Stonewall Was a Riot: 12 Films to Celebrate Over 50 Years of Pride & Protest
Xabiani Ponce de León appears in 'This is not Berlin' by Hari Sama. Photo by Alfredo Altamirano. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
As rainbows begin flooding your social media, branded content starts to wish you a happy pride and corporate sponsorships continue to flaunt their commitment to LGBTQ causes, it does well to remember that Stonewall was a riot. The 1969 events that have since become the so-called origin myth of the modern gay rights movement began not as a pride march but as an anti-police riot that lasted days. The mafia-run gay bar in the West Village in New York City played backdrop to a heated and violent confrontation between drag queens, gender non-conforming individuals (many of them black and brown) and the NYPD when the place was raided by police officers.
The prejudice and brutality that sparked the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots is not, alas, a thing of the past — especially when one remembers that there continues to be an epidemic of violence against trans women of color. And so, in the spirit of that pivotal riot we have come to celebrate (and sanitize) every year since, and given the current series of protests across the country rightfully calling out police brutality and systemic racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd (and too many others), we’ve compiled a list of LGBT films that celebrate activism and the power of protests. Because the fight for equality needs to be an intersectional one, equally attuned to homophobia as to racism, to transphobia as to sexism, taking on gentrification and immigration, mental health and labor laws — issues these films tackle in ways both didactic and entertaining.
