Stonewall Uprising

According to Stonewall Uprising, a new doc about the Greenwich Village riots that sparked the modern LGBT civil-rights movement, the first U.S. gay-rights organization was called the Mattachine Society and was founded in New York in the ’50s. That’s not true. The first gay-rights org was chartered here in Illinois in 1924 by Henry Gerber (his home is an Old Town landmark) and called the Society for Human Rights. But we can almost forgive the filmmakers this error; the closet has made early gay history at best a foggy discipline.

That’s apparent in Uprising, in which about a dozen eyewitnesses (including touching testimony from a retired cop) recall the hetero-normativity of the post-Eisenhower era that classified homosexuality as a mental illness and led to draconian measures like electroshock therapy. Despite growing acceptance within the West Village, queers still gathered in dingy Mafia-run bars like the Stonewall Inn that were routinely raided by the police. A tipping point happened in the early morning hours of 1969 when street kids, activists and trannies rebelled against the police once and for all (the film wisely sidesteps the myth that its catalyst was Judy Garland’s death).

But after a riveting retelling of the riots themselves, the film stops dead in its tracks. The impact of the riots leads only to New York’s first Pride March, never mind the nationwide movement that it sparked. Gay and straight viewers should check out this doc, but it left me hungering for a sequel… Stonewall Aftermath?

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