Out gay director Roland Emmerich was on the receiving end of some very nasty vitriolic abuse by people condemning his new movie outright purely on the first sight of a trailer. A petition was even drawn up urging people to boycott the movie even though no-one had still actually seen it yet to judge it fairly. The complaint levied against Emmerich was that he was attempting to re-write a crucial watershed in gay history when the birth of the gay liberation movement was really born. The trouble with the argument is that actual detail of those nights 46 years ago when the Stonewall riots took place are very spotty to say the least given that most of the participants were unknown, and a good number died in the ‘80s during the AIDS crisis, but still so many people are claiming that their take on events is the only correct one. Yet for example, according to historian David Carter in his book ‘Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution’, Emmerich got the mix of the crowd spot on.
queerguru has seen the movie already and our sister site queertiques carries our full review. We know that we are one of a handful of critics who actually liked the movie as although Emmerich’s fictional narrative is by no means a documentary on the events leading up to that fateful night in 1969 it is a strongly political based drama that will resonate with younger audiences in particular as it gives a real sense of what went down and help paved the way towards social acceptance and equality.
Emmerich’s movie is essentially a coming-out-story which many of us can so easily relate too, he just happened to use the Stonewall riots as the background, which is something we all need to be reminded about.
