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Activists paint Stonewall statues brown to protest film’s ‘whitewashing’
Statues opposite New York City’s Stonewall Inn have been painted brown in protest of a new film’s ‘whitewashing’ of the riots.
Openly gay directly Roland Emmerich came under fire after the release of the movie’s trailer, which focuses on a fictional white male character and ignores the real-life drag queens and trans women of color who started the LGBTI rights movement.
In response, the two anonymous activists – two queer gender non-conforming women in their 20s, one white and one a Latina immigrant – painted the white lacquer sculptures and dressed them in dark wigs and colorful clothes that reflect the style of Stonewall-era trans women.
‘Those sculptures are supposedly there to commemorate the Stonewall riots, but there isn’t a trace of the actual riots in them,’ they told the Autostraddle blog.
‘They’re a slap across the face to the Black and Latina trans women who got whacked with batons and shoved into police vans, and still had the guts to continue to lead the fight for LGBTQ liberation.
‘We painted them because Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Storme DeLarverie and all the other black and brown people who led the movement deserve credit for their courage and strength.
‘What we did was rectification, not vandalism.
‘Those statues are bronze (brown) underneath the layer of white paint — the symbolism behind that is infuriating. I know that some people are going to be angry, but I’m not concerned with preserving bullshit art. I’m angry about the whitewashing of LGBTQ history.’
The Gay Liberation Monument was commissioned in 1979 to commemorate the riots but considered too ‘explicit’ for public display because it is of a gay and a lesbian couple touching.
The post Activists paint Stonewall statues brown to protest film’s ‘whitewashing’ appeared first on Gay Star News.
Darren Wee
www.gaystarnews.com/article/activists-paint-stonewall-statues-brown-to-protest-films-whitewashing/
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