https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3PcbgNpJIk
If you’re at all familiar with the Stonewall riots (and if you’re not, it’s cool, fake it and bear with me), several names should be familiar: Storme DeLarverie, Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera. Leaders of the riot, all three are people of color (the latter two were also trans women), yet each and every one of them is conspicuously absent from Roland Emmerich’s latest whitewashed disaster epic—sorry, “award-winning social-justice masterpiece”— Stonewall.
In their place comes a white dude named Danny, who never existed and wasn’t at the riots, but who heroically comes in to ensure even more heroic profits for the good people at Roadside Attractions. It truly boggles the mind to think that studios believed they could get away with such an unapologetic act of whitewashing in 2015. And the fact that they hired Roland Emmerich—the genius behind The Patriot and 1998’s Godzilla — to direct a movie about the most seminal moment in gay history, is, frankly, breathtaking. But I digress. Ever since the trailer was released on Aug. 4, the Internet has responded with aggressive critiques (sometimes, the Internet can do good, guys!), and a petition to boycott that’s now attracted more than 20,000 thousand signatures. Trans women of color and lesbians who were at the riots have since spoken up, and their reaction was a collective “What the f*ck?”
To commemorate this beautiful moment in internet outrage, I assembled a group of my favorite “informal” comedian friends — Ben Dwork, Yeni Sleidi and Taylor Grode — and together we made a quick parody of it, available above. Don’t worry: It’s only 90 seconds, it’s very loud, and requires astonishingly little thinking to enjoy (we hope). If you like Independence Day (I’m not even entertaining dissenting opinions on that very good film), you might like this. Or not! It’s cool. But either way, Stonewall has a history we should all take time to learn about, not from Roland Emmerich, but from the people who actually, you know — made it.
(Via the Daily Dot, Autostraddle and Salon)