From History to the Mainstream

In 1969, New York police raided an inn in Greenwich Village known as the Stonewall Inn, a prominent LGBT bar at the time. Despite being a common occurrence for such an establishment, the raid attracted a large crowd that responded rather violently. This event became known as the Stonewall Riots, and is regarded as one of the most important events in the push for LGBT rights in the United States. The actual bar itself closed, to be replaced 20 years later by a bar with the simple name of “Stonewall.” This bar gained recognition as a national landmark while the surrounding area is included on the U.S. Register of Historic Places. Recently, there is even a push for Christopher Park, a “narrow green wedge” across the street from the bar, to be commemorated as a national park.¹

Slightly more recent, though, is the release of a movie about the Stonewall Riots directed by Roland Emmerich and simply titled Stonewall. At the moment, it’s not doing so well either financially or critically.  Despite its $17 million budget, it has only managed to bring in slightly under $200 thousand. And, on the critical front, it stumbled almost immediately after trailers came out showing the completely fictional Danny Winters: a generically handsome white guy from Indiana, as the protagonist taking center stage in a struggle that involved numerous African Americans, Latinos, women, and transgendered people. Emmerich responded to the resulting controversy by noting that, at that point at least, “it wasn’t about the film, it was about the trailer.”² Shortly after saying this, the film released and the controversy and the critics didn’t stop.

With the black museum movement detailed in From Storefront to Monument, you can find several similar problems facing the LGBT and African American communities when it comes to the public history. These include the need to address stereotypes, the gendering of their particular histories, and pushing against the prolonged history of degradation these particular communities have dealt with. And, when creating a form of public history, whether through a museum movement or a Hollywood production, these issues need to be addressed in a hopefully satisfactory way. Stonewall, as the controversy and the criticism show, didn’t.

The issue that I found most relevant, though, was that of mass appeal. Namely, both the myriad of museums looked at in the reading and the film needed to decide how much importance they needed to place on attracting as many people as possible. Rather than keep their respective pieces of public history isolated to the particular minority group affected and the issues affecting them, the question of whether they should work to gain a more mainstream audience was fielded. And with that came the question of how to actually appeal to the predominately white and, in the film’s case, straight and cisgendered mainstream was brought up.

For the museums, this was a question that pertained to two general aspects: their location and the exhibits they displayed. Location, in addition to the symbolic importance we saw with the building of the Holocaust Museum, also determines who is going to be able to actually visit the museum. If it’s on the Mall, it gains a national significance and audience but you lose the significance of having it located somewhere close to the black community like with the DuSable Museum in Chicago. There was also the issue of the Mall being rather close to the former location of a prominent slave market. For the exhibits, these museums often looked at topics that were controversial, emotionally difficult, or, in the case of the Rats exhibit, tied closely to the everyday lives of the people living nearby, but it was suggested that they start using exhibits that would garner more mass appeal. Rita Organ, a former staff member of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati noted that “It was as important ’to educate non-African-Americans about us’ as it was to educate African Americans about themselves.”³

And it because of that concept of needing to educate the proverbial non-African-American that Danny Winters was created. Emmerich, in his efforts to not make a film just for the LGBT audience, but also for straight people, he decided to use the “straight-acting” Danny as an “easy in” for this expanded audience.⁴ The idea being that they’re more likely to empathize and/or sympathize with him when he gets mistreated because of how otherwise normal he is. If this is all there was to it, there likely wouldn’t have been as much of an issue as it turned out to be. Had Danny simply been created to provide a more accessible, if dramatized, look inside the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation movement, it would have given audiences a chance to learn about a not-that-well-known historical event from a perspective that was largely similar to their own except for a few relevant changes.

Turns out there's a reason movies are rated low on trustworthiness.

This turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by backlash that followed the film. Danny, instead of simply being an observer that would help ease audiences into this particular subculture and historical event, takes a very proactive role in things. And, in doing so, he takes away from the actions of the actual people who took part in the events. One of the better examples of this can be seen in the trailer where he throws a brick that actually starts the riot. Now there are contradictory accounts on who threw this particular brick, but any of these would have been more acceptable than giving the role to the newly created fictional character.

Now while the suggestions of Rita Organ and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati to appeal to a wider audience (hopefully) didn’t detract from the historical accuracy of their exhibits, Emmerich and Stonewall can’t say the same. Mark Segal, who was actually at the Stonewall Riots, noted in his review that the film is not for “people seeking good LGBT history, nor for a community who wishes to see its history portrayed with dignity and respect.”⁵ In the attempt to bring this historical event to the mainstream, actual history was lost. And this issue of mass appeal is something that all forms of public history need to address. How much effort should be put in to attract the more mainstream audiences? What sorts of changes will be made to do so? And what parts of history should you be willing to set aside in your efforts?

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<sup>1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/nyregion/lawmakers-seek-national-park-in-honor-of-stonewall.html?_r=0↩
2. http://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonkeating/director-roland-emmerich-discusses-stonewall-controversy#.sdM8poPG↩  
3. Andrea A. Burns. From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 154.↩  
4. http://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonkeating/director-roland-emmerich-discusses-stonewall-controversy#.sdM8poPG↩  
5. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/stonewall-movie/↩</sup>