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Stonewall Uprising: A Film Documentary. Dir. and prod, by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner. VBsFIhe American Experience, 2010. 82 mins. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ films/stonewall/)
The Stonewall uprising of 1 969, as it has since become known, was a decisive moment in che assertion of gay righcs in che United Scaces that became a worldwide symbol of gay activism and gay pride. Closely following the interviewbased book by David Carter, Stonewall, the Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004), the documencary by Kace Davis and David Heilbroner celebraces che rioc by mosdy gay men and marginal youeh who frequenced the Sconewall Inn (a bar) in Greenwich Village, New York, as the real beginning of the successful movement for equal rights for gays and lesbians. Fighting back against a police raid on rhe popular bar in the center of gay Greenwich Village, customers did not go quietly into custody, and their resistance attracted a huge crowd that fought intermittently with the police for several nights running. Their confrontation came to symbolize the moment when gay activism matured into a movement.
The perspective in rhe film is definitely that of the gay community, even though there is some limited testimony of (then councilman) Ed Koch, who had encouraged a crackdown on gay bars, and Seymour Pine, the deputy inspector of the Morals Division of the New York Police Department (nypd), who led the raids on the bar. The prevailing standard of morality of the 1960s is depicted in periodpiece film clips from Mike Wallaces dark and gloomy documentary, "The Homosexuals" (a 1967 episode of CSS Reports), on homosexuality and from other grainy television or gritty shortsubject films voicing dire warnings against homosexuality as moral deviance and a mental disorder. This black-and-white moral and legal atmosphere is the starting point of rhe film, the stone wall of prejudice, showing the prevailing disgust, cruelty, and violence visited upon lesbians and gay men in the late 1960s. The film does not refer to contemporary, largely religious and politically based hostility to homosexuality or to the tragic consequences of prejudice in fighting the early stages of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome epidemic; nor, except in passing, does it refer to the continuing struggle for what has now become a fight for inclusion in terms...