Analysis Of The Movie Stonewall

Just typing in the name of the New York bar and inn gets you countless results of differing opinions; a lot of them to do with the new movie, aptly named Stonewall, and its portrayal of the riots. Opinions are split on whether or not it perpetuates the erasure of the trans women of color that were present at Stonewall. Differing opinions aside, it is clear that Stonewall’s new movie re enactment is impacting our society; just perhaps not in the good way.

To remind anyone who doesn’t remember, the Stonewall riots started on June 28th, 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, at the titular Stonewall inn. What started as a gay man’s refusal to succumb to the routine police harassment one night turned into a three day series of riots fought by gays, lesbians, trans women(then known only as drag queens), and street kids; all a mix of races.

However, there is controversy over Roland Emmerich's new movie, Stonewall, and its accused “Whitewashing” of the momentous LGBT riots. These accusations lie in the fact that movie centers around a fictional character named Danny Winters; a white gay man who was kicked out by his parents and wound up in Greenwich Village, NY, instead of focusing on the trans people of

The issue lies in that Emmerich’s new movie, like many other Stonewall memorials, does just the opposite; it minimizes still the amount of people of color shown by many accounts to have been present and very active in the riots. In Emmerich’s new film, two influential and interesting latinx figureheads of the riots (Ray Castro and Sylvia Rivera) are meshed into one fictional side character, while Ed Murphy, a white bouncer, was given a very large role in the movie. As well as this, no one on the writing crew was involved in the actual Stonewall, and there are as many as two black actors and maybe five to eight latinx people in the cast and

But everywhere you went, all you saw was about how dogs were so much better. You find out about something big, something amazing that both cats and dogs did together, just to find that most tributes and reenactments focus only on the dogs; giving cats a brief background spotlight at most. You feel outraged, and righteously so; it’s not fair that dogs get all the attention when they were not the only participants. However, when you protest, you are met with remarks such as “most of those who go to see these things are dogs, they need to have a relatable role model that keeps them coming back,” or, “But the dog learns to accept and honor the side character cats”, or even worse, “But dogs had just as much to do with this event, so they should get the spotlight too, so if you want to give the cats 100% of the credit, why don’t you check history