While Emmerich says he can empathize with his accusers, he insists his intention wasn’t to erase any group of people’s place in history, but to make a movie from a perspective that aligned with his own experience.
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As a director you have to put yourself in your movies, and I’m white and gay.”
“I’m using a white character to be educated by [transgender women of color]”. That was one of the difficulties in getting the movie made.
Why aren’t the real stories of trans and queer people of color good enough for Emmerich?
The same can not be said for Stonewall’s central character, who literally takes a brick out of the hands of a ferocious queen of color and hurtles it into history. Everything starts to feel like it was cobbled together from spare parts of every possible movie cliché: Danny’s stern father (who, naturally, is also the macho football coach); the police brutality that’s full of sneering gay slurs; the softly lit seduction scene. Director Emmerich, best known for the shamelessly enjoyable digital-effects schlockbusters Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, begins each new scene in Stonewall with the knob at 11. And he acknowleges that the lacking definitive historical record presented a challenge to create a film that would “please everyone”.
From the ashes of the Stonewall riots, we created the Gay Liberation Front, and from there I formed a group called Gay Youth.
“But it clearly was a big mistake for some people out there”.
The UK-born Irvine, who previously starred in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, admits that he was only peripherally aware of the Stonewall rebellion when he took on the role.
There was a good reason why it was an untold tale on screen, he adds: “Nobody knows exactly what happened”. It was cool for us to mix historical facts with fictional ones. “And they’re still today out in the streets in big numbers… because there [aren’t enough] activists out there working for them”.
“We have these fictional kids, like my character, that represent all the people who we don’t know about – the hundreds of kids who fought in the riots and were forgotten about”, Irvine says.
However it does seem the gay director is perhaps reflecting his own conflicted attitudes, which he’s then transferring onto the whole LGBT community.
Still, Beauchamp doesn’t view the backlash as completely negative. “We may have marriage now, but in terms of the gay civil rights movement, we have just got started, I really believe that”. It’s a fairly obvious dramatic structure for such a story-introducing a clueless audience proxy who can receive all the expository dialogue meant for us-but it’s at least modestly effective at setting the scene of daily life for an LGBT American circa summer of ’69. I don’t think there’s a target audience. “Cong is such a strong character who has no fucks to give”. So I think that’s fine.
Last Sunday, I was at the Stonewall Inn in New York City to kick off a campaign to make neighboring Christopher Park a national park.
Conversely, Abit – who says playing Marsha P. Johnson helped enrich his appreciation of LGBT history – worries the backlash may backfire, negatively impacting the possibility for future movies based on queer culture to be made.
“I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in”. Its not a story like MILK where you have this one character. “Stonewall” doesn’t tell the story of the violence the LGBT community has suffered and the ways in which our community’s heroes have stood their ground against that violence.
Alas, not only does Stonewall lack any subtlety, but it also focuses on all the wrong parts of the story – namely, it’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed, made-up protagonist (which in itself has landed Emmerich in some hot water as the real riots featured a far more diverse array of protesters at their forefront). “Over the years, it was always this mythical thing that happened”.
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Emmerich says “not one studio in Hollywood wanted to make the movie, we had to do it totally independently and that was much harder work”.
