When I first learned about the Stonewall Riots through my work with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, I was struck that the circumstances that lead to LGBT youth homelessness today are pretty much the same as they were 45 years ago. The courageous actions of everyone who fought against injustice in 1969 inspired me to tell a compelling, fictionalized drama of those days centering on homeless LGBT youth, specifically a young midwestern gay man who is kicked out of his home for his sexuality and comes to New York, befriending the people who are actively involved in the events leading up to the riots and the riots themselves. I understand that following the release of our trailer there have been initial concerns about how this character’s involvement is portrayed, 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.”
— Roland Emmerich, best known for directing apocalyptic action films like Independence Day, defends his film about Stonewall against scorn from the LGBT community after watching its trailer this week with a message posted to his Facebook page
Peter McKinney
Thank you for telling the real story and not giving in to the rabid trans/black gay communities unreasonable demands.
Luis Collazo
Its not the real story its about a fictional character Peter McKinney. However I still plan on seeing it!
Ummmm Yeah
If you look at the pictures from that night the majority of the rioters are white gay men. Argue with the visual evidence all you want, but it will still be the truth. It’s the liars and uninformed claiming everyone but white gay men were there that should be shamed.
Loyd Hawkins
It was epicly silly for people to pre-judge a movie they have never seen in the first place based on a 2-minute trailer. Some people are always looking to be offended, so much so that they find offense wherever they go.
James V Carroll
I’ll definitely support this film, but the IMDB page contains a lot more white actors than I expected for this historical film set in 1969 NY. Someone should have noticed while casting.
Ladbrook
I’m glad he made the film, but I won’t be tempted to pass judgment on it until I ACTUALLY SEE IT. It’s so odd that a number of people in the LGBT community complained about it before seeing it. It reminds me of all those Christian assholes who ripped Brokeback Mountain while openly acknowledging that they hadn’t seen it nor would they ever see it. Insanity.
Amaurys Arias
Every time I see this image, I cringe.. Is such a perfect metaphor for white privilege… Him, at the forefront being the hero while all the minorities stand in the back looking in amazement at this brave straight acting white savior.
And I wouldn’t have a problem, if this was remotely true. A black tran, drag queen is credited with throwing the first brick.
Kangol
@Peter McKinney: He’s building the film about a fictional white protagonist. Sorry you can’t deal with people’s dissent about Hollywood’s typical whitewashing approach to every issue. Support the film if you want, and let others decide to proceed as they see fit.
For anyone who really wants to see what the protesters at Stonewall looked like, believed, and fought for, which wasn’t monochrome homonormativity, r@cism, transphobia, or sexism/misogyny in the LGBTIQ community, you can watch Kate Davis’s and David Heilbroner’s excellent 2010 documentary Stonewall Uprising.
Amaurys Arias
One day will get historically accurate film with the LBT, blacks and Latinos included, and on a EQUAL playing field.
Tobi
If you can call a few drag queens doing a couple of high kicks a “riot”… *sigh*
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152818323816636/
SeeingAll
Look up the mugshot of Williamson Henderson, allegedly the only arrestee from the riots who the police photographed. He looks vey much like many of the types seen in the trailer.
SeeingAll
@James V Carroll: 1969 NYC was almost entirely white, though.
SeeingAll
http://www.stonewallvets.org/images/Williamson/NYPD-mugshot_1969_Stonewall.jpg
darian
All I’m seeing from any promo of this movie is an attempt to cheapen stonewall and sell tickets. Way to stick to the status quo.
SeeingAll
@darian: Cheapen it ? It looked sort of romanticized and grand in the trailer.
rikard
well that makes sense. it does not make me want to see the movie. in fact i am less inclined to see it. it is like Titanic with all the hype about realism and recreating the luxury, they still chose to tell a fictional story. with all the true, compelling, pathos laden stories, they made one up instead. it’s hardly a surprise the story of the Stonewall uprising has been whitewashed. sad, but not a shock.
MarionPaige
tired ass White Queens cry about there not being a lot of gay themed movies even with the alleged “success” of BrokeBack Mountain. And then, out of the other side of their mouths, tired ass White Queens prove the point that anyone who dares to use the word GAY in a film or tv project has to face the tired ass White Queens Standards and Practices Board. How many of the people yelling foul over the alleged lack of minority faces in the Stonewall trailer would even hung out with people of color like the alleged Stonewall Crowd? Oh, wait, we do know that don’t we?
1. There was a very recent drive by the NYPD to shut down places in The Village where kids of color were hanging out because they were allegedly too noisy and disruptive.
2. I read some time ago that the Stonewall bar was in danger of going out of business because no one went there.
It’s like I’ve long said, if actual real life representative gay people showed up at a gay fundraiser, Aghast Tired Ass White Gay Activists would probably call the Police on them.
darian
@SeeingAll: Yes cheapen or trivialize with stereotypical archetypes of minorities. It seems like my private Idaho mixed with rent without the music.
MarionPaige
in short, there was another Stonewall in The Village, where the NYPD arrested and harassed gay kids of color, and Tired Ass White Queens didn’t risk their corporate advertising or their corporate charitable donations to combat what the NYPD did.
MarionPaige
I was in an adult bookstore at the end of Christopher Street a few years ago when the NYPD came in and asked the store clerk if the building’s video cameras (that pointed out at the street level) worked and if the NYPD could get a copy of the video. IN SHORT, there was an organized YEARS LONG campaign by the NYPD to harass kids of color hanging out in The Village and to drive them out of the area because the new demographic of The Village didn’t want THOSE KINDS OF PEOPLE handing out in THEIR neighborhood. And,
Where were the tired ass White Gay activists during all of this?
MarionPaige
Not to hog this topic, but, there is an organized city agency in New York City that corrals various different diverse city agencies in NYC (including the NYPD) to combat what the city calls QUALITY OF LIFE ISSUES. I’m fairly sure that this agency did not exist during the Stonewall riots BUT IT EXISTS TODAY. And, it was this agency that went out Pinter et al (arresting 50+ year old gay men for prostitution) and it was this agency that went after those kids of color in The Village.
How many tired ass White Queens have mentioned this agency? In the Pinter case, The Bitchless Blog was the first to point out that the Pinter Case was likely THAT AGENCY IN ACTION rather than just random arrests of gay men.
SeeingAll
@darian: I get your viewpoint. Of course, it IS just the trailer. We’ll see.
SeeingAll
@MarionPaige: That was inevitable though. The Village is just a big boring comfy place now (and so less gay than it was, anyway) and the residents just don’t like the Piers crowd (SOME who are a lot of trouble, but only some). But….that’s the story of all Manhattan now. .
MarionPaige
The Reality is that some people are obviously of the opinion that Roland Emmerich hasn’t bought enough advertising in gay media and he has not donated enough money to gay .orgs for him to use the proprietary term GAY in a film project.
The White Gay Community doesn’t give a shit about gay kids of color.
lykeitiz
You seem to like saying “Tired Ass White Queens” in all of your rambling posts here, talking about white oppression while ignoring your own. What about all the black churches rallying against gay marriage, and the black communities overwhelming votes against it? More than 34,000 black churches from 15 denominations, representing 15.7 million African Americans, have pulled away from the Presbyterian Church (USA) because of its newly declared endorsement and acceptance of same-sex “marriage” through a recent vote. How quickly a group of people forget what it’s like to be oppressed. So, why don’t you take a look in the mirror and see if that Tired Ass Black Queen staring back at you can do anything about her own house before she jumps on someone else’s?
richard s
@lykeitiz: MarionPaige seems to not understand that the black community is turning its back on gay black youth. Many of the kids that end up on the streets are there because their families have turned them out or its incredibly dangerous to live in their neighborhoods as gay kids. The “tired ass white queen” community has done much to try and help.
Cam
They also made a Stonewall movie before, surprising that none of the gay press seems to even mention it in this context.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114550/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_79
Avery Alvarez
I don’t believe that Stonewall was lead or started by black trans activists, or drag queens, or any of the others offended groups complaining.
I think that is PC/SJW revisionist history, which is just as bad as right wing revisionist history.
At the same time, I don’t think it was started by a clean cut white guy. That’s just Hollywood revisionist history.
Hopefully the movie will have good representation of everyone.
It’s sad that even this important movie about LGBT history has turned, once again, into the oppression olympics.
richard s
@Cam: the other movie has been mentioned in other “gay press” postings that I’ve read
lykeitiz
@richard s: Thanks for the backup. I usually try to stay out of this stuff, but that was just too much.
And in my haste, I forgot to name the target of my rage. Yes @MarionPaige: ……that was directed at you.
Finrod
Wow, he really doesn’t get it. He’s so blind to his own bigotry that he can’t see how absurd it is to have to make up a character to tell his story rather than use the real people that started the riots. And some of the commenters here are so good at rewriting reality, they’d make GREAT Fox news correspondents.
Colorful Kent
He needs to release a better version of the trailer then that shows all the characters.
M1k3y10
@Avery Alvarez: You seem to have a poor grasp on how the riots went down. plainclothes police officers entered the bar first and began arresting people after asserting some horseshit about illegal liquor sales. people inside of the bar, including Marsha Johnson, a black trans woman, began resisting. Marsha is credited with initiating the resistance within the bar.
“When Jerry Hoost, who was a co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front, got to the Stonewall Inn on the evening of the uprising, John Goodman told him that Jackie Hormona was the one who started the riot, and that soon after, Marsha Johnson andZasou Nova quickly joined in.
“Later, Marty Robinson, and later Morty Manford, told Robin Souza, who was one of the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance, that Marsha Johnson was involved in starting the riots. “The story that Robin Souza told me, that Morty Manford told him, was that Marsha Johnson said, ‘I got my civil rights!’ and then Marsha threw a shot glass into a mirror. And that’s what started all the riots.”This was later know as the ‘shot glass’ heard round the world. “So I think when you look at the mythology, with the few known facts that withstand scrutiny, I do not think that there is any doubt that she was there the first night. And I think if we had to conclude, in all probability, that she was probably among the first to resist the police in a physical way.”
M1k3y10
@lykeitiz:
Are you really trying to hold black folks oppression agasint them?
You say that as if black gay people don’t fucking exist at all.
Being black and gay are not mutually exclusive.
White state legislators are preventing you from getting married and not protecting your employment and housing, since they’re the ones that control state government and overwhelmingly voted into office by their white constituents. White lobbyist are lobbying Congress to prevent you from having rights. The GOP has been running on an anti-LGBT agenda for 30 years. Look to your white Republicans that have been been winning elections on demonizing homosexuality since Reagan. The white Mormon Church in Utah funded the entire Prop 8 campaign. White owned businesses like Chik-Fil-A are funding anti-gay organizations and candidates around the country.
It really says everything to me that so many gay white men are so down to fight for the cause that they are willing to accept lies from straight-white-media that blames Black folks rather than look at who’s really fucking them over.
Jan. 2009: Salon.com
In their statistical analysis, Egan and Sherrill found that the exit polls dramatically overstated African-American support for Proposition 8. According to the two professors, 58 percent of African-Americans voted for the measure. By comparison, 59 percent of Latinos and Hispanics supported it, along with 49 percent of whites and 48 percent of Asians.
….
Egan and Sherrill found that 70 percent of those who attend church weekly reported voting for the measure. Eighty-one percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans also voted for it.
Notice that we didn’t have folks running in the streets screaming slurs about Christians or Republicans… but instead Black folks. Funny that.
Jan 2009: Ta Nehisi Coates
Among those who attended church weekly, African-Americans were support for Prop 8 was lower than amongst any other ethnic group.
….
There are people in my business who took to the highest hills to decry the betrayal of black Californians, and to this day, are giddily noting that blacks sunk marriage equality in California, who foist the failure of marriage equality on seven percent of the electorate . I will not speculate on their motives. But let’s see how loudly they address this study. Let’s see how much ink we see spilled revisiting those assumptions.
Nov 2008: Daily Kos – A massive post breaking down the math which shows how fucking ridiculous and reaching you’d HAVE to be to even attempt to try to blame Black folks and how literally, by the math, it would be fucking impossible for them to be the primary cause of Prop 8 passing, which, you know, also involves ignoring the fact that all other voter ethnicities make up 9.3 TIMES as many voters as a potential, hyper-inflated assumed Black vote.
BUT HEY WHY WORRY ABOUT THE FOLKS WHO ARE CONSISTENTLY ATTACKING YOUR RIGHTS AROUND THE COUNTRY AND REAL THREATS WHEN YOU CAN JUST BLAME BLACK FOLKS RIGHT?
“The racial and ethnic demographics of the Don’t Say Gay polling are of interest, too. 75% of those who identified as Hispanic said that teachers should be able to discuss other sexual orientations; 60% of Black respondents gave that answer; only 46% of White respondents thought so. And this is interesting to me because so many white liberals whisper to me: “You know, the Black community is so conservative on these issues.” Yeah, I don’t know anything of the kind. These anti-gay bills in TN come from a segment of the White community.
“
—
Chris Sanders (from the Tennessee Equality Project)
Like no one is saying that there are black people who are homophobic but to blame hem for you not getting to walk down the aisle is bullshit.
M1k3y10
@richard s:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/03/07/1685601/opposition-to-marriage-equality-concentrated-among-elderly-evangelicals-and-non-college-educated/
Of course, the headline on the post skips that one, but it stands out:
Voters over age 65 oppose same-sex marriage 58-37.
Voters under 65 favor marriage equality 52-44.
White evangelical Christians oppose same-sex marriage by nearly 3 to 1.
African-American evangelical Christians narrowly oppose marriage equality 47-45.
All non-evangelicals, including other white Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, African American non-evangelicals and Jewish voters, support marriage equality by double-digit margins.
White voters who do not have a college degree oppose marriage equality 56-40.
Non-white voters without a college degree support marriage equality 54-38.
White college graduates support marriage equality 56-41.
Non-white college graduates support marriage equality 58-35.
Avery Alvarez
@M1k3y10: Actually, I know the difference between “history” and someone’s personal, very biased narrative.
Your anecdotal evidence is cheap and meaningless. It seems everyone has a different narrative of what went on that day.
So is your suggestive conjecture, which is NOT in any way shape or form objective evidence.
“I do not think that there is any doubt…”
The operative word in this sentence is “think”. You think something. Well, that means nothing. ONce again, that’s not evidence of anything and your righteous indignation doesn’t add an once of credibility.
I understand you want this movie to be about you. You want to see yourself as the star. You want to take credit for it all by yourself. Your group did it. You were the leaders. But that’s nothing but your selfish ego. Don’t call that history. The fact is, it was a group effort. And judging by the trailer, that’ s going to be depicted.
stranded
@Loyd Hawkins: Isn’t that the whole point of a trailer. For you to judge it, to decide whether you want to see it or not? I’m not hating on the film, but it’s hard pass for me.
digreene3
@stranded: I don’t understand how people don’t get that
digreene3
@Avery Alvarez: I feel like you don’t get it. When you’re black AND gay in this country, you don’t get to learn about SO MUH of your history because it’s so often erased and overshadowed. We get a month where we learn about the same 5+ people (Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall etc) and then we move on and don’t hear about it til next February. The trailer tells you what you’ll see in the movie and what I and many LGBTQ people of color see is another story about a white male who becomes everyone’s savior with the people of color with one liners in the back ground and vastly under developed. Whitewashing is not something that’s new. Hell, decades ago, people of color were played by white people in black face. We still only see one or two people of color on any given tv show let alone LGBT. Why create this fictional character when the groundwork for this TRUE story is all there.
Avery Alvarez
@digreene3: I do get it. I totally get it. There’s not doubt that there could be more done to elevate and celebrate Gay POC, their accomplishments, their contributions, their successes and victories. There’s no doubt that we need to talk about them more, acknowledge them more, and yes, see them fully and accurately portrayed as part of LGBT history, without the white savior.
But this movie, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all, is it? Of course, it typical and disappointing that Hollywood would present us with a white, clean cut, Midwestern country boy, played by a heterosexual as the main protagonist. Personally, I feel that Stonewall wasn’t just about any one individual, but about a group effort by many diverse people, and I truly hope that’s what depicted in the movie. But you know what, as LGBT becomes even more mainstream, there will be more movies. There will be more tv shows. There will be more documentaries. We WILL get those stories about LGBT POC where they are the lead
As I mentioned, I personally agree with you. As I said, I’m hoping these movie really details and depicts a whole diverse cast of people who made the history we know as Stonewall happen. But what I see in these comments, is more or less people trying to claim stonewall as their own. My people started it. My people lead it. My people were the first and only. I’ve seen one commentator on the Youtube trailer try to wipe out men completetly from the story – saying it was only lesbians, drag queens, and black trans women. I don’t like that. I don’t like it if they said only white gay men were present and fighting, and I don’t like it when others try to claim it was only drag queens and trans people. This is all of our history, and as I’ve said repeatedly, I truly hope it’s depicted that way.
animaux
@digreene3:
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/08/07/jeremy-irvine-responds-to-claims-of-whitewashing-in-stonewall-film/
Scroll down that article and you will find the promotional photo showing the character of Marsha P. Johnson. She is one of the major characters in the movie.
Cam
@lykeitiz:
If you are saying that something is widely known, then it should be easy for you to post up links proving it.
The story I heard, and saw in a documentary wad that a lesbian began the resistance by escaping the car the police had her in more than once.
meghanada
@MarionPaige: Let me tell you this, Marion: You lot are nothing without “tired white gay queens”. If Black queens, to your your terminology, were worth a thing as activists, your community would be the least homophobic in the US – they’re not, they’re the most. You lot are too busy policing Grindr profiles of white men to do any serious works in your community. And you want to claim Stonewall as being only about yourselves? Look at actual material evidence regarding the protests – 90% of the people there were white males, the ones who made LGBT movement.
stranded
@animaux: a major character is not the main character. That’s kind of my problem with the so called diversity solution in Hollywood. They think by casting minorities in secondary and tertiary characters roles that they’ve covered their ass in supporting diversity.