1) Stonewall
Boy does Roland Emmerich know how to make a disaster movie – and this one is unquestionably his most disastrous, a grotesquely offensive subversion of the Stonewall riots that has no interest in acknowledging anything about that pivotal LGBTQ+ moment’s queer rage and diversity. How fucked up is this movie? It pulls a white, cisgender, gay male character named Danny (Jeremy Irvine) out of the ether and goes so far as to posit that he incited the riots, unapologetically erasing and whitewashing the trans, lesbian, black, brown and female heroes actually responsible.
In essence, Stonewall is the equivalent of making a movie about the Civil Rights Movement in which Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Malcolm X are all relegated to the background and played by white actors while a handsome white guy finds his calling in “leading” their struggle. It’s a stunning slap in the face of the actual rioters, who fought hard and sacrificed much in a fearless, inspiring pursuit of equality and freedom from systematic oppression.
Out of some wrongheaded attempt to appeal to mainstream audiences (wrongheaded because this year has already brought us Tangerine, Transparent and Straight Outta Compton, all fantastic stories about minorities that refuse to bow to conformity and succeed in part because of that), the movie decides to puke up a cis/white-savior narrative all over an inherently non-cis/non-white chapter of American history.
[zergpaid]This, along with a script that’s as inept as it is insensitive, causes it to make an execrable mess of history in the process. “We’re all in this together,” it seems to be saying through its stereotypically handsome, All-American protagonist, flat-out ignoring that the queer and trans people of color (particularly women) faced far greater risk and lived with far less privilege or safety than guys like Danny. Stonewall reduces a fiery, desperate and real QTPOC movement to the insipid tale of a white gay guy just trying to belong, then has the stones to turn around and claim that it’s not his story but everyone’s story.
But it’s not, at all. Trans and non-gender-conforming activists were not at Stonewall to be the supportive sidekicks and comic relief to more socially “acceptable” gays like Danny. Heroes like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera deserve to be honored – and they deserve to be the heroes of their own fight to be treated like human beings.
There have been some well and truly shitty movies this year, but none of them are as baldly offensive and deleterious as Emmerich’s feature-length perpetuation of the insidious stereotype that the LGBTQ+ rights movement was and is one fought by white, cis, gay men. The movie is indicative of shadowy attempts by some mainstream factions of the movement to erase trans, non-white people of color, especially women, from historical accounts of their own struggle. But in actuality, those same minorities are some of those who have fought the hardest, suffered the most and gained the least.
They deserve recognition. And they sure as hell deserve better than Emmerich’s whitewashing, transphobic, insultingly pasteurized middle finger to a monumental moment in history, the worst movie of 2015.