Stonewall: Now And Then

The historical moment we call “Stonewall”—a series of grass-roots protests with complex motivations and diverse participants that took place in and around a divey Manhattan fag bar during the summer of 1969—has always been something of a Rorschach test: We see in it what we need to see...

Where a critic for the Hollywood Reporter was pleased with the movie’s encouragement of “political awakening,” Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak recoiled at a straight-pandering “monstrosity” whose “badness is nearly unfathomable.” Our disparate reactions to a movie like Stonewall can’t help but reveal personal preoccupations and wishes, and those, in turn, suggest a queer “community” that is very much unsure of where it wants to go next.

To be clear, taking Stonewall seriously in the way I have is not the same as offering a defense. It doesn’t warrant that. But I do think it’s worth considering why such a small, misbegotten movie—one that we could, as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir suggests, just as easily nudge into the memory hole—has generated so much angst. 

Stonewall was a moment when we all put aside our differences and united to finally fight back—or at least that’s what most of us want it to have been. Stonewall, on the other hand, comes at a moment when the always jury-rigged alliance between the various queer contingents feels more uncertain every day; when our debates over terminology, community norms, political goals, and paths toward social justice feel increasingly fractious. 

Is it any surprise the stakes of this movie—our movie—feel so high? Usually cinema screens simply reflect back the light projected onto them—but sometimes, they act as mirrors for the audience as well. This is one of those times.

The Stakes Of Stonewall, J Bryan Lowder, Slate.

Only the brilliantly perceptive Mr Lowder could make Fagburn temporarily lift his ban on blogging about this sodding movie again.

PS The only other article worth reading on this hoo-hah is Tim Teeman's The Gay Shame Of Stonewall The Movie.

Anyway... No more on Stonewall, it's got boring.

Everyone's feigning outrage now, it's all a bit 'Cecil The Lion'.

PS And finally... here's Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, your actual surviving Stonewall street kid...

The movie is pretty accurate in terms of the street kids being the main engine of things. In one criticism of this film, someone was saying they were angry because there were so many gay stereotypes. Gay stereotypes are what made it happen. The people who passed for straight hid and didn’t want to be active at the beginning. The straighter-acting people ran away.

Gay Dad Watch: Won't Somebody Please Think Of Our Children!

Over the weekend, the New York Times published one of the most frustrating, yell-at-the-screen articles I’ve read in a long time. The piece, cheekily headlined “Chelsea’s Risqué Businesses,” explored an ongoing skirmish in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that used to be edgy and largely gay but that’s now mainly blanketed in the boringness of gentrification. The fact that no one actually thinks of 2015 Chelsea as particularly seedy, in a gay sense or otherwise, makes the battle—which apparently has sanctimonious gay parents trying to drive out gay porn/novelty shop owners in the name of the CHILDREN—all the more exasperating. But, as I explored in my recent long-form piece on the history and future of gay culture, the phenomenon of gay people attacking traditionally gay spaces and practices in the name of respectability is, sadly, nothing new. Indeed, it’s been the main mechanism by which much of the mainstream advocate class has tried to cajole “equality” from straight people in the wake of the first AIDS crisis...

J Bryan Lowder on great form as ever on Slate. Now read on...

There goes the neighbourhood etc etc.

What Was Gay?: An Essay

In an increasingly accepting world, homosexual men are all too eager to leave their campy, cruising past behind. But the price of equality shouldn’t be conformity.

A stunningly good essay by J Bryan Lowder for Slate.

The above quote is a pretty lame summation of the piece ('homosexual men'!?), but that's subs for you.

My thoughts have been provoked! x

PS Had another of my Kenneth Williams' moments, now posting stories from before Thursday roughly when they broke.