Stonewall, Trump, and the Battle To Save Queer History

I recently watched the severely derided Roland Emmerich film Stonewall (2015), based on the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The film centers on Danny, a white teenager who gets kicked out of his Midwest home for being gay and runs to NYC. Once there, he’s absorbed into a local gay group of other young people, several of them sex workers and all of them poor with no stable home. 

When it came out, I remember (anecdotally from Tumblr posts) that people were claiming the film was ahistorical and revisionist. That’s only partly true. 

The riots were a show of force between angry and proud homosexuals and a handful of police, happy to wield state power against them. A David versus Goliath in the Greenwich Village Coliseum. Shouting grew into spats. Spats grew into slinging purses, which then grew into launching beer bottles and then police clubbing. And then, bricks and fire. Soon after, Marsha P. Johnson arrived at the scene. She wasn’t actually, as common myth claims, the one who threw the first brick. She was, however, one of the few prominent rebels that night whose name we know. In many eyes and subsequent retellings, she was the hero of the Stonewall story. 

The escalation of violence is of course covered in the movie, although in that story, it portrays Danny throwing the first brick. For a wide distribution audience and in Roland Emmerich’s mythology, Danny was the hero. 

Every story needs a hero. It’s fundamental. The actual historical record matters but that does not necessarily instill in our community a hope for a savior, which is an idea that can give strength to many and power generations to seek justice. A community that, decades later, continues that very same battle against our Goliath. For us queer people, that hero was Marsha – a valiant and brave fighter who took arms and led an army of queer people against the state and won. In Emmerich’s film, she was a background character (admittedly horribly portrayed). 

We are in the second Trump Regime, one that is far more hostile to LGBT+ rights, among other repressions. When Obama declared the Stonewall Inn a national monument, it was absorbed into the National Parks Service, which Trump’s Regime now oversees. And as reported on February 14th, 2025, the Park Service removed all mentions of transgender people from that monument. In effect, a new and much larger Goliath takes shape. And as we’ve seen from Trump’s numerous executive orders and continued desire to oppress transgender people and attempt to erase them from existence, a hero must rise again to fight back. 

But that hero can only be created after the fact, like Marsha. For now, in our current battles, we must turn to the actual historical record to see how they won. The gays and dykes and trans people, the fairies and poofs and butch lesbians, banded together that night. The women in Stonewall that night refused to follow the police to be separated and the men refused to show them their IDs. When outside, they made fun of the cops, allegedly calling them “Pigs!,” and “Faggot cops!” and cheered each other on. They were resourceful and used what items they could scrounge together, bottles, coins, trash, and turned them into weapons. These are lessons we can learn going forward. We must band together, be forceful, and be resourceful. And then after, when we’re on much more solid footing, we can craft a hero of our time. Because, as my roommate told me the other day, “sometimes the myth is more important than the reality.”

Andrew Proctor is a film editor, queer film historian, and creative producer, as well as a contributor to The Forum. He resides in the New York City area.