Stonewall Uprising - Theatrical Trailer

"It was the Rosa Parks moment," says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement.

Told by Stonewall patrons, reporters and the cop who led the raid, Stonewall Uprising recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history. (Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum)

A treasure-trove of archival footage gives life to this all-too-recent reality, a time when Mike Wallace announced on a 1966 CBS Reports: "The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage." At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history.

Stonewall Uprising Is Best Gay Documentary Ever-

Riveting Recollections of Stonewall Veterans Alive Today Provide Compelling Narration


Producers/directors Kate Davis and David Heilbroner have created a masterful 82-minute film based on the 2004 book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter—who appears several times in the screen version.
Onscreen at the beginning of Stonewall Uprising is the following note: “Few photographs of the raid and riots that followed exist. Other images in this film are either
recreations or drawn from events of the time.”
Throughout, riveting recollections of a score of Stonewall veterans alive today—Martin Boyce, Dick Leitsch, Yvonne Ritter, Martha Shelley, and Doric Wilson, to name a few—skillfully are woven together to provide the compelling narration.
Four decades after the event, they incisively depict the repressive, homophobic climate of 1960s New York City; the police raid on the Stonewall bar and gay resistance to it; and the first Gay Pride March exactly a year later on June 28, 1970.
Several segments of the film especially intrigued me.
A now-aged Seymour Pine, the deputy inspector in charge of the police at Stonewall—who reminisces repeatedly in the film—finally admits regarding the often-youthful homosexuals he had arrested at the time, “You knew they broke the law, but what kind of law was that?”
Playwright Wilson remarks about Stonewall, “We were ourselves for the first time.”
But activist Shelley sums it up best: “In every Gay Pride Parade, every year, Stonewall lives!”
Don’t miss this superlative film about the dawn of gay liberation.




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