Photo courtesy of YouTube.
The day is June 28. The year is 1969. The time is 1:20 a.m.
About 200 gay men, lesbian women, drag queens and nonbinary individuals gather inside Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City. Music is playing, patrons are drinking and dancing is plentiful.
The outside world is coldly unaccepting of the LGBT community, but the confines of the bar provide an escape into another world — one where the hostile reality of life as queer person in the 1960s fades away, and in its place freedom of expression reigns supreme.
But then everything goes to hell.
The music stops. The lights go dark. A few people, recognizing what is about to happen, frantically run toward the doors and windows in an attempt to escape, but it is no use. They are already barred shut.
Police flood into the bar, shouting, “We’re taking the place!” Men are lined up and asked to provide identification. Female police officers directed those dressed as women to the bathroom to have their sex verified. Usually the patrons would comply, but this time no one does.
Outside, the patrol wagons arrive, and police officers herd clubgoers into the vehicles. One officer shoves a drag queen, and she responds with the thwack of her purse on his head. The crowd, growing larger by the minute, begins to boo and tension builds.
“Why don’t you guys do something,” wails a lesbian woman in handcuffs. Moments later, an officer throws her into the back of the vehicle.
Angered by her mistreatment, the crowd grows irate and then violent. They fight back against the police officers, forcing a handful of officers to barricade themselves in the bar.
No one at the time knew it, but this was just the beginning of three days of violent protests soon to be known as the Stonewall Riots, largely considered the catalyst for the modern LGBT civil rights movement in the U.S.
Forty-six years later, it seems impossible that police officers would target a group of people solely for their gender identity or sexual orientation.
“We’re much more tolerant and enlightened now,” you’ll likely say. “Sure that happened in the past, but today people are free to be themselves without restriction.”
Yet, in one of the most peculiar twists of irony, a film based on the Stonewall Riots — titled Stonewall — suggests the opposite. Released on Sept. 25, the film highlights the internalized homophobia, fetishization of masculinity and whitewashing of queer history that still looms large in society today.
Let’s start with the problematic comments from Roland Emmerich — the director of the film, which bombed at the box office after grossing a measly $112,414 in its opening weekend — as he defends his choice to make a masculine, white, cisgender boy named Danny the movie’s main character, even though many of the leaders in the riots were people of color, drag queens and nonbinary individuals.
“You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” Emmerich said in an interview with BuzzFeed. “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”
Altering the history of LGBT activism to make it more digestible for straight audiences is abhorrent, especially when it means minimizing the contributions of passionate advocates like Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen reported to have fought back against the police during the riot, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a transgender woman who helped lead the resistance before she was arrested.
Instead of being recognized for the dynamic characters they are — and the phenomenal leading roles they could be for a properly made movie about Stonewall — they are relegated to the sidelines, merely minor characters overshadowed by the muscular, oh-so-attractive and oft-scantily-clad Danny (Jeremy Irvine).
In the eyes of Emmerich, it seems, it doesn’t matter how large a contribution a person has made to the cause of LGBT equality. Unless they are attractive, white and “straight-acting” — which, by the way, a gay man can never be, considering that acting straight means having relations with a person of the opposite gender — they are merely a hindrance on ticket sales.
This also begs the question: If someone is uncomfortable seeing a movie because it has a transgender or nonbinary main character, what makes Emmerich think they would attend a movie about a pivotal moment in the LGBT rights movement, no matter how “manly” the main character is? The answer, I presume, is that they wouldn’t, and by drastically whitewashing the key figures in the Stonewall Riots, Emmerich likely turned off a sizable amount of LGBT people who would have otherwise headed to the movies in droves.
An important point to remember, however, is that the flaws within this movie are indicative of much more wide-scale problems.
For years, groups like the Human Rights Campaign deemed transgender rights as secondary to advancing the cause of marriage equality. This was done both explicitly in their words — Elizabeth Birch, the executive director of the campaign from 1995-2004, said making transgender inclusion a legislative priority would occur “over my dead body” — and implicitly in the group’s lukewarm support over the years of nondiscrimination laws that covered gender identity.
It seems to me that many gay advocates believed the general public would be much more willing to accept two men or two women falling in love than they would someone assigned male at birth who identifies as a woman. (The organization today, however, is a much more passionate advocate for the rights of transgender and nonbinary individuals.)
Yet the root of these problems are on an individual basis. Within the LGBT community, terms like “straight-acting” and “discreet” — which means a person is not easily identifiable as gay — are considered by many as badges of honor that prove they aren’t like “most gays.”
On dating applications such as Grindr and Tinder, guys often include “no fems” and “masculine only” as important traits they seek in a partner. It seems that Emmerich is not the only gay man who has reservations about the acceptability of those who fall outside of gender stereotypes — in fact, based on my interactions on gay dating apps, many gay guys themselves unabashedly consider femininity a deal breaker.
Caitlyn Jenner herself has also dipped her toe into “respectability politics,” or when a marginalized group alters its values in an attempt to appear compatible with the majority. She defended Halloween costumes made at her expense, saying, “I’m in on the joke,” even if, she added, many in the transgender community still find it offensive.
She also tried to define herself as a “reasonable” transgender individual and not like those other ornery advocates, saying, “Now, the community — you know, GLAAD, all the people in the community — are like, ‘Oh my God, you have to get the pronouns right, you have to do this, you have to do that.’ I’m much more tolerant than that.”
While the concept of what being transgender means might confuse some people at first, Jenner’s acceptance of misgendering from others is wrong. It seems that Jenner is satisfied with begrudging tolerance and doesn’t require wholesale acceptance of who she is. In fact, she speaks as if her contentment with ridicule and lack of understanding about her gender identity makes her more tolerable than transgender individuals who aren’t satisfied with half-hearted approval.
Granted, I am a cisgender male, and thus can’t speak on behalf of transgender individuals, but I believe that most would disagree with Jenner on these issues, just as most LGBT individuals disagree with the rewriting of history within Stonewall.
It’s 2015, and there’s never been a better time to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or any other identity that falls outside societal norms. There are so many types of amazing people and diverse ideas within the LGBT community that it’s unconscionable to mute their voices and erase their experiences because we believe they stray too far from the norm.
So be loud, be proud and express yourself freely — and if someone has a problem with that, it’s their loss.
