Let the Protests Begin!

Roland Emmerich's film Stonewall had its official premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and of course, trans activists were there.

LGBT protesters crashed the red carpet at the world premiere of Stonewall at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). They say the film downplays the key role that trans people of colour and lesbian activists played in the 1969 riots that launched the gay rights movement in the US. TIFF fans weren't happy to see them. Stonewall’s gay director, Roland Emmerich, tells Daily Xtra he wanted to make a movie for everybody. “I never quite understood this whole word of ‘whitewashing,’” he says.

I lost patience with the whole "whitewashing" and "erasing trans people" arguments when they were trotted out in reaction to a two-minute trailer. Nobody ever gets a clear idea of what a movie's actually about from a trailer. And of course, you can imagine how much sympathy I have for those "activists" who rail on about white cis-gender gay men -- as though we had nothing to do with gaining any ground in the civil rights arena.

As for Emmerich rewriting history, there are some illuminating comments at this story at Towleroad. For example, commenter FLL has a couple of actual facts:

(1) Sylvia Rivera and was not present at the Stonewall Riots. There is testimony showing that Sylvia wasn't there (please see my reply to Darien Taylor below). So why does the protester in the clip above wear a t-shirt that mentions Sylvia Rivera?

(2) In all these years, no one has ever come forward to suggest that Miss Majors was present during any of the rioting. It's obvious by listening to any interviews Miss Majors has given that she is lying.

(3) The unidentified white lesbian who was the victim of police brutality was exactly that, an unidentified white lesbian. She was not Stormé DeLarverie, who is an African-American. Stomé herself always refused to verify that she was the lesbian in question. The policeman beating the lesbian with his nightstick enraged the crowd of mostly white gay men. The unidentified white lesbian was the victim, not the "leader." The only leader which took action was the crowd itself.

I remember hearing about the riots a couple of years after the fact (news coverage wasn't what you'd call "extensive"), and remember the reports of drag queens and gay men rioting. Suddenly, by the '80s and the rise of the New Left, the whole thing was the work of trans folk. (I'm not going to belabor a possible connection there -- draw your own conclusions.) I noted here the documentary evidence that white gay men were, indeed, the majority of the protesters.

As for the film itself, I've only seen a couple of reviews (I admit to being somewhat turned off by blog posts rejoicing in the fact that critics are panning it), and what struck me about them is that they take Emmerich to task for not making the movie they think he should have made. Sorry -- as a long-time reviewer of works in different media, including film, you don't do that. I have no patience with reviews that wind up being about the reviewer rather than the work, and I'm certainly not going to pay attention to them.

I don't know if I'll manage to see it -- it is on limited release, which means my favorite cheap theater is not showing it, and it's a tight month.

I may have more on this, but not right this minute.