Pride Month: Stonewall (1996)

I can say with pretty good confidence that this is the first series I've ever done on The Audient, of any length, where two films had the same title. 

What can I say, once I decided I was all in on the Stonewall theme for my four Pride Month viewings in 2026, I was all in.

Nigel Finch's Stonewall from 1996 predates Roland Emmerich's Stonewall from 2015 by 19 years, and that may not be entirely a coincidence, because there are a lot of plot elements in the 2015 version that we first see in the 1996 version. And no, it's not just because they're about the riot outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in June of 1969, which unofficially launched the gay rights movement in the United States, at least in terms of the public conversation. 

For starters, they both feature a central relationship between a new clean-cut kid from the country, just arrived in New York, and a rail-thin young Latino -- or maybe we should say Latina, since both protagonists are drag queens, to the extent that pronouns get discussed. 

Then in both cases, the new kid from the country also has a relationship with a more straight-laced man from the Mattachine Society, where the activism hoped for mainstream acceptance achieved by homosexuals themselves becoming more mainstream -- for example, wearing suits and other sophisticated attire, rather than dressing in drag. 

We know that Finch's film was based on a memoir with the same title by gay activist Martin Duberman. Wikipedia does not attribute any source material to Emmerich's version, so perhaps we can include among the many demerits for that version that it's a light theft of Finch's material. 

The reason I wanted to watch another fictionalized Stonewall story that was underpinned by real events was that I heard this one was supposed to be a musical. I thought that sounded really fun and like a really spirited way to leave off my Pride Month viewings in 2026. 

Well, it turns out that wasn't quite right. There are "musical sequences" in this film, but they mostly involve drag queens lip-synching songs from the 1950s that might have appeared on a jukebox in 1969, sung originally by women. These sequences are entertaining, but they aren't even full numbers, usually about 30 seconds of material apiece. Then there is also a protest song or two sung by folky guitarist Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), the fresh-off-the-bus transplant to Greenwich Village, who differs from his counterpart in Emmerich's version because he's a lot stronger with a lot more agency. 

So no, it wasn't the full musical I was expecting. But was it worth watching? Most definitely yes.

Which would be no guarantee from the chintzy promotional materials you see above. Even for 30 years ago, that poster art is really cheap. And I wouldn't be surprised it would have made no one want to see this movie. 

But would you believe I could actually identify more actors from this movie than from Emmerich's better budgeted version? Weller is someone I know but whose name I didn't know. More easily recongizable to me was the lead, who goes by La Miranda, and who is played by Guillermo Diaz -- who I thought was a regular collaborator of Spike Lee's, until I looked up his filmography and realized he hasn't appeared in a single Lee film. Well, I recognize him anyway. John Doman and Bruce McVattie also appear here, but the most easily identifiable in all the cast, though in a small role that couldn't get predict his future stardom, was Luis Guzman.

The big advantage this version has over Emmerich's is its sense of honesty. The polish someone like Emmerich can bring to a film is clearly a substitute for truth. You just believe these characters more. You believe the things they're saying and the things they're doing. Now, you may remember I was more positively inclined toward Emmerich's movie than most people, though still not positive on it overall, but it's clear to me how much it suffers in terms of the depictions of its characters. This depiction always feels charitable toward them, while the movie that you'd think should be more 20 years more enlightened is considerably more tone deaf overall.

I don't want to make this whole post a comparison of these two movies, but I do want to give one more. Both essentially have to fill a movie's worth of material prior to the riots, because those were a fairly self-contained event, even if they spread out over a few additional nights after the original riot. Finch's version seems to be even a bit more character focused than it's interested in laying the precise historical groundwork for the riots, which would understandably interest Emmerich's version more because of its larger budget and larger sense of historical importance. Finch's Stonewall feels more important overall precisely because it doesn't think of itself as important. It thinks of itself as an eccentric little Stonewall movie with true-to-life characters, some of whom serve as a Greek chorus while lip-synching 50s pop. 

I was disappointed by this version in one small way: Marsha P. Johnson does not make an actual appearance. The titular character in my first film, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, showed up almost immediately in Emmerich's version, and I'm quite sure could be seen in the footage of last week's Before Stonewall. Here, I thought for sure one of the characters was her, but the character is then introduced as Princess Ernestine. Oh well.

That concludes another Pride Month on The Audient. And I do want to remind myself as I leave: I don't have to wait for Pride Month to come around to watch these movies and further educate myself on the LGBTQI+ experience. Of course I do come across these films during my ordinary viewing, but usually only for new year releases. I should fit in the older ones whenever I can. 

Pride Month: Stonewall

I'm back on track with my original intention for this year's Pride Month theme thanks to a little thing called a VPN.

Forgive the stretch I am about to make, but it's thematically appropriate. I had always thought of a VPN as something you did in a dark alley somewhere, not unlikely a gay street kid in New York turning a trick. It was something to be ashamed of it and it exposed you to risk. 

Turns out, nowadays, a VPN is something built into your standard antivirus program, mine being Norton. 

As you might recall, last week I tried to watch Roland Emmerich's Stonewall as my first movie in this four-movie Pride Month series, focused on the history of the gay rights movement, but it was geoblocked. Because my AppleTV is linked up to the U.S., it showed me the movie as an option through a Cinemax subscription, which I would get free for a week before being charged $8.99 a month after that. But watching it? That's when it came up with the big "this is not available in your country" message. (And the mishap caused me to miss the week's grace period, so it's ended up being an $8.99 rental of the movie.)

When it came time for me to figure out the second movie in the series, and I was not willing to give up on Stonewall, I tried going to Norton first, as a better option to finding some VPN of unknown providence out there in the wild somewhere. Turns out, there's a spot on the Norton dashboard where you can turn on a VPN, easy peasy. And though mine connected me to Australia by default, which was no help, I found it was just as easy to change the country to the U.S. And boom! Suddenly Stonewall would play.

Funny the things you've written off as adjacent to piracy, that turn out just to be normal parts of a modern internet security setup. And when I googled what most normal people use VPNs for, the second listed choice was to bypass geoblocking -- as though this was such a perfectly legitimate usage of a VPN that mainstream companies like Norton have just made it a standard part of their offerings. 

Before we get into the particulars on this lightning rod of a movie, I could tell it was a great match with last week's movie, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, within the first five minutes, when none other than Marsha P. Johnson is introduced as a character. And there's something really funny about this. The actor playing Johnson was Otoja Abit. You wouldn't recognize that name, but I immediately did. You see, back in COVID, I happened to select one of the many new Netflix Christmas offerings, quite randomly, to review on ReelGood. That movie was A New York Christmas Wedding, which I wrote about positively, awarding it an 8/10 on our ratings scale. Who directed that movie? Otoja Abit.

"So what, Vance?" you say. "So you saw a movie directed by a guy who was an actor in another movie."

But the thing about Otoja Abit is that he is one of only a handful of directors who have ever reached out to me after reading my review of their movie. I can't at this point remember the form that reaching out took, but I believe he emailed me. (That would seem to be the only explanation, since I didn't post about the movie here, nor are there any comments against the review itself.) I exchanged a few emails with him and he was very appreciative of my coverage. (I should pause to say that I have assumed pronouns for this person. Otoja Abit could be a she/her or a they/them, so apologies if anyone reading this has identified a mis-gendering on my part.)

Okay so this movie. A lot of people hate it.

I did not hate Stonewall. Did I like it? I can't say that either.

The people who hate it seem to be a lot more qualified to hate it than I am, because it is a representation of them -- and a very failed representation at that.

I read a smattering of comments about it on Letterboxd after I'd posted my own 2.5-star rating. Their reservations resonated with me, to be sure. They found the representation of even the wide array of gay men in this movie circa 1969 to be highly problematic. The lead character, played by Jeremy Irvine, was white-washed, more like a straight white guy that they made gay in order to allow audiences to relate to him. The more effeminate men were too effeminate by half. And then there were too many scenes that reeked of gross dismissiveness of the gay experience, like one character crying while receiving a blow job from a stranger in the park.

These things did register with me as I was watching. But pretty early on in this movie, I decided that this was sort of like the Baz Luhrmann version of the gay experience: big, broad, and lacking in the sensitivity of the finer details. 

If you know me, this sounds like a compliment. I am a Luhrmann fan. But what I saw when I watched Stonewall was what I imagine Luhrmann haters see when they watch Luhrmann films. And this takes some putting myself in their shoes. I expect that a Luhrmann hater does not see an incompetently made film; they see a film whose pleasures are entirely disposable, like a pop song that they also hate but that they recognize is catchy. 

So this didn't work for me like a Luhrmann film works for me, but it felt like a Luhrmann film in the sense of providing an "epic" version of the subject matter, one told with a big budget mentality, not a keen eye for the finer details of representation. 

Now, we know that this is a story it's okay for Emmerich to tell. Emmerich is gay. So the Stonewall haters shouldn't have a "how dare he?" component to their hatred. They just think he's out of touch, that he's sold out to a wing of homosexual activism that tries to mainstream gays rather than to celebrate their individuality, and that his career's worth of sub-par disaster movies indicate that he could never tell a story like this. 

My perspective as a film critic is a little different. The reason I wanted to watch Stonewall is that I was a big fan of Emmerich's 2011 film Anonymous, an opulent costume drama that questioned the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. I thought this was a really successful filming of a really intricate script, and it made its case so convincingly that I, too, now don't believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays. (So, perhaps my entire credibility is now out the window with you.)

So for me, I see a director screaming to get out of the career path that forced him to make a dozen movies in which the White House gets destroyed, and to make more intimate films. One of which is Stonewall, even if it's intimate only by Emmerich's standards. Let's say "more personal films" instead. 

Is his depiction of the June 28, 1969 Stonewall Riots a success? Not entirely. Not even mostly. In fact, I found the riots themselves to be oddly anti-climactic in the narrative. There's definitely a bit of a sound stage quality to how the riots looked on that street in Greenwich Village where all the movie's "gay street kids," as they are called, hang out. 

But I can't bring myself to fault the man for trying. This subject obviously feels near and dear to him. The thing is, Roland Emmerich does have significant limitations as a filmmaker. As much as I like Anonymous, and appreciate films like Universal Soldier and 2012, this is not a man who has ever been considered "good" by the critical community. He gets the job done, and his movies make money, but I think a lot of people don't even consider him to be as good as Michael Bay. If he makes an imperfect Stonewall Riots movie, maybe that's what we would/should expect. 

In any case, I was glad to have the opportunity to learn more about these riots than I did in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which was not itself a Stonewall movie as such. If I keep watching movies this month that relate to Stonewall -- and there are at least a handful of other options available on my streamers -- then maybe I'll get a fuller sense of what turned out to be four days of protesting, the unofficial launch of the gay rights movement. And then maybe I'll see all the other ways Emmerich's film is deficient.

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to say about the movie. Although indeed the characters we initially meet, one of whom is played by Caleb Landry Jones, are quite effeminate, and perhaps not in the best possible way, I was interested to see the movie present the contrasting styles of gay activism at this juncture. A character played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers represents a less radical form of gay activism, but also the one the movie clearly sees as insufficient, in which they are trying to mainstream gays, put them in suits and ties, so that heterosexuals, the ones currently firing them from their jobs, will accept them more as equals. While we understand today that this is not helpful and is in fact an instance of suppressing what makes gay men (and a few lesbians) themselves, you can see why this was considered as a tactic at the time. 

The performances in the film vary in quality, but I did want to give a special mention to the film's second lead, a character named Ray, played by Jonny Beauchamp. He's the "gay street kid" that we are supposed to relate to the most, our most accessible in to the experience, if we are considering the lead, Danny, to be our surrogate. He's flamboyant but he's not being "aggressively sexual" with Danny, which is how others come across to him at first. And he goes through a pretty heartbreaking character arc in which he questions his worth. The performance by Beauchamp makes this one of the more resonant parts of the viewing experience.

Okay, back in a week's time with another Stonewall-adjacent movie, in all likelihood. 

Pride Month: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

I'm back for my fourth straight year watching four movies in the month of June in honor of Pride Month. 

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.