Era$e/Rew]nd ~ Film Reviews ~ "Before Stonewall"
25th Anniversary DVD release (Peccadillo Pictures- 1984/87
mins)
Under Pressure - Irfan Shah turns the hose back on
the establishment with a 'memento' style look at films
they either didn't want you to see or didn't want you
to remember. 'Before Stonewall' - an exploration of
prejudice and gay pride in 1960s America - re-released
with extras.
Release 22.06.09
The secret histories of homosexual America are remembered
in this absorbing documentary re-released on its twenty-fifth
anniversary.
On June 27 1969, New York gay bar, The Stonewall Inn,
was raided by the police. It was a tipping point in
history – the three nights of rioting that followed
helped to create the Stonewall pressure group and is
considered the birth of the modern Gay Rights movement.
The documentary takes five decades of archival film,
movie clips and personal recollections of writers and
journalists like Rita Mae Brown, Evelyn Hooker and Jim
Kepner to explore the tumultuous events leading up the
riots. The 2009 release includes further interview footage
of Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Jose Sarria, a Q&A session
with directors, Ken Livingstone, Greta Schiller and
Richard Kwietniowski.
Poignant and quietly powerful, ‘Before Stonewall’ is
a moving history of homosexuality in America told through
a combination of talking heads and rich archive film
footage. Along the way we are taken into Harlem speakeasies,
army barracks and the courtrooms of the McCarthy witch
hunts. We see embryonic gay rights movements coalesce
ad evolve but are also given a glimpse of the sheer
isolation felt by many forced to live secret second
lives.
If anything, the ribbons of narrative drag a little
in the middle but this is a minor fault as the accumulation
of personal stories is ultimately powerful.
The most powerful moments in the documentary are provided
not by the famous figures such as Allen Ginsburg but
by the lesser known, ordinary people who describe their
trials and small, tender victories – the man whose epiphany
was realising that ‘we weren’t bad people, that we are
good people’; the lesbian soldier who stood up to Eisenhower;
the joyous reunion of the habitués of the Black Cat
club, back together in happier, more open times. It
is a quiet, understated and ultimately inspirational
film.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Stonewall
reporter and eyewitness, Lucian K. Truscott IV, tries
to explode the myth that the police raid on the mafia-owned
Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars.
Rather than being a deliberate 'clearout' of the gay
community, Truscott argues that the Stonewall operation
was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector,
Seymour Pine who was convinced that The Stonewall was
selling liquor without a license and was being used
by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons
who worked on Wall Street. The Deputy Inspector is said
to have carried out the operation without the knowledge
of the officers of the local police precinct, whom he
suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other
Mafia-run gay bars in the Village. The bar's regulars,
Truscott goes on, 'were mostly teenagers from Queens,
Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens
and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements
on the Lower East Side'.
Who do we believe? Perhaps we'll never know. Virtually
no TV or newspaper footage exists of the riots themselves
- and so we have virtually no proof of who was there
and who wasn't.
