Stonewall: Strange But True

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20th Century America, Ed Murphy, Homosexuality, New York City, Seymour Pine, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, The 1960s

There is a subplot in Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich) that revolves around the activities of the nefarious Ed ‘the Skull’ Murphy (Ron Perlman), a mysterious but threatening figure who seems to basically run the bar. This subplot reads like a ludicrous invention, an effort to shoehorn more drama into the riot, as if Emmerich thinks the riot itself isn’t enough of a reason for the audience to care. But, surprisingly, a substantial portion of the subplot is true. Ed Murphy’s life story is probably the most wildly improbable thing about the actual Stonewall Riots.

 

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

When Seymour Pine (Matt Craven) raids the Stonewall Inn for the first time in the film, early in the week, he takes Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) into custody and questions him about the death of a street youth that he knows, but he denies knowing anything. Later in the film, it emerges that Murphy is running a prostitution ring in which street youth are kidnapped, pimped out, and then apparently murdered. Danny (Jeremy Irvine) gets kidnapped and is forced to turn a trick at a hotel. Initially he thinks his client is an older but conventionally dressed man, but after that man disappears into a bedroom, another older man, Jay, emerges, grotesquely dressed as a woman and starts to initiate sex. But Ray pulls a fire alarm and rescues Danny. They concoct a scheme to confront Murphy, who is in the process of assaulting them when Pine launches his second fateful raid on the Stonewall. So as the movie frames it, Pine was really trying to get evidence of connect Murphy to the killing of the street youth. There’s also some not-clearly explained stuff about missing bonds that Pine thinks might be connected to the Stonewall.

Perlman as Murphy

There are serious problems with the subplot. As I said, it feels too pat, like it’s pure invention. The film completely drops the subplot once the riot starts, except for an epilogue text mentioning Murphy, so the plot never gets resolved in any fashion. Ray and Danny are fictional characters, so their whole part of the plot is untrue. And the scene with Danny in the hotel room, in which Jay the creepy drag queen attempts to have sex with him, is down-right offensive, since sex with an elderly drag queen is presented as a terrible peril that Ray narrowly rescues our beautiful young protagonist from. Danny has already started turning tricks, so the terrible thing about the sex is not the unwilling-sex-for-money element but the fact that the client is repulsive. (One reviewer apparently got the sense that Danny thinks the transvestite is the person who killed the street youth, but I don’t recall anything in the film to suggest that.)

As I said in the first part of my review, the whole scene borders on transphobia (the only reason I say ‘borders on’ is that Danny is being coerced into this, so that there’s an argument to be made that the lack of consent is supposed to be the awful element of the scene). But when Jay comes out of the bedroom, the camera lingers on his swollen ankle in a woman’s shoe and on the garish lipstick he’s wearing, and he literally crawls up Danny’s body, like that dead girl who climbs out of tv sets in The Ring. It’s awful drag, and Jay seems to think he’s passing as a woman when he’s clearly a man. While the protests of the trans community that they are being written out of the story of the Stonewall riots are basically unfounded, this scene pretty much justifies the trans community’s anger against the whole film.

But once we subtract Ray and Danny from this subplot, the rest of it is, surprisingly, based in fact.

The Improbable Life of Ed Murphy

Murphy grew up in Depression-era Manhattan where he was a problem child. He was expelled from a Catholic grammar school and later got sent to a reform school for assaulting a policeman with a milk bottle. After briefly working in a gay bar run by the Jewish mafia, Murphy fought in France in World War II. His post-war career included stints working as the doorman for gay bars, burglarizing dentist’s offices for dental gold, a ten-year term in prison noted for the numerous fights he got into, and finally a stint as a professional wrestler. During his wrestling career, he took to shaving his head and adopted the nickname “The Skull”. His signature move was a head-butt, and he was famous for throwing chairs at fans who booed him. (However, he’s not to be confused with his contemporary, pro wrestler Mike “Skull” Murphy.)

He eventually got a job as a house detective at the New York Hilton, doing discrete security work. And it’s here that his story gets weird. Murphy became involved in a remarkably elaborate prostitution and blackmail ring that operated across the whole country. The ring recruited young, often homeless men, known in gay parlance as ‘chickens’, and used them to turn tricks at the Hilton or sometimes another hotel. Once the hustler got a client into a room, one of two things would happen. Sometimes the chicken would steal the victim’s wallet and leave. They kept the money but turned the contents of the wallet over the ring, who would use the driver’s license and other information to begin blackmailing the victim. In the other scenario, Murphy or other members of the ring would break into the room, posing as members of the Vice Squad. They would threaten to arrest the man, but agree to let him go if the man paid them a “fine” or “bail money”. New York vice cops were notoriously corrupt and bribable in the 1950s and 60s, so the scheme relied on the terrible reputation of the real police to add verisimilitude to the con.

What is truly astounding about this whole scheme is the extraordinary lengths they went to. Sometimes they put the ‘arrested’ victim into a room with a second supposed victim who would then encourage the victim to pay up by talking about how bad it would be if he was outed as homosexual. The fake cops sometimes used real guns, real police badges, and fake copies of actual police paperwork such as arrest warrants. Sometimes they took the victim down to a police precinct and pretended to go inside to “speak with the duty captain” while the victim was held outside in a car by another member of the ring. Sometimes they took the victim into night court and sat in the back of the courtroom while one member would go and chat with the court clerk. In one case, a member of the ring actually tricked a desk officer into putting the victim into a holding cell for a while.

The whole purpose of these elaborate charades was to get the victim to agree to pay up. Once the victim did, the ring drove him to his bank (waiting with him until it opened, if need be) so he could take money out; sometimes they actually waited in line with him. In some cases, they literally had the victim empty his bank account, demanding sums so large the withdrawal required special authorization from a supervisor.

But the demands often didn’t end that day. The ring frequently continued to blackmail its victims long afterward. Sometimes they called the victim pretending to be a reporter who was writing a story about their arrest, to remind him about the risk of exposure. Occasionally, members flew across the country to press a victim for more money, and once went as far as London. In one remarkable incident, they confronted a nuclear scientist at a secure government research facility. The frightened scientist passed them off as personal friends and wound up giving them a tour of the top-secret facilities when a supervisor entered the room. Even more brazenly, when the ring snared a New Jersey congressman, on two occasions they escorted him out of his office on Capitol Hill and flew him by private plane to a New Jersey bank to make a pay-off. They escorted a surgeon out of an operation to make a payment, and escorted an admiral out of the Pentagon. In all, the ring is estimated to have garnered more than $2 million, a colossal sum of money for the period.

This blackmail ring nabbed more than just a New Jersey congressman. Their victims included two generals, a decorated Navy pilot, a reportedly well-known British film producer, an Ivy League professor, the head of the American Medical Association, and several reportedly well-known actors, singers, and other performers. They are thought to have snared famous pianist Liberace at one point. Another victim, Admiral William Church, committed suicide after years of pay-offs when the actual police investigating the ring tried to interview him.

Exactly what role Murphy played in the prostitution scam is unclear. Some have said he was one of its ringleaders, while Murphy later claimed that he joined the ring to act as a police spy, and records suggest he was arrested during the investigation and gave evidence to avoid a jail sentence.

Murphy’s mug shot

When the real police finally learned of the scheme and brought the members of the ring to trial in 1965, the whole thing became a national scandal. The detective supervising the case actually treated the targets as victims rather than as criminals, a surprisingly progressive choice given the way homosexuals were treated in the post-war period. Pressure from the Mattachine Society in the wake of the scandal led the NYPD to end the entrapment operations that made this scheme so plausible.

But That’s Not All

After dodging jail time for his involvement in this scam, Murphy went on to become the door manager of the Stonewall Inn. Historian David Carter thinks that Murphy may have run a prostitution network out of the upper floor of the Stonewall, although he doesn’t explore it much in his book on Stonewall, perhaps because at this remove there simply aren’t many people left who know much about it. Certainly the New York Mafia ran prostitution rings that provided chickens to wealth gay men, including clients such as Liberace, Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, and reportedly a vice-president.

The Stonewall Inn claimed to be a private club that required memberships. Those who wanted entrance had to sign a book. Smart patrons used fake names, but lots of others used their real names. Murphy combined that information with information that the bartenders had pumped from patrons to start blackmailing gay Wall Street bankers.

According to Seymour Pine (who, incidentally, literally wrote the US Army’s handbook on hand-to-hand combat), the thing that actually led to the raid on the Stonewall was not simply its status as a gay bar, but rather a report that negotiable security bonds had vanished from Manhattan brokerage houses and turned up for sale in Europe. A theory emerged that the bonds were stolen by a gay banker who was being blackmailed by the mob, and the activities at the Stonewall made it seem like it could be the center of the blackmail. So Pine claimed in later years that his true goal was to shut down a blackmail ring and not simply to harass the gay community.

Inspector Seymour Pine, about the time of the Stonewall Riots

Carter offers an even more interesting theory on top of these details. He points out that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual and probably in a relationship with Clyde Tolson, his assistant director at the FBI. By the late 1960s Hoover’s sexual interests were a widely whispered secret within the gay community; in fact, a 1968 publication, The Homosexual Handbook, actually outed Hoover by name, but was forced to remove the mention from a subsequent printing of the book. Hoover is rumored to have been a transvestite; although historians have dismissed the story as unsubstantiated, at least two witnesses have insisted that they saw Hoover dressed as a woman at parties at which Mafia-provided hustlers were present. At least one of these hustlers claims to have had a picture of himself with Hoover in drag, which he kept as a way to ensure his own safety from police harassment.

Seymour Pine later in life

From all of this, David Carter theorizes that Ed Murphy may have had compromising photos of Hoover that he used to keep Hoover off the Mafia’s back. He doesn’t have any direct proof of this, but given Murphy’s role in both prostitution and blackmail rings, it is an entirely plausible theory, and one newspaper source reported that one of the leaders of the Hilton prostitution scam had pictures of himself with Hoover, which may be a reference to Murphy, who claimed to have known Hoover.

Ed Murphy in 1978

And that brings me back to the offensive scene with the elderly transvestite. It fits what we know of Ed Murphy’s activities. Murphy was at one point rumored to have participated in the kidnapping of a street youth, Carter suspects he was running a prostitution ring, and he may have had a connection to Hoover.

And that’s why I think that Jay is supposed to be Hoover; Jeremy Irvine has broadly hinted at this. And note Hoover’s first initial.

But Wait! There’s More!

Murphy’s life had one last surprising twist to it. After a career as a petty criminal, soldier, doorman at gay bars, pro wrestler, pimp, blackmailer, and police informant, in the wake of the Stonewall Riots he fashioned an even more improbable identity for himself as a gay rights activist.

In 1972, he founded the Christopher Street Festival, timed to coincide with the growing Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, and in 1974, he persuaded the parade’s organizing committee to reverse the direction of the parade, so that it would start at Central Park and end at Christopher Street. His motive for this was probably money, since if the parade ended at Christopher Street, all the bars and businesses there were likely to turn a nice profit, but he insisted in later life that of all the people running the Stonewall Inn, he was the only one who actually cared about gay rights. He took to calling himself the First Stonewaller and began riding in a float in the parade.

Ed Murphy in a Pride Parade

Over the course of the next two decades, Murphy became a highly respected activist, doing charity work for a variety of causes including homeless street youth, prostitutes, and the mentally handicapped. Whereas the street youth in Stonewall distrust Murphy, he was in fact beloved by the real street youth, who nicknamed him ‘Mother’. When the AIDS crisis developed Murphy championed that issue as well. In 1978, he formally came out as gay and led a march in support of an anti-discrimination bill for New York City. He acted as a witness against mafia figures who controlled the gay bars, and decried the police corruption of the 1960 by which gay bars paid off the police to be notified when raids were coming; he claimed that the police had been paid off literally hours before the second Stonewall raid. By the end of his life, he had become known as the Mayor of Christopher Street (although he’s not the only figure that title has been applied to, since Marsha P. Johnson was another candidate for that honor). When he died of AIDS in 1989, he received a standing-room only funeral and was posthumously named Grand Marshall of what was by that point the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade.

So the Stonewall Riots weren’t just transformative for the gay community in New York City. They also apparently gave Murphy an opportunity to redeem himself for the way he had preyed on the gay community earlier in his life. It’s a pity that the film couldn’t make his sub-plot more satisfying, because he was much more fascinating person than the film suggests.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, seriously, get David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

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Stonewall: There’s Got to be a Morning After

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20th Century America, Christopher Street Liberation Day, Dick Leitsch, Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Liberation Front, Homosexuality, Mattachine Society, New York City, Roland Emmerich, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, Sylvia Rivera, The 1960s

In my previous post, I explored all the rioting that Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich) left out. In this post, I want to talk about something else the film left out, namely almost everything that followed the riots. The riots themselves aren’t really what matters. What matters is how the riots changed the gay community in the year that followed. In the movie, after the riots, the film jumps ahead to Danny (Jeremy Irvine) returning home to visit his former lover and his way more interesting kid sister. And then he goes back to New York City, bumps into the street youth including Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) and then participates in a huge march to Central Park. The viewer is left to figure out for him or herself how the riots produced the parade.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

Prior to the riots, the gay community existed mostly underground. Gays, lesbians, and trans people tended to meet furtively, in the few bars that would tolerate their presence. Gay men congregated in parks, back alleyways, and in places that were generally deserted at night, like docks and warehouse districts, looking for anonymous sex. There were a few public organizations, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, that had enjoyed modest success in pushing for limited legal rights for gays and lesbians, and a few gays had dared to appear on television and radio shows. But that was as far as organization went.

The riots changed that dramatically. Just a few days after the riots, a leaflet began to circulate that read “Are The Homosexuals Revolting? You Bet Your Sweet Ass We Are” and announced the formation of group to further this revolution. Dick Leitsch, president of the New York branch of the Mattachine Society, wrote an account of his experience during the Riots, titled “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” (‘dropping a hairpin’ being gay slang for hinting about being gay), and circulated it widely within the gay community.

When the Mattachine Society held a meeting on July 9^th, not even two weeks after the raid on the Stonewall Inn, more than 100 people attended. More than 200 attended another meeting the next week. While Leitsch struggled to control the meeting and tried to emphasize the Mattachine’s strategy of respectable protest, the street youth who attended the meeting would have none of it, insisting on a more confrontational approach. On July 30^th, about 500 gays, lesbians, and trans people marched from Washington Square Park to the Stonewall, shouting “Gay Power!” In the months to come, this more militant approach tended to displace the Mattachine Society’s more respectful strategy toward fighting for gay rights.

Over the next several months, numerous groups were formed to demand rights for gays and lesbians. The Gay Liberation Front began hosting dance parties where gays and lesbians could dance without having to give money to the Mafia. The simple right to congregate and dance was tremendously important to them; when a lesbian was punched in the face by a staffer at a Mafia-controlled bar for refusing to stop dancing with another woman, the GLF organized a dance-in at the bar and refused to be intimidated by the owners.

Come Out, the newspaper of the GLF

In general, the GLF was the most in-your-face of these new groups. They actively sought confrontation with straights. When the Village Voice refused to run ads containing the word ‘gay’, the GLF protested with a large crowd outside its office (which, as I mentioned in my previous post, was across the street from the Stonewall) and got it to change its policy. The GLF also began confronting politicians at public meetings and candidates forums. They launched a newspaper, set up a bail fund, and began organizing to feed the street youth.

But the militancy and fractious nature of the GLF also alienated some gays and lesbians, who organized the Gay Activists Alliance in response. The GAA focused on forging a sense of gay and lesbian identity and refused to get sidetracked with other political causes the way the GLF frequently did. They demanded a meeting with Mayor Lindsey’s administration, and actually got one, although it was with an advisor who promptly ignored their demands. The GAA adopted the Greek letter Lambda as their logo, creating a symbol that continues to be used long after the GAA has disbanded.

The GAA marching in a parade

In late February of 1970, Seymour Pine, who had led the raid on the Stonewall, similarly raided the Snake Pit, another Mafia-owned bar that catered to homosexuals. When the patrons began to congregate outside, Pine feared a repeat of the rioting, and arrested 167 people and took them down to the Sixth Precinct. One of the patrons, an Argentinean named Diego Vinales, leapt from a second floor window  of the precinct building and was impaled on the spikes of the fence outside.

Vinales survived, and was eventually cut loose from the fence and taken to a hospital, but word began to spread that he was dead or dying, and the crowd inside the precinct became angry and turned the arrests into a spontaneous sit-in. In the confusion, several gays slipped into the police chief’s office and used his phones to alert the media, both mainstream and the new gay newspapers, and the GAA.

Later that day, a crowd of 500 gathered in front of the Stonewall to protest and marched to the Sixth Precinct. It eventually marched to Vinales’ hospital to hold a vigil. The fact that such a crowd could be raised so quickly showed just how far the movement had come in barely more than half a year.

Congressman Ed Koch wrote to the police commissioner demanding to know why Pine had violated the commissioner’s promise to not entrap or harass gays and lesbians. He became the first elected official to speak up for homosexuals, and his willingness to align himself with the gay community was a factor in his eventual election to the mayor’s office. In May, the GAA badgered Carol Greitzer, a city councilwoman, into agreeing to sponsor a bill banning job discrimination against homosexuals. Sylvia Rivera, a truly fearless transwoman, claimed that she hit Greitzer over the head with the petition in support of the bill.

Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, dedicated to helping what would eventually come to be called trans people, and established Star House, a shelter for street youth. (Sadly, the considerable efforts of trans men and women to support gay liberation ran into enormous resistance from gays and particularly lesbians, who often derided trans women as “female impersonators”. As a result, when a bill banning job discrimination did finally get passed in 1986, all mention of trans people had been removed. The hostility Rivera encountered eventually led her to leave New York City and abandon activism for two decades.)

Trans activist Sylvia Rivera

Vinales’ accident, and the publicity it received in the traditional media, helped shift public opinion against police raids and in favor of fully-legal gay bars, with the result that gay bars began to proliferate in the next few years. The Stonewall Inn, however, closed about three months after the riots. It had drawn too much attention for the Mafia to feel comfortable with it, and its owner, Fat Tony, was murdered, perhaps because of his tendency to talk too much when he was high.

Craig Rodwell pushed for an event to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, and on June 28^th, 1970, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march took place. About 20 groups were represented and what started as several hundred people marching from Christopher Street to Central Park had swelled to several thousand by the time the march reached its destination. A few years later, the annual parade reversed its route so that the party at the end benefitted the businesses along Christopher Street. The Christopher Street Liberation Day parade eventually turned into a Gay Pride Parade and inspired countless similar parades annually around the world. Germany’s main pride event is still called Christopher Street Day.

The first Gay Pride parade, Christopher Street Liberation Day

So in that sense, it is possible to trace a straight line from the Stonewall Riots down to contemporary Gay Pride events, still usually held in June in honor of the Stonewall Riots, although many younger gays, lesbians, and trans people no longer realize that Gay Pride is actually a commemoration of that event. Indeed, many worry today that Pride Parades are simply becoming a new way for corporations to market goods to gays and lesbians.

It’s a shame that Emmerich chose to skip over everything that happened between the Stonewall Riots and the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade a year later, because that year saw the unleashing of an enormous tide of energy, enthusiasm, protest, anger, and organizing. Reading about all those events, arguments, and organizational work makes me a little envious of those who lived through that heady period, although I’m deeply grateful that I get to live with the fruits of their decades-long struggle rather than having to put up with the considerable social stigma, discrimination, and violence that those earlier activists encountered. One activist commented just a few days after Stonewall, “All I know is I’ve only been in this movement three days, and I’ve been beaten up three times!” (Carter, Stonewall, p. 213).

A Brazilian Gay Pride event

The film offers a far simpler narrative, in which the riots just magically give birth to a parade a year later, instead of acknowledging the parade as a piece of strategic planning by Rodwell, who realized that commemorating the riots would help build a gay identity and a sense of history for a people who, at the time, were perceived as having no history. The story of Danny Winter, budding gay rights activist working in post-Stonewall New York City would have been a much more interesting story than the one Emmerich chose to give us. I suppose now I’m just complaining that Emmerich didn’t film the movie I would like to see, but if you’re going to totally make up someone to drop into an historical event, wouldn’t you want to focus his story on the interesting stuff?

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

Stonewall: Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting

Tags

20th Century America, Craig Rodwell, Homosexuality, Mattachine Society, New York City, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, The 1960s

In my previous post, I discussed the first night of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and how they are depicted in Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich). After the riot scene, the film jumps forward a year, and shows its hero, Danny Winter (Jeremy Irvine) returning to his family home in small-town Indiana, in search of the quarterback he’s still in love with for some reason. That creates the impression that the Stonewall Riots lasted only a single night, Friday the 27^th. In reality, the police raid on Friday night touched off six nights of clashes between the police and protestors. So instead of devoting so much screen time to Danny’s tedious back story, which could probably have been explained in 4 lines of dialog and perhaps some attempts to call home, the film should have explored the reasons why Friday night wasn’t the end of the matter.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

Saturday Night: The Biggest Riot

While it’s understandable that Emmerich decided to concentrate on the most famous night of the conflict, it’s an unfortunate oversimplification, because the Friday night riot was not in fact the biggest one. The crowd Friday night has been estimated to be 4-500 people in size, which means it was only the third largest night. Over the course of Saturday afternoon, as word about the previous night’s events spread, people began going down to Christopher Street to see the damage for themselves. The result was a slowly growing crowd of street youths, gays, lesbians, hippies, and even a few tourists that by 9pm had come to number 2-3000. The crowd began singing, chanting, and shouting slogans like “Gay power!” and “Christopher Street belongs to the Queens!” A few activists from the Mattachine Society and Craig Rodwell, a very important activist at the time who had broken with Mattachine over its cautiousness, handed out fliers. Members of the crowd began kissing each other, a truly radical gesture that horrified some of the older, more closeted gays who had shown up. The general mood was one of anger mixed with pride at the previous night’s events. The police kept trying to disperse the crowd, and the Stonewall Inn’s owners sought to draw people in to the re-opened bar.

The size of the crowd was probably a combination of curiosity about how much damage had been down, anger over a dramatic incident of police harassment (this was, in fact, the second raid on the Stonewall in one week), and surprise and curiosity about how a community perceived as lacking in masculinity and the ability to fight back had managed to hold the riot police at bay for so long.

A group of street youth posing on the second night of riots

The hotness of the evening began to raise tempers and at some point around perhaps 10pm, the crowd decided to block the street to vehicles. Cars and buses that tried to get through the crowd were harassed. The only casualty of the whole riots happened when a taxi driver became so terrified that he had a fatal heart attack. The crowd began to throw bottles and garbage at the police, and the trash cans were lit on the fire, something that happened frequently during the riots. Not too far away stood the House of Detention, New York’s women’s prison, and the inmates (who included Afeni Shakur, future rapper Tupak Shakur’s mother) began to light toilet paper on fire and throw it out the window to express solidarity.

Marsha P. Johnson, one of the leaders on the previous night, climbed a lamppost (in a dress and high heels, no less) and dropped a bag containing a large heavy object into the windshield of a police car. The officers in the car grabbed the nearest person, who wasn’t a protester, pulled him into the car and drove off, beating their hapless prisoner. In another incident, a group of six policemen began to savagely beat a street youth who had not done anything, but around 50 Queens attacked them, rescued the boy, and allowed themselves to be beaten rather than turn him over to the police.

When the crowd attacked another police car with a cinder block, the police radioed for help. For the next several hours, approximately 100 officers struggled to deal with the crowd. Around 2:15am, 150 riot police showed up to provide assistance. Unlike the first night’s riot police, this group was equipped with riot shields and marched down Christopher Street in a tight phalanx, forcing the crowd to retreat. The street youth responded the way they had the night before, with a Rockettes-style kick line. The result was initially much as it had been the night before. The street youth made good use of the peculiar street plan, which involved short blocks and streets meeting at odd angles, to thwart police efforts to drive them off. When they were pushed out of one block, they simply ran down the street, around the corner, and came at the police from a different direction.

A map of the confused Greenwich Village streets around the Stonewall

Unlike the previous night, however, the police successfully occupied the block of Christopher Street that houses the Stonewall. But they were unable to force the protesters out of the surrounding streets. In one incident, two police officers chased a crowd of more than 100 protestors down a street, until the crowd realized how badly it outnumbered the police. Suddenly it was the police officers who had to flee from the crowd, which was shouting  “Catch them! Fuck them!”  It was not until 3:30am that the police succeeded in fully restoring order.

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday: Things Quiet Down

The following three nights, the police modified their strategy. On Sunday, the police realized that they had to show up with large forces very early in the evening and prevent crowds to forming. The Mattachine Society posted a public notice at the Stonewall Inn calling for peace and quiet, whereas Rodwell sought to continue the protests to maximize their impact. The result was that the protests were smaller and more dispersed. One group of street youth took advantage of the heavy police presence on Christopher Street to go down to the Sixth Precinct and plaster both police cars and the private cars of officers with “Equality for Homosexuals” bumper stickers.

The notice posted by the Mattachine Society in the window of the Stonewall

The Stonewall stayed open and in what might be a rare example of genuine historical irony, the police actually encouraged people to go into it. Poet Allen Ginsberg stopped by Stonewall and danced with the street youth. He famously remarked, “You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

Monday and Tuesday night were relatively quiet. The police continued their strategy of preventing crowds from forming, and rain and the fact that it was a workday depressed turnout. But the police became increasingly confrontational, perhaps to restore their wounded pride. Many officers shouted insults at gays, and one man was arrested purely for talking back to a belligerent officer. On Tuesday night, a police officer was mobbed while beating a protester, and his badge was stolen. It was found the next night, hanging from a tree on a string of pickled pigs’ feet.

Wednesday: The Last Night of Rioting

But on Wednesday, things heated up again. The Village Voice, which despite being a liberal newspaper was deeply anti-gay in this period, made the mistake of publishing two articles on the riots, which happened literally across the street from their offices. The articles were peppered with phrases like ‘limp wrists”, “the Sunday fag follies”, “dancing faggots”, and “the forces of faggotry”. The two articles infuriated the gay community, and a crowd of between 500 and 1000 people descended on the building and argued about whether to burn it down.

A photo from the sixth night of the riots

Additionally, by this point, word about the riots had spread through the leftist community in the city, and large numbers of Black Panthers, Yippies, and other radicals came down to Christopher Street looking to fight the police. They understood that the gays had somehow been able to defeat the police on the first two nights and wanted to participate in that. The Rev Irene Monroe, a middle-schooler at the time, says that a large group of blacks came in from Brooklyn on the first night of the riots trying to find a member of their community who was known to frequent the Stonewall, but the only night that David Carter reports a large group of heterosexual black protesters appearing is Wednesday, so it’s possible her memory of the date is wrong. The raid on the Stonewall didn’t happen until 1:20am, and the violence didn’t start for some time after that, so it unlikely the word of the rioting reached anyone in the wider NYC area much before 2am, and it seems curious to me that a middle-schooler would have been allowed to roam the city so late at night. But on later nights the protests started much earlier.

The crowd by this point was seriously angry, and Wednesday’s riot lacked the half-camp ridicule of the first two nights. This night appears to have been the most violent. A number of gay-friendly shops were looted, presumably by non-locals who didn’t know which businesses had a history of being gay-friendly or exploiting gays. Dick Leitsch, the president of the Mattachine Society, described seeing the extent of the injuries suffered by the street youth. “7^th Avenue from Christopher to West 10^th looked like Vietnam. Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs, and necks….The exploiters had moved in…blacks and students who want a revolution, any kind of revolution …swelled the crowd…but ‘graciously’ let the queens take all the bruises and suffer all the arrests.” (Carter, Stonewall, p. 204) Unlike previous nights, the violence that night ended quickly, in about an hour.

A photo from the last night of the riots

Wednesday night was the last night of the riot. Protesters vowed to return, and police expected trouble because Thursday was the start of a four-day weekend for the 4^th of July, but although a large crowd of people appeared, there was little trouble.

Despite the violence and the size of the crowds, arrests were surprisingly few. On the first night, only 13 people were arrested (7 of them employees of the Stonewall), on the second night 4, and on the last night, only 5. A total of five officers are known to have been injured, including officers who sustained a broken wrist, a fractured leg, a serious cut under one eye, and a bite on the arm. Many protesters sustained broken ribs and arms, among the more serious injuries. A number of those arrested reported being beaten several hours later, down at the precinct.

Why did the protests go on for so many nights? The answer is clearly complex. Much of it was clearly pent-up frustration on the part of the gay community over how gays were treated by the police. Once the cat was out of the bag, the gay community clearly wanted to express its anger. The street youth played a large role in most nights of the protest, and in their case they may have been driven by their anger at their situation and a desire to extend the upside-down situation in which they momentarily felt a sense of power over the police. The riots began to subside on Sunday, due in part to the tactics of the police, but perhaps also because many of the initial protestors had been injured or decided that they had gotten away narrowly on the previous nights. The resurgence of the violence on Wednesday was clearly due to the inflammatory articles published by the Voice as well as the desire of outside groups to strike a blow against the police. But it’s also clear that the police gradually became more interested in inciting violence as a way to avenge their previous humiliations. Riots are rarely mono-causal events; a specific incident will trigger violence, but it takes a powder keg of anger, resentment, and perceived grievance to produce a substantial crowd willing to engage in multiple days of violence. That the violence was in considerable measure driven by a segment of the community normally perceived as passive and unwilling to resist speaks volumes about the depth of resentment gays felt.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

Stonewall: A Butch Too Far

Tags

1960s, 20th Century America, David Carter, Homosexuality, Jeremy Irvine, Jonny Beauchamp, Marsha P Johnson, New York City, Roland Emmerich, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots

A couple weeks ago I looked at the trailer for Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich), a new film looking at the 1969 Stonewall Riots that triggered the Gay Rights movement. Well, it came out this week and I figured since it’s in the theaters right now, I ought to post my thoughts about it, even though I haven’t finished my review of The Physician. So if you’ve been waiting to find out about the Isfahan sequence in that film you’re gonna have to wait a while longer. And this post is also a bit longer than usual, because the material is fairly complex and controversial.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

The history of the Stonewall riots, especially the all-important first night (Friday, June 27^th), is an extremely confused one. It’s the nature of riots to be chaotic and confusing events, and the existence of so many first-person accounts of the events has created a great deal of disagreement about who did what and when. Many participants were drunk, high, or both. Additionally, like flower children and Woodstock, many gays, lesbians, and transwomen have made a habit of inserting themselves into the narrative and claiming to have played one key role or another (see note at bottom for a discussion of the gender terminology I’ve opted to use here). Because Stonewall was a foundational moment for the gay community, there’s a lot of social prestige to be had by claiming to have been there.

For example, the black lesbian performer Stormé Delarverie, claimed to be the butch lesbian whose 10-minute struggle with the police riled the crowd into intervening, but police arrest records seem to suggest it may have been Marilyn Fowler, a white lesbian. Sylvia Rivera, a Latina transwoman, claimed to have thrown the first punch and the first beer can, but Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen claims that Rivera was not actually present the first night, because she was sleeping off heroin in a nearby park, and Rivera told numerous conflicting stories about her role in the riot. Most people agree that Johnson was present the first night of the riot, but Johnson’s account of her actions, which involved throwing a shot glass inside the bar, seems to have been transformed by urban legend into throwing the first brick outside (I haven’t been able to find any source that has Johnson claiming to have thrown a brick, just lots of websites saying “many claim” she did). Eliot Tiber, a gay white man, insists that Judy Garland’s death helped spur him and other patrons of the Stonewall into rioting, even though the Garland claim has been debunked; Tiber also claims to have ‘rescued’ Woodstock a few weeks later. Miss Major Griffin Gracy, a black transwoman activist, claims to have been present, but has denied that Johnson was present and has also denied that there were many gay men involved, both claims that are refuted by numerous other participants, which makes her testimony appear unreliable. The list goes on.

Marsha P. Johnson

So in my look at the film, I’ve decided to rely heavily on what is, in my opinion, the best piece of scholarship on the Stonewall Riots, David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York, 2010). Carter’s book is a meticulously pieced-together work of history. In addition to interviewing numerous eyewitnesses (and being careful to not mention what other eyewitnesses had told him), he backs up his analysis with a wide range of published sources, as well as many he unearthed for the first time, and does an excellent job of weaving the various accounts of the riots together into a timeline of events, although he admits to one or two places where he is uncertain exactly what happened.

David Carter

The Film

Stonewall centers on Danny Winter, a wholesome-looking white boy from small town Indiana who gets thrown out of his house just before graduating high school when he’s caught having sex with the quarterback of the football team. He inexplicably goes to Christopher St in New York City, then a center of barely tolerated gay culture, and meets a group of effeminate homeless gay youth, including the Latino Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), who starts teaching him how to survive on the streets. Ray takes him to the Stonewall Inn and within three months Danny has become a fixture of the community.

Jeremy Irvine as Danny Winter

Unfortunately, the villainous Ed ‘the Skull’ Murphy (Ron Perlman) decides that Danny is just right for his ring of hustlers, kidnaps Danny, and basically rents him out to a pair of men at a hotel. Ray intervenes to rescue him and they hatch an idiotic plan to threaten Ed with exposure to the police. It’s at this moment, when Ed is choking the consciousness out of Ray, that Detective Seymour Pine (Matt Craven) launches his second police raid of the week on the Stonewall Inn, unintentionally saving Ray and Danny from Ed but pissing off the patrons of the bar enough that a riot breaks out during which the police are trapped in the bar under siege by a mob of angry gays.

When the riot, which Danny and the street kids participate in aggressively, winds down, the film jumps forward a year, to Danny’s tearful reunion with his mother and his younger sister Phoebe (Joey King), who come to New York to watch him march in the first Gay Pride parade.

Cinematically, the major problem with the film is that Danny’s story is, frankly, boring. As a hero, he’s remarkably bland, indecisive, and in need of rescuing, and he has generic Hollywood good looks. It’s a major problem when the hero’s young sister, who only appears in a handful of scenes, is a more interesting character than he is. I wanted to know more about this precocious young teen who reads J.D. Salinger and wants Andy Warhol’s autograph, and less about our white-bread hero who still pines for his high school crush after living through a transformative moment of gay liberation.

Additionally, the film has serious issues with its treatment of its more effeminate characters. The first gay person Danny encounters is Queen Tooey, a creepy older queen that Danny is clearly repulsed by. Later, when Danny is forced into turning a trick with the men in the hotel, one of them turns out to be a rather loathsome transvestite. And although Danny likes Ray, he’s not attracted to the effeminate Ray but to the more traditionally masculine Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Danny’s function, as Emmerich has acknowledged, is to make the film accessible to straight audiences, but it’s highly unfortunate that the audience identification character is positioned to re-affirm traditional ideas about masculine desirability; the film never questions why Danny is uncomfortable with effeminate men, and his lack of sexual interest in them is presented as ‘normal’.

Roland Emmerich

That has nothing directly to do with the historicity of the film, which is the subject of my blog, but it has a lot to do with the hostility the film has aroused in the gay and trans community. Many trans people have claimed that the film fundamentally misrepresents the riot by downplaying the role of drag queens and transwomen in favor of a traditionally handsome white male. And that gets us into the question of who the rioters at Stonewall actually were.

The Participants in the Stonewall Riot

The question of who really rioted that night in 1969 has, in the past decades, become a rather controversial one. Black and Latino gays and transwomen have staked a claim to being the instigators of the whole riot. If you review my third paragraph you’ll see what I mean. A black lesbian claimed to be the first person to actually fight the police, a Latina transwoman claimed to have through the first punch and the first beer can, a black drag queen claimed to have been the first person to resist, and a black transwoman claimed that most of the rioters were drag queens and transwomen. All of these claims are open to challenge, but it’s clear that a lot of people find it very important that their segment of the LGBT community played a role in starting the resistance out of which the Gay Rights movement grew. (Just last month, two trans activists defaced George Segal’s famous statues of a lesbian couple in Christopher Park to demonstrate their claim that “black + Latina trans women led the riots” and Miss Major approves of their action.)

The first question is who the patrons of the Stonewall Inn were. Some people have depicted the Stonewall Inn as hosting a cross-section of the entire gay community as it existed in the late 1960s: white, black, Latino, masculine, effeminate, drag queen, transvestite, middle class, lower class, and so on. The Stonewall was an illegal, Mafia-run bar that lacked running water, fire exits, a liquor license, or an occupancy certificate, but it was able to attract its clientele because the State Liquor Authority refused to issue liquor licenses to bars that catered to gays and lesbians. (Contrary to the movie’s prologue text, it was not illegal in 1969 to serve alcohol to gays; that practice was overturned in 1967 by a lawsuit brought by the early gay rights organization the Mattachine Society.) The Stonewall was not the only bar in New York City with a homosexual clientele, but it was centrally located within Greenwich Village, the heart of the New York gay community, and close to bus routes and the subway system, which made it a popular and accessible destination.

The Stonewall Inn shortly before the riots

1960s gay male society tended to bifurcate into two broad camps: the ‘Butches’ (who preferred to be called ‘homosexuals’) and the ‘Queens’, derisively also called the Sissies, Swishes, Nellies, and Fairies. The Butches were men who presented a traditionally masculine gender identity and were therefore able to pass as heterosexuals. They tended to be fairly conservative in clothing style and lifestyle, and were deeply in the closet, painfully aware of how easily they could lose their jobs, families, relationships, and respectability if they were exposed as being homosexual, so they tended to adopt a very cautious attitude toward the legal problems they faced, and they favored an incremental, assimilationist strategy. Their preferred organization, the Mattachine Society (virtually the only pre-Stonewall organization for gay men), was pushing for gradual change, but had brought lawsuits that successfully ended police entrapment of homosexuals and exclusion of gays at bars. Beginning in 1965, they began to annually picket Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but insisted that they do so ‘respectably’, meaning single-file, without touching each other, and wearing suits and dresses.

The Queens, on the other hand, were basically everyone who couldn’t easily achieve gender conformity in their mannerisms and presentation. Contrary to its usage these days, Queens were not generally those who dressed in women’s clothing, but simply effeminate men. Danny Garvin, a regular of the scene at the time, described what was called a ‘scare queen’ or a ‘flame queen’; “they were supereffeminate, hair would be teased, they would wear eye makeup, Tom-Jones type shirts, maybe hiphuggers, bright colors.” (Carter, Stonewall, p. 76)

Separate from them were the ‘Drags’: transvestite men who dressed in women’s clothing and who included both modern drag queens and transwomen, as well as men who dressed in women’s clothing for sexual pleasure. As Carter points out, some of the confusion about the rioters may stem from the fact that references to ‘queens’ in the riot have been assumed to refer to drag queens, when in fact they refer to effeminate men more broadly. But Drags were quite rare in public because in 1969 it was illegal for men to dress as women or vice versa; the legal rule was that a person had to wear three items of ‘appropriate’ clothing to be legal, so Drags risked arrest the moment they left the privacy of their own homes.

The Stonewall Inn was attractive to Queens because their non-conformance to 1960s male gender standards meant they were likely to be asked to leave other bars that were willing to serve a more discrete Butch clientele, such as Danny’s, a Village bar that was popular with the Butch crowd. And unlike many other bars, the Stonewall had two dance floors where same-sex dancing was permitted, something that was not countenanced elsewhere.

A third key segment of the gay community in the Village were the Street Queens, effeminate gay youth who were homeless because their inability to conform to standards of masculinity tended to get them thrown out of their homes at a young age and made them less employable. These young men lived on the streets or in cheap hotel rooms and survived by hustling, shoplifting, dealing drugs, and a range of other illegal activities. They tended to congregate around Christopher Park, not even a block from the Stonewall, and they liked the Stonewall because it was willing to allow them entrance, if they had the money for the cover fee. They were known for their quick wit and senses of humor, one of the few forms of social capital they possessed. Carter seems to feel that most of these Street Queens were white, although he mentions a few black and Latino ones (however he doesn’t justify this assertion). The street youth were not Drags, since few of them had the resources to seriously indulge crossdressing at anything other than the most basic level, and as homeless people, they would have run an incredible risk of arrest, simply for crossdressing.

Most sources seem to agree that there were a modest number of lesbians who frequented the bar, and a small number of straight women, although Tina Crosby, who wrote the first history of the Stonewall Riots, says that the people she interviewed all insisted it was a virtually woman-free zone. Men in women’s clothing were few in number inside the Inn. Chuck Shaheen, who helped run the bar, recalled only four who ever attended (three of whom got in because they were big spenders). One of the bartenders, Maggie Jiggs, was a drag queen. Carter argues that the doormen were reluctant to admit more than a small number of men in women’s clothing, presumably because this would have brought further police attention to the illegal bar. Even Sylvia Rivera, a transwoman who was fixture of the drag scene, told an historian that “The Stonewall wasn’t a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time.”

So while there were many men in the bar who were did not conform to 1960s gender standards by doing things like wearing make-up, calling each other ‘she’ and ‘girl’ and ‘Miss Thing’, and dressing in an effeminate style, it is unlikely that the bar hosted large numbers of Drags. Unless Carter failed to locate key participants, or else allowed his own white male identity to skew his understanding of the event, it seems that claims that most of the rioters were drag queens or transwoman of color are substantially incorrect.

A photo from the second night of the riots

The Stonewall Riot

Stonewall follows David Carter’s depiction of the scene at the Stonewall. Marsha P. Johnson (Otoja Abit) is the only full-out Drag in the film, but Queen Tooey is depicted as a scare queen, and several members of the street youth are fairly effeminate, including Ray, Orphan Annie (Caleb Landry Jones), and Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis), who seems to be a combination of Cross-Eyed Sylvia and Zazu Nova Queen of Sex, both street youth mentioned by Carter.

Abit as Johnson

The early stages of the bar raid deviate from Carter’s reconstruction of events because of the fabricated sub-plot involving Ray’s confrontation with Ed Murphy, who gets arrested quickly and handcuffed to Johnson and dragged into a paddy wagon from which they quickly escape; in reality, Murphy was handcuffed to Blonde Frankie, the Butch doorman, and both were able to escape from the paddy wagon as the riot began to develop. Johnson’s claim of throwing a shot glass at a mirror is not depicted.

Those inside the bar were allowed to leave if they could show ID and were ‘appropriately’ dressed. 5 Drags (presumably Johnson among them) were taken into the women’s bathroom to be inspected by two undercover female police and the three who were found to be men were escorted to the paddy wagon; the other two were found to be post-operative transwomen and were allowed to leave. Likewise, a butch lesbian, who was wearing a man’s suit, was handcuffed. Those who exited the bar made a comic scene out of it. In the film Ray initiates an impromptu runway walk for the Street Queens; while not exactly true, it’s certainly in the spirit of what did happen.

But when the butch lesbian begins wrestling with the cops, she shouts “why aren’t you doing anything?” to the crowd of bar patrons and street youth who have congregated outside the bar, and that’s when things start to get ugly. (Most accounts agree that this was the turning point that triggered the violence.) The street youth run to her rescue and fighting breaks out. The shocked police officers, who never expected the ‘fags’ to resist like that, are caught off-guard and badly outnumbered (historically, after the first paddy wagon had departed, Pine had only 8 officers with him, including two undercover women, and only one of them was uniformed, whereas the crowd at this point was probably between 2 and 300 people). The police retreat into the bar and slam the door, barricading it with tables (or, in the film, a jukebox).

Locked out, the cinematic crowd begins throwing things. Queen Cong hands Danny a brick and he throws it through a second floor window. (Although not explained in the film there was a nearby construction site where some rioters found cobblestones to throw.) In Carter’s reconstruction, the first cobblestone is thrown by a Puerto Rican named Gino, not by Johnson.

One of the kids cuts the bar’s phone line (which didn’t happen), and several others including Danny rip up a loose parking meter and use it as a battering ram against the door (which did happen). Another kid finds some lighter fluid, sprays it on the boarded-up windows and through cracks in the door, and lights it on fire. That too happened. Eventually one of the police women crawls through a rear window (in reality an air vent to the roof) and calls the Tactical Police Force (the riot police).

In this whole scene, the rioters are depicted as being mostly street youth, primarily white but with some blacks and Latinos mixed in. Johnson, after leaving to find someone to let her out of her handcuffs, comes back and helps rescue Ray when he’s grabbed by a TPF officer. While there may have been a few other men in women’s clothing in the riot scene, they’re only in the background and not focused on. A famous moment when Johnson smashed the windshield of a cop car using her handbag is omitted from the film.

A typical crowd shot from the film

But overall, the film’s depiction broadly fits Carter’s reconstruction of the riot, and in fact it fits the only known photograph of the first night of the riot. In the photo we see four police officers (one plainclothes) trying to corral a group of more than a dozen street youth. In that group, one is clearly black, three appear to have dark skin, and the rest appear to be mostly white or at least fair-skinned. One man, all the way in back, is wearing what might be a woman’s white blouse, but two others are wearing male clothing, and we cannot see what the rest are wearing. Photos from the other nights of the rioting have roughly the same mix. Only one of the photos that I have seen has a clear image of a Drag (Miss New Orleans, second from left in the first row in the photo from the second night posted a few paragraphs above.) However, it’s documented that on later nights, the crowd became much more mixed, including a sizable contingent of militant blacks.

The photo from the first night

Carter emphasizes that the street youth played a major role in the riot because there were a lot of them in the area (since their preferred haunt, Christopher Park, was less than a block away), they had nothing to lose by being arrested (since they were poor, homeless social outcasts), and their lifestyle included frequent bursts of violence. Most of the figures he interviewed agreed that the street youth dominated the action.

A photo from the sixth night of the riots

Butchness and the Lack Thereof

But there is one group who played relatively little role in the first night of the rioting, namely the Butches. They were less likely to be on-hand, since the Stonewall was less attractive to them given the effeminate patrons that the Butches tended to despise. More importantly though, the Butches saw themselves as having a lot to lose if they were arrested, whereas the street youth didn’t. One of the participants reported seeing that someone had written “where are the butches when we need you?” on the sidewalk at some point during the riot. So it’s clear that the Gay Rights movement owes a very substantial debt to the effeminate gay men, the ones who couldn’t hide in the closet and so for whom gay rights were almost literally a matter of life and death. It was the nellies and the swishes and the fairies who risked their health and life fighting the police that night, not their more deeply-closeted brothers.

Stonewall is at its best when it focuses on the effeminate street youth. The struggle of these young men to survive is effectively demonstrated through Danny’s plight and Ray’s gradual induction of him into their ranks. The film shows us their poverty, their camp humor, their willingness to resort to violence, and their various survival strategies, many of them criminal. Danny, as a previously middle class white youth, gets a lesson in the harshness of homeless life when Ray explains that he literally has no options other than prostitution because he has no family to turn to, no education to use, and no other resources available. Emmerich clearly cares about this dimension of the story.

Ray and Queen Cong

Emmerich wanted to bring the story of the Stonewall Riot to a straight audience, and concluded (perhaps not unreasonably) that using straight-looking handsome white man as his lead would do that. But gay and lesbian stories are becoming more acceptable to straight audiences, and it’s a shame that he didn’t take this opportunity to push his straight audience further, by offering a hero who was less masculine or less white or less Hollywood-leading-man in some other way. And, as I noted, Danny’s reaction to some of the more effeminate men in the film borders on transphobia. If Danny is meant to be the audience identification character and to help educate the audience, then Emmerich had an opportunity and a duty to educate the audience about the more effeminate element of the gay community.

While Stonewall has come in for a lot of criticism even before it came out, I don’t think all of that criticism is warranted. It appears to be drawing much of its narrative from Carter’s book, which has been widely praised and certainly impressed me with the quality of the research. Its general depiction of the demographics of the crowd is solidly supported by historical evidence (although one can argue that Carter may not have interviewed enough people of color). But the film’s choice of a conventionally masculine hero is problematic. For me, it’s not his ethnicity that’s the real problem, since a majority of the rioters seem to have been white. Nor is it the fact that he’s not a transwoman; they didn’t participate on the first night in large numbers either, if Carter is correct. The problem is that Danny is for the most part a Butch, even if he’s homeless, and as I said, the Butches weren’t there in any numbers that first night. The issue isn’t his white male privilege, but rather his Butch privilege.

What shocked the police about the riot is that the rioters were men who were perceived to be deficient in masculinity and who were therefore never expected to fight back. By making Danny conventionally masculine, the film is, on a basic level, betraying the events and encoding a different kind of masculine privilege on the narrative. It may be this fact that truly rankles some of the film’s opponents. Had Danny been a Queen, even if he wasn’t a drag queen, I don’t think the film would have been quite so offensive to the trans community because it would at least have been challenging the Butch privilege and transphobia that is still a major issue in the gay community today. (If you don’t believe me, just browse some gay personals and see how many of them use the phrase ‘straight-acting’, which is the new term for Butches, or that say ‘no fems’.) Or even if Danny had finally paired off with Ray at the end, the film might still have avoided the pattern of transphobia that it offers.

As Carter sees it, one of the most powerful tools employed by the rioters was their ridicule of the police and their challenging of the dominance of conventional masculinity. Repeatedly during the riots, the street youth formed a Rockettes-style chorus line and taunted the approaching police with a song:

            We are the Stonewall girls

            We wear our hair in curls

            We don’t wear underwear

            We show our pubic hairs

            We wear our dungarees

            Around our nelly knees

They did this as a wave of riot police were bearing down on them; at the last moment, they would break and run around the block to get behind the police and then repeat the taunting, demonstrating how incapable the heavily-armed police were of stopping a group of mostly unarmed teenagers from making fun of them. The rioters also frequently offered to have sex with the police, and at least one rioter escaped from a police beating simply by propositioning the officer until he dropped his baton and let the rioter go. This flaunting of gender rules is another reason that the Butches stayed out of the fray for the most part.

The chorus line forming in the film

The film includes the chorus line, which is a very famous detail of the riot, but doesn’t explore its deeper meaning as a strategy of ridicule, because in this film, traditional masculinity retains its value. Danny does not subvert masculinity, but rather embodies it and seeks it out romantically.

Part of the reason I think this matters is that in civil rights clashes of this period, the riot police always won; they always battered down their opponents. But at Stonewall, the riot police lost, or at least were force into an impotent draw. And they lost to a group of people notoriously imagined to lack all masculinity and agency, who defeated them in substantial measure by undermining the masculinity of the riot police. It was the heavily armed police who were revealed to be insufficiently masculine that night. The ability of gays, lesbians, drag queens, and transwomen to manipulate and transgress gender boundaries was revealed to be a source of remarkable strength, not a fatal weakness, and this ability has frequently been used to great effect in public protests. Emmerich’s film completely fails to see this.

Riot police in the film

The story of Stonewall is a complex one, and in Carter’s reconstruction, it has a couple startling twists that I’ll look at in my next post or two.

A Note about Gender Terminology: As I wrote this post, I was conscious of the challenge of employing appropriate gender terminology. My chief concerns were 1) to be respectful to people who identify as trans today and not simply write them out of the past and 2) to be respectful to those people in 1969 and how they understood their gender identity. The chief problem for me is that two of the widely used terms in 1969, transvestite and crossdresser, are ones that many trans people today find offensive. How to refer to a range of people back then while writing today and seeking to be respectful to both past subjects and contemporary audience?

I strongly sympathize with the rights of transmen and women to be referred to with terminology they themselves choose and are comfortable with. But I feel obliged to extend that principle back into the past, and employ a vocabulary that these people in 1969 used to refer to themselves. To apply contemporary terminology to people in the past who used a different set of terms for themselves seems just as rude to me as refusing to speak of modern trans people with their chosen pronouns or applying the labels of the past to them.

So the practice that I finally settled on was, as much as possible, to use terminology that I could find evidence of the subjects themselves using. For those who lived long enough to adopt the term ‘transwoman’, such as Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major Griffin Gracy, that is how I refer to them, even if they would not have used that term in 1969. However, Marsha P. Johnson does not appear to have seen herself as what we would call a transwoman; she used both the terms ‘drag queen’ and ‘transvestite’ (such as when she and Rivera founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries organization in 1970). When dressed as a woman, she was comfortable using pronouns of both genders, but when dressed as a man, Johnson could get very upset if referred to as a woman. Consequently, I refer to Johnson as a drag queen. In the film, Ray, Queen Tooey, and Orphan Annie do not dress as women, although they employ some women’s accessories, and Queen Cong dresses both as a man and a woman in different scenes, although more frequently as a woman. So I have used the term ‘street queen’ for these characters, which was in common usage at the time. For men whose gender identity is unknown, such as the majority of the Drags, I have used ‘crossdresser’ and ‘transvestite’ as roughly interchangeable.

This is not a perfect solution, but in historical writing, one frequently encounters these sorts of terminological challenges and it is usually necessary to adopt some form of imperfect compromise. If I have offended any of my trans readers with this compromise, I apologize and hope my reasons for the decision are at least clear.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

Stonewall: The Trailer

Tags

20th Century America, Gay Rights Movement, Homosexuality, Jeremy Irvine, New York City, Stonewall

Roland Emmerich’s upcoming movie Stonewall, about the 1969 Stonewall Riots, released its first trailer last week and in doing so provoked a good deal of negative commentary and protest. Here’s the trailer:

Now it’s unfair to review a film before it comes out, and trailers can often be profoundly misrepresentative of the film itself. Rather than discuss the events of the riots themselves, I figured I’d provide a few thoughts about the controversy around the trailer so that people can have some context for when they see the film.

The Stonewall Riots, which started on Friday, June 27^th, and recurred for several nights through the following Wednesday, were a spontaneous uprising of gay homeless youth, drag queens and what would today be called transwomen (for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to drag queens, transwomen, and effeminate gay men as ‘transvestites’, the general term used at the time of the riot; some of these people later identified as transwomen, but others did not), and other gays and lesbians. Ethnically it was a very mixed group. The Riots played a key role in sparking the Gay Liberation movement, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Craig Rodwell, who recognized the need for publicity for the infant Gay Liberation movement and so ran to call reporters and get his camera. It was Rodwell who had the idea to commemorate the Riots the following year, a commemoration that eventually turned into the tradition of gays celebrating June with Pride Festivals and Parades.

The Stonewall Inn, one week after the riots

One major criticism of the Gay Rights movement (as Gay Liberation is more commonly called today) is that it has tended to focus on the needs, concerns, and interests of white gay men and women more than those of black or Latino gays and lesbians, transmen and transwomen, leathermen and other more marginal segments of the gay community. For example, the recent Obergefell ruling by the Supreme Court establishing the rights of gays and lesbians to marry, is part of a strategy that seeks to win support for gay rights by emphasizing how similar gays and lesbians are to straight people, even though many gays and lesbians are more interested in alternative relationship models that include open or polyamorous relationships. The needs of transmen and transwomen to have access to appropriate bathroom facilities has only just recently become a topic of serious concern for many gay rights activists, who have often tended to consider the needs of transpeople as a ‘harder sell’ because the straight community is less likely to sympathize with those needs. Many more inclusive activists worry that, having achieved a slate of rights such as marriage and the right to serve in the military, middle class white gays may decide they don’t need to work hard for those on the margins. Indeed, many gays are unsure why transpeople should be included in the Gay Rights movement at all. So after decades of fighting for the rights of the broader gay community, many transpeople and other more marginal groups worry that they may be thrown under the bus or abandoned by the people who used to be their allies. They worry about being ‘erased’ from the past, their lives and contributions swept to the margins of the past just as so many of them are today.

As a result, the role of transvestites, blacks and Latinos in the Stonewall Riots is of more than just academic interest. Much interest has focused on the question of who started the riot. A black lesbian has been reported as the first person to struggle with the police, a Latina transwoman claimed to have thrown the first punch and the first bottle, and a black drag queen has been cited as the first person to throw a brick. If these claims are true, if black and Latino transvestites were central to the riot, then these segments of the gay community have always been part of the movement and they are central to it, not just on the margins. If the first people to resist the police on that day in 1969 were blacks, Latinos, and transvestites, then the rights that I currently enjoy as a married white gay man are in considerable measure due to the struggles of those blacks, Latinos, and transvestites, and I owe them the benefit of my efforts to help them win their rights. (Whether these claims are actually true or not is an issue I’ll tackle when I post about the film after it comes out; as it turns out, the issue is more complex than many assume.)

The Trailer

The trailer suggests that the film tells the story of Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a handsome, young, straight-looking Midwesterner who comes to New York City, meets a Latino transvestite Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), and happens to be at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the police raid that triggered the riots. He seems to radicalize the crowd into violence (he appears to be shown throwing the first brick). Ray, on the other hand, develops a crush on Danny, who refuses his advances, and eventually breaks down in despair (“There is no home, there is no family, Danny.”).

Our wholesome middle class white hero

If Stonewall is using Danny as a way to attract a broad audience to the film so that it can introduce that audience to the struggles of a racially diverse group of gays, lesbians, homeless youth, and transwomen struggling to find a safe space in the face of legal persecution and police violence and to teach that audience about how that persecution helped give birth to the legal and social rights that gays and lesbians enjoy today, then I think this could be an effective movie. And the trailer certainly suggests the movie acknowledges the presence of transwomen, drag queens, and effeminate gay men; Ray appears to be a central character, and the bar scenes show a number of men dressed very femininely.

The movie may also do some good by teaching a younger generation of gays and lesbians about the movement that brought them their legal rights and the social acceptance they currently enjoy. The Pride movement, which today has mainly become an excuse for over-commercialized parties, was in origin a demand to be allowed to exist peacefully and a struggle for basic social toleration in the face of the sort of casual bigotry and police violence that the film seems interested in focusing on.

Jeremy Irvine released a statement in response to the outcry against Stonewall. He reveals that his character is homeless, that Ray is a Puerto Rican transvestite, and that Marsha P Johnson (the black drag queen who claimed to have thrown the first brick) is an important character in the film, but that a fictional black transvestite grabs the first brick. So Irvine, at least, perceives the film to be a fair treatment that seeks to include and acknowledge these people. And at least one promotional poster emphasizes the ethnic diversity and transvestism of the cast.

If, however, the film is using Danny to usurp the role played by transvestites and ethnic minorities, to turn the Stonewall riot into a story of how a straight-looking white man helped a rag-tag bands of transvestites, blacks, and Latinos find their voice and their hope through his leadership, then the film is guilty of misrepresenting the riot and allowing whites to see themselves as the saviors of downtrodden blacks and Latinos and transvestites instead of the beneficiaries of those people’s self-originated struggle. Danny may be gay and homeless, but he’s white and straight-looking, and that puts him in a privileged position over gay homeless transvestite blacks and Latinos, who are pretty much the bottom of the social totem pole in American society by virtually all measures.

And the trailer certainly offers reasons to think that it’s erasing the contributions of various participants in the riot. There’s a brief shot of a butch-looking white women being pushed into a police car and shouting at the crowd; but the butch lesbian who first struggled with the police is usually said to be a black woman (although some reports credit a white woman). A fictional black transvestite might be the first person to grab a brick, but Danny gets to throw that brick, instead of the black drag queen who’s usually credited with that honor. Danny is the one giving hope to Ray, and inciting the crowd to fight back. So instead of a self-empowered group of minorities, the film appears to be offering us a straight-looking white savior.

As I said, Stonewall isn’t out yet (it has a September release date), and trailers can be wildly misleading of what’s actually in a film. So perhaps the trailer is more about marketing to middle class white sensibilities, to get that audience to go see a story that will push its boundaries and help it see that the Gay Rights movement is much more complex than they think it is. I certainly hope that’s what this film is trying to do. But at the moment, I am less than optimistic about what the final product will look like, and I understand the anger that the trailer has elicited. Indeed, I share it.

Want To Know More?

As I noted, the film isn’t out yet. But if you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.