How to make a revolution boring

Stonewall
Directed by Rolland Emmerich
Written by Jon Robin Baitz
Starring Jeremy Irvine, Johnny Beauchamp, and Vladimir Alexis
Rated R

Let’s get this part over with first: Roland Emmerich, the director of the new film Stonewall as well as the disaster blockbusters The Fourth of July and The Day After Tomorrow, is a dope. After the gay, German-born director learned about the plight of homeless LGBT youth, he decided to make a movie about them, and that movie transmogrified into the story of homeless LGBT youth who helped start the 1969 Stonewall Riots, considered the symbolic, though not actual, beginning of the modern gay rights movement. This wasn’t the dopey part; it’s actually a laudable idea. But Emmerich, used to making studio movies with $200 million budgets, treated his independently financed $17 million film about an iconic moment in both American and queer history like a consumer product. He allowed test audiences – the focus groups of the movie business – to convince him that in order to draw in straight moviegoers that the film’s protagonist should be a fictional white-bread white boy from Indiana who is “straight-acting.” He told Buzzfeed, “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”

As problematic as “straight-acting” is as a term, it’s still used rather widely by gay and straight people, though certainly not the progressive ones. You’d think that the director of a movie about the Stonewall Riots, which were a response to constant police harassment of LGBT people in New York City who refused to act straight, would be a bit more enlightened. Of course, he focus-grouped a film about a historical event, so maybe enlightenment is not something we should expect from him. Yeah, Emmerich is a dope.

Yes, he deserves a great deal of the criticism he’s had heaped on him. In addition to the test audience filmmaking and the “straight-acting” comment, the movie is not good. It’s ham-fisted, overstuffed, often cloying, and its good parts are easily overshadowed by its dreadful parts (and more on that later). But I can’t agree with the most damning attack: the claim that the film is a white-supremacist text that erases the people of color, femme queens, the transgender people, the butch lesbians, and all of the other not-straight-acting people who started the Stonewall Riots. Simply, that claim is that Stonewall white washes Stonewall. Danny, after all, is shown to throw the first brick of the riots!

I read numerous criticisms of the film that stated that the riots were started by black drag queens, so Danny’s presence and role was a lie. The popular twitter personality Sam Kalidi joked, “If your Grindr profile says ‘No fats, no fems, no Asians, no Blacks, and no guys over 30’ you’ll love Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall.” For Queerty, he posted a photo of three Barbie dolls with “Diana Ross & The Supremes Biopic Directed by Roland Emmerich.” Lady Bunny responded with photo of Anne Hathaway sitting on a bus with the caption, “‘It took one woman sitting down to make a nation stand up.’ ROSA: The Movie, directed by Roland Emmerich.”

Funny, yes. But also wrong. Danny is the proxy for the audience; his experience is meant to introduce the audience to the homeless LGBT kids in Greenwich Village. The white proxy is a tired, cynical trope in films about the Other, and its use is based on close-minded assumption of the demographic of an audience and its inability to empathize. Some proxies are worse than others – think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves – but Danny’s failure as a character is more in his spectacular dullness than his ahistoricity. Despite some claims to the contrary, there were a huge number homeless, formerly middle-class gay kids like Danny (though probably more interesting than him) rioting outside the Stonewall Inn that June night. This is clear if you read the historical accounts, from David Carter’s masterful book Stonewall to the narratives of the riots’ veterans. But if you based your knowledge of Stonewall on Facebook memes, which sadly seems to be what many people have done, you’d think that the film has an army of Dannys replacing all of the people of color who were at Stonewall. But that’s not what the movie depicts.

Kicked out of his house for being gay by his wretched football coach father, Danny (Jeremy Irvine) takes the bus to New York and immediately is taken in by Ray, a fem Puerto Rican street prostitute who is usually in some sort of drag. Ray (Johnny Beauchamp) is clearly based on the pioneering transgender rights activist and Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, whose given name was Ray though had been renamed Sylvia by the age that Ray is in the film. Ray is different from Sylvia in some key ways – Sylvia was much more politically aware than Ray, who is more concerned with survival and, unfortunately, her unrequited love for Danny – but it is Ray’s quips of street wisdom, her wise-cracks, and her righteous anger at the world that has rejected, beaten, and spit on her that give Stonewall what little life it has. And Johnny Beauchamp is fantastic as Ray, making her as dynamic and sympathetic as Danny is wooden and dull.

Additionally, while entirely too much of the film follows Danny around on his mopey quest for self-acceptance, two of the best scenes in the film focus on black drag queens. Marsha P. Johnson, played by Otoja Abit, was a legendary figure from Stonewall, and along with Rivera founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group that helped homeless trans women and runaways. Johnson is depicted reverentially, as funny and kind, and her flamboyant reaction to her arrest at the Stonewall Inn incites the soon-to-be rioters. And she then gets to sock the evil bar owner Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman) before he escapes; the scene is entirely fictionalized, but it’s satisfying.

Queen Cong (Vladimir Alexis) has the most profound moment in the film. While Danny, Ray, and their friends are being evicted from a filthy SRO, Cong rips down the curtains to create an outfit. Danny is appalled and says, “You just take what you want, don’t you?” Yes, she replies, because she has nothing. And then: “I have not seen one dream come true on Christopher Street, baby. Not one.” This bitter fatalism sets up the anger and frustration to spills into the riots, and Alexis’s delivery is chilling.

Based on the drag queen Zazu Nova, who is credited with sparking the riot along with Johnson and a white hustler named Jackie Hormona, Cong carries a brick in his bag, just in case he wants to smash a store window and steal something. She pulls it out of her bag as the riot begins and Danny takes it from her, trying to stop her from throwing it. (Because Danny is that boring.) But Danny’s erstwhile boyfriend, the creepy assimilationist activist Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), thinks Danny is going to throw it and tells him not to. Pissed at Trevor’s demanding tone, Danny does throw it, shattering a window above the bar.

This scene enraged me for two reasons. First, after the disastrous response to the film’s very white first trailer led to calls for a boycott of the film, Jeremy Irvine made a point of claiming that Cong “pulls out the first brick of the riot scenes.” I posted his statement on Facebook to argue that the movie was going to be less offensive than the trailer made it out to be. Yes, Cong pulls it out – but Danny throws it! Irvine’s dissembling was both ballsy and bizarre. My jaw dropped in the theater.

Second, while Danny’s brick throwing is not necessarily historically inaccurate – the “first brick” was actually a garbage can and no one knows who threw it – the image of the lame white boy literally stealing a black queen’s agency from her hands is galling. The use of the white proxy can at least be cynically and barely justified by someone who wants straight white folks in middle America to understand the experience of LGBT people, but ripping the symbolic power from Cong, and therefore from Zuza Nova, is when the good will that the depictions of Ray, Marsha, and Cong had built up in me dissolved.

I can understand why Emmerich and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz (a once-important artist who should know better) had Danny throw the brick. It completes his transformation from naïve bumbler to angry activist, and as the proxy, this could elicit similar feelings in the audience. But Danny doesn’t stay angry. After the riots, he goes to Columbia University and, we’re told, barely visits Ray, Cong, and the rest of group who saved his life. Since Danny is the proxy, then is the audience also supposed to abandon these street kids who started the revolution?

Stonewall’s crime is its cynicism and its great failure is its emphasis on Danny. It is true, as Alex Jung pointed out on Vulture, that Sylvia Rivera and P. Marsha Johnson would be much more interesting and important people to build a film around. (It’s not true, as Jung claims, that Stonewall erases them from “the record.” One bad, clearly fictionalized movie doesn’t have that power.) Luckily, David Francis, who directed the Oscar-nominated ACT-UP documentary How to Survive a Plague, knows that and he has just begun filming Sylvia & Marsha. I do hope that the many people outraged by Stonewall, for both the right and wrong reasons, support the documentary when it arrives, to help show that white proxy theory is hooey. Until then, I hope they pay to see the wonderful comedy about two trans prostitutes in Los Angeles Tangerine, watch the great black lesbian film Pariah on Netflix, buy the DVD of new documentary about Puerto Rican transgender women Mala Mala in November, and, even better, redirect their rage towards passing laws protecting transgender people, pushing for more services and housing for homeless LGBT youth, and supporting the efforts of local LGBT historical societies that are educating the public about our struggle.

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Punditry, celebrity, and linguistics

In looking at the last three reviews that I’ve published and forgotten to post here, I realized they were all documentaries. Since I’m only getting published every two weeks now, I’m feeling less of a need to be focusing on what’s big right now and rather on what I think you should see that you probably haven’t heard about. Or that’s the idea anyway.

The Best of Enemies

People stay in their hermetically sealed ideological camps and hear only the echoes of themselves and the people they agree with, and when they interact with others, it is as if they are encountering an invading force of abjectly evil barbarians. Compromise, mutual understanding, and respect are almost nonexistent in our political discussions (and I am hardly innocent in this). Liberals blame Fox News, and conservatives blame the so-called “liberal media,” when neither of them are not just simply calling the other side degenerate idiots. Again, it’s a complicated process, but the fantastic new documentary he Best of Enemies makes the case that demon seed of this horrible situation can be traced to the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. [read the rest]

Amy

There were so many terrible things about Amy Winehouse’s death in 2011 at the age of 27. She was arguably the greatest singer of her generation, having produced two instantly classic albums, the jazz album Frank (2003) and the throwback soul album Back to Black (2006). Like those of entirely too many great rock stars who died at 27 – Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain – Winehouse’s death was an artistic tragedy for popular music and its fans. More importantly, it was horrifying, if unsurprising, for the family and friends who adored the magnetic, spectacular, deeply troubled Winehouse. Less importantly, but particularly troubling for me, was how the worst people in the world used Winehouse’s death to express their misogyny, pathological lack of empathy, and judgmental derision for addicts. She was troubled before she became famous, but the celebrity media, fed by its schadenfreude-infected consumers, turned her troubles into disasters and then gleefully covered them until they killed her. In the days after her death, I unfriended a couple dozen people on Facebook, the ones who called Winehouse a skank, a loser, a whore, and deserving of her end. I want them those people, and I want George Lopez, Jay Leno, and every other comedian who mocked Winehouse’s troubles, to see Asif Kapadia’s excellent and disturbing documentary about Winehouse’s life. [read the rest]

Do I Sound Gay

When I figured out that other people were figuring out I was gay, or maybe gay, or maybe just weird, say around the age of 14, I became hyper-vigilant about how I might be perceived by, well, everyone who was close enough to perceive me. Most of it was in my clothes (carefully disheveled instead of carefully dapper), my proclaimed interests (basketball not Bronski Beat), and my physical gestures (unlimp that wrist). When I heard my voice recorded on an answering machine, I was a little bit horrified. The long, dramatic “Hellohhhhh” and the Valley Girl inflection of “Call me?” I wasn’t even trying to be funny. Yes, there was some internalized homophobia, but I was more concerned about detection, about what would happen in my high school social circle if they correctly determined that I was gay. (It happened, and some of them behaved wretchedly.)

I modulated my vowels as best I could, dropped certain references and added others, and kept a watchful eye and ear. This was, of course, exhausting. It seemed to have worked, however. In a way. Before I started my review of David Thorpe’s insightful and excellent documentary about whether there is a gay “voice” Do I Sound Gay? I asked my Facebook friends just that question. Every single straight person who answered, including several I went to high school with, said I didn’t. Several of my gay friends, however, wrote that I speak in such a way that signals to other gay people that I’m gay, but that these signals, they claimed, are rarely picked up straight people. But, it also seems, if I’m excited, I’m really obviously gay. This is not surprising, since I’ve been known to belt “Yaaaaassssss!” in such moments. [read the rest]

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Virgil and Burns

I moved to East Hollywood six months ago, to a neighborhood that some people called Virgil Village. It’s a mostly working-class Mexican and Salvadoran neighborhood and has been for decades[1. The 2013 estimates were 60% Hispanic, 20% non-Hispanic white, and 14% Asian. The median household income is $53,046. Around 14% of my neighborhood lives in poverty.], and it has an increasingly number of young, usually but not always, white members of the so-called creative class. While I’m not young anymore, I’m a member of that class by privy of my education and privilege. And I chose the neighborhood partly because of its proximity to both Silver Lake and Hollywood, but mostly because I could (barely) afford the large one bedroom apartment in a building from the 1920s. I guess I’m a gentrifier in that I live in a vaguely[2. It’s the best maintained complex on the street, but our plant potters were stolen from a Shell station and there are more than a few repairs that I’d recommend.] gentrified complex mostly populated by people similar to me. I guess the neighborhood as a whole is slowly gentrifying, but we’re several years from getting a Trader Joe’s; the closest Starbucks is still 1.1 miles away, which is pretty far in a Starbucks-packed place like Los Angeles.

My current neighbors have yet to say or do anything in my presence that is as offensive as the many of things I heard when I lived downtown, where the contrast between epic poverty and epic wealth is particularly glaring, and many of the people with that wealth (or think they’re destined for that wealth) are disturbingly unaware of their carelessness. Yes, I’ve heard complaints about my new neighborhood[3. Los Angeles Parking Enforcement likes to levy their regressive taxation rather aggressively in this rather poor neighborhood, while sanitation doesn’t bother to pick up the large items, like couches and TVs, left as trash on the curbs.], but the ones I’ve heard aren’t based in a disdain for the culture or class of the vast majority of its residents.

Yesterday evening, I was walking up Virgil, and a half block from the corner of Burns, I saw a stereotypically dressed and affected hipster — that slur for creative class types — strolling around the corner laughing on his cell phone. He strolled right into the collection of votive candles that have populated the southwest corner of that intersection since Leonardo Gabriel Ramirez, a 17 year old boy from the neighborhood, was shot and killed on May 23. He was the fifth person murdered in East Hollywood in the last 12 months, and the youngest. The crime is unsolved, as most crimes in poor communities are, especially when the victim is not white.

After kicking half of them over, he laughed in surprise and just kept walking. As he passed me, I yelled, “That’s a fucking memorial!” He didn’t even turn. I hadn’t stopped walking myself, and I was steaming by the time I got to the other side of the street. I turned, and I went back to the memorial. I righted all of the votives, propped up the ones that were too chipped to stay up by themselves, and I lit the one that had a wick I could reach with my lighter. I was still angry for the next half hour. When I was walking home late that night, I came upon the memorial again. The candle I’d lit was out, but someone had lit another. That’s when I took this picture[3. My next door neighbor took pictures of the memorial soon after its creation.].

I don’t know this guy. I don’t know if he even lived in my zipcode. I don’t know if he was drunk and not in command of his full faculties. I don’t know if he’s normally so disrespectful, or if he even understood what those candles were for. Of course, you’d have to be pretty unaware of your surroundings not to know what a grouping of votive candles in such a place might be. I don’t know if he’s the kind of gentrifier that are so easily maligned. But he seemed to be. What I saw was a young white man of a certain station who treated a local symbol of mourning like garbage. He was careless; his laughter and his phonecall were more important. He didn’t understand that he lived in a community where his neighbors were grieiving; he didn’t seem to think that he was part of that community, a community that is culturally, historically, and socioeconomically specific.

I don’t know enough about the politics of gentrification[4. I wouldn’t even know where to start. The Google Scholar search is insane. But there’s a musical about gentrification in Brooklyn by The Civilians. And some great humor by Mike Albo and Amanda Duarte], and I may be stretching to connect this man’s behavior to that thorny problem, which is particularly thorny in Los Angeles, where the housing shortage is grave. It might just be that this was just an example of a jerk and a misunderstanding. But his behavior seemed as symbolic of gentrification as those candles are of grief.

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I wrote a bunch of reviews over the last few months

Since February, I’ve reviewed a bunch of movies. Here are some highlights, in case you missed what I do over at San Diego LGBT Weekly.

CinderellaCinderella, one of the most indelible of Western fairy tales, has been reinterpreted countless times since it first appeared in print in the 17th century; but mostly the story stays true to its origins: a wealthy girl is turned into a servant by a horrible stepmother and a fairy godmother helps the girl win the heart and hand of a charming prince. The animated Disney version released in 1950 is the most famous, and its story structure, characters and lyrics from its songs are so iconic that most people cannot think of Cinderella without thinking of Gus the mouse, the wicked stepsisters Drisella and Anastasia, and “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” While Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was wildly reimagined into the commercially successful but artistically and thematically messy Maleficent, with Disney’s massively budgeted live action version of Cinderella, they didn’t stray more than a few inches from the source material. And the result is an instant classic. [More]

Get HardPeople laughed during the preview screening of Get Hard. This is what bothered me most about the comedy featuring Will Ferrell as a clueless finance executive who hires a much more clueful Kevin Hart to prepare him for 10 years in prison. More than how terribly made it is, how pathetic and offensive its humor is, how simply dumb it is, what irks me most about Get Hard is that people liked it. And more than whether or not the people in Hollywood are gay, straight, black, white, conservative or progressive, Get Hard’s tickets sales are what will ensure that Hollywood continues to make movies likeGet Hard, movies that, yes, are inept, but are also, and more importantly, bad for our culture. [More]

Going ClearI now live five blocks from the giant blue Scientology building in Hollywood, and I often catch a bus at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, where young Scientologists, wearing blue blazers and solicitous smiles pass out proselytizing leaflets proclaiming, as all religions do, that they have the true answers to enlightenment. I avoid them. This is unfair and, honestly, bigoted, because the vast majority of Scientologists are good people looking for answers to life’s problems; they are not among the members of the Church hierarchy who, according to critics, operate like an organized criminal syndicate that happens to also be a cult. But you never know who among the foot soldiers is actually, well, a soldier who might eventually con me, stalk me, or keep me prisoner in a desert compound. As someone who has spent his life looking for answers to deep emotional questions, I have great empathy for people doing the same thing. But after watching Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s extraordinary and damning documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, I worry for these young Scientologists and what might happen to them. [More]

While Were YoungMaybe it’s because I’m about the same age at the characters Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play in While We’re Young that I so identified with them, their ennui about aging and their adulation of a much younger, fresh and earnest couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Josh (Stiller) and Cornelia (Watts) have reached their early middle age and discovered that they have not become the people they’d planned to become. They seem comfortable – he teaches documentary filmmaking and she produces the movies of her famous father and they have a nice apartment somewhere in New York City – but Josh, especially, is not the successful, lauded documentarian he wanted to be, and they do not have children. At the beginning of the film, they talk about how great it is that they’re free to do whatever they want because they’re not tied down, that they don’t need kids to be fulfilled. But when they meet Jamie (Driver, playing a version of Adam from Girls) and Darby (Seyfried, adorable but underused), Josh suddenly, Cornelia more slowly, realizes that they are somewhat unfulfilled. [More]

Ex MachinaHollywood is enthralled with big budget science fiction and fantasy films, particularly those starring superheroes, but despite their technological sophistication few of them do much more than please the eyes and leave you a little hard of hearing. Too much of a good thing is not good. These films have also brought along with them a renaissance of “hard” sci-fi, speculative fiction that makes you think more than it makes you drop your jaw in awe of the special effects. In the last few years, brainy big budget films like Inception, Interstellar, and District 9 have joined the exquisite, modestly budgeted Her and Under the Skin. Belonging to the latter category is Alex Garland’s fantastic Ex Machina, a gorgeous psychological thriller about artificial intelligence, arrogance, and, deliberately or not, misogyny. [More]

 

Max is a blood bagBefore I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, I spent a weekend watching George Miller’s three previous films about Max Rockatansky, all of which were filmed more than thirty years ago and starred Mel Gibson in the role that made him a superstar. I’d never seen them, and it hadn’t occurred to me to do so until now. This is a little odd, considering my taste in movies, but it happened. I watched them in order, first Mad Max (1979), then Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981), then Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985). All of them feature Max (Gibson), a stoic hero who tries to avoid a conflict between good and evil around him but then becomes its hero; the films are progressively more expensive and more explosive.

The first film, a low budget Australian surprise that for many years was the most profitable film in history, is an exploitation film; a hyper-violent revenge fantasy about a nearly lawless near future that happens to be directed by an auteur. It’s stunning and unnerving and brilliant. The second is a Hollywood-budgeted post-apocalyptic spectacle so stylistically influential that we cannot imagine dystopian depictions without the mutant vehicles, steampunk machinery, the clothing made of leather and feathers. The third is more of campfest, with Tina Turner as an evil queen and an army of abandoned children that make the film more family friendly. It was the only one of the films not rated R, and that was clearly a deliberate attempt to bring in more money.

Decades later, after Miller made Babe and won an Oscar for Happy Feet, he’s returned to Max, recast him with the wonderfully intense Tom Hardy, and paired him with an astonishing Charlize Theron, and made a film as surprising as Mad Max was. It’s the best action film in years. I haven’t seen a movie so jaw-dropping, so bold and ambitious and thrilling, since The Matrix 16 years ago. And by jaw-dropping, I mean my jaw actually dropped as I leaned forward in my seat in giddy awe. [More]

SpyMelissa McCarthy’s patented under-her-breath dirty jokes work extremely well in Spy, partly because we’re led to believe that she is a schlubby cat lady, so the jokes are a surprise, and partly because they are very, very funny (but unprintable in this publication). Susan is endearing and sympathetic because she looks and acts a lot more like a typical American woman than absurdly skinny Rose Byrne does. Her quest to become a superspy is all the more fun because it is seemingly impossible for a woman who everyone assumes is uncoordinated and weak. But she’s actually not what we assume; she’s almost superheroic in her abilities. [More]

I also reviewed The Last Five Years, Focus, Chappie, Insurgent, The Water Diviner, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, The D Train, Pitch Perfect 2, Tomorrowland, San Andreas, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

 

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Partly

It took a couple hours, but I’ve started crying. Partly, it’s the staggering shift from my childhood in Cincinnati, when and where being gay was treated more or less the same as being a pedophile, to my adulthood in LA, when and where my gayness is at least protected by the state (and the State) and the vast, vast majority of people I deal with on a daily basis either celebrate who I am or don’t give a rat’s ass. Partly, it’s remembering my wedding, when I married Rob, back when it wasn’t even legal in New York, and it will always be one of the greatest days of my life. Partly, it’s because of remembering losing Prop 8 and the debilitating sorrow I felt. Partly, it’s because that sorrow was made powerfully profound knowing that my neighbors and some of my family members and millions of strangers had contributed to it. Partly, it’s that my marriage and my subsequent partnership didn’t survive to this day, that having the right to love doesn’t give you the ability to make it last. Partly, it’s knowing how this ruling will change the lives, in concrete ways, of friends I have in Michigan and Ohio and Texas (and everywhere else), and these changes, the assurances and protections, are so needed and so great. Partly, it’s that I haven’t had any coffee yet, since I haven’t been able to tear my eyes from the computer screen. Partly, it’s knowing that I am going to the wedding of my dear friend Curtis in a few months, and it will be the first time that I will be at the wedding of two gay people and it won’t be a subversive act, and that is such a relief.

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