New York’s Greenwich Village in 1969 was close to paradise for most young folks, but closer to a refugee camp for Danny Winters. A player on his coach-dad’s football team in small-town Indiana, he was bound for big-city Columbia University until the worst imaginable high school “outing” — exposed, in more ways than one, during a quarterback sneak behind a barn.
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Jonny Beauchamp, Joey King.
Rating: R for sexual content, language throughout, some violence and drug use.
The subsequent flight and plight of naive, tortured Danny (Jeremy Irvine) is fictional but the main event is not in director Roland Emmerich’s “Stonewall,” an earnest if problematic account of the revolt that launched America’s gay rights movement.
Gay History 101 (Cliffs Notes): The upheavals of WWII left a national longing for prewar social order, manifested by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s efforts to cleanse government of communists and others deemed “un-American” — including homosexuals, considered dangerously susceptible to blackmail.
"Those who engage in acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons,” said a 1950 Senate report. “Sex perverts in Government constitute security risks."
Some 5,000 were discharged from the military or from federal jobs. It was illegal for homosexuals to congregate, be served alcohol or dance in public. The FBI kept lists of gays and gay establishments. State and local governments followed suit, shutting down gay bars, arresting and exposing their patrons in the newspapers. Thousands were jailed or put in mental hospitals.
By the late ’60s, the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and hippie movements — plus the Village’s liberal environment — let gay sex workers live there in flophouses and parks and colorblind Christopher Street gangs, one of which takes Danny under its wing.
Stonewall — owned by the Mafia’s Genovese family — was a complex “community center” where the Mob could blackmail its wealthier clientele (the Wall Street types) and overlook all the drug and sex transactions, while paying off the cops for advance notice of routine raids. Dancing was the main draw for the adolescent runaways, drag queens, butch lesbians and male prostitutes it catered to.
At 1 a.m. on June 28, 1969, the place was raided yet again. Only those in drag and without IDs were arrested. Most of the 200 inside were released but hung around outside. The crowd grew fast. The cops formed a phalanx, slowly marching and pushing them back. The crowd mocked them with comic salutes and chorus kick lines, egged on by applause. When cops picked up and threw a transvestite into the back of a paddy wagon, he/she shouted at bystanders, “Why don’t you guys do something?”
They did. Said one of them, Michael Fader, later: “We had a collective feeling that we’d had enough .... Everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in one particular place .... It was the last straw.”
Screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz renders that well but perpetuates a lot of stereotypes in the process. Sadistic cops beat the hell out of Danny for no reason. Only one subset of a complex set of people seems to be represented. Drag queens aren’t “transgendered,” they’re female impersonators. No transgender women were at Stonewall or in “Stonewall,” which almost entirely omits the few brave women who were.
Mr. Irvine (of “War Horse” semi-fame) is appealing but not highly convincing as the Hollywood-handsome, straight-looking protagonist who becomes an unlikely rebel with this cause. Stonewall manager Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman) pimps out pretty boys like Danny in a noxious kidnap subplot. Jonny Beauchamp as campy Ray — wildly jealous and full of grievances — eerily resembles Michael Jackson.
Procol Harum’s beautiful “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is used and abused as the bar’s anthem: Every time we hear it, skipping the light fandango, two gay lovers are dancing while a third one watches brokenhearted across the room.
“Stonewall” holds no candle to “Milk,” “Malcolm” or “Selma.” German disaster-director Emmerich (“White House Down” 2013, “Godzilla” 1998, “Independence Day” 1996) is not known for nuance. His film is a farrago, but still involving and of value to younger viewers for whom serious gay repression is ancient history. Before Stonewall, only about 100 activists were open about their sexuality. A year later, June 28, 1970, 10,000 joined in New York’s first Gay Pride march.
For the 25th annual march, there were 1 million.
The film’s suggestion that Judy Garland’s death and NYC funeral had something to do with inspiring the revolt trivializes it. Judy was/remains beloved of older, middle-class gays. These teenage street kids couldn’t have cared less about her. Stonewall had become their facsimile of home. When it was raided, they went from acquiescence to resistance, and fought for it. They had nothing to lose. It was heroic and exhilarating.
Not so exhilarating: 40 percent of today's homeless youth nationally — many of them kicked out by their parents — are LGBT.
Opens today at AMC Loews at the Waterfront.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.
First Published: September 25, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
