Finally, the not-great-looking historical movies about gay pride can grace our theaters! The first trailer for Roland Emmerich's Stonewall is here, and it looks... fine? The movie uses an invented handsome white dude named Danny (Jeremy Irvine), who looks like he goes from a naive, suburban boy to an aggressive, confident activist. At least we've moved far enough along that a reasonably expensive-looking historical drama about gay rights is actually kind of boring. Besides, Ron Perlman looks like he'll be great as Ed Murphy, the shady manager of the Stonewall Inn itself.Update: The trailer for the movie has -- rightly -- come under fire for whitewashing the moment of the Stonewall riots. particularly by making the focus of the film a conventionally attractive cis white man. Emmerich has responded to the accusations on his Facebook page, which you can find here. He's clearly concerned with "getting it right" and doing justice to the story -- and it's possible that the trailer was cut to highlight the story in a way supposedly acceptable to mass audiences -- but that doesn't negate the importance criticism.
The original version of the post lauds the fact that this movie is being made at all, but that is certainly not the only way of approaching the issue, and likely not (entirely, at least) the correct one. There is a more than valid, vital perspective on the mainstream success of the gay rights movement that sees it as, at least in some respects, a sad thing. Hopefully, Stonewall does right by as many of the people present at the original riots as possible, and hopefully it is not the last time the story is told on film.