People have complained that it is whitewashing:
http://www.aazah.com/articles/whitewash ... cKmc_lVikp
Roland Emmerich, on the other hand, has noted some of the struggles he has made making the film:Whitewashing History: Stonewall Movie Leaves Out Trans Women and Black Drag Queens Who Started The Movement
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SUBMITTED BY ANONYMOUS (NOT VERIFIED) ON WED, 08/05/2015 - 11:49
Watching history repeat itself before your very eyes can be a bit taxing. Just like how they are often relegated to the sidelines of the movement they helped start, in the new movie Stonewall, Trans Women and Drag queens and persons of color are being all but written out of history.
Quick history lesson: The Stonewall riots were a series of violent protests against the police by the LGBT+ community in New York in 1969. Many cite the Stonewall Riots as the single most important event that led to the LGBT+ liberation movement in America, and the foundation upon which all modern LGBT+ rights are founded upon.
With the release of the trailer, there is some level of controversy regarding director Roland Emmerich’s version of historical events.
The trailer, claims to be a ‘true story’, and tells the audience that a young, white, cisgender, gay man was the first to throw a brick and start the Stonewall Riots. In reality, hundreds of eye witness accounts and documented evidence have said the riots were started by black drag queens and transgender women.
The two people most credited with sparking the riots and paving the way for modern LGBT+ rights were Marsha P.Johnson, a black transwoman who performed as a drag queen, and Silvia Rivera, puerto rican transgender woman. These two people, who are universally recognized as starting the riots, take a back seat in to the "pretty white boy" who comes to save the day.
Marsha was the one who ‘really started it’ on the night of the riots, according to witnesses in David Carter’s Stonewall biography.
She went to the Stonewall Inn that night for her 25th birthday, and as a stalwart of the bar, was a focus of much of the celebrations. Like many trans women at the time, she performed as a drag queen.
During the riots, Marsha was observed dropping a heavy weight onto a police car – a powerful moment in the initial resistance.
Following the protests, Marsha took a pioneering role in the movement. She demonstrated on Wall Street in the 1980s against the extreme prices of AIDS drugs and was a mother figure to many LGBTI youths to come her way.
Sylvia was a 17-year-old Puerto Rican drag queen and trans activist on the night of the riot, persuaded by Tammy to attend.
According to one biography, she was in the crowd that gathered outside of the bar. She is believed to have yelled: ‘It’s the revolution!’
She is cited with being one of the first bystanders to throw a bottle.
Sylvia was a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, as well as co-founding the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with her close friend Marsha P. Johnson. She dedicated her life to helping homeless young drag queens and trans women.
Other players included Allyson Allante, who was just 14 when she was arrested, as well as Diane Kearney, Zazu Nova, Miss Peaches and more.
Honestly thiis film is a slap in the face to the people who took part in the riots, who fought in the streets for your right to be treated like a human being. It’s an insult to the LGBT community, to trans people, to drag queens, to women and people of color. Hollywood has once again taken our moment of major historical significance and told us that the only way people will care is if a white man is the hero, and that the only way change really happens is if a white man fights for it.
http://www.vulture.com/2015/07/roland-e ... ewall.html
Roland Emmerich Discusses His Gay-Rights Drama Stonewall and Debuts the Exclusive Poster
By Kyle Buchanan Follow @kylebuchanan
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As the action-movie auteur behind films like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and White House Down, Roland Emmerich tends to spend his days on set managing explosions and working with tricky special effects. But when Emmerich recently changed gears to make the intimate, low-budget gay-rights drama Stonewall, he found himself faced with a whole new set of problems. "It was a huge challenge to make this movie, and if I had not absolutely wanted it, it would not have happened," he told Vulture this week.
Emmerich's new film tells the story of the 1969 Stonewall riots — where a long-oppressed queer community finally fought back against a police raid at New York's Stonewall Inn — and when it comes out in theaters on September 25 (you can check out the exclusive poster teasing that release date below), it will do so at a pivotal point for gay rights and visibility. On the one hand, this has been a historic year for progress thanks to last month's gay-marriage decision at the Supreme Court, and queer representation is at an all-time high both in real life and in the arts. At the same time, though, we're coming up on the tenth anniversary of Brokeback Mountain, and it's still as difficult as ever to get a gay movie financed, let alone a period piece dealing with a pivotal incident that isn't taught in most high-school history books.
"It was an uphill battle, but we finally did it," said Emmerich, who was only able to get Stonewall made after he moved production from New York to Montreal — "We wanted to do it in New York on location, and that failed miserably because it was so expensive" — and slashed the budget to a meager fraction of what he typically can command on his bigger films.
The ensemble nature of Stonewall also proved to be a hurdle for Emmerich. "If you can cast a central character with one or two famous actors, you have a good chance to get the movie financed, but in my case, I knew there was not really one central character in the Stonewall riots," said the director. And while the film has a nominal point-of-view character in Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a young gay man kicked out of his family home who finds refuge with the street kids who congregate at the Stonewall Inn — all of whom face ongoing harassment that finally comes to a head during the riots — Emmerich insists that the diverse crowd that fought back at Stonewall won't simply be reduced to just one young, blond hunk. "I think we represented it very well," he said. "We have drag queens, lesbians, we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what 'gay' means."
In fact, Emmerich cast several performers who'd never made a movie before — including Jonny Beauchamp, who's since appeared on Penny Dreadful as Angelique — in an effort to diversify his cast, which also includes veteran actors like Ron Perlman and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. But while Emmerich confirms that several of his newcomers are openly gay (like the director himself), he didn't consider that a requirement to be cast. "I don't think you should say, 'He can only play gay because he is gay,'" said Emmerich. "I think Jeremy did an amazing job playing gay, acting gay, and then there were gay actors who also did an amazing job. It was more about who was the best actor for the part, and I always do it like that."
Now, though, those intimate considerations are mostly put behind him, as Emmerich is in the middle of a grueling shoot for another one of his big action movies, the sequel to Independence Day. I asked him whether a movie like Stonewall provided an opportunity to recharge in between orchestrating bouts of big-budget carnage. "Totally," he said. "Even talking about it to you now, I'm getting homesick. Right now I'm shooting a big one, and I have to do it in record time." He laughed ruefully. "It's an ongoing nightmare."
So, here's the question, is this whitewashing, a film that's struggling to be put out there, or something in-between?
