The First Brick

The First Brick

In what seemed to be a normal early morning in Manhattan, New York City in 1969, one of the most important acts of protest took place outside a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. This protest, eventually known as the Stonewall Riots, would lead on to the creation of gay liberation movements that would go on to spread across the United States, eventually helping to stop the discrimination that the LGBT+ community was receiving heavily during the sixties. However, this important event in the history of the LGBT+ community has had different interpretations, especially in recent years with the critically acclaimed movie Stonewall by Roland Emmerich.

Marsha P Johnson

Stonewall is not a historically accurate account of that important morning in 1969, instead, the film portrays the story in a different light, that has caused many critics to scream whitewashing. Historians and Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt the only member of the street youth of Stonewall alive have raised remarks of how the events were so different to how they are portrayed in the film. Lanigan-Schmidt mentioned in an interview about the film about how the main white character Danny did not throw the first brick stating; ‘and that whole cornball thing of him being the one to throw the first brick.’[1] In fact, it was a black transgender woman called Marsha P Johnson who threw the first brick through the window that started those violent 1969 riots. Another witness of the riots, Mark Segal, also has backed this up stating the film ‘almost entirely leaves out the women who participated in the riots and helped create the Gay Liberation Front’ which was a complete mistake for Emmerich to do and led to the Boycott Stonewall Campaign.[2] This campaign called for the movie to not be watched due to the inaccuracy of this important event from the late sixties.

Stonewalls Danny

Although the film has its inaccuracies, it does show what life was like for homosexuals around the world during the sixties. It portrays the beatings from the police that were happening daily and sometimes the attempted sexual abuse from the police. We see how the Mafia had a big impact on the communities ‘safe’ spaces by paying off the police to leave bars like the Stonewall Inn to their own devices due to them not being allowed liquor licenses. However, they were still routinely raided and many homosexuals up to the point of the Stonewall riots were arrested and put on a list of known homosexuals if they were wearing more than three items of women’s clothes or didn’t have identification. The film clearly shows how the LGBT+ community was discriminated against during the sixties and why the Stonewall riots came to be. As soon as that brick was thrown the lives of the community had changed forever and it is horrible to think about where the community would be today without this important event from the sixties. Stonewall thus gives an important insight to the modern generation of the activities that would happen to the community in 1960s America.

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[1] Nigel Smith, "Gay Rights Activists Give Their Verdict On Stonewall: 'This Film Is No Credit To The History It Purports To Portray'", The Guardian, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/25/stonewall-film-gay-rights-activists-give-their-verdict.

[2] Mark Segal, "I Was At The Stonewall Riots. The Movie 'Stonewall' Gets Everything Wrong", PBS Newshour, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/stonewall-movie.