The Stonewall Movie
As someone who doesn’t really keep up with Cinema, because of the cost of seeing a movie in theaters, I hadn’t heard anything about the Stonewall movie until I saw a post about it just now. After I read it I looked up the previews and watched it, then read up on my Stonewall history.
The movie was obviously disappointing, but not surprising. It’s doing the same thing Hollywood does to everything else: creating the cis, white, male hero that everyone rallies behind, and making every minority character in the film a less important side character. On one hand, I can see why someone would make that decision. Being Trans is a more charged issue than being gay, which is accepted by the majority of Americans, so more people would go see a movie about a white gay boy than a black trans woman.
They made the safe decision, but it wasn’t theirs to make. Frankly they’re doing everything the main stream LGBT movement has been doing for years: candy-coating everything to make it more acceptable to the public. A cute little white boy or girl that just wants to love who they love is a lot more acceptable than someone who presents outside of the gender norm. Wanting to get married is a much prettier issue than someone who wants equal access to heath care, or the problem of homeless youth. But the truth is that these issues really aren’t that different from each other in the first place.
The freedom to express yourself and identify how you choose, and be given equality, is something that applies to all of us, and our movement should bring us together, not tear us apart.
