Roland Emmerich: Stonewall was “a white event, let’s be honest”
Emmerich is still whitewashing history, because facts (and good filmmaking) continue to evade him
“Stonewall was a white event, let’s be honest.”
—Roland Emmerich, in a comment almost as tone-deaf as the entire runtime of last year’s whitewashed, historically inaccurate bomb Stonewall, which he produced and directed.
Speaking with The Guardian, Emmerich tried to defend against the massive criticism he endured for Stonewall, which ignored the major role of LGBT people of color in order to cast a cis white guy (played by a straight actor) as the hero of the infamous 1969 riots, which birthed the modern LGBT rights movement.
“My movie was exactly what they said it wasn’t. It was politically correct,” he said. “It had black, transgender people in there. We just got killed by one voice on the internet who saw a trailer and said, this is whitewashing Stonewall. Stonewall was a white event, let’s be honest. But nobody wanted to hear that any more.”
When the original trailer for Emmerich’s film was released, it led to calls of whitewashing, which eventually became so severe that a petition was started calling for a boycott. It accused Emmerich of “erasing the contributions of of-color queer and gender non-comforming activists.”
Emmerich responded by asking people to watch the finished film, claiming that it would help settle any worries that it had rewritten history to appeal to white people. Unfortunately, critics disagreed.
“A vanity project of astonishingly huge proportions, Stonewall is the deeply misguided work of a white, gay, obscenely privileged man proclaiming, ‘This is how I see our history,'” wrote Randy Shulman in our review of the film. Stonewall ultimately bombed at the box office, taking in less than $300,000.
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