Storifying Stonewall

By Kelly Cogswell

I'm not surprised that the director of the new movie "Stonewall," sidelined the butches and drag queens of color for a hero who was gay and white and male and so macho that nobody was gonna be checking his trousers to see if he had all the equipment promised by that pale chiseled face. After all, that's what the LGBT movement did, tidying up its history almost as quickly as the broken glass and ashes were cleared from the West Village streets.

Only four years afterwards, Sylvia Rivera, one of the original Stonewall riot girls, had to claw her way onto the stage of the 1973 Pride celebration, and wait out the jeers before she could speak about how trans women were getting beaten and raped in jail, and call on the community to look outside the inner circle of white middle-class concerns.

Even now, national LGBT groups put forward only their whitest, most gender-conforming foot, and until recently would jettison the T any time trans issues seemed a stumbling block to pro-gay legislation. Questions of racism in our community are still barely acknowledged.

So why would we expect more from the earnest gay director Roland Emmerich, who told Buzzfeed he just wanted to make sure LGBT kids knew their history, and in particular shed a little light on LGBT homelessness? I don't even care he said he wanted a "straight-acting" character that middle America could identify with, because isn't that what most directors want, especially mainstream directors like Emmerich?

He's best known for blockbuster action films that feature likeable, macho central figures, and narrative arcs that never diverge as they move towards their inevitably exciting but happy conclusions. While he deserves his props for casting actor Will Smith as the lead in "Independence Day," when that seemed a daring choice, and centering an interracial couple in "The Day After Tomorrow," these movies still warn us not to expect subtlety, and any careful handling of what historians like to call facts.

In fact, it seems he treated "Stonewall" like any fiction film, imagining that if somebody had to pick up that brick and throw it, and if it would help get this important story told, why not a nice white boy from Indiana that the rest of America could identify with, and maybe even elicit a little sympathy for LGBT issues, especially queer kids that were the bulk of the original Stonewall crowd? At least he didn't pretend to be doing a documentary, unlike some films about ACT-UP that also give the impression that our most important activists have always been white and male.

For me, the problem of "Stonewall" and other films like it is as much the form as the usual content. Suppose Emmerich had been writing the film now, taking into account all the recent progress we've had in trans visibility, and deciding to give center stage, for instance, to Marsha P. Johnson, would it would have changed the film in any significant way? Or like Dan, would a Marsha-like character exist mostly to suffer for a while, overcome adversity, and develop into a heroine, just in time for a happy, happy ending, in this case conveniently taking place before the real Marsha's violent death.

You'd get a black trans face in there, and maybe be closer to the facts, both of which are good, but not good enough, since what I want is a film about Stonewall and the queer experience that actually comes closer to the messy truth.

That's the fundamental problem, after all, with all these kinds of heroic social change films. They homogenize experience, flatten it out, so that it is impossible, for me anyway, to recognize "history" onscreen where all the activists are heroes, even if they are flawed. And success is always inevitable. Even last year's movie "Pride," had that kind of glow about it. No matter that the queer campaign in Britain to support striking miners eventually failed, we did get to see hearts and minds changed as some conservative miners relinquished their homophobia and supported the queers in a big fuzzy hug at their own Pride Parade. The death of one of the gay characters of AIDS just lent an additional poignancy to the whole thing.

I suppose it's tempting, especially for embattled movements, to create these little mythologies in which we raise our fists at the right places, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and never fight with each other for more than a few minutes. But they aren't real. Even if they are eventually made more representative, seemingly more accurate, these stories cannot be our stories until that traditional narrative is broken, twisted, queered. Until we learn to celebrate failure without sneering at success, and bust the story open to reveal how much we've accomplished, less by charging heroically ahead, than by simply persisting, sometimes in blind hope, sometimes in rage.

A Plea For Queer History

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I've always liked Larry Kramer. He's one of the few people as perpetually pissed off as I am, and equally obsessed with gay history. While his thing lately is extracting queers from their historical closets, I'm desperate to preserve our activist history.

Without history, without memory, each generation seems to reinvent itself from scratch with a piecemeal vision for our movement, few role models, no understanding of organizing techniques or even how activism fits into the bigger picture of social change.

In our ignorance, we've allied ourselves with one party, diminishing our political bargaining power, and embraced a leadership seemingly determined to separate us from our history of survival and resistance. If not for some vague image of Martin Luther King, and an even vaguer image of Stonewall, we wouldn't even have had the idea to take to the street, carry signs, make speeches, and perhaps organize a sit-in or two after the Marriage Equality efforts in California fumbled their way to defeat.

Worse, we barely reacted when Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign told us to sit down and shut up after secret meetings with the Obama administration. "They've got a vision. They've got a plan."

Maybe it's time to pull a woolly mammoth from the tar pit of queer history. I recommend the Lesbian Avengers.

If you've heard of them at all it's probably for their ongoing legacy of Dyke Marches held all over the country, or their bold direct actions like taking over a radio station to put pressure on Spanish-language media to mend their homophobic, racist ways.

In fact, the most radical act of the Lesbian Avengers was to take queer activism where it had never been before, into the heart of heartland politics. And if this history had been remembered, queer Californians could probably still get hitched.

Turn the dial on the time machine to 1993-4. The place is rural, conservative Idaho, largely lacking in progressive networks. When the Idaho Citizens' Alliance put an anti-gay measure on the ballot banning everything from antidiscrimination ordinances to queer books in the library, it seemed a slam duck for the Christian Right. And almost was.

Local queers responded in two ways. The No on 1 Coalition, a loose association of LGBT groups centered in the capital city of Boise, hired a full-time staff and called on the Human Rights Campaign Fund, Gay and Lesbian Americans and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

These guys bankrolled and centralized the campaign, instituting "message control" whereby the executive committee carefully controlled who could speak to the press, or send letters and articles. Arms were twisted to get local groups to comply. And like the recent "No on 8" campaign, queers were shoved in the closet and the door locked after them. Television ads twisted themselves in knots to avoid the words, "gay" and "lesbian," and focused instead on messages denouncing government interference in private lives.

Luckily, No on 1 stuck mostly to the southern part of the state. In the more rural, northern part, a tiny local chapter of Lesbian Avengers in Palouse decided Idaho needed rather different tactics. They called the Lesbian Avenger Civil Rights Organizing Project (LACROP) in New York to come help, and eight full-time and eight part-time workers arrived headed up by native Idahoan, Sara Pursley.

The Avengers did almost everything in reverse. Local lesbians and gay men were put front and center, encouraged to set their own priorities, come out in their communities and share power as widely as possible. Together, they organized speak-outs and kiss-ins. Some even went door-to-door to talk about their lives. Nobody was censored. And getting your voice heard and your life validated made it worth the risks of violence, vandalism, and fear. Queers made connections with each other, forged a place in their communities, oh, and won a bunch of votes.

The northern, rural region where the out and proud LACROP was active defeated Proposition One by a significant margin. The centralized, closeted efforts in the more urban and progressive area around Boise only narrowly defeated the measure, with the rest of the nearby counties voting overwhelmingly "yes" to adopt Proposition One. The extra votes in the LACROP region made the difference, along with Mormons who actually voted "no" because of bashing from the Christian Right.

It's time for this history to be more widely known. Imagine if those asshats in California had understood that lesbian and gay visibility should have been a fundamental part of their campaign, and not a liability.

Imagine if they'd understood the power of working together with a broader shared vision-- liberation -- and that impatient activists bringing visibility to important issues are not just blowhard loonies but an essential force creating space for organizers and lobbyists to find common ground for change.

Imagine, imagine, imagine if they had less money, and had to focus more on human capital, on creativity, on energy, on pure heart. Imagine, if we'd only remembered what those lesbians did once upon a time in Idaho.