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90 Secod Cinema: Before Stonewall
Before Stonewall, an excerpt

It’s a common misconception that the 1969 Stonewall riots, one of the first instances in which the gay community fought back against discrimination, ignited a surge of homosexuality in America.  As the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall shows, this is far from the truth.  Before Stonewall uses a mixture of individual interviews and archival footage to highlight a community that was forced to hide their true identity for years.  The Stonewall riots were the final straw that inspired a swell of closeted gay individuals to come forward in order to advance their rights.

Through reflective and often humorous personal accounts of the years before Stonewall, stretching back to the 1920’s and World War II, we learn about a community that suffered in silence until little by little, they began to come together.  As soldiers returned as heroes and settled in the port cities, they began to realize they were not “geographically isolated,” as former Army Chaplain George Buse says.  But through archival footage of the McCarthy hearings, we see how quickly these feelings evaporated.

Directors Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg use archival footage of one McCarthy hearing, used to uncover Communists and spies in the United States, in order to shed light on how these baseless accusations affected the homosexual community, an aspect of McCarthyism that is rarely discussed.

This clip comes right after a discussion of books and studies released in the 1940s and 1950s that spoke openly about homosexuality, including Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and the introduction of the Kinsey reports.  “It really shook people up…it made it impossible for them to think about homosexuality in the old ways,” says activist Barbara Gittings.

But then, punctuated by a storm siren, we learn about the growing number of investigations into the military and the state department, designed to weed out anyone suspected of being gay.  Later, we learn that once one investigation was complete, the next was spawned by pressure on the fired employee to out any other employees they know are also gay.

Legions of soldiers and state department workers lost their jobs under accusations of “deviancy” – back then, a way of getting around using the word “gay.”  Schiller and Rosenberg chose this historical footage carefully; McCarthy uses purposely threatening rhetoric against someone sitting at his own table.  Interestingly enough, this clip features no overt mention of homosexuality, but if we feel anxious for this dissident’s future, we certainly feel the same uneasiness for the gay community that this administration was determined to eliminate.

by Mary Iannone

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