And for the fourth straight year I'm going for a theme, though I'm not sure entirely how that theme is going to come together.
Just to recap, in 2023 I watched two movies about gay men and two movies about lesbians, one from present day and one from the past for each. In 2024 I watched LGBTQI+ movies from around the world. In 2025, the focus was on trans movies.
This year? I think I'm doing movies about the history of the gay rights movement, but the movie that inspired the theme may not actually be available.
I'm not a Roland Emmerich apologist, but I do have an outsized amount of love for one of his movies that went beyond his wheelhouse of large-scale disaster movies. That movie is the 2011 film Anonymous, a highly accomplished film that helped establish my controversial and largely debunked view that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of his plays. (Let's not get into it.)
And so I always thought there was a chance I would like, more than the average person, Emmerich's 2015 film Stonewall, which has a much more significant negative reputation attached to it. It looks at the Stonewall Riots that were considered the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States.
But it's a pretty elusive movie. I didn't find it on any of my streaming sites, even for rental. Until it popped up on AppleTV, but only with the caveat that I try Cinemax for free for a week before subscribing for $9.99 per month. (Please remind me to cancel this subscription before it kicks in.)
I don't usually like to sign up for these sorts of deals. They stress me out. I know some people work this system to perfection, but I'm always worried I'll get a head injury or a sudden bout of amnesia and forget to cancel the subscription. Or that there's another way they will secretly "get me."
But I took the plunge this time, because indeed, my 2026 Pride Month theme sort of depended on it.
When I went to press play on Tuesday night, I got the message that the movie wasn't available in my country. (Then why show it to me in the first place, dammit.)
I should tell you that I am betwixt and between on my Apple subscription. It's a U.S. account, and that usually means anything they show me on iTunes is available for me to rent. But ah, iTunes no longer exists, as of these past few months. Now it's all AppleTV, and though the functionality for most things seems to be the same, it may be that there's now actual geo-blocking for certain apps and movies, rather than all that being determined by the country with which my account is associated. If true, that will be a big disappointment come the end of the year, when I usually rely on this resource for accessing some films that came out earlier in the U.S. but are not yet available in Australia.
I don't want to take too much more time from the actual movie I watched, but let's just conclude by saying my ability to watch Stonewall is now very much in limbo. It could be as simple as needing to set up a VPN, which may be something I'll try.
For now, though, I needed to watch a Pride movie on Tuesday night, and I tried to stay on my expected theme by picking up The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson on Netflix.
This was already on my Netflix watchlist, so I suspect it was a candidate for a past version of my Pride Month viewings. It's a documentary about the death/suspected murder of the title character, a trans woman who was a leader in the gay liberation movement, back in 1992. The case has been cold since the documentary's 2017 present tense, 25 years after she died, but now crime victim advocate Victoria Cruz is trying to heat it up again.
Barely a minute into the film, Stonewall is evoked. So then it made me wonder: Should I devote the entire month of viewings to movies that are in some way about Stonewall? I don't know a lot about it, and I'm sure to improve that significantly if I watch four movies about it. And there are plenty of other options, as I discovered in my fruitless searches for Emmerich's film.
David France's film is constructed in a similar way to any documentary about a person uncovering clues and evidence about a cold case, with one big difference: It barely pretends, even for the sake of drama, that there is going to be anything new forthcoming from Cruz' investigations. It's entirely contrary to the point of the documentary that this would even be possible.
What The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson makes clear over an hour and 45 minutes is that those who wanted to bury evidence of hate crimes against LGTBQI+ people have always been successful at doing so. The system is set up to help them bury this evidence. That would have been particularly the case when Marsha Johnson and the film's other main character, Sylvia Rivera, were dipping their toe into the protest racket back in the 1970s. It was still quite definitely the case in the early 1990s, when Johnson's body was found floating off the Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan, and officially deemed to be a suicide, even though all those who knew her swore up and down that Johnson was not the sort of person to take her own life. And it's even still the case in 2017, a comparatively liberated time, when the detectives who investigated Johnson's death, now mostly retired, tend to speak angrily to Cruz and hang up on her, barely concealing their disdain for the victim.
Watching The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson nine years after it was made, it was interesting to watch the changes that have occurred when talking about trans people, even between then and today. In this movie there is very little consistency about the pronouns used to talk about Marsha. Most in the know try to use she/her, but many others use he/him, even loved ones and other supporters. Of course, some of this has to do with the fact that these standards certainly weren't codified back in 1992, much less than when Marsha first came on the scene as what some consider the mother of the gay liberation movement.
If I have a regret about The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, it's that it does struggle, to some extent, to bring Johnson to life as a character, even though the movie's title promises to do that. It's no accident, of course, that the word "death" is listed before the word "life" in the title. We have no choice but to focus on her death more than her life, because the video footage of her prior to 1992 was scant, and filling in with photos only covers that gap a little bit. It's not the movie's fault. I suppose this was just inevitable to some degree.
We do get a lot more of Sylvia Rivera, who is also no longer alive at the time of filming, but who recorded a lot of video in the years after Johnson's death, as she was a crusader in trying to get the probable murder of Johnson properly investigated. We follow her personal struggles as she becomes homeless and is even kicked out of her shanty town "home," in one of the film's many sad scenes. Unfortunately, she's an imperfect replacement for Johnson as the film's central character, as she's not the force of great charisma that Johnson seems to have been.
Ultimately the story's main character would have to be the investigator, Cruz, whose tireless work tracking down leads forms the focus of the narrative. We see her reconstructing the timelines that led to Johnson's death, and we even see her using one of those corkboards where evidence gets attached with pushpins. This was the only part of the movie that really rang false to me, and that's probably only because I listened to a podcast about how these corkboards with their strings connecting pictures of people is largely a creation of screenwriters and not actual practice in criminal investigations. Of course, that doesn't mean that an intrepid everyman/everywoman couldn't use such a practice as a form of imitation of what they've seen in the movies.
Cruz is a very placid character, unassuming. As the film goes along, and as one metaphorical door is closed in her face after another, we see the rage start to build in her. It never has a traditional outlet in a climactic moment, but where it leaves us -- in a way, no closer to the truth than when she began -- is a powerful reminder of the uphill battle still faced by victims of hate crimes based on sexuality.
I'll be back next Wednesday with my second Pride Month viewing, which will in some way be connected to this first one.
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