The Kanopy viewing gave me a handful of choices, but I decided to opt for the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall rather than its counterpart (and sequel), the 1999 documentary After Stonewall.
I was curious to see how Greta Schiller's film, made 42 years ago, would have both differing techniques and differing sensitivity levels when discussing a subject like this than a documentary made today. And I (thought I) got a pretty good preview of it right from the opening line of text.
Which I will have to paraphrase because Letterboxd was being really fiddly about letting me get back to the very start of the movie to write it down, after I'd finished watching. From the main menu, the only option I had was "Continue watching," which put me back into the movie at the very end of the closing credits. But when I tried to move the progress bar back to the beginning, I could get no earlier than about 40 seconds in. Annoying.
In any case, the opening line of text was something like this:
"None of the people interviewed in this movie should be assumed to be homosexual."
Oh boy. Disclaimers right from the start.
Then the next screen came up:
"... or heterosexual."
Cheeky. I liked it.
And I liked the movie a lot too. Indeed documentaries made 42 years ago are very different from documentaries made today, in many respects. Although there are talking heads over the large trove of historical footage captured in this film, the talking head interviews are conducted in a very different manner than today, caught on the fly rather than in a controlled studio setting or makeshift studio setting, and appearing only in little snippets without very much background information on each person. (This even extended to luminaries as significant as Allen Ginsburg.) All we know is that they're either homosexual or heterosexual -- or, I suppose, possibly neither.
The one thing I should say is that the movie is not actually that much about Stonewall, which I might have figured out if I'd analyzed the semantics of the title with a little more depth. Given that Stonewall provides a line of demarcation, and the movie specifically discusses what was before that, I should not be surprised.
What this movie is more about is setting the stage for the cultural moment that occurred in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, when a bunch of gay men and women spontaneously rioted after yet another police raid of that known gay club. Those riots lasted several more nights, as the energy generated by them was contagious, and quickly swelled into a long-term political movement that continues today.
But maybe I didn't need to dive further into the actual events of the night, which were in fact covered, albeit not in documentary form, in last week's film, Roland Emmerich's Stonewall. It strikes me that the actual details of the riot were probably not exceptional, considering that they did not result in any deaths or even any significant injuries, as far as I recall, obviating the need for a forensic analysis of the blow-by-blow.
And this film does a good job, sometimes a bit quaintly but usually on point, of giving us a brief history of the public face of homosexuality in the U.S. prior to Stonewall. This includes footage from old movies in which the characters on screen were implicitly gay, though likely that was not stated out loud, as well as depictions of men in drag in the movies. We also see a man walking around on the street in drag, sort of unsure if he should actually be doing it or whether there might be someone about to pounce out for the shadows and beat him to a pulp. There are newspaper headlines and other sorts of news footage, in giving us a sort of collage approach to these pre-Stonewall days.
One thing I found interesting was the linking of the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement. It might not surprise us to know, given their general progressive bent, that many homosexuals poured themselves into these other movements as a way of expending their activist energies when they couldn't yet expend them on their own cause.
Overall this film was a treasure trove of useful information in a tidy 87-minute package. If I have one complaint, it's about the narration by Rita Mae Brown, which felt stilted, even a bit like AI. I looked her up and she seems like an engaging figure, so I can't figure out why the narration is so rote, so removed from the images it's describing.
Otherwise, this is a pretty solid compendium of information, and it reminded me that documentaries are not just an invention of the past 30 years. I mean of course they aren't, but documentaries are not something we tend to go back decades to dig up, a truth that I acknowledged when I did my series Audient Authentic in 2020, watching documentaries from earlier decades that I would never have sought out if not for that series.
And one thing I really liked about Before Stonewall, which also relieved me, was that the presentation of this material was not noticeably less sensitive for being four decades in the past. Surely the filmmakers were sympathetic to the cause, but that didn't mean they wouldn't feel like they had to cover the subject in a more hush-hush way, especially at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Sure some of the interviewees may not be as enlightened or as careful with their words as they would be today, but the film itself is not guilty of anything like that.
Also just as I was worried -- unnecessarily, except for the editor part of my brain that wants everything to work together neatly -- that Stonewall would be entirely forgotten within the scheme of this film, the film does end with images of Stonewall, a culmination of what we've been working up to. Well done landing the plane.
I'll wrap up my Pride Month viewings next week with a final film that I think will be quite fun.
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