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?

‘Tuesdays at Tescos’, HOME and the Re:Play Festival

Victoria Baths, and Ancoats, and now Number One First Street… The soft launch of HOME is bringing us ever-closer to HOME itself and it’s a genuinely exciting feeling. From the makeshift theatre foyer on the second floor of this smart office building, serenaded by a live guitar player, and with a lovely craft beer in hand, you can look out (through snowflakes in my case) and see the new building emerging over the way.

On Tuesday, fittingly, I saw ‘Tuesdays at Tescos’ inside the pleasant temporary performance space. You might have seen me Facebooking about how good it was. The final performance is tonight, and you should treat yourself. You can even get half-price ticket deals on the HOME website.

The play is a one-hour monologue spoken by Pauline, a trans woman renegotiating her relationship with her ageing father now that she has been able to reveal her true self, or, ‘Me. As I am. Now.’, as she says, softly and repeatedly like a mantra.

I came away feeling very moved by Scott Kentell’s performance. He brought a gentle sincerity to a very good script. His performance was assured and insightful (I can’t imagine Simon Callow’s was a better, and I’m a fan).

The director Sue Womersely and performer Scott Kentall are interviewed here:

listen to ‘Replay Festival 2015: Tuesdays at Tesco’ on audioBoom

‘Tuesdays…’ is part of the 2015 Re:Play Festival, an annual selection of theatre that gives audiences a second chance to see the best work from the previous twelve months.

On Friday night I’ll be looking back at a year of comedy with the Re:Play Breakthrough Comedian of the Year competition. I need all the inspiration I can get for my own foray into stand up this year, of course…

Thursday, Friday and Saturday gives you another chance to catch Jenny May Morgan’s portrayal of a questionably-talented author of women’s erotica pushing her latest work, complete with mucky novel extracts… An Evening of Filth and Despair promises to reach into dark and delicious Julia Davis comedy territory.

On Saturday night, Chris Hoyle’s play Two Spirits dramatises the story of the three Sioux Warriors who came to Salford in the late nineteenth-century as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show. This coming together of disparate cultures was researched heavily by the playwright during time spent in Dakota and a documentary about his time there will screen after the play. Theatre and film for one ticket, not to be missed.

Re:Play is not only a great chance to see quality new work so cheaply but it will also whet your appetite for the big HOME-coming too…

Check the full line up HERE.

Queer Narratives

Lord knows I love Larry Kramer but I was underwhelmed by the 2014 adaptation of The Normal Heart, Kramer’s drama about the formation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first body to attempt to tackle the mysterious illness we now know as the AIDS pandemic. The play was originally staged in 1985. Kramer then wrote a screen version for direction by Ryan Murphy last year, in which there was somehow less of a sense that the world didn’t care about a disease killing New York’s ‘undesirables’, than that the disease itself was actually only happening to a dozen people in a telephone crisis centre. The world felt oddly remote, and not for the right reasons. In 1969, Kramer’s sexy screenplay update of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love won him an Oscar nomination, but time didn’t seem to be working in his favour for a twenty-first century Normal Heart. There was something of the clunky and anachronistic exposition we are all supposed to accept in this post-Downton Abbey world, but I was oddly unmoved by it, plus I straight up did not rate Jim Parsons. Having said that, Julia Roberts gave a great turn as the Virginia Woolf-like scientist providing a lone voice of reason and restraint as the virus gathered pace; Mark Ruffalo I could happily watch sanding door frames with the sound off; and Joe Mantello’s manic diatribe as the body count hopelessly increased, was, I think, award-winning stuff. But the road was full of rocks to get you there.

If you want a lesson in narrative grace, watch Transparent. In fact if you want a lesson in most of the important skills of contemporary drama, Transparent has them – script, pace, casting, story, you name it. And it doesn’t make things easy on itself. Turning-point scenes happen off-screen, there are numerous flashbacks, temporal dislocation, narrative uncertainty. But it’s all water tight, and so consistently and persistently emotionally fraught that it’s best to sit back and not speak for a while after each episode. It’s also the most genuinely queer thing I’ve seen in ages. The fluidity of gender and sexual identity is practically torrential in Transparent. It’s a story that’s as much about navigating human desire across all manner of boundaries/binaries as it is about a trans woman – the blindingly talented Jeffrey Tambor as Maura – coming out to her family of adult children. It’s listed on IMDb under ‘Comedy’ but I can’t think what for – other than as some kind of categorical titillation to prevent a straighter audience being deterred. Regardless, it does have plenty of funny moments, effortlessly and circumstantially funny that is, and therefore real comedy, the comedy of life rolling on with pitfalls and errors. What I like most about it though is that it has is no discernible interest in ‘normalising’ trans or queer experience – doing so would cost the story the uniqueness that convinces you that you have never seen anything like this before.

The Queer Forum

My friend Siobhan and I have started a venture called The Queer Forum. Inspired by the TED Talks, we are hosting irregular get-togethers in which we invite half a dozen LGBTQI/Queer-identified people to give an informal talk to a friendly audience about something of importance or interest to them, and/or to our community. We might also show some short films, time permitting. It's not-for-profit, community focused and aimed at bringing queer folk together for education and fun.

We held our first event during Pride weekend and it was a really lovely, warm, eye-opening and well-received event. We learned about the film critic Vito Russo, about being a visiting covert lesbian in Bolivia, about gay erotic art, LGBTQI Muslim life, and more. You can see videos of some of our talks at our Vimeo channel.

Our next event is on Sunday 7th December at 6pm at Bangkok Restaurant on Princess Street, Manchester.

If you want more of a taste of what we're about, here's the Introduction I gave to our first event:


Hello. Thank you to everyone for coming to our first ever Queer Forum event. A special thanks to Rachele and the team here at Bangkok for giving us this lovely space to work in, and for including us in the Queer We Are program of events. Rachele approached myself and Siobhan separately to do an event here and, because great minds think alike, we both came up with the same idea; to do something like the TED talks that was for, by and about LGBTQI people. We both feel strongly that making yourself heard is an important thing for queer people. Stephen Beresford, who wrote the movie Pride, which no doubt you’ll all be going to see next month, said the other day how hard he’d found it as a gay man to make himself heard about anything other than sex; and that’s as a middle class white guy. There are voices everywhere that should be heard and we want The Queer Forum to be one of the places you’ll hear them.

Of course it’s no good making yourself heard if there’s nobody to listen, so this project is also about bringing people together, for support, for sharing, and to bear witness. We should be able to come together and share ideas in an environment that’s fun and intellectual, and that’s not just about partying while Rome, or indeed Paris, burns. Laverne Cox has said that it’s important to always remain teachable in the face of ignorance; including your own. So let’s all promise ourselves to remain teachable. It takes a lot of courage to talk in front of an audience and I know you’re all going to be supportive and welcoming. I hope you’re inspired by what you hear today; perhaps inspiredenough to come and be one of the speakers at a future event.

So, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, andbe today’s warm up act and give you a selection of great quotations from queer people:

Join us as we explore Manchester’s Gay Village. It’s meaning. What is it saying to us? Is it a powder keg of the avante-garde?
The Divine David Hoyle

Straight people aren’t the enemy. Gay people aren’t the enemy. Ignorance is the enemy.
Anonymous dancer from Flesh at The Hacienda

The only ‘queer’ people are those who don't love anybody.
Rita Mae Brown

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another, precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of' sexual orientation.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I think God is a callous bitch not making me a lesbian. I'm deeply disappointed by my sexual interest in men.
Diamanda Galás

My name is Martin Boyce, and in 1969 I was a drag queen known as Miss Martin. I remember on that night, when we saw the riot police, all of us drag queens, we linked arms like the Rockettes and sang this song we used to sing: "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls. We wear our dungarees above our nellie knees." And the police went crazy hearing that, and they justimmediately rushed us. We gave one kick and fled.
Martin Boyce

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing

I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are 75 million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.
Larry Kramer

The dead are still here holding our hands.
Jackie Kay