Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Whitewashed Stonewall Movie Tanks At Box Office

Stonewallfilm

'So when 
Stonewall the whitewashed trans history erasing movie comes out, save your hard earned T-bills.   Just say no to erasure and whitewashing of the undeniable trans and person of color influence in what went down on a sultry June 1969 night that changed the course of American history and started a human rights movement,'
-TransGriot,  August 5, 2015


Roland Emmerich's Stonewall opened last weekend, and it not only received overwhelmingly negative reviews, it spectacularly tanked at the box office.  It made only a measly $112,414 from 127 theaters.

Heh, heh, heh.  Looks like the movie going public and the critics have spoken.  The disaster film king made a real life cinematic disaster, and Emmerich needs to stop trying to make excuses for it..

Note to Hollywood, next time don't be so quick to erase people of color and trans folks from an event we helped jump off.   If you had centered the movie around the real life history of it, the money you made would have been exponentially more than the paltry sum you did make on opening weekend.

Arrested Trannies, 1962.jpgThe Stonewall Rebellion was not a planned Fire Island gay action as the movie tried to depict it as.  It was a spontaneous reaction by trans people, butch lesbians, drag queens and other denizens of the Stonewall Inn on that sultry June 1969 night fed up with repeated harassment from the NYPD as the Fire Island gays cowered in their closets.

The historical record backs that up.  


The gay rights revolution was jumped off by the peeps the Fire Island 'good homosexuals' reviled and who had nothing to lose by fighting the powers that be.

Deal with it.

Hollywood has done many movies based on historical events, most recently Selma. and for the most part they stayed true to the historical story while taking mild dramatic license with it.  

Stonewall
was a straight up crime against history that could not be allowed to stand, because it sought to erase trans people and people of color from the seminal historical event they jumped off.  

It's also not an accident that white gay men like Larry Kramer rushed in to try to defend the indefensible erasure.   Who's crazy now, Larry?

As the child and godchild of historians and heir to that distinguished legacy of trans activism, I'm doing the happy dance because Stonewall tanked at the box office.

Next time you want to do a movie about an TBLG historical event Hollywood, ground it in the actual history of the event you're trying to put on the silver screen..  



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