facts and personal stories.


Art/ History  
In my fiction, I've set stories in specific times and places. I've researched every aspect of those places and times, in particular my last two novels Every Time I Think of You and its sequel Message of Love. For the latter novel, I spent two years interviewing current and former Philadelphia residents, graduates of the two universities in the book, and visited Philadelphia and three archives.

An ad/flyer from the U. Penn student newspaper in 1982.

Cautious to not misrepresent the times, I noted when a Penn gay student group met, where they went, which buildings were then wheelchair accessible or not, and how AIDS crept into the lives of my two main characters Reid and Everett, before it even had a name. 

That I was alive then, and the same age as those characters, lends some veracity. Not being a Philadelphia resident may make my authorial authenticity suspect.

But that's why it's called fiction. Do those novels 'fail' the authenticity check because I am not a wheelchair-user and am not in a relationship with a paraplegic? That would be a reactionary hard line of maligning a work of fiction for not being something else; a documentary.

 
Instant Satire
Humor, however misunderstood, wins the day. Portland-based Alejandro Juarez created a series of satirical images that insert an image of actor Jeremy Irvine into historic moments from protests led by people of color. Those savvy enough to see the meaning get the intent.

Alejandro Juarez' Photoshp satire images

"I found it insulting to insert a cis white man into our history and omit or relegate the people who instigated that historic action to the background," writes Juarez in his several Facebook posts. "I spent some time on Photoshop playing with the main character in the movie (Danny) and inserting him into famous historical civil rights and liberation struggles to highlight the ridiculous decision by the makers of the upcoming Stonewall film."

But when I reposted these images, another Latino "friend" was outraged, blaming me for "insulting" these historic figures. This exemplifies the obdurate humorless stance of instant outrage that is only giving the film more free publicity. 

He completely misunderstood a Latino person's deft critique, and apparently I, as a "cisgender whitey," am forbidden from sharing it. I deleted the link, not out of self-censorship, but because no matter how I recount my years of activism, I can still be perceived as "mansplaining" from a fictive patriarchal roost.


Homework
Forget the fact that for decades, through my journalism, even the seemingly innocuous work of assembling arts and nightlife listings and accompanying photos, I weekly strive to visualize the local queer community in all its diversity.

Jeremy Irvine as Danny in the 2015 Stonewall film.

Emmerich and screenwriter Baitz have taken a risky move by fictionalizing a sacred, and now fabled, event. 
By portraying those pivotal days, before there even was a fully organized LGB or T community, they have induced the ire of those who decry the idea that a young white gay male sparked the riots. By all accounts, it was a group effort. And that's where I agree with the preemptive critiques. But a lot of other things didn't happen.

Emmerich and lead actor Jeremy Irvine have posted replies, apologetic ones of sorts, claiming that the film will honestly portray the rebellion. That it apparently sets pivotal people like Johnson and Rivera to the sidelines is to be expected from a corporate Hollywood version. It's happened before.  Emmerich says that's not the case:

"I understand that following the release of our trailer there have been initial concerns about how this character’s involvement is portrayed," he wrote. "But when this film – which is truly a labor of love for me – finally comes to theaters, audiences will see that it deeply honors the real-life activists who were there — including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Ray Castro — and all the brave people who sparked the civil rights movement which continues to this day. We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance."
 

Marsha P. Johnson

The upswing of the controversy is that more people will speak out and become informed about the multifaceted lives that led to our current liberation and the legacy of Stonewall.

Even the once virulently anti-gay New York Times now includes feature articles about transgender lives. 

And the backlash has sparked more support for another film about Marsha P. Johnson. Developed by filmmakers Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel, the narrative story is being portrayed and produced by trans people of color.

But whether or not the new Stonewall film succeeds in telling an authentic story will be decided by those who see it, not by those who demand that their version of a now-mythologized event be the only version of the story that's told. 

UPDATE: As predicted, the movie sucks, according to nearly all reviews. 

And director Roland Emmerich's comments clearly show that the film is a "dumb-down" glossy fiction aimed at straight people who don't know or care about the controversies:

Emmerich to Buzzfeed: "You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people. I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”