The Emmy Award Winning Documentary ‘Before Stonewall; made in 1984 has been restored and is about to enjoy a theatrical run in June as part of the celebrations to mark the Anniversary of the Stonewall riots considered the pivotal turning point for the LGBTQ community.
Directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, this look back at the history of being gay from the early party of the 20th Century has a wealth of obscure archival footage. They show that being exposed back then as homosexual in society could mean the loss of everything, being totally shunned and made a complete pariah. Only Hollywood seemed to permit any sort of openness as long as it was in the form of exaggerated caricatures. That is until the Hays Code was introduced in 1934 and stricter censoring forbid even the merest hint of homosexuality.
It was America joining World War II that changed all of that. Suddenly young men were being forced to leave the comfort of their homes and be holed up in male-only battalions and the prospect of being killed in action, enbravened some to be more open in their sexuality. And not just the men, as one interviewee confirmed over 98% of her WACS platoon were lesbians, a fact that she enlightened General Eisenhower when he suggested a purge which he soon dismissed once he knew the facts.
Strange though, although not mentioned in the film, it was Eisenhower as the post-war President that signed the Order that created The Lavender Scare when gay men and women were hunted down in Federal Employment and exposed and fired from their jobs. Several of those people ended up taking their own lives.
The end of the war did however imbue some of the returning servicemen and women with a real sense of freedom for the first time in their lives. Many of them choosing to stay in the port cities and start new lives rather than returning to the bosom of their families and being forced back into the closet. The fact that these cities now had a wealth of gay bars meant they could now at last mingle with their own kind.
Heroes emerged like Harry Hay who in 1950 co-founded The Mattachine Society the first known homosexual group in the world. Soon after lesbians formed The Daughters of Bilitis and the small publications they produced were eagerly, and very discreetly, passed around from person to person desperate to read about others like themselves.
Literature became another key in the evolution of a community that at first barely acknowledged each other. The depressing throat-slitting classic The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall gave way to more novels and even a whole spread of slightly tawdry gay pulp fiction that was eagerly consumed.
They are attempts to equate those early years with the struggle for black civil rights, which evidently was supported by many closeted gay activists. Both of these communities were persecuted and threatened mainly because of sheer ignorance and the rhetoric of the far-right and the likes of McCarthyism whose message of hate embittered the general population. We were both easy targets, and it took a long time to empower ourselves to fight back.
That was exactly what happened the very night that the Police raided the Stonewall Inn once again on the flimsiest of excuses, but this time the drag queens and the trans women in the Bar fought back, and changed history once and for all.
There is no denying the enormous changes that one event kicked off and how far our community has gone in the achieving so many equal rights such as same sex marriage. However it seems somehow extremely ironic, and very scary indeed, that now 50 years on we may actually be on the precipice of fighting all over again to keep them.
This excellent movie should be compulsory viewing for all our community as this is our real ‘family history; of how we grew up. The language may seem old fashioned as everyone is homosexual and not a sole mention of ‘gay’ or ‘queer’, let alone ‘trans’, but the spirit and the message are still very much now,
Labels: 2018, documentary, gay history
