It is often cited as an event that gave rise to the Gay Pride and everything that would come later, the revolt that took place at the Stonewall Inn and in its surroundings, in the Greenwich Village of New York, on June 28, 1969. That was 50 years ago. For that reason, it does not seem a bad idea to dedicate a memory. However, we have to make an effort to recognize forgotten protagonists of that movement that would end with “the oldest taboo of mankind”, as our Juan Gil-Albert would say. Because there has been some distortion about it. We can see it, for example, in the monument erected next to the Stonewall Inn, in Christopher Park, the work of George Segal. In that sense, you have to keep in mind that there were not only white boys and girls that night, there were also blacks, Latinos, and there were trans, drags, transvestites …. In fact, Stonewall Inn was known to be popular among the most marginalized people in the gay community: transsexuals, drag queens, ladybugs, hustlers and homeless youth. But the monument erected in 2016 is looking for the “whitewashing” of the LGBT movement. There is an authentic controversy on this issue. The 2015 premiere of Roland Emmerich’s film “Stonewall” raised the alarm bells of many, frankly outraged. It is a remake of the “Stonewall” of 1995, made by Nigel Finch. Its protagonist is a white man who responds to the masculine stereotype of the W.A.S.P. Midwest, which does not correspond to the all truth of what happened that summer of 1969. In contrast to that approach, in 2017 the Netflix platform premiered the documentary “Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”, which has as protagonists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two LGBT rights activists who were on the front line during the Stonewall revolt. Two transgender women (then called transvestites), one black and the other of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent. Without entering to value its cinematographic merits, the case is that it exposes before the spectator a reality very different from the one that shows us “Stonewall”. The recognition of the contribution of transgender people in relation to the struggle for LGBT rights, is an unavoidable objective in view of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall revolt.
George Segal, Gay Liberation Monument (2004)
To that end we had planned to incorporate to our Screening, a video with some very powerful images of Sylvia Rivera when in the Gay Pride of 73, from the stage, she faced all the gays W.A.S.P. that they were there together, to spit on them about “Y’all better quiet down”, because they were reproaching her for not being worthy of being on stage, to her, a transgender Latina and drunk, and she made them see that it was them ―the unclassifiable―, the ones who were suffering from prison, that it was she and her sisters, who had split their faces in front of the police so that they ―W.A.S.P. from the Midwest― they could be touching their butts in the middle of New York … But while this post was being made that video has been removed from youtube [https://youtu.be/UQg5xzirxH4]. Then, we will return to the present more immediate, because the transgender and intersex struggle has not ended, before on the contrary it becomes increasingly necessary, in the midst of a Gay Pride increasingly cishomonormative and with a racism that is revealing itself in a way slow but unstoppable. So we have chosen to bring to our screen Chenta Tsai, also known as Fucking-Fagot-Chinese, who has just published a book of obligatory reading Three delicious rice. Sex, Race and Gender (Plan B, 2019), in an interview that will remove more than one aesthetic and ethical foundation.
