STONEWALL UPRISING
Produced & Directed by Kate Davis & David Heilbroner
Written by Heilbroner, based on the book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
Released by First Run Features
USA. 82 min. Not Rated   
 

By the standards of New York City streets disturbance, the three-night clash between the police and angry patrons at a Mafia-run bar would rank low in terms of violence, way below the lethal riots during the Civil War or in 1964. But the confrontation at the Stonewall Inn is significant for what it ignited, the long-gestating gay rights movement. Why did hundreds of mostly gay men—drag queens, young gay kids who considered the neighborhood their turf, and regular joes—snap on June 28, 1969, resisting arrest during yet another police raid? There’s not just one pivotal answer, or answers. Stonewall Uprising persuasively makes the case that it was inevitable. As one father said to his son, “About time you fags rioted.”

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s workmanlike documentary crams a lot of pre-1969 history into the film’s first half, providing a road map from the time when homosexuality was a crime in all 50 states, except, for some reason, Illinois. Some of its footage might be familiar—the requisite montage of 1950s homogeneous, consumer-oriented suburban life or Mike Wallace’s sensational and homophobic TV report, The Homosexual, from 1967. Excepts from this and the 1961 “Boys Beware” PSA would be a hoot if they didn’t reinforce the overwhelmingly draconian legal and medical opinions of the day, which carried dire consequences: harassment, shock treatment, sterilization, and the equivalent of what’s described as a pharmacological waterboarding. In retreading this ground, the film has the power to shock.

This portion feels like an annotation of 1984’s insightful documentary Before Stonewall, which devoted more screen time to the growing political challenges to discrimination and for what passed for a visible gay culture before ’69—the pulpy lesbian paperback novels and muscle magazines. With some overlap, both films take note, for example, of the 1950 formation of the Mattachine Society to advance legal rights and the term “twilight people,” a euphemism for the demimonde, in use long before it came to be associated with Stephenie Meyer.

Though it may not have as much historical heft as the earlier film, Uprising zeroes in, hour by hour, on that first night at the Stonewall (a “toilet” with “watered-down drinks”), relived by participants, now back in the limelight. All give good quotes, though a few longwinded eyewitnesses repeat themselves. Fortuitously, the Village Voice, then located around the corner in Greenwich Village, had a major scoop on its doorstep. Journalists Howard Smith and Lucien Truscott IV, plus the police officer who led the raid, add their voices to the look back.

But it’s after the riots that the real show begins. The commemoration of that June weekend a year later launched annual gay rights parades around the world, and snowballed into increased visibility and political action, which the follow-up 1999 film After Stonewall recalls in a greatest-hits complication of landmark events. Enter electoral victories, Harvey Milk, ACT UP, to name a few. For those who haven’t seen the prior films, Stonewall Uprising will, nevertheless, be eye-opening. (It will air later this year as part of the American Experience series.) For a fuller picture, watch Before Stonewall and After Stonewall, which have just been rereleased on DVD. Kent Turner
June 16, 2010