Who knew that German-born schlock-buster director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, 10,000 BC, 2012, White House Down, etc) was also a prominent LGBT campaigner? Everybody, perhaps. Here, at any rate, he, with scriptwriter Jon Robin Baitz, has given the famous 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, prompted by a police raid on a gay bar, a wholly conventional, soapy Hollywood treatment.
Our hero, cleancut, straight-looking all-American kid, Danny (Jeremy Irvine, best known for War Horse) is kicked out of his home in Indiana by his intolerant football coach father, after he is caught having sex in a car with the school's quarterback. Danny, waiting for his scholarship to study astronomy at Columbia to come through, rolls up homeless in Christopher Street and meets a colourful gang of queens, trannies and hustlers, living on the street, turning tricks, in a sub-culture outside the law, among them pretty, flamboyantly effeminate Puerto Rican, Ray (Jonny Beauchamp, the break-out performance here) who looks after Danny and soon dotes on him.
But when Ray introduces Danny to the Stonewall Inn, a gay hang-out run by the Mafia (Ron Perlman!) with the collusion of corrupt police, Danny falls for handsome, intelligent gay campaigner Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Myers) who seduces him by putting A Whiter Shade of Pale on the jukebox – and they move in together as lovers.
It's only after Danny has caught Trevor snogging another man that he stops believing in his calmly progressive approach, and, on the fateful night outside the bar, he's the one who throws the first brick, shouting "No, Trevor! It's the only way! Gay Power! Come on!" And it was from this act of resistance, that gay liberation fronts and Pride marches as we now know them around the world, ultimately developed.
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It is odd that Emmerich, who thinks nothing of flooding, freezing or alien-invading the entire world, should have made so little of these actual riots, which actually continued for several days but here look just like a slightly rough night out. But there we are: this Stonewall is sanitized, canonized.
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