Stonewall, the forthcoming Roland Emmerich film which fictionalizes the start of the pride movement in a West Village nightclub, follows the fable of Danny, a cornfed gay kid from the Midwest who follows his dreams to New York City and totally starts it all by throwing a brick throw a window and Finding Himself.
The problem with this retelling, aside from the fact that a story about a boy following his dreams to New York City is cliché as hell, is that it completely miscasts history in favor of some whitewashed bullshit with a shiny white cis man at its center, when in fact Stonewall and the subsequent LGBTQIA rights movements that it preceded were known to have partly begun by extremely awesome trans activists of color like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. (And, Jesus Christ, wouldn’t a film about the true activists been far more interesting than the scrubbed Disney bullshit they’re trying to feed us? I wanna see some Marsha goddamn Johnson/who the hell is Jeremy Irvine! War Horse? Come ON!)
Luckily there are comedians out there specializing in the #fixeditforya department, and froma few of them comes this excellent parody trailer that asks the tough questions, such as, “Who the fuck is Danny?” And also how the hell Hollywood decided the guy responsible for disaster films like Independence Day and 2012 (the best) would be a great choice to direct historical fiction about the time an entire civil rights movement began! Watch it, laugh, cry, and then check out Mara Wilson totally reading Emmerich on Twitter: “Has anyone told Roland Emmerich that Stonewall wasn’t one of the parties at his house exclusively for young, fit, white, gay men.” Burns like sunlight on a white Kansas boy’s skin!
Text by: Julianne Escobedo Shepherd - The Muse