Oh No! "Stonewall Is Terribly Offensive, and Offensively Terrible"

Since its first trailer debuted, and maybe even before that, Stonewall, Roland Emmerich’s dramatization of the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn, a seismic event credited with kicking off the modern gay-rights movement, has been met with dread. 

Partly because, yes, it’s Roland Emmerich, the mega-schlock auteur behind disaster flicks like The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, and 2012, and outright disasters like Godzilla. 

He’s certainly a strange fit for a piece of relevant political rabble-rousing. (Day After Tomorrow could maybe be seen as a climate-change call to action, but then the C.G.I. wolves show up.) So, there was some trepidation about that, certainly. 

But more troubling was how Emmerich seemed to be framing the story, with Jeremy Irvine playing some beautiful, blond angel from the Midwest, sent to the Village to marshall the non-white, gender-queer street kids into action. 

Which, y’know, is certainly not how the Stonewall riots, which were largely incited by drag queens and trans women of color and lesbians, actually happened. And yet there was Irvine in the trailer, looking corn-fed and fit in a white T-shirt, while various characters closer to the demographic of the real Stonewall rioters slinked around him in the dark. So, there was hue and cry about that, as well there should have been.(Keep Reading)