"Stonewall": The riots that started the Gay Rights Movement, with nice cops, a White Saviour, J. Edgar Hoover, and some dicks

 

Link to NSFW version

The Stonewall Riots of June 28-30, 1969 began with patrons of the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village fighting back against police harassment.  They ended with the modern Gay Rights Movement and the "minority group" model of LGBT identities. Today there are Pride festivals and parades around June 28th of every year to celebrate that beginning., and queer history, literature, culture, and politics are definitively divided into pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. 

Although there have been many books and documentaries, Stonewall (2015) is the first movie intended for a mass audience.  It assumes that you are straight, with little or no knowledge of the riots, an ally but mostly unaware of the closeted, harassed, hounded life of LGBT people before Stonewall (and sometimes still today)

1. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), a clean-cut all-American kid from rural Indiana, gets a scholarship to Columbia, but before his parents can fill out the scholarship papers, they discover that he is gay and kick him out.  His closeted boyfriend, football star Joe(Karl Glusman), refuses to talk to him.  

Bonus Karl Glusman cock after the break

So he goes to New York anyway, where everybody -- repeat, everybody -- falls in love with him.  Well, what do you expect from the focus character?

Danny lives on the street, and works as a hustler (although the look of pure disgust he gets whenever a client tries to go down on him would probably limit his success).

He hangs out and often lives with a group of androgynous gay and transgender street kids led by Ray/Ramona (Johnny Beauchamp). 

2. They are regulars at the Stonewall Tavern, a dive-bar run by Mobster Ed Murphy (Ron Pearlman), who may have murdered Ray's boyfriend. It was illegal to serve alcohol to "a known homosexual," so all gay bars were underground, mostly run by the mob.

3. Meanwhile Danny gets involved with Trevor (Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, left), a middle-class college student,  who picks up twinks by playing Procul Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" on the jukebox.  I'm always moved by the line: She said "There is no reason 
And the truth is plain to see."

More after the break

Trevor belongs to the establishment-gay rights Mattachine Society, which promotes the idea that being gay is a mental disability.  We should accommodate the straights and wait for them to accept us. Especially if you are white, masculine-appearing, and haven't been outed.

Bull!  This is the 1960s, the era of anti-Vietnam protests, marches, sit-ins, Black Power, Women's Liberation, the Beatles singing "You say you want a revolution!"  Danny hates it; he wants to march with placards reading "Gay Power"!  But he actually drops out of the Mattachine Society because he sees Trevor using "White Shade of Pale" to pick up someone else.   Back to the Stonewall street-kid crowd.

4. There are regular police raids, giving the cops an opportunity to harass, belittle, assault, and arrest the gays.  Until the gay-friendly Deputy Pine (Matt Cravan) takes over and orders his men to be nice to the gays.  He continues the raids, but only because he's trying to solve the murder of Ray/Ramona's boyfriend.  This is completely whitewashed.  The L.A. police were bitter enemies of the gay commuinty. We have interviews with some of the cops who participated the riots,  They say "We  thought we were doing a good thing, getting mentally-unstable perverts off the street so they couldn't hurt anyone."

5. On the night of the riots, the mob kidnaps Danny and forces him into having sex with J. Edgar Hoover in drag. 

6. Meanwhile Deputy Pine realizes that Ed is in the bar, and sends out a squad car to pick him up, letting the gay patrons go.  Again, whitewashing the antipathy between the police and the gay community.  

But the cops outside let Ed escape, and that makes the gay patrons so mad that they start yelling "Gay power!,' and Danny throws the first brick.  This scene has been criticized for making Danny the White Savior, minimizing the contribution of femme, transgender, and nonwhite LGBT people.  Black trans woman Marcia Johnson is often named as throwing the first brick, although she denied it.

So it wasn't police harassment, it was letting a mob boss escape, that caused the Gay Rights Revolution? 

7. Afterwards Danny goes back to Indiana to see his ex-boyfriend.  Left: ex-boyfriend cock.

. His Mom and his sister turn out to be allies.  They even come to the Gay Liberation March held the next year. This is minimizing the difficulty of coming out to family and friends during the era, and often today. Relationships end.  When I came out, more than a decade later, my brother was supportive, but my sister wouldn't speak to me for five years (today she's an ally).  I didn't dare come out to my fundamentalist Nazarene parents, but they eventually figured it out.

My Grade: Ok for a mass audience, but to anyone who knows anything about the Gay Rights Movement, the historical inaccuracy is annoying. C+ 

Some dicks and butts on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends