World Pride 2019 anticipates a crowd of 4 million to descend on New York City in celebration of the 1969 Stonewall Riots’ 50th anniversary. I know some people going, but I’m not aware of any official Milwaukee contingent. That seems odd given the historical moment that—one would think—would warrant the effort. In the past, Milwaukeeans were among representatives from all 50 states who carried a huge rainbow flag in the NYC Pride March. Symbolically, the flag was cut up, and each flag bearer received a piece as a relic.
Perhaps our local lack of enthusiasm is due to a lack of awareness. Popular LGBTQ culture has barely documented the event or its causes to raise our communal consciousness. It would be four decades until the documentary Stonewall Uprising appeared in 2010. An honest and well-constructed narrative, it includes an infamous quote by TV news anchor Mike Wallace who, in a 1966 segment, uttered: “The average homosexual is promiscuous and not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship.” That was our lot in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, the melodramatic Stonewall, made five years later, Hollywoodized the story, replete with the obligatory cute, woke white guy from Indiana leading the charge. It managed a bleak 10% on Rotten Tomatoes’ tomatometer. Viewer approval was higher than 80%, proving how easily audiences can be distracted by a buck fawn.
Meanwhile, the New York City Opera just opened Stonewall, an operatic setting of the event. Its cast represents the Stonewall Inn’s diverse clientele, from closeted Connecticutians and drag queens of color to disowned street urchins and a palette of butch and femme lesbians. While it received critical acclaim, as a modern opera, it’s well out of the realm of all but an elite coterie of opera buffs. I doubt the Florentine Opera will stage it in our lifetime, if ever.
These attempts focus on the riots, while the back story of oppression is cast in dry documentary or as a mechanism to get to the good stuff.
There is one sleeper: Staircase. I admit having just viewed it for the first time only days ago. A film adaptation of a play by the same name, Staircase was released in 1969, a few weeks after Stonewall. It stars the unlikely duo of Rex Harrison as Charles and Richard Burton as Harry, gay lovers whose 30-year relationship bears all the hallmarks of any long-term relationship. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf manner, they bicker, exchanging deprecating volleys in the high queen’s vernacular of the King’s English, yet they are inseparable. They live unremarkable lives, both barbers working together in a shop below the apartment they share with Harry’s bedridden mother. They endure the unrelenting homophobia of the time (Charles is summoned to court for dressing in drag at a local bar) while, as outsiders, they watch the straight world blithely frolic with abandon.
Critics panned the film, but I cannot help but think fear of guilt by association, or, in this case, guilt by any empathy for the characters’ very realistic plight motivated their tepid reviews.
Watching Staircase, one enters into the microcosm of the daily repression LGBTQs endured for simply existing. The rejection of that was Stonewall.
