Movies

The lesbians of “Stonewall”

History is a tricky thing. Say what you will about today’s incessant use of iPhones and cameras, but their ability to capture moments for later proof and investigation of a particular moment in time might have proven helpful during something like the Stonewall Riots. As one of the most important happenings in LGBT history, the night of June 27, 1969 has been discussed, celebrated and heavily debated, as there is little footage of the events, and bystander’s commentary isn’t as reliable with differing opinions and interpretations of what spawned the uprising.

Forty-six years later after that sticky night in New York City, the details are being called into question because of a new feature film, Stonewall, Roland Emmerich‘s fictional retelling of the riots. (Although it only features the first night, when ultimately reports say the rioting continued for four days.) Roland, an out filmmaker whose work includes Hollywood blockbusters like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and The Patriot, based his story around Danny (Jeremy Irvine), a 17-year-old from Indiana who heads to Christopher Street after his parents kick him out for being gay. The bulk of the film is about Danny’s befriending of a group of hustlers who hole up together, sharing a single floor and few blankets in a run-down room on the same block of the Stonewall Inn.

The riots don’t begin until the climax of the film, although they are most of what has given way to criticism before most have been able to see Stonewall. (Now that reviewers have, however, the reviews focus on other facets they find unwatchable, including shaky story and melodramatic dialogue.) Because the movie highlights the white, gay male lead’s experience at the riots, the focus is less on the trans women, people of color and lesbians that were also involved. Interestingly, mosts of the discussions that have been had seem to even leave out the lesbians altogether.

The Stonewall Lesbian(s)

“A rather tough lesbian was busted in the bar and when she came out of the bar she was fighting the cops and trying to get away. And the harder she fought, the more the cops were beating her up and the madder the crowd got. And I ran into Howard Smith on the street, The Village Voice was right there. And Howard said, “Boy there’s like a riot gonna happen here,” and I said, “yeah.” And the police were showing up.- Lucian Truscott, IV, Reporter, The Village Voice, (Stonewall Uprising)

In 1969, it was illegal not only to having any same sex relationships, but for people to cross dress. Lesbians would be arrested if they weren’t wearing at least three items of women’s clothing, which is why many butch dykes would be thrown into jail after police raids on the underground gay bars, such as the Stonewall. In the film, out Toronto-based actress Joanne Vannicola plays the singular lesbian character with lines. In an early scene, she is thrown into a paddy wagon for donning menswear, alongside trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and another one of the film’s stars, Jonny Beauchamp as Ray/Ramona who were also violating the masquerading law. This happens just minutes after Joanne (playing a character named Sam) can be spotted in the background of a scene inside the bar, slow dancing and kissing a femme.

“My first day [on set], you won’t see much of it because it was edited down,” Joanne said, “but there was a big sort of jail scene where we were all thrown into jail prior to the Stonewall riots. You see a quick clip of my face at one point-we were all put in the paddy wagon and thrown into jail. There was a lot of lip locking with a lady, too, you just don’t see it on film. I had three to four hours of kissing! You just see like five seconds.”

Sam is a fictional character, which is based off of the real lesbian who has been cited by several sources as inciting the riot on the night of June 27. At the time, a lesbian bar called Gianni’s was where most of the women went, but some still populated the Stonewall, as all of the gay bars were own and operated by the mob and faced the same scrutiny from cops. So when two female cops went to the Stonewall undercover as lesbians that night, they weren’t out of place. They were on the lookout for “homosexuals who were selling or using drugs.” But when Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine and his men busted into the bar, it wasn’t just another night of putting up with police brutality. Lillian Faderman writes in her new book, The Gay Revolution:

A small knot of lesbian patrons were also signaled out for special attention when a couple of them got feisty, back-talking to the officers, yelling “We have a right to be here!”

…The real turning point … came after several policeman dragged a butch lesbian out of the bar. They’d handcuffed her because she’d struggled with them. The paddy wagon was full, so the officers pushed the hefty, dark-haired woman who was wearing a man’s dress suit into one of the squad cars that were lined up on the street. But she wouldn’t stay put. Three times she slid out the driver’s-side back door and tried to run back intot hte Stonewall, perhaps to a lover still being questioned. The last time, as a beefy policeman wrestled her back toward the squad car, she yelled to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”

In the film, Joanne delivers these lines while handcuffed, stealthily escaping outside the cop car doors but being pushed back in every time. She finally screams for help from the crowd, inciting the mob of gays, trans women and lesbians to use their size to take on the small amount of police that threatened them.

“I actually saw a photo of her which, you know, there’s very little footage, but there is an image of a lesbian with kind of a leather vest whose in the middle of chaos,” Joanne said. “She’s much bigger than I am. She was, like, taller and broader and stronger, but there isn’t any information about her. That’s the sad reality.”

Although we don’t know the name of this woman, many cite well-known mixed race drag king and lesbian activist Stormé DeLarverie as “the Stonewall lesbian.” Stormé, who passed away in 2014, said she engaged in an altercation with a cop the night of the riots, getting clubbed and receiving 14 stitches in her chin. But Joanne said she does not want to be confused for playing Stormé in Stonewall.

“She was black. She was a drag king; she was an amazing civil rights activist, an LGBT activist. She was a performer, and a brilliant human being,” Joanne said. “Is Stormé in the movie? No Stormé was not. And if Storme were in the movie, I would not have played her.”

Stormé DeLarverie

The only woman’s name who was found in police records from that night was “Marilyn Fowler,” who was also assumed to be the woman thrown into the police car. But as Faderman writes in The Gay Revolution:

Jim Fouratt, who witnessed the riot and knew Marilyn Fowler, claims, however, that she was a slight woman and definitely not the “two-hundred-pound butch” who triggered the riot. In recent years, an urban legend has spread that African American butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie…was the woman in the police car. She’s been dubbed the “Rosa Parks of the gay revolution.” … But as [Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution author] David Carter points out, DeLarverie was well known in the community and would have been recognized immediately; the woman who triggered the riot was unknown to those eye-witnesses who Carter interviewed. Also, Carter says, DeLarverie’s age, height, ethnicity, and physique do not match eyewitness descriptions of the lesbian who set off the riot.”

This isn’t to say that Stormé or Marilyn did not play a role in the riots. Instead, it’s all that more frustrating they wouldn’t be included in the film.

The Stonewall lesbian

In the film, Sam is a Hollywood version of the unnamed heavyset butch who asked for the crowd’s help, and Joanne said she was interested in auditioning for the film without knowing much about the role.

“I am an out lesbian actor and that’s a very difficult thing to be in the culture that we live in,” Joanne said. “So when I heard that there was a movie that included the Stonewall riots that was being made, I knew about Stonewall-I didn’t know about all the players, but I knew about it-I wanted to be in it. I hadn’t even read a script; I didn’t know what it was about-I just wanted to be in it and that’s what I brought to my audition room without having read a script.”

Joanne said her experience on set was transformative, and that it felt like there were many women and out LGBT people on set.

“It was an emotional experience for all of us who were LGBT, because it’s very rare that we get to do something with so many queer people, so it kind of transcended everything, “Joanne said. “We told a lot of stories, we cried a lot, we talked political, we talked gender-we talked a lot of stuff. And it was a pretty fascinating experience that no one will get to know about, really, except for those that are talking about it, which some of us do. It was very special and, unfortunately, the protest started before the film was released and it was based on a two minute trailer and that’s tough, right, because there’s already a pre-conceived notion before it’s released and a lot of anger and pent-up ideas and emotion.”

Joanne feels Roland, as the director, is misunderstood; that he did not have the typical Hollywood support his films receive with him on Stonewall because producers and studios weren’t interested in backing the gay-themed movie.

“Do I have many millions to make an indie film? No. If I did, I’d make a film with lesbians in it,” Joanne said. “If I were writing a movie, that would be the movie I’d wanna make. That’s what I would do. But that’s not this movie that Roland wanted to make. And I think people also mix up the fact that it’s a dramatic film and it’s fictional, based in a historical time in the ’60s, when Stonewall was happening. I think it’s very confusing and complex because you have that as well as today’s culture who may not know what Stonewall was about and who was there and conflicting accounts of it. So it’s not that simple, and I feel like it’s-are people represented entirely? No. Are there a lot of women? No. Was I happy to be in this movie? Yes. Did I get to play a lesbian? Yes. Was it someone that I think was amazing? Yes. Did she have a lot of airtime? No, but let’s make more, right? Because we go after queer artists, we do ourselves a disservice. I think our energy-and I see it over and over again-is better spent, if we’re gonna get mad, let’s go after the people with the biggest amount of power who actually hate us, who don’t want to see us represented. That’s what I really believe.”

On set, Joanne suffered some physical injuries for the part.

“The stuff on-set was actually hard because I was bruised up and down my arms from wearing handcuffs for days on end and I had my ribs kind of crushed a little bit. Not crushed, but heavily bruised,” she said. “I was in extreme pain. It was days of pain and then days and days of recovery because I couldn’t breathe. So I kind of gave my body to that!”

Joanne said it is a constant struggle to find great roles. She’s often relegated to a few lines or otherwise boring parts, although she does think it’s changing.

“This is a life long journey for me as a lesbian actor, because it’s a lot of time and I’ve been severely-what would be the word?-scrutinized and certainly attacked, in many ways, for the choices that I’ve made because I refuse to walk into a room being other than that core self,” she said. “The culture’s not ready for it. When I have to audition for any part, I walk in gendered as I am, which includes pants and wearing short hair, and doing the best that I can with the size of the role that I’m given. I work harder in some ways to make sure that I’m completely 100 percent prepared for any audition that I have so that they might consider hiring me even if the part is not made for a lesbian. Maybe they’ll change their minds is kind of the way I go into every room. Not thinking just about being a lesbian because, of course, I’m playing a character, and want to embody that character, but I bring that part of me-my lesbianism-to every role I play. People will attack me for it and they do, but it’s a choice I made and it’s not an easy one.”

Coming up, Joanne is playing a genderqueer role in the second season of Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce and is creating her own content, including a short film she hopes to make into a feature. She also has a memoir, tentatively titled Walking Through Glass, due out spring 2017.

“As an actor, there just isn’t enough content. Instead of getting weird and becoming crazy like a lot of people can be, and I mean that with love if you don’t have enough opportunity, it can be a really hard world to be in,” Joanne said. “And it is a hard world to be in, as evidenced on the Emmys with Viola [Davis] in her Emmy speech about the difference between white women and black women and opportunities, and I feel the same way about being a lesbian and a woman, and both are really difficult. It’s just very difficult. I’m trying to change that in my life and create more content. I really feel that’s what we have to do, all of us, to advance the culture for each other.”

Joanne’s hope for Stonewall is that it will lead to further investigation of the riots and LGBT history, and eventually, more films.

“Negative energy does not advance any of us in any way, and I think our energy is better spent feeding more work and more stories and exposing the lives of people we have yet to learn about like Storme and the women of the women’s bar down the street,” she said. “There are so many stories to tell; I feel like that would be a better use of energy.”

Continuing the conversation

Happy Birthday, Marsha is a forthcoming film about trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (who is not in Stonewall), but many are furious that the wide-release feature film relegates the trans women and people of color to “props,” staging educational protests and some encouraging a boycott.

“Seeing the film in its entirety was disappointing in how once again white gay men reduce trans women of color down to historical, social and political props, further highlighting issues of classism, trans-misogyny, anti-blackness, Hollywood trans-face casting, misgendering, identity appropriation and transparent propaganda,” Ashley Love, an activist and organizer, told The New York Times. And other publications have followed suit, giving honest reviews of the film’s focusing on the white gay teen and his use of Ray and Marsha when he’s desperate. They also provide a bit of “comic relief,” BuzzFeed’s trans-identified reviwer notes, not taken as seriously as the main coming out story for the gay, white, cisgender lead.

Marsha P. Johnson

And what of the lesbians? I counted a handful throughout the film. Besides Sam and her femme lover, there were two other women visible in the background at Stonewall and a few women at the Mattachine Meeting Danny attends. In that scene, legendary gay activist Frank Kameny isn’t shown in the most flattering way, angering Danny in his buttoned-up approach to achieving civil rights by having civilized conversation. This struggle between the different community ideals would have proved more exciting to delve into, including Barbara Gittings and partner Kay Tobin‘s pre and post-Stonewall advocacy. Interestingly, production notes include a thank you to Kay for her manuscripts and archives available from the New York Public Library.

Another lesbian figure who was witness to the Stonewall riots themselves, however, was Daughters of Bilitis member Martha Shelley. The then-26-year-old left Gianni’s the night of the uprising and spotted the “brick-and-bottle-throwing crowd.” She assumed it was an anti-war riot, but quickly realized it was her own community fighting back.

“I don’t know if you remember the Joan Baez song, ‘It isn’t nice to block the doorway, it isn’t nice to go to jail, there’re nicer ways to do it but the nice ways always fail,'” Martha said in the documentary Stonewall Uprising. “For the first time, we weren’t letting ourselves be carted off to jails, gay people were actually fighting back just the way people in the peace movement fought back.”

Perhaps how some people see lesbian women’s involvement in the events of Stonewall can be best summed up by the Berkly Barb’s report of the events in a July 1969 article “Gays Hit New York Cops.” The reporter writes:

“Ironically, it was a chick who gave the rallying cry to fight.”

The irony, indeed.

Stonewall opens today.

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