Hidden Figures: Laudable Lies

Tags

20th Century America, Civil Rights Movement, Dorothy Vaughan, Hidden Figures, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, Octavia Spencer, Racial Issues, Taraji P Henson, The 1960s

I know that I promised my next post would be with the historical consultant for The Eagle. But I just saw Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly) and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it down in blog form. So I promise I’ll get to the interview in my next post.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this movie, you may want to put off reading this, since I talk about major plot points.

Hidden Figures tells the fascinating story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. All three were originally hired to work as ‘computers’, women who did the low-status work of laborious mathematical calculating and double-checking the work of higher status male scientists in the era before the birth of electronic computers. Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematician whose calculations proved invaluable to the launch of the Atlas rocket that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the head of the ‘Western’ Computing group, a group of African-American female computers kept separate from the ‘Eastern’ Computing group, who were white women; realizing that her job will eventually be made obsolete by the arrival of an IBM computer, Vaughan teaches herself Fortran and becomes an expert in computers. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) pursues her ambition of being an engineer for NASA.

All three women encounter racist obstacles at NASA. Johnson struggles with the fact that the only bathroom African-American women can use is located literally half a mile away on the Langley campus where she works, forcing her to take extended breaks simply to use the bathroom and thereby drawing the ire of the division head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Vaughan is long overdue for a promotion; she has been acting as the supervisor of the Western Computing group, but hasn’t been given the title or the pay of a supervisor, and the woman she reports to, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) doesn’t seem to care. Jackson needs to take night classes in order to apply for the engineering position, but the only school that offers such classes is segregated, and she has to persuade a judge to allow her to attend the classes.

Monáe, Henson, and Spencer

Ultimately, all three overcome their obstacles. Johnson repeatedly demonstrates her invaluableness to Harrison, who increasingly bends the rules to allow her to participate in the work of getting Glenn safely into space and back. Vaughan masters the newly-installed IBM computer before anyone else, and then teaches the other members of the Western Computing group how to work with it, thus saving all of their jobs and giving them a future on the cutting edge of computer science. This convinces Mitchell to arrange Vaughn’s over-due promotion. Jackson persuades the judge to let her attend the night school classes she needs and by the end of the film is on her way to becoming an engineer.

The story is well-told all around. The script is funny and does a good job of making the mathematical problems of early space flight intelligible to a general audience. The performances are all solid, especially Henson’s. And the costume designer does a very subtle job of highlighting the exclusion of African-American women from NASA; the white men tend to vanish into a sea of identical white dress shirts and dark ties, while the black women stand out in demur but colorful skirts and blouses, highlighting the absence of ‘colored’ people whenever they’re not around.

Katherine Johnson

The story it tells is an important one. These three women all played important roles at NASA and made major contributions to American space exploration for several decades. Their story deserves to be told, and it’s exciting to see the movie do so amazingly well at the box office. All too often, American history is presented as the accomplishments of white men, and Hidden Figures does a good job of reminding us that women of color have made great contributions to the country as well. It’s particularly nice to see a biopic about African-Americans who aren’t entertainers or athletes. These women are important not because they’re pretty or can sing, but because they’re smart. And the film confronts the problems of segregation head-on, particularly in Johnson and Jackson’s storylines. Americans need a reminder of just how ugly and unjust segregation and Jim Crow were.

The problem with the film is that in the pursuit of its goal of highlighting the struggles these three women had with segregation and racism, it significantly misrepresents what was going on at NASA in the 60s.

NACA and NASA

The organization we think of NASA began life in 1915 as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It existed until 1958, when it was shut down and replaced with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA began hiring African-Americans to work as computers already in 1941, but like many branches of the American government in the period, NACA was segregated. It had a system of bathrooms, cafeterias, and other facilities for whites, and less well-maintained parallels for blacks.

Henson as Johnson solving a problem involving the space capsule

However, when NASA was formed in 1958, it wasn’t segregated. For example, NASA abandoned the system of segregated bathrooms, even though many of its properties were carried over from NACA. The story about Johnson having to run back and forth between buildings to use the bathrooms is actually a story that Jackson told about NACA in the 1950s. In the film, Johnson has to make several bathroom trips, once in the rain, trying to do her calculating work on the toilet so as not to fall too far behind in her work. Finally, when she breaks down and complains to Harrison, Harrison angrily goes out and uses a crowbar to tear down the sign labelling a particular bathroom as being for colored women. It’s a great scene that produces cheers in the audience, but it’s simply untrue.

Similarly, Vaughan was denied the supervisory position she deserved for some time, but that was during the 1950s. By the time the film opens in 1961, Vaughan had already been a supervisor for 3 years. Jackson was offered a position in an engineering team and then had to find a way to get into those classes, whereas the film suggests that she is kept from applying for the position because Mitchell is somewhat racist and unwilling to bend on the rules. So far as I can determine, the film consistently projects the segregation of 1950s NACA half a decade backwards onto 1960s NASA.

NASA in the 1960s was actually a tool for desegregation. Already when he was the Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson saw NASA as a way to advance African Americans by hiring and promoting them into better-paying and more respectable positions. It’s no coincidence that NASA desegregated in 1958; Johnson was the head of the subcommittee that oversaw the passage of government act that created the agency.

Morgan Watson, NASA’s first black engineer

Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong.

So by painting early 1960s NASA as a strongly segregated environment, the film is somewhat unfairly tarring NASA for NACA’s failings, and denying NASA’s modest role in helping advance the interests of African-Americans. The real racism that the women experienced in this period seems to have been from the communities around Langley. Vaughn had difficulties find a place to stay. In the 1960s, many of the black male engineers encountered threats and violence from the white locals, and one white NASA employee was so badly injured and threatened that he left NASA entirely. Had it chosen to, the film could have made its point more honestly by contrasting the comparatively accepting environment of NASA with the much more racist environment beyond its gates.

Racism or Sexism?

The more I think about the film and read about the background, the more I find myself thinking that the real problem Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson experienced wasn’t so much racism (although they clearly did encounter some of that) but sexism. Consistently, there is a pattern of the men doing the important, high-status work (such as figuring out the physics of space flight and designing the capsules) while the women (both black and white) are relegated to the low-status work of computing, even though the film makes clear that doing so is a waste of their talents, especially Johnson’s. Apart from Johnson, the only other woman in the Space Task group, Ruth, appears to be a secretary, and there are no women at all in the engineering group that Jackson is involved in.

Dorothy Vaughan

Johnson repeatedly insists that she needs to be involved in the key meetings where decisions are made, because excluding her means that she has to wait to get the data she needs, which often renders her work obsolete by the time she’s finished it. She persuades Harrison to bend the rules for her to sit in on briefings with the Air Force, and eventually he invites her into Mission Control when Glenn’s flight happens (a decision that the film claims probably saved Glenn’s life). The issue here is not that she’s African-American, but that she’s a woman and the men around her are uncomfortable with her presence.

While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.

So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles. Their obstacles were clearly intersectional, involving both their race and their gender, but the film discourages us from thinking too much about gender by highlighting a simultaneous divide of gender and race; the scientists and engineers are all white men and the computers almost entirely black women (the exception being Vivian, who leads the white female computers, but who is never shown making any intellectual contributions to the project and who mostly acts as an administrative obstacle to Vaughn). The result is that whenever gender emerges as an issue, race is almost always there at the same time. There is one scene when Johnson’s future husband (an African-American) makes a sexist remark, but that’s almost the only moment when gender is highlighted as an issue. So the film tends to subsume gender issues under race issues in a way that makes it hard for the audience to see the gender component of the problem.

None of this makes Hidden Figures a bad movie, merely a movie that privileges its message over the facts. It tells an important story that people need to know. I just wish it had been a bit more honest with the facts.

(I feel a need to point out that I’m not a specialist in either American history or NASA history. I’m basing my comments on information I’ve been able to dig up online, and it’s possible that I’ve missed evidence that NASA was a more segregated environment than I realize. I’m certainly not suggesting that NASA was magically free of racism in the 1960s. It clearly wasn’t. I’m sure that these women encountered many obstacles due to their race, but they weren’t the specific obstacles the film offers.)

 

Correction: An earlier version of this post described John Glenn as the first American in space. I should have written that he was the first American to orbit the Earth, since Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom both flew high enough to be in what is defined as space prior to Glenn’s flight, but neither of them achieved orbit. I regret the mistake. Thanks to T Rosenzveig for catching it!

 

Want to Know More?

Hidden Figures is still in the theaters, so it’s not available on Amazon. However, if you want to do some reading about these women, their story is told in Hidden Figures, by Mary Lee Shetterly. Another book about them is Sue Bradford Edwards’ Hidden Human Computers. Richard Paul and Steven Moss’s We Could Not Fail discusses the history of African-Americans in the space program.

Finally, you could look at Steven Moss’s unpublished master’s thesis, NASA and Racial Equality in the South, 1961-1968, which is available online.

Nina: The Trailer

Tags

20th Century America, Nina, Nina Simone, Racial Issues, Zoe Saldana

So last week, the first trailer for Nina, the biopic about the black jazz singer and activist Nina Simoe, was released. Here it is.

The trailer has re-ignited a controversy that first flared when it was announced that Zoe Saldana had been cast to play Simone. The reaction on Twitter from many black people was quite negative, using phrases like “I am disgusted”, “it made me physically ill” “truly heartbreaking”, and “a rogue SNL skit”. You can see some of the reaction here.

As a white guy, this reaction startled me. I had only just heard about the movie a week ago, and I hadn’t heard about the controversy over Saldana’s casting. Why would so many black Americans be upset about this movie, including Simone’s own daughter? So I decided to dig into it a bit. White Americans like myself can often be quite unaware of how black Americans experience American culture, and I firmly believe that it’s the job of white Americans to try to understand the complexities of race without just asking black people to explain it to us; it’s not the job of black Americans to explain race to us. So this post is really about me trying to understand race from the privileged position of whiteness. My apologies if I do a poor job of it.

I first really noticed Zoe Saldana as a performer when she was cast as Lt. Uhura in the Star Trek reboot (a misbegotten film in my opinion, for reasons having nothing to do with Uhura, but that’s a totally different issue). She was also cast as Anamaria is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a Caribbean pirate queen. Why, I wondered, would black people object to a black actress playing a black singer?

Zoe Saldana

 

Except, as it turns out, Saldana is Puerto Rican and Dominican (although she does have some Haitian ancestry as well). (And see Update below.) I realized I had been perceiving her as a black actress because Uhura is a black character. And Saldana is very fair-skinned, whereas Simone was a very dark-skinned woman. Additionally, while Saldana is classically beautiful, with straight hair, and a thin nose and lips, Simone had curly hair, and a wide nose and lips. In order to play Simone, Saldana had to wear a prosthetic nose, a wig, and skin-darkening make-up. So the controversy is primarily that Saldana does not look very much like Simone.

As I thought about it, my reaction was that this objection was unfair to Saldana. Essentially, the film’s detractors seemed to be complaining that Saldana wasn’t ‘black’ enough to play Simone. But who gets to determine who’s black and who’s not? As I’ve commented before on this blog, what Americans think of as race is really a social construct far more than a biological fact. So asserting that Saldana wasn’t black enough seemed to me to be reifing race, asserting that it is somehow a biological category after all. And saying someone is or isn’t black is playing the game that racists used for centuries, a new iteration of the infamous ‘One Drop’ rule that said that anyone with a single drop of black blood was fully black.

Nina Simone

 

And furthermore, I thought, arguing that historical characters can only be played by actors and actresses who physically resemble them is a serious problem. That would arbitrarily exclude many brilliant performers from playing many of the greatest roles in film and theater. Only certain Italians would be able to play Julius Caesar, for example, because few others would have the proper coloration and aquiline nose for the role. Only a very tall man would ever be able to play Charlemagne, since he was about 6’5. And going just a little bit further, nearly every role in Shakespeare would be closed to non-white performers, since nearly all his roles are Europeans.

But then it occurred to me that I was essentially thinking that black activists didn’t have a right to be upset, that I wasn’t giving them credit for thinking deeply enough about an issue they live with on a daily basis much more than I do, skin color. So I dug a little deeper.

And then I realized that there was another layer to the issue, one much more about historical attitudes toward blackness. A key element of Simone’s story is that she was considered too ‘black’ to be attractive, because she lived at a time when beauty was defined by white standards. For a black women to be pretty, she needed to have fair skin, a thin nose and lips, and straight hair. In other words, she had to look like Zoe Saldana, and not like Nina Simone. Simone’s life was to some extent shaped the fact that she didn’t fit the racially-charged beauty aesthetic of her day. Her success as a jazz singer and as a civil rights activist allowed her to serve as a role model for generations of black women who, like her, didn’t and still don’t fit the beauty standard of American society.

And some of her work explicitly addresses these very issues. Her “Four Sisters” directly addresses the stereotypes around black women’s bodies. Her jazz version of the traditional folk song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” played with the fact that the song is traditionally sung about white people rather than black people.

Nina Simone in later life

 

The intensely negative reactions on Twitter were expressions of anger and pain that Hollywood has taken an important role model for an alternative beauty standard and given it to a conventionally beautiful women who was then ‘debeautified’ with make-up and prosthetics in order to play the role. Why, many of these people asked, couldn’t this role have been given to an actress who naturally looked more like Simone? Why couldn’t the film validate Simone’s model of beauty instead of undermining it? Why did they decide to put Saldana in blackface, at a time when blackface is considered entirely unacceptable in almost any other context?

And it doesn’t help that most of the production team for the film is white.

My whiteness affords me the privilege of thinking about casting historical roles purely on the basis of merit. It allows me to assume that most white actors can easily substitute for historical figures who did not share their appearance. But the complex, ugly racial realities that we live with don’t afford that same privilege to many black actors, who are often perceived as being ‘too black’ for some roles (i.e. not pretty/handsome enough by white standards) or not ‘black’ enough for others (i.e. black gang members or hustlers or prostitutes). Racial attitudes shape black performers’ careers in ways they don’t shape white performers’ careers, and a prestige role like Simone could have gone to many actresses who have probably been considered too dark-skinned or too wide-nosed or just too ‘black’ for many other roles.

Does this mean that Saldana shouldn’t have taken this role? Does Simone have to be played by a dark-skinned actress? I don’t know. In an ideal world, where race isn’t an inescapable issue, any actress who has the skill for the part ought to be considered for it. But in the world we actually live in, things are a lot messier. Race pervades most facets of our society, and it shapes things like casting decisions and how we understand films and performers. Ultimately I don’t think I have an answer to the question, but I think I understand the position of the people who are upset a lot better than I did before.

As I thought about this whole issue, I wrestled with whether I ought to post about it. I’m a white guy struggling to think about race, an issue that I have the luxury of being able to ignore when I want to. Do I understand the issues clearly enough to be able to say something intelligent about it? I hope so. Am I missing some additional facet of the situation that black people can see? Probably. Have I just said something clueless about race? I really hope not.

But it’s clear to me that race and white privilege is a huge issue in this country, and it’s at least as much the job of white people to think about race as it is the job of black people to explain it to white people. So I decided that even if my thoughts aren’t entirely on the mark, I had an obligation of a sort to post this. Hopefully I’ve been able to cast a little light on the problem for my white readers who may be as puzzled as I was about this controversy.

Update: A point that I had intended to include, but forgot to. Saldana has said that she doesn’t identify as black because “people of color don’t exist ’cause in reality people aren’t white.” So she rejects the social construct of race. That’s certainly her right, but it has definitely offended some in the black community. As the post I just linked to comments, “Saldana’s decision to accept the role of Nina Simone as a labor of “love” makes her view of race and racism all the more puzzling. It appears as if donning Blackface and depicting Simone has done little to connect the actress with the crooner’s spirit. You can’t portray Nina Simone without realizing how intricately race was intertwined with her life and career.” And it’s worth pointing out that it’s easier for a light-skinned actress to reject the social validity of race than for a dark-skinned actress to.

Here’s another blogger writing on the question of Saldana’s race and responding to the same quote.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not out yet. But if you want to know more about Nina Simone, you could start by reading her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.

Chi-Raq: Do Sex-Strikes Really Work?

Tags

20th Century Africa, 20th Century America, Aristophanes, Charles Taylor, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Leymah Gbowee, Liberia, Liberian Civil War, Lysistrata, Nobel Peace Prize, Peloponnesian War, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

The plot of Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) involve the women of Chicago going on a sex-strike in an effort to get the gangs of their district to stop engaging in senseless gun violence. The strike spreads to the strippers, prostitutes, and gay men on the down low, and eventually to women across the country and the world (the wives of the mayor of Chicago and the US president both take the oath). And ultimately, the plan works. The two rival gangs lay down their weapons and everyone, including the large corporations who have been ignoring the south side of Chicago economically, sign a pledge to deal with the roots of the problem as well as its manifestations.

Chi-Raq is based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, first performed in Athens in 411 BC in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Spartans. In this case, the story was pure fantasy. Greek women did not go on a sex-strike, and the war only came to an end in 404 BC, following the disastrous defeat of the Athenian navy at Aegospotami, which ensured that the Athenians would be starved into surrendering. But has the strategy been used successfully somewhere else?

Lee himself seems certain the answer is yes. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Lee suggested that such a tactic might be an effective response to sexually harassment and date rape on college campuses. See for yourself. The comment comes at about the 3:55 mark.

This implies that rapists are worried about what their victims think and want, which seems unlikely in most cases, and it suggests that there is a direct connection between women’s actions and rape, which there isn’t. But let’s assume that Lee was simply speaking carelessly during the pressure of a nationally-televised interview, and that he was intending to be empowering to women. But he says something else during the interview that is factually problematic.

Shortly before the comment about date rape (about the 3:10 mark), Lee mentions Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and claims that she used a sex-strike to bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War. He’s quite specific about this, and in fact, during the movie, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) googles Leymah Gbowee and learns that Gbowee used a sex-strike to end the war in her country.

Leymah Gbowee

The Second Liberian Civil War erupted in 1999 against president Charles Taylor and ran for four years, being brought to an end in 2003 by the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement (ACPA). In 2002, activist Gbowee helped found the Women in Peacemaking Network (WIPNET), and Gbowee used this group to organize Christian and Muslim Liberian women to publicly protest for peace, defying orders by President Taylor to stop.

WIPNET used a number of tactics. They staged pray-ins at churches and mosques. They occupied a soccer field that President Taylor’s motorcade regularly drove past. They wore white t-shirts to make themselves more visible. And they initiated a sex-strike. According to Gbowee, the strike lasted on and off for a couple of months. As she said in a book about the protest, “It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention.” Some of those involved were beaten for refusing to have sex (which again underlines the fact that it’s not a tactic likely to solve a problem like rape.)

During the peace talks, WIPNET staged a sit-in of several hundred women literally right outside the meeting room (which had a glass wall, making the sit-in visible to the negotiators), essentially holding the negotiators hostage, and refusing to let them get food or go to the bathroom. When the negotiators tried to leave the room, Gbowee and her supporters threatened to rip their own clothes off, taking advantage of a powerful African cultural taboo against female nudity; the action essentially threatened a curse on the soldiers who tried to physically move the women. After a few weeks of this, Taylor agreed to resign. Two years after the war came to an end, WIPNET helped orchestrate the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female African head of state.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor

Gbowee’s efforts were considered so instrumental to achieving the ACPA that she, along with Sirleaf and a third woman, received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.

So by Gbowee’s own account, the sex-strike did not have any direct effect on the effort to stop the war. If that was its purpose, it failed. But the fact that it was an off-and-on affair suggests that it wasn’t actually intended to stop the war so much as to garner publicity and raise awareness, which it did a good job of. So while in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, the sex-strike ends the violence directly, in Gbowee’s approach it was a way to strengthen the movement.

 

Other Recent Sex-Strikes

Liberia is not the only place sex-strikes have been attempted. Twice in the space of two years from 2011 to 2013, the women of Barbacaos, Colombia, led a Crossed Legs movement as a protest against the lack of a paved road leading to their community. They argued that the lack of adequate roads presented a serious health hazard and an economic obstacle for women who needed to get inland from the small port town. The catalyst for this as a woman’s issue was the death of a 23-year-old pregnant woman whose ambulance got stuck on the way to a hospital. Unlike in Lysistrata and Chi-Raq, however, the men of the town quickly came to support the Crossed Legs movement, presumably because they saw the road as something they wanted as much as the women did. The Crossed Legs movement raised enough publicity (something previous protests had failed to accomplish) that the government vowed to pave at least half the 57-kilometer road. But by 2013, the women decided that the last 30 kilometers also needed paving and resumed the strike. (I haven’t been able to find anything about how effective the 2013 strike was.)

The road into Barbacaos, Colombia

Poor roads were not the only reason that Colombian women have tried sex-strikes. In 1997, a male military official called for a sex-strike to try to get the various guerrillas and drug lords to work for peace. That effort failed. So too did a 2006 attempt by the wives and girlfriends of gang members in Pereira in an effort to get them to surrender their guns. That strike was called off 10 days later. It was claimed as a success, despite no evidence that it actually reduced homicides.

However, in 2011, a sex-strike in the Filipino town of Dado succeeded in ending separatist violence on Mindinao after just a few weeks. In this case, it was not simply a sex-strike though. The women of Dado maintain a sewing collective that was unable to deliver its products because of violence on the roads outside of Dado. So in addition to withholding sex, the women also withheld their income from their husbands. In Kenya and Togo, week-long sex-strikes were held in 2009 and 2011 as a form of protest, but the brief duration seems unlikely to have done more than demonstrate that women cared strongly about specific local issues.

From this survey of recent sex-strikes, a few things seem clear. First, sex-strikes are useful for attracting attention to a problem. The outlandishness of the gesture garners media attention, which shines a spotlight on a major issue. So when they are used as a tool to focus attention on an issue, they stand some chance of bringing results. Second, sex-strikes don’t seem very effective when used on their own to directly address violence, for the simple reason that a man who is willing to be violent will presumably consider using force against his wife or girlfriend, or else will simply seek out a prostitute or another willing woman. Third, they are more likely to succeed when they are combined with other incentives. The modest success of the 2011 sex-strike in Barbacaos was actively supported by the men of the town because they wanted the road too, and the Dado sex-strike was used to reinforce the fact that the violence was hurting Dado economically.

So Lee is wrong when he claims that Gbowee’s sex-strike ended the war in Liberia, and he’s probably wrong when he suggests that the tactic might be effective against date rape, unless he meant that it might be useful in raising awareness about what date rape is and why it’s wrong.

Spike Lee

But Chi-Raq is clearly a fantasy. I don’t think Lee is suggesting that a sex-strike would actually work to end violence (although one Chicago woman has decided to organize an actual sex-strike in response to the film). Too many scenes in the film are obviously unrealistic, such as the scene where Lysistrata seduces a National Guard armory general by getting him to strip down to his underwear and then dry hump a cannon while blindfolded and handcuffed, or the scenes where women across the world jump onto the sex-strike bandwagon. Instead, I think that what Lee is doing is what Gbowee actually did with her sex-strike, using it to generate media attention for a deadly serious problem. Lee’s a smart guy (as he reminds Colbert in that interview, he’s a tenured professor in film studies at Columbia), and it’s clear that he sees his film not as a literal solution to the problem but as a wake-up call to the nation. Let’s hope that his cinematic sex-strike has the same sort of success that WIPNET’s did.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. There is also a documentary about her, Pray the Devil Back to Hell.

Chi-Raq: Ancient Athens in Modern Chicago

Tags

20th Century America, Ancient Greece, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Comedies, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusack, Lysistrata, Movies I Love, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) is a modernization of the classic Athenian comedy Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian War. When I heard about Lee’s film, I was intrigued, since it’s not every day a movie based on an ancient play gets produced, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points, including the end of the film.

 

 

Lysistrata

Lysistrata was first performed during a war between the Athenians and the Spartans. The war began in 430 BC, and had continued ever since. By 411, the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Athenians. 4 years previously, they had opened a new front in the war with a disastrous invasion of Sicily; they had lost much of their navy and large numbers of citizen sailors had been captured. The failure of that invasion probably marked the point at which the Athenians should have decided to cut their loses and sue for peace, but the Athenians stubbornly refused to do so.

So in 411, Aristophanes, who was part of the anti-war faction at Athens, staged Lysistrata as a critique of the war. In the play, Lysistrata proposes to bring the war to an end by persuading both the Athenian and Spartan women to go on a sex strike. They vow not to have sex until the men arrange a peace. To advance their cause, Lysistrata’s followers occupy the Acropolis and seize the state treasury, which will hinder the war cause, since the city will not be able to pay its war expenses without it. During a conversation with one of the city’s magistrates, Lysistrata accuses the Athenians (who are literally sitting in the audience watching) of having made disastrous decisions in the war. Eventually a desperately tumescent Spartan herald arrives with news that the Spartans want to negotiate, and the equally desperate magistrate agrees to sit down and discuss terms with him. Lysistrata shows up with a young woman named Reconciliation and uses their lust for her as an incentive to keep the negotiations moving. The peace is celebrated with a feast. Throughout the play, choruses of Old Men and Old Women clash in bawdy ways, dramatizing the struggle between masculine lust and feminine chastity.

The play is often today read as an anti-war play, which is probably reading more into it than Aristophanes intended. The play does not condemn war in general, only this war in particular. By 411, the Athenians were clearly tired of war, but could not seem to find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict without damaging their pride. The play wittily suggests that male military aggression and male sexual desire are somehow combined.

Lysistrata is not an easy play to stage nowadays. In this period, Athenian comedy was extremely topical, and many of the play’s references no long make sense to audiences who don’t know who, for example, Hippias or Cleisthenes were. Many of the jokes are directed at men who were probably sitting in the audience, satirizing them for their personal foibles and reputation. The play also contains a lot of jokes so deeply connected to the exact situation that modern audiences won’t get them any more; during the negotiations, the herald and the magistrate treat Reconciliation’s body as a map of Greece, discussing which parts of it they want to claim, but without understanding the actual geography of the war, the double-entendres lose much of their punch.

Another challenge to staging Athenian comedy is that it is extremely bawdy, far more so than all but the most raunchy of modern comedies. This mixture of political satire and sex jokes is off-putting to most modern audiences. Imagine a Saturday Night Live political sketch crossed with American Pie and you start to get the effect. Athenian comedy is so frankly sexual that one scholar commented, “if you don’t find a dirty joke in a line of text, you’re probably not looking hard enough.” The women of Lysistrata want the war to end because it’s interfering with their ability to get laid and purchase dildoes. The Spartan herald’s erection is given almost an entire page’s worth of attention, as people try to guess what he’s got hidden under his cloak. This is not some genteel Victorian farce; this is comedy all about penises and vaginas.

 

Chi-Raq

Lee has transposed the action of the play to the south side of Chicago, often nicknamed Chi-raq by its inhabitants because there is enough violence for a war zone. The two warring factions are rival gangs, the Spartans, led by the rapper Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon), and the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). One day, Chi-Raq’s woman, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) stumbles across the scene of a gang shooting in which an 11-year old girl has become an innocent victim. She sees the girl’s mother Irene (Jennifer Hudson) grieve for her daughter and demand that something be done.

Lysistrata (center) persuading the woman to take the oath

Lysistrata gathers a bunch of her friends and arranges a meeting with some of the women who date the Trojans, including Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), Cyclop’s woman. She persuades them to swear an oath. “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

From there, the movement grows as even the strippers, prostitutes, and guys on the down low take the oath. Then the women seize control of a National Guard armory, and the movement goes global, much to the frustration of Mayor McCloud (D.B. Sweeney), whose wife takes the oath. From there, the story plays out to its conclusion.

Hudson’s Irene

But as the story progresses, Lee inserts scenes of Father Corridan (John Cusack) performing the funeral for the murdered girl and leading an anti-gun march. Although skeptical of Lysistrata’s tactics, he plays an important role in getting Chi-Raq to come to the negotiating table. He and Irene circulate posters offering a reward for information about who shot the girl. Finally, at the end, when it looks like the negotiations between the Spartans and the Trojans will collapse because of Chi-Raq’s resistance, he tearfully acknowledges that he is the girl’s killer. Accepting the magnitude of his crime, he is led away, calling on all the gang members to admit their guilt in the situation and work to end the violence.

On paper this all sounds heavy-handed and tendentious. But Lee manages to make the material work through a combination of three contrasting elements. The film is every bit as vulgar as the source material. Jokes about dick and pussy and blue balls abound. The Old Men of the film just want to get laid again and are determined to restore their masculine pride, while the Old Women aren’t entirely happy to give up sex but see the greater goal behind the strike.

But the coarseness of the humor is off-set by the fact that most of the dialogue is in rhyming verse. Although some of the verse feels a bit clunky, and can be hard to follow, at its best, it becomes Shakespearean, elevating the vulgarity to the level of high art. Chi-Raq’s speech at the end plays as a morality tale, in which the actor is exhorting the audience to learn from his mistakes. Here’s an example, in which Lysistrata confronts the Old Men:

 

And then there is the profound passion of the film. The film opens with a prologue text informing us that more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the past 15 years than in both the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. “This is an emergency!” a voice declares at both the start and finish of the film. Cusack delivers the funeral sermon with an urgency that grows to fury at “this self-inflicted genocide,” and it’s clear that he is voicing Lee’s own feelings about the situation. Both Lysistrata and her friend Dr. Helen (Angela Bassett) deliver powerful speeches about how they are fighting to save the lives of their community.

Cusack’s Father Corridan, preaching the funeral sermon

Jennifer Hudson’s performance is particularly powerful. Her own personal tragedy, in which her brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and nephew in their West Chicago home, hangs over the film, a profound reminder that this is not simply an exercise in entertainment. When Hudson as Irene leads an anti-gun march, she is surrounded by dozens of extras all carrying photos of the actual relatives they lost to gun violence. And the film is not afraid to point fingers. At different moments, it accuses the NRA, the prison-industrial complex, Indiana’s gun shows, the Republican party, the media, the banks, and the adolescent gang-bangers of all playing a role in the slaughter. The mayor is a thinly-veiled satire of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who reportedly opposed the film because it was bad for tourism.

Lee has quite masterfully managed to transpose Lysistrata for a modern audience, capturing the marriage of bawdy humor and serious intent and even much of the original’s structure. Both play and film are in verse, both make use of song and dance, and both have choruses that act to set the stage and keep the action moving; Lee’s chorus is Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson as Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus

Given the challenges of reproducing Classical Athenian comedy for modern audiences, Lee has pulled off an impressive feat. While Chi-Raq is not a perfect film (the verse is not always easy to follow, and a few scenes fall flat, including one where Lysistrata seduces the general of the armory), it’s a worthy effort, both in terms of cinema and in terms of the cause it serves, and you should definitely give it a viewing.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers.

Hail, Caesar!: Fun with Hollywood Scandal

Tags

1950s, 20th Century America, Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Comedies, Eddie Mannix, Esther Williams, Films about Hollywood, George Clooney, George Reeves, Hedda Hopper, Joel and Ethan Coen, Josh Brolin, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Spencer Tracy, The Robe, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio

Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen) is a rather fluffy film set in 1950s Hollywood. While LA Confidential used the period as the setting for a thriller, the Coen brothers use it as a chance to explore the silliness of the period. The plot, such as it is, involves Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a ‘fixer’ who works for Capital Pictures, covering up scandals before they can get into the media. The studio is in the middle of making a prestige Sword-and-Sandal pic about a Roman general who undergoes a religious conversion when he accidentally meets Jesus at a well. But the star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets kidnapped, and Mannix has to scramble to find him. There’s not really much actual history here, other than the general setting, but I figured I’d dig into some of the characters and look at whom they might be based on.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points.

 

Eddie Mannix

Eddie Mannix was actually a real person, but Brolin’s character bares only a superficial resemblance to the real thing: basically, they’re both married, Catholic, and work as fixers, but that’s about it. The real Eddie Mannix (d.1963) was MGM’s comptroller and general manager, and worked closely with MGM’s head of publicity to control press coverage of the performers who worked for the studio. It was his job to fix the actual scandals by paying off witnesses and victims, getting the police to look the other way, and so on. He is alleged to have covered up a car accident that Clark Gable got into by making John Huston take the blame for it. (In the film, Mannix at one point alludes to covering up a similar incident.) He reportedly arranged for the destruction of a pornographic film that Joan Crawford had made while she was a teenager. When Spencer Tracy went on one of his periodic benders. Mannix had a system for how to deal with the star.

The real Eddie Mannix

And he was largely responsible for destroying the reputation of an unfortunate young dancer and actress named Patricia Douglas, who was hired to provide companionship at a drinking party for 300 of MGM’s salesmen. Douglas was raped during the party, and when she tried to pursue charges, first in criminal court and then in civil court, Mannix used his contacts in the legal system to make the charges go away.

Brolin as Mannix

Mannix also had an ugly set of relationships. He cheated on his first wife, Bernice, with a dancer named Mary Nolan, whom he beat so frequently that she required 15 surgeries. When she tried to sue him, he had the police run her out of town. He may have arranged Bernice’s death in a car accident. His second wife, Toni Lanier, eventually had a long-term affair with Superman star George Reeves, with Mannix’ blessing. When Reeves called off the affair in 1958, Toni was deeply distressed, and Reeves suddenly had a car accident after the brake fluid drained out of his brake line. Not long after that, Reeves committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Connect the dots if you’re so inclined.

 

Baird Whitlock and Hail, Caesar!

Whitlock is an established actor who, like Spencer Tracy, has a tendency to go on long benders from which Mannix has to retrieve him. Some reviews have suggested Whitlock is modeled on Kirk Douglas, apparently because of Douglas’ involvement in Sword-and-Sandal pics like Spartacus, but I think he’s actually based more on Richard Burton, because Hail, Caesar! seems to be a spoof of The Robe. Both films are about a jaded Roman soldier who converts to Christianity after a brief encounter with Jesus; both feature a scene in which the tormented soldier stares up at Jesus as he hangs on the cross, and both films have a strategy of only filming Jesus from behind and focusing instead on the soldier’s face. The bloated speeches that Whitlock gives sound a lot like speeches from The Robe. But Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are other obvious inspirations for Hail, Caesar!

Clooney as Whitlock

 

DeeAnna Moran

Scarlett Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, who is very obviously modeled on Esther Williams. Like Williams, Moran is a bathing beauty whose water ballet films are a major money-maker in the 50s. (In fact, the Coen brothers arranged for Williams’ tank to be restored so they could film Moran’s mermaid sequence in it.) Moran is on her second divorce, working on a film, and having an affair with director Arne Slessum (Christopher Lambert), when she discovers she’s pregnant. Desperate to protect her wholesome image, Mannix arranges for her to discretely surrender the baby to a third party, with the intention of then adopting the baby as if it weren’t her own. Similarly, Williams discovered that she was pregnant by her second husband while working on Pagan Love Song; she later divorced that husband. While working on Million Dollar Mermaid, she had an affair with Victor Mature. But the detail about Moran giving up the baby and then adopting it back is taken from Loretta Young’s life, when she got pregnant with Clark Gable’s child, reportedly during a train ride.

Johansson as Moran

 

Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez

Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy. He’s an expert trick-rider and good with a lasso, but totally out of his league when he gets cast in a drawing-room romance as a playboy. Some have suggested that Doyle is modeled on Kirby Grant, best known for the tv series Sky King, but while Grant did singing cowboy films, his central shtick seems to have been trick piloting. Doyle’s more likely to be modeled on Gene Autry, who like Doyle is both a singer and an expert rider. Roy Rogers is another possibility.

Ehrenreich as Doyle, trying to act

Doyle gets sent on a studio-manufactured date with Latina dancer Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who is pretty obviously Carmen Miranda. She even makes a joke about being able to dance with fruit on her head. But Miranda’s heyday was the 40s (her career went into decline after WWII), and Carlotta is a young woman. The film doesn’t delve into Miranda’s abusive marriage, alcoholism, or drug usage at all.

 

Laurence Laurenz and Burt Gurney

Hobie’s movie is being directed by the stuffy British Laurence Laurenz (Ralph Fiennes), who is appalled at how poorly-cast his leading man is. In one amusing sequence, he finds himself forced to give Doyle elocution lessons so he can say the line “Would that it were so simple” without his Southern accent. Laurenz seems to be a version of Laurence Olivier, especially once it’s revealed that he’s having an affair with Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum).

Gurney is a song-and-dance man. We get to see Gurney perform a classic 50s dance number called “Dames”, which is filled with innuendo (it’s probably the best scene in the whole film). It’s clearly a riff on Gene’s Kelly’s Anchors Aweigh, although the Coens were also reportedly inspired by Fred Astaire and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. But I doubt there’s any evidence that Kelly (or Astaire or O’Connor) was gay, or that he was a communist sympathizer. And Tatum’s dance style is much more like Kelly’s working class masculinity than Astaire’s upper-class elegance.(See Update.)

Tatum as Gurney

 

Thora and Thessaly Thacker

Tilda Swinton plays twin sisters Thora and Thessaly, both of whom are gossip columnists in the mold of Hedda Hopper or Luella Parsons. Both women were famous for their ability to ferret out celebrity gossip, and although they had initially been friends, they came to hate each other and feuded for years.Hopper was both feared and despised in the late 30s and 40s for the damage her column could do; Tracy once kicked her in the ass after she revealed his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, while Joseph Cotton pulled a chair out from under her. Joan Bennett once sent her a skunk as a Valentine’s Day gift.

But the angle that Thora and Thessaly are also twin sisters was taken from Esther Lederer and Pauline Philips, better known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Landers reportedly became angry when her sister decided to start her own advice column just a few months after Landers had begun hers (without giving her any warning). For much of the rest of their lives, they had a stormy relationship (Van Buren reportedly one tried to persuade a paper to drop her sister’s column and run hers instead) and when Landers died in 2002, they were reportedly not on speaking terms, despite an apparent reconciliation in the 1960s.

Swinton as one of the Thacker sister

 

Update: As a commenter on this blog pointed out, the affair between Laurenz and Gurney probably owes something to the rumors that Olivier and Danny Kaye were lovers. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the claims, but that doesn’t mean the Coens might not have gotten inspiration from the rumors. And Kaye was suspected by the FBI of being a Communist, which fits Gurney’s character.

 

Want to Know More?

Hail, Caesar! [Blu-ray]is available at Amazon. If you’re in the mood for another look at Hollywood in the 1950s, check out L.A. Confidential [Blu-ray].

Like I said, there isn’t much actual history here, but if you want to read more about Hollywood scandals, you can try The Hollywood Book of Scandals : The Shocking, Often Disgraceful Deeds and Affairs of Over 100 American Movie and TV Idols

Stonewall: Strange But True

Tags

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.

Stonewall: There’s Got to be a Morning After

Tags

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.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Ronald Reagan and Racism

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20th Century America, African Americans, Alan Rickman, American Presidents, Apartheid, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Nancy Reagan, Racial Issues, Ronald Reagan

One accusation that has been leveled against Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels) is that it depicts the Reagan White House unfairly. For example, Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s son, wrote that to depict “Ronald Reagan as a racist because he was in favor of lifting economic sanctions against South Africa is simplistic and dishonest.” Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News complained that “[Eugene] Allen had warm relations with all the presidents with whom he served, and left the White House in 1980 with a hug from Ronald Reagan; Cecil Gaines, leaves the White House in rage over Reagan’s stance on South African apartheid. The film depicts Eisenhower as a colorless milquetoast, largely ignores southern Democrats’ support for Jim Crow during the 1960s and paints Reagan as slightly senile.” Reagan biographer Paul Kengor blasted one scene in which Reagan refuses to accept a bill that would have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa due to its Apartheid system of segregation, because the film offered no wider political context for Reagan’s decision.

So does the film merit such criticism?

It’s clear that Eugene Allen, the man on whom The Butler’s Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is based, was treated at least somewhat better than Gaines is in the film. Whereas Allen retired as the White House Maitre d’hotel at the end of his career, Gaines spends 30 years as a butler and quits when he is refused a pay raise and promotional opportunities by an unnamed supervisor. While the incident represents Gaines’ acknowledgment that some of his son Louis’ (David Oyelowo) complaints about American society are valid, the scene as it literally plays is false, and in that sense, Shapiro’s objection is valid. It undeniably misrepresents Allen’s decision to retire. (But Shapiro’s claim that Gaines quits “in rage” is a serious exaggeration; Whitaker plays the scene very quietly and calmly, with no expression of emotion at all. Nor is Reagan’s stance on Apartheid the actual issue, although it does seem to prompt his demand for a raise.)

Eugene Allen and his family posing with Ronald and Nancy Reagan

But the film includes an incident from Allen’s life in which Nancy Reagan (Jane Fonda) invites Gaines and his wife to a State Dinner as guests rather than staff. There’s a suggestion that Gaines is uncomfortable at the dinner when his co-workers are waiting on him, but apart from that, the film plays the scene as the Reagans respectfully acknowledging his long service.

The Allens with Nancy Reagan

The film’s whole approach to the scenes with presidents is to show Gaines quietly serving in the background while the various presidents are discussing political issues with advisors. Periodically, one of the politicians will briefly acknowledge Gaines in a more personal way. President Kennedy tells him that he didn’t understand how deeply black people were hated until he saw the treatment the Birmingham marchers received, and after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy gives him one of her husband’s ties. Gaines receives a tie-pin from President Johnson. The film also shows him attending Johnson in a vulgar scene in which a constipated Johnson is sitting on a toilet discussing racial issues with his advisors just outside the bathroom door. The film spends more time on Richard Nixon (John Cusack) than anyone else, showing him as Vice-President trying to get the black staff at the White House to vote for him, and as President discussing how to deal with the Black Panthers and then drunk and despondent just before his resignation. Ford and Carter don’t even appear, except in news clips. So in most scenes, the presidents and their advisors treat Gaines as a domestic servant, but the film scatters in a few brief personal conversations, at least one each for Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan.

The Kennedys greeting the White House domestic staff, with Cecil Gaines (Whitaker) on the right

In Reagan’s case, the personal scene comes when Reagan (Alan Rickman) asks Gaines to mail a letter to a constituent. The constituent is having economic problems, and Reagan wants to send some money, but Nancy and his staff object to him doing this. So he asks Gaines to do it on the sly. It’s a scene that humanizes Reagan for the viewer, although it doesn’t say anything about Reagan’s attitude toward Gaines. Personally, I think Reagan comes off quite well in that scene.

Nor does the film “paint Reagan as slightly senile” as Ben Shapiro charges. I certainly saw no sign of that in the film. And it’s worth pointing out that Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s 16 years after leaving office, almost certainly had the disease while he was president. His son Ron Reagan Jr has said that he saw traces of the characteristic confusion in his father as early as 1984, and reporter Lesley Stahl did as well. So had the film chosen to explore that facet of Reagan’s time in office, it would have had justification for doing so.

Reagan and Apartheid

However, the essence of the complaints about the film is really that the film treats Reagan poorly because it includes a scene in which South African Apartheid is an issue, and implies that Reagan was racist. Gaines is serving Reagan during a meeting with unnamed Republicans who are seeking to persuade the president to not veto the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which aimed to impose economic sanctions on the white South African government because of the country’s system of segregation, which became infamous during the 1980s. During the scene, Reagan says twice that he has made up his mind to veto the bill, without explaining why.

Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman as Nancy and Ronald Reagan

Reagan did veto the bill, which had bipartisan support, but his veto was overridden by a substantial margin in both houses. It was, in fact the first time in the 20^th century that a veto of a foreign policy bill was overridden, and it was seen as a significant defeat for Reagan. After the override, Reagan released a statement attributing his veto to a concern that the bill would hurt the people it was intended to help.

So the scene is essentially accurate. Republicans did press Reagan to accept the bill and he did in fact veto it. And it’s hard to argue that the film should have ignored the event. The whole film is about the dismantling of segregation in the US, and the CAAA played in role in helping to bring about the end of Apartheid in South Africa, so its inclusion in the film is appropriate. But the film does not make any statement that Reagan was motivated by racism. Kengor is correct that the film does not explore any wider context for the bill or Reagan’s decision, but I’m not sure that the film could have provided a meaningful context without going substantially out of its way.

Is this film biased against Reagan? Does it depict Reagan as a racist? I don’t think so. If it had wanted to paint Reagan in a negative light on race issues, it could certainly have done so by including reference to his use of the racist Southern Strategy to woo racist whites into the Republican Party, for example by using coded language about ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks’, or his decision to kick off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure town whose only claim to fame is the lynching of three Civil Rights activists in 1964, or his 1982 defense of Bob Jones University, which was losing federal funding because of its ban on interracial dating. It could have mentioned that Reagan declared the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South”, or that he described Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a personal hero. It could have highlighted Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, who explicitly acknowledged the role coded racism played in the campaign. In a film dealing with race and racism in the United States, inclusion of these events would have been entirely reasonable.

Reagan at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi

The fact that Reagan was friendly to domestic servants in the White House and once hugged Eugene Allen doesn’t really occlude the numerous ways that Reagan used racism as a tool during his political career. Michael Reagan insists that his father was not a racist and at various points did nice things for black friends; that may well be true but it doesn’t mean that Reagan can’t have exploited racism to further his own goals. It is entirely possible to have black friends and yet still say and do racist things. So whether Reagan’s veto of the CAAA was motivated by racism or something else entirely, the film uses the incident as an example of the way Reagan’s policies looked quite different to blacks than to whites. Given that the whole movie is about how black people viewed America and American politics in this period, that’s an entirely reasonable approach. Could the film have gone into deeper detail about Reagan’s decidedly mixed record on racial issues? Could it have provided more of the context Paul Kengor wanted by delving into the Reagan administration’s policies and the political strategy Reagan used to win two elections? Absolutely, but had it done so, I think Reagan would have come off much worse than he does in the film.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.