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Stonewall Didn’t Need a White Male Lead. So Why Does It Have One?
http://www.vulture.com/2015/09/stonewall-yet-another-white-surrogate-project.htmlIt’s as bad as you feared. Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall makes good on the historical erasure promised in its trailer, turning a pivotal moment in queer history into a vanity project. Stonewall, the three-day uprising against the police that birthed the modern queer-rights movement, also made the names of two trans activists of color: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who eventually founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (later renamed Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries), an advocacy organization for homeless LGBT youth. They are two exceedingly important historical figures, and the types of compelling characters around whom movies should be made.
Stonewall doesn’t simply erase them from the record — Rivera becomes a lovelorn “composite” character named Ray, and Johnson, who many witnesses say started the riots, isn’t present when they begin — but instead replaces them with a fabricated fictional lead: Danny Winters, a gay white boy from Indiana who serves as our entrée into the wild world of Christopher Street. In Stonewall, people of color, street queens, hustlers, and lesbians become peripheral, undesirable, and, at times, delusional — an amusing footnote in the great arc of gay liberation — while Danny, the interloper, throws the first brick that starts the riots, yelling, "Gay power!" In this way, Danny misrepresents queer history, while also acting as yet another instance of a narrative relying on an audience surrogate: the white guy who can properly tell the story of "the other."
This was always the intention. In the press notes for the film, producer Michael Fossat said, “The biggest challenge in casting this film was the character of Danny because he’s in every scene and the film is really about him.” They settled on Jeremy Irvine, a 25-year-old, blue-eyed British actor with a shaky grip on the American accent. “Danny is a very straight-acting kid,” Emmerich said. “[The audience] can relate more strongly to him and through Danny’s eyes they’ll experience the more extreme situations depicted in the film.” Who is the audience? “I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people.” he told BuzzFeed. “As a director you have to put yourself in your movies, and I’m white and gay.”
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Stonewall parody trailer
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This is why so many of us had so many problems with The Help and other movies. This idea that white Hollywood has that stories, even stories about black people, black culture and black movements, simply MUST be told from the point of view of a white person is so moronic, stifling and maddening it makes you want to scream, cry and throw things all at the same time.
I just saw a story where a big time Bollywood actress has just made the leap to American television. Her character's name is Alex Parrish and she's half white, even though the actress that plays her is fully Indian. I guess having a fully Indian character who's name is Priyanka or some other gorgeous Indian name would just be considered too much.
And what really pisses me off is that Hollywood assumes that everyone is as insular, closed minded and racist as they are. And we are ALL lessened and denied some amazing stories and characters as a result.
