6 Movies / June 28 at 8 p.m.
Monday, June 28 marks the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots which gave rise to the gay liberation movement and inspired decades of Pride parades each June. On that night, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village had finally had enough of police brutality and abuse. At the time, cross-dressing was illegal in New York, as was same-sex dancing. After years of police raids on gay bars and harassment of gay men and lesbians, the Stonewall patrons fought back when the police tried to cart them off to the nearest precinct. Led by drag queens Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the scuffle turned into a full-scale riot, with police cars overturned and the crowd freeing people as soon as the police could catch them. Within days, the Village was flooded with leaflets decrying police persecution and within six months, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance had been formed to campaign for the rights of LGBTQ peoples.
TCM commemorates Pride Month and the Stonewall Riots with six documentaries about the lives of LGBTQ peoples around the world, including three network premieres:
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989, TCM Premiere) helped bring the AIDS crisis to public consciousness by focusing on five people, gay and straight, who died of AIDS-related complications. The HBO production won the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary for directors-producers Rob Epstein and Bill Couturié.
The Celluloid Closet (1995, TCM Premiere) uses interviews and film clips to bring to life film critic Vito Russo’s seminal study of coded and overt gay images on screen. Lily Tomlin narrates from a script by Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin.
Paragraph 175 (2000, TCM Premiere) is the first feature-length documentary to present the stories of gay men and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis under Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting homosexuality. Producers-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman captured the stories of five men who survived the concentration camps and one woman whose experience was decidedly different.
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) brought producer-director Epstein his first Oscar for a moving biography of California’s first openly gay elected official. Through photographs, archival footage and interviews, the film chronicles Milk’s rise to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, his assassination and the civic unrest that followed the light sentence given his killer, Dan White.
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977) saved lives. When this massive undertaking, comprising interviews with 26 gay men and lesbians assembled over a five-year period, first aired on PBS after its theatrical release, producer-director Peter Adair received thousands of letters from LGBTQ people who had never heard their stories told from their own perspectives. The film remains a landmark in documentary and gay history.
Before Stonewall (1984) captures life in the LGBTQ community before the Stonewall Riots, using interviews, photographs and archival footage to paint a picture of life in America before the event that marked the dawn of the gay liberation movement. Interview subjects include historian Martin Duberman, poets Allen Ginsberg and Audre Lord, psychologist Evelyn Hooker and activists Barbara Gittings, Harry Hay and Frank Kameny.
