On June 28, 1969, Stonewall Inn, a speakeasy in Greenwich Village popular with gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens, was raided by New York police. This wasn’t the first time the bar had been searched, after all, Stonewall Inn was serving alcohol without a license and was a well-known gay hangout at a time when homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder and homosexual sex could land you in prison. The June raid began to go off script when the patrons of the bar, particularly the transgender men and women present, began resisting arrest. Details get a little murky here, but it is accepted much of the crowd consisted of gay, lesbian and transgender people of color. It is also generally known that among the first to begin throwing stones were 25 year old African-American transwoman Marsha P. Johnson and 17 year old Puerto Rican transwoman Sylvia Rivera
Earlier this year, movie director Roland Emmerich, best known for action packed blockbusters like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, announced that he will be documenting the Stonewall Riots, largely considered the birth of the gay rights movement. This news was not met with the fanfare and praise from the LGBT community Emmerich was probably expecting. Instead, accusations of whitewashing the history of the gay rights movement came pouring in.
According to IMDb, Stonewall will focus on Danny a white, cisgender, gay man played by Jeremy Irvine, best known for his role as Albert Narracott in War Horse (2011). In the trailer, fictional character Danny leaves his prejudiced Kansas town for the freedom of New York City. There he meets a variety of gay (also mostly white) men, eventually becomes a gay leader, and appears to throw the brick that incites the riots.
The gay community has often been accused of focusing too much on cisgender, white gay men, particularly in television and movies. Stonewall may be just another example of the lack of diversity in the gay community. People of color are almost completely absent from the trailer, and the one person of color with speaking lines plays to the trope of sassy Hispanic gay men.
Within days of the trailer’s release, a petition was created on Gsanetwork.org calling for a boycott of the film. A major concern of Stonewall opponents is that people of color are largely underrepresented in LGBT spaces, and by wasting this opportunity to include actors of color in his depiction of events, Emmerich will continue to perpetuate the idea that the gay community consists mostly of middle class, cisgender white men. This viewpoint is particularly damaging to transgender, gay, and lesbian people of color who are more likely to experience fatal anti-LGBT violence, but only make up about 11% of LGBT characters in movies.
Defenders of the movie claim that the history hasn’t been whitewashed because no single group was responsible for starting the riots. While there are very few eye witnesses still living, historian Martin Dauberman says that, while it’s impossible to know who started the riots, “Any movie [about Stonewall] that features a gay white man as the hero is historically inaccurate, and to say as much is not to be crazy.”
Emmerich took to Facebook to defend the movie, saying “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.” If the film is meant to honor the activists that were there, Emmerich and Co. could have chosen any of the real people that were a part of the Stonewall Riots to be the protagonist instead of creating a gay, white savior.
Stonewall will be in theaters September 25th. It will likely get a GLAAD award because the Stonewall Riots were the catalyst for the gay rights movement, but to leave out the people of color who helped start the movement does a disservice to the LGBT community. The continued erasure of people of color shows that despite the gains LGBT people have made since Stonewall there is still a long way to go.