Stonewall, and Stonewall by Roland Emmerich

To be honest I could barely get to the end of the trailer for Stonewall by Roland Emmerich. Instead, I’d encourage everyone to watch the Marsha P. Johnson documentary, ‘Pay It No Mind’, and Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 speech at Washington Square before you see Stonewall (or instead of). The Stonewall rebellion was so much by and about queer and gender non-conforming people of colour that to fictionalise a white male lead in a film about it seems like it can only possibly have been done at their expense. Why? Presumably to make the story more ‘palatable’ – and by palatable we mean suitable for Hollywood, and quite possibly the Oscars. Well, screw being palatable. Stonewall has been co-opted and whitewashed enough. Example: the Stonewall charity was founded in 1989 and only this year officially put trans rights on its agenda. Enough.

As a secondary point, it’s interesting (as a long-time Stonewall student) reading the think-pieces that have accompanied the kickback against the film. Various critics attempt to present as hard fact what cannot actually be proven about the Stonewall uprising, thus offering their own kind of historical re-write with a well-intentioned agenda. Sylvia Rivera moves to the forefront of the newest Stonewall narrative while the film itself apparently chooses to focus on Raymond Castro with a cameo possibly from a Marsha P. Johnson-esque character, while names like Marilyn Fowler, Jackie Hormona, Zazu Nova, Wolfgang Podoloski, Stormé Delarverie and Tammy Novak begin to fade away from the narrative – and as for the butch dyke (or possibly trans man) who was the first to escape arrest, she’s in the film, but people still wonder if she existed at all. This is the nature of Stonewall.

Most Stonewall historians have at some point had to disavow to some degree their principal sources of evidence. Everybody wants to have been there, thrown the first bottle or punch, and who wouldn’t? People fought hard, but not necessarily in the order we might think. I feel strongly in my heart that of all people, Marsha P. Johnson never spoke a dishonest word about anyone and that nobody had reason to speak one about her. Marsha was at Stonewall the first night (though if it was for her birthday she was celebrating early; she was born August not June), but how grieved might everyone be if it were more widely known that Marsha had described how, on the first night of fighting, she had frantically searched for her friend Sylvia Rivera, knowing that Sylvia would want to be involved, and had apparently found her asleep in Bryant Park, possibly homeless and perhaps using heroin. Sylvia couldn’t have thrown the first bottle from there, of course. Sylvia was with Marsha the second night of the fighting, with courage blazing, and subsequently devoted her life, her energy, her health to a movement for equality, or ‘power’ as she always called it, often living homeless and struggling with drink, always helping others, much the same as Marsha who would famously give you her last dollar – and it really would be her last. How are saints like this not fit for lead roles?

This video is quintessential Manhattanchester

'Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies
The past is your present, the future is mine...'

A girl racing home from her job in a pizza parlour to get ready for a night at the Funhouse in New York City, Barny Sumner and Gillian Gilbert turning up to the club in shorts, that quotation above... this 1983 video couldn't be more Manhattanchester if it tried... 

'Confusion' - New Order (1983)

Books that I got for my birthday

End Of Year Review: 2011

2011: I turned 33. It looks like I will outlive Jesus after all (touch wood). This little blog turned 3 years old. Look what I was doing back then; not much eh? This year I had my tenth anniversary working for Manchester University Press and my fifteenth anniversary of living in Manchester. I moved here in September 1996, three months after the IRA bomb. Mum wasn’t happy. Also this year I showed up in the Manchester Evening News and Attitude magazine with a load of Manchester chums. Click click flash flash darling.

I quit smoking in September, this time for good. I’m doing really well and enjoying life without cigarettes. *clicks heels* It was the right time. You should all try and quit this year. Apart from anything else it does wonders for your hangovers.

Our amazing dog Sam died this year. ‘Sammy Lammy Lambkin’ to those who loved him, and we really did love him. We had him from a puppy and he was ours for seventeen years. When I would pack up my bags to go back to University at the start of term he would sit on them to try and make me stay. He was a big dumb sweet thing and our family isn’t the same without him. Good bye Sammy…

In capital ‘P’ Politics, ‘Occupy’ and the ‘99%’ movement may have deftly solved a problem that Socialists have been mulling over for decades: how to make the middle class realise they are part of the working class, and how to make the working class feel enfranchised by middle class dissent. More power to it. The 1% can be dismantled, I feel sure of it. They got the guns but we got the numbers.

In music, Morrissey ends the year without a record deal and I wonder/worry that we might have heard the last of him once again. In related news, Bon Iver overtook not just Elliott Smith but Morrissey himself as my most played artist this year. Times they are a-changin’…

Amy Winehouse died in July. Not long afterwards we went to Camden Square bearing gifts to say goodbye in the slightly flimsy but well-intentioned way that you might when somebody’s music has been in your heart through some important things. I’m so sad about it still. ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ always stopped me in my tracks but these days it sounds too sad to bear. It was a hot day in Camden and I’ll always remember the shadows on the High Street and the lovely friends I was with, and writing out lyrics with a silver pen on the train down to London like a teenager.

Here’s what the rest of 2011 looked like from here. This write-up has been brought to you by THESE SONGS RIGHT HERE…

The family…

I became an uncle this year, not once but twice. After a somewhat agonising pregnancy for my poor little sister Clare, baby Jack arrived in January, complete with personality and appetite and sass from the off. He is the spit of Clare, ergo beautiful, but I sense a degree of forthcoming naughtiness previously pioneered by my brother Sean. Fun times ahead! Then in June little Stanley James followed for my big sister Emma and to start with he was just the opposite of Jack. He arrived a bit early and we had to worry and fuss over his weight, there was barely anything of him, he was like a little Victorian baby, all swaddled and passive. Then he just bloomed. I heard him giggle for the first time last week and, well, it’s just the reason you get out of bed in the morning isn’t it? Our two beautiful boys. There’s so much to show them, I can’t wait… *makes pile of books, records and travel guides*

The trips...

New York in March. Glastonbury in June. Berlin in September. Festival in Murcia. Loads of London and Stratford and Liverpool and Sheffield. And Salford...

The parties...

In the summer I DJ’d to help raise money for my friend Amber’s boob-job. In Liverpool I played at the Alternative Miss Liverpool pageant for a gorgeous crowd of gender terrorists in taffeta. Off The Hook had its first birthday party. Our new wayward disco baby Drunk At Vogue had her first outing after two years of daydreaming about it and several months of me and my friends working like disco dogs to make it happen. (Eyes peeled for more parties in the New Year). I’ve played at a gay wedding, a photography exhibition, on a boat on the Irwell, in a warehouse, a disused office, at Dalston Boys Club, Clique, Bollox, the Contact Theatre, the Northern Quarter Loves U Festival (before Mr Scruff!), in full Halloween make up and in my underwear at a fetish party. Good year.

The starfucking...

This year I met Jarvis Cocker backstage at the Town Hall after his wonderful interview with Dave Haslam. I ate some of his Pringles. I chatted to Victoria Wood at the International Festival. I slept in Elbow’s tipi at Glastonbury with Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers drinking on the grass outside. I saw the lovely Kirsten Dunst and the awful Lily Allen backstage. I drank and DJ’d with Joel Gibb in Berlin, swapped messages with John Grant about his Glastonbury appearance and the Weekend movie (more of which later), got invited to Spain by Jonsi, met Tim Burgess on Halloween, and had a full drunken body hug with Alan Hollinghurst. I think I’m done…

The movies...

‘I’ve been a lot to the movies lately; the last one ruined my heart...’ sang Jonas Alaska on one of my favourite songs of the year. He wasn’t wrong; a couple of real heartbreakers left their mark on me this year.

‘There was a mother who came to the [AIDS ward] and one... two... three times she lost her boys there...’

‘We really had a great time. We would go out dancing and then I would come home and sleep. Unfortunately none of those men are alive today...’

‘All of the guys in that office got infected. And they all died except one...’

‘Everybody in that study died but me...’

We Were Here was the documentary we were all waiting for. A handful of articulate and erudite voices talk us through their personal accounts of life in San Francisco at the time the AIDS epidemic hit the city. It was a time of weekly funerals and young gay men walking around ‘like concentration camp victims’ and of scarcely believable quantities of fortitude and love. Make it a duty to watch this film and pay your respects.

Like We Were Here, Weekend managed to be both life-affirming and terribly painful. Understated performances, incredibly sexy, and shot with the cinematic quality (and guidance) of a Quinnford and Scout photograph, this got under my skin in a way I hadn’t expected. As an almost-love-story it made a few people take a good hard look at themselves, myself included. I was supposed to go for post-movie drinks the night I watched it but I couldn’t; instead I walked around the city by myself for an hour in a cinematic and dreadfully upsetting fashion listening to ‘What’s In It For Me?’ by Avi Buffalo on endless repeat. But really, what’s in it for me? Maybe I should find out…

The boys…

Come off it, I’ve got to save something for the autobiography haven’t I?

The future...

Next year it will be ten years since I came out of the closet at the tender age of 24 (on my Mum’s birthday). To coin a 2011 phrase, It Gets Better. I’m making a list of resolutions as always; let’s see how life intervenes. I’m working on Novel Number 2 and maybe re-hashing Novel Number 1, or maybe not. DJing as much as I can, trying to make the world a better place, having a spring clean, the usual. As for the blog, I have an exciting project beginning in January. It’s called ‘Manchester: In Residents’ and every week or so I will hand the reins of Manhattanchester to a different fascinating individual to let them tell their own particular Manchester story; how they got here and where they’re at. Let’s see the city from the inside. I’ve already had some brilliant responses. Tune in…

To follow: 2011 in pictures …

Porn Stars and Crystal Castles: New York, March 2011, Day Three

Like the opening of a first novel, I wake still wearing my clothes and contact lenses. The latter have to be peeled from my dry corneas like kiwi skins. We are hangover-hungry so decide to walk the sweltering few blocks to East Houston to eat at Katzs Deli. When we arrive it is bedlam, too hyper and complex for two bleary-eyed (vegetarian) Europeans to attempt so we slope a few doors along to the trusted Ray’s Famous for pizza and soda and fries that we can’t finish. All health and restraint has left us at this point I should point out. I would gain a stone every week if I remained in that city. Granola won’t cut it after ten pints of the black stuff.

Partially restored, we amble along Houston Street where, at fifty paces, I spot (yet another) beautiful muscled and bearded specimen. I’m certain I recognise him so I make Dee slow down to inspect. He’s divine. Then I remember with a little shame where I recognise him from. He is a porn star, Arpad Miklos. I confess to Dee. Rather than being shocked, she asks if I would like to have my picture taken with him. I would not. At the next corner, a group of concerned Lower East Siders gather around the prone body of a homeless man who is zonked out on the pavement in the midday shade. The ambulance pulls up to the kerb as we pass by, the siren trepanning holes into our skulls.

We opt for a lazy Village mooch the rest of the day. My water bottle spills into my bag so Bleeker Street is treated to the spectacle of me drying twenty dollar bills on a tabletop in the sun, inviting a mugging. Dee and I have one of our wonderful world-to-rights conversations, which come rarely in life and usually on holiday, but which are a major reason we’ve come to New York together if we’re honest.

At Washington Square, Dee spots actor Mark Pellegrino from Capote, Lost, Being Human, CSI etc. It’s a celeb-fest today. We dine on crisps and Reeces Pieces back at the apartment then I have to shape up for the Crystal Castles gig at Terminal 5. Down in the subway I have a peculiarly touching moment with an elderly homeless lady who needs a ticket but has no money and can’t work the machine. I buy her ticket for her and she is grateful and polite. She isn’t loony or inadequate, she is old and seems terribly sad. I do not want to know what her story is. I realise how immune I’ve become to seeing people living rough, to my eyes it’s more prevalent in Manchester than in New York, though neither seem as serious as London. This is the price paid for the shiny cities I love so much, people at the bottom of the heap scraping by, or not, living off surplus if they’re lucky. What does one do? Listen to pop music, look the other way, drink something …

It is the week of the super moon and there she looms, heavy and huge over the statue at Columbus Circle, the atmosphere black and white and profound in glowing circles. ‘The moon has nothing to be sad about, staring from her hood of bone …’

The queue for Crystal Castles is predictably young and hip and wasted. I have no ID so am given a special wristband which means ‘Do not serve alcohol to this man.’ ‘But I’m 33,’ I appeal. ‘Prove it,’ says the doorman. I give up, aggrieved, but inside it seems to matter not a jot whether I have a wristband or not so I make a start on the medicinal spirits and mixers.

DJ Destructo (please...) warms up the crowd with some not-bad dirty electro and I spot the first gurns of the evening from punters who are wearing the same social pariah wristband as me. They are young, fit and out of their boxes by 9.30 pm. There are plenty of glowsticks around too, just in case you were afraid young New Yorkers had suddenly gotten as hip as their European counterparts. They haven’t. But oh to be young and moneyed and in Manhattan … Teengirl Fantasy (who I thought were Dutch but are actually Brooklyn party boys) are supporting and they put me right in the mood for a dance. I don’t even know what genre their music is, it’s profoundly ambient but the beat says DANCE. It’s ‘electronic’ basically, okay? They sound like this …

A man walks onto the stage. ‘I don’t know if you guys heard, but a couple of months ago Alice broke her ankle [crowd boos] The doctor told her she would have to cancel this tour [crowd boos some more] but Alice told him, FUUUUCCCCCKKKKK YOOOOOOUUUUUU ….’ Then it goes OFF like this …(force yourself to sit through it, but turn the volume down…)

How do you even review a Crystal Castles gig? You can’t be indifferent. The music gets you or it doesn’t. In fact, it will piss you off if you don’t like it. I love them, Dee tried but couldn’t, that’s why she’s at home reading Gangs Of New York tonight. Music aside, they are fuck-off cool in that they’re a band that happened completely by accident. Alice is an unhinged up-for-it rock n roller who happens to be in an electro outfit. The boy makes all the noise but really, who cares about him, just get on with it. The gig is big and white and electric and loud like the moon. I swap texts with my boys who are partying in Berlin and it kind of feels like we’re all together across waters and dancing and mental repetitive beats.

The cab takes me home along the west side of the island so I get to see all the Hudson piers deserted at night. Falafel and ears ringing is how all the best nights end.