“Stonewall Uprising: The Year That Changed Everything" at the Rock Island Public Library Main Branch -- June 3.
Friday, June 3, 2 p.m.
Rock Island Public Library Main Branch, 401 19th Street, Rock Island IL
A watershed moment in the history of LGBTQ rights will be explored in a June 3 Gay Pride Month event at the Rock Island Public Library's Main Branch, with the venue hosting a screening of the American Experience episode Stonewall Uprising: The Year That Changed Everything, a Peabody Award-winning work that the Philadelphia Inquirer deemed “an important documentary – and a passionate and compassionate reconstruction.”
Taking place between June 28 and July 3 of 1969, the Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent, and the riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay-liberation movement and the 20th-century fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States.
Directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, Stonewall Uprising begins with a general overview of societal attitudes toward homosexuality in 1960s America. Archival footage from locally produced television programs, public-service films warning of the "dangers" of homosexuality, and an episode of CBS Reports titled "The Homosexuals" are also featured. Among the documentary's interviewees are Stonewall participants and observers Virginia Apuzzo, Martin Boyce, Raymond Castro, Danny Garvin, Jerry Hoose, Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, Dick Leitsch, John O'Brien, and New York Police Department deputy inspector Seymour Pine, which allow the work to present both a national perspective and a personal one.
The film also touches on pre-Stonewall activism, including the Annual Reminder pickets held in Philadelphia, and then shifts to the days immediately preceding the riot and the specific conditions in New York City, including a raid on the Stonewall Inn that had happened days before the raid that triggered the riot, to explain why conditions were ripe for some action to happen. Archive film from the riots, dramatic re-enactments, and eyewitness testimony are presented, along with animation of the streets surrounding the Stonewall Inn showing how rioters were able to evade and outflank responding police. Shown on PBS's American Experience series on April 25 of 2011, the work led author and civil-rights activist David Mixner to state, "Like the movie Milk, this film can have a major impact on the LGBT movement.”
Stonewall Uprising: The Year That Changed Everything will be shown at the Rock Island Library's Main Branch on June 3, admission to the 2 p.m. event is free, and light refreshments will be served. For more information on the screening, call (309)732-7323 and visit RockIslandLibrary.org.
