If only cameras then were as ubiquitous as cameras now, "Stonewall Uprising" would have been a much better film, and the Greenwich Village riots would have had more impact. The documentary, co-directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, with a writing credit for him and an editing credit for her, provides some splendid interviews with aging members who were among the rioters a half-century (plus one) ago, but the visuals are lacking.
Unfortunately, there seems to be almost no video or film of the three-day riot that one veteran referred to as "the Rosa Parks moment" for gay activists and organizers. Strangely, there was practically no coverage by any New York TV station, and since the battle went on in the midnight hours, photos were rare. Therefore, a number of shots are repeated, leading to "oh, no, not again" moments, and the overall impact is lessened.
Listening to the speakers, however, is gripping and moving. We hear from people who had been marginalized most of their lives, beaten regularly in semi-organized mayhem, often led by the police. Many in the New York community tended to hang out in "gay bars," like the Stonewall Inn, many controlled by the Mafia and most of serving as the same sort of refuge/gathering place African-Americans found in small-town churches in the South.
William Eskridge, a law professor at Yale, is the main speaker, while Lucian Truscott IV and Howard Smith, whose Village Voice office was within a block of the Inn, recalled the days and nights, with Truscott recalling triumphantly that he broke new ground in American newspapering by referring to the rioters as "the forces of faggotry." Seymour Pine, a retired policeman who was head of the public morals unit of the precinct, speaks with a different attitude now. Others, like poet-activist Martha Shelley; Raymond Castro, a baker in the Village; drag queen Martin Boyce; John O'Brien, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front; and Dick Leitsch, executive director of the Mattachine Society, speak movingly of the three days when they saw the police running from the homosexuals, rather than the other way around.
Most moving of all is playwright Doric Wilson, one of the many who marched a year later to celebrate the riots and to prove that they had become a real force. Wilson said that he began to weep as the march, or parade, moved up Sixth Avenue from Greenwich Village, and he saw that a large and supportive group of people was marching or watching. And he wept again as he remembered that triumphant time.
Davis and Heilbroner have put together an excellent film. Despite the shortcomings, the interviews are crisp and to the point, and the filmmakers chose excellent speakers with good stories to tell. Like so many studies of the expansion of any form civil rights, "Stonewall Uprising" celebrates how much has been accomplished, but its very existence demonstrates how much is yet to be achieved.
"Stonewall Uprising" opens today at the Plaza Frontenac.
–Joe