STONEWALL RECALLS THE BIRTH OF THE GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT
There was a time when amorous attraction to someone of the same sex was considered a mental illness, a reason for exclusion from government jobs, a basis for police persecution, and even expulsion from one’s own family and school. Even today, as a title at the end of Stonewall reports, 40 percent of all homeless youth in the United States are lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgendered persons. Political Film Society nominee director Roland Emmerich (for The Day After Tomorrow) recreates that era during three months in 1969 through the eyes of a fictional Danny Winters (played by Jeremy Irvine), who leaves a small town in Indiana and goes to New York City, where has applied to attend Columbia. Flashbacks to his life in Indiana reveal that he was caught by two apparent latent homosexuals having sex with a fellow student athlete in high school, whereupon the coach demands that he seek help, his athlete friend betrays him by saying that he was tricked into having sex, and his father puts a suitcase in his room, presumably to avoid public humiliation for the family. Upon arrival at Christopher Street, he is befriended by Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), a transgendered Latino gay (depicting Sylvia Rivera), who offers him a place to stay for the night in a flophouse room with other homeless gay youth. Danny is naïve about gay life, his innocence makes his attractive beyond his good looks, and he is forced into offering a prominent part of his body for sale in order to pay for his food. Attracted by Danny, Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) soon offers him a place to stay as if the two were partners, and then kicks him when he finds another sex partner. Danny discovers that flamboyant multiracial drag queens frequent the bar named Stonewall Inn, which police raid once each week on the pretext of finding underage patrons, who can then be arrested. However, police are brutal in the process, and Danny is twice roughed up. The owner of the bar, Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman), pays protection money to the police to operate the bar but also spots Danny as a hot prospect for lucrative prostitution to someone resembling transexualized J. Edgar Hoover. Midway during Stonewall, Trevor’s idea for ending the injustice meted out by the government is presented—act and dress normally, join the Mattachine Society, and file court cases. But that is impossible for Danny’s transgendered friends, who are too alienated from the repressive system to pass for straights. When the police raid the bar for a second time in a week, contrary to protection money assurances, Murphy is arrested on the pretext that he is a Mafia crime boss. As the bar patrons gather outside in anger, Danny suddenly shouts something about gay power, and a riot breaks out: Police are attacked and retreat into the bar for safety. The gay liberation movement is born, and riots continue for two more nights, thereby attracting the attention of the press and the political establishment for the dawn of gay pride, which is commemorated each year in Gay Pride parades and related festivities (whereas a similar though one night of protest in Los Angeles during 1968 was ignored). Titles at the end explain how Murphy, Rivera, and others played prominent roles in that movement. For recalling the era of LGBT repression and the birth of the gay liberation movement despite some historical inaccuracies (notably, that the actual leader of the demonstrations was African American Marilyn P. Johnson, not a White boy from Indiana) and an exaggerated depiction of fast-talking drag queens, the Political Film Society has nominated Stonewall for best film on human rights of 2015. MH