I saw this tonight and I think that if you’re a New Yorker, this is an important film. For school education, I think it’s not enough to just talk about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement; this should be included alongside the others.

The current and upcoming generations of gay teenagers have a unique experience – gay as a defined identity, and sans the religious right, without the imminent pandemic danger it’s earlier generations of youth experienced. The gay experience now is affected by consumerism (pop culture, blog culture), consuming the various aspects to build the identity. For whatever reason, if it’s that AIDS doesn’t phase kids as a deathly reality anymore, HIV infection statistics among youths have started climbing up in correlation with the popularity of bareback (condomless) porn. The AIDS epidemic of the 80′s is less tangible a reality and more a story– the tangible evidence of its destructiveness and the blind eye politicians (the president) and government agencies turned towards addressing the epidemic– wiped out with the generation that endured it.

Life as a gay person in the lower and middle classes pre-gay rights movement (of which the Stonewall Uprising in June of 1969 was the start) is less tangible a reality and more a story as well. A reality still for those trapped in insular environments, but for the masses – at least on the surface level due to a bit of attention in the entertainment media- the cultural temperature appears safe. I think it’s easy to feel a bit apathetic now – the battle is off the streets and in courtrooms. It’s why psychologists have studied internalized racism– when it goes guerilla, it’s much harder to address.

The film does a nice job of recounting the times and the perspective of what it was like then for the lower-middle class gay. The anti-gay propaganda doled out in classrooms to children is really horrifying and I’m curious what damaging effects it’s had on those youth. I love the imagery of drag queens in full garb fighting the policemen – they were the ones who were fighting back that night, perhaps that’s a lesser known fact. Some of the more violent aspects were mentioned only in passing – how gays were beaten, killed, and dumped in rivers; not just by police smashing your head in but by suburban gangsters who drove into manhattan and would pull you into their car to murder you. It was said the police turned a blind eye to the killings of gays and not bother to conduct an inspection unless you were of an upper class family. A friend of a friend was a victim of one of these abductions where some gangsters broke a beer bottle in half and ground it in circles around the victim’s eye socket, removing his eye and pulverizing his eye socket so only a large gaping hole in the head remained. Then they took the broken bottle and went to work on the stomach.

Coming from the west coast, it was nice to have some way to experience the Stonewall Uprising through interviews and re-creations. The turning point in the West Coast’s history of gay activism comes with the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official in active office. This was our Stonewall – which I read about in The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk while I was attending Berkeley.

The first time I came to New York in early 2004, I went in search of the Stonewall.. it was snowing and windy, I had no idea where I was going, and I had spent the day trying to walk around the city with frozen hands. I ended up at some club, I’m not sure if it was the Stonewall though..
I haven’t tried to find the Stonewall since then, for no real reason. However, it was nice to see the film just a few blocks from where it took place. I guess that’s nice about watching movies about New York in New York- Manhattan is small and usually some scene you’re watching will be just down the street of where you are. That’s more real that reality TV.

Synopsis from Film Forum:

http://www.filmforum.org/films/stonewall.html

“It was the Rosa Parks moment,” says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement. Told by Stonewall patrons, Village Voice reporters and the cop who led the raid, STONEWALL UPRISING compellingly recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. A treasure-trove of archival footage gives life to this all-too-recent reality, a time when Mike Wallace announced on a 1966 CBS Reports: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history.

USA • 2010 • 82 MINUTES • FIRST RUN FEATURES