#NotYourProp: An Education Rally - Sept. 24th – (The real Stonewall Riots weren't Roland Emmerich's & Jon Robin Biatz's whitewashed and classist fiction, it was a rebellion against transphobia and police brutality)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

#NotYourProp: An Education Rally

WHEN: September 24^th - 6:30pm to 8:30pm

 

WHAT: Stonewalling Accurate & Inclusive Depictions, or SAID, hosts ‘#NotYourProp: An Education Rally’, to be held outside the historical Stonewall Inn on the eve of the highly disputed ‘Stonewall’ film’s premiere and will bring together professors, historians, noted advocates and community leaders to #Educate, #Enlighten and #Empower.

WHERE: The Stonewall Inn 53 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014 (outside building)

CONTACT: Media inquiries or more info: ActualSAID@gmail.com   

S.A.I.D.’s website: www.1969SAID.blogspot.com

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In a recent New York Times interview, journalist and S.A.I.D. coordinator Ashley Love said, “Seeing the film in its entirety was disappointing in how once again white gay men reduce trans women of color down to historical, social and political props, further highlighting issues of classism, trans-misogyny, anti-blackness, Hollywood trans-face casting, misgendering, identity appropriation and transparent propaganda.”

Scheduled rally speaker Octavia Lewis, Education Specialist for Transgender Programming at New York’s Hentrick Martin Institute, writes, “We’ll no longer allow the gay patriarchy to edit out trans women and lesbians of color from history or belittle our resistance just to retain their white male privilege."


June 4th, 2015 - Octavia Lewis (left), Eunic Ortiz, Stonewall Democrats NYC President (right). Lewis accepting award for SDNYC during Stonewall Democrat NYC's Annual Event

Also speaking at Thursday’s history presentation, educator and Black Lives Matter NYC organizer Aaryn Lang writes, "Marginalizing trans women of color in the Stonewall movie is part of an age old Hollywood tradition of whitewashing history to further separate marginalized people from the truth of their existence in this country. We have been, and continue to fuel this movement."


August 25, 2015 - Aaryn Lang on MSNBC discussing male violence against Black trans women

On September 22^nd Vanity Fair published a scathing film review of the Stonewall entitled ‘Stonewall Is Terribly Offensive, and Offensively Terrible’ in which writer Richard Lawson notes, “Turns out, Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be—more offensive, more white-washed, even more hackishly made… Stonewall at least does that bit of good: it illustrates how systems of privilege and prejudice within a minority can be just as pervasive and ugly as anything imposed from the outside. And that’s an outrage. So how long until someone throws a brick through the screen?”

More background: Director/producer Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz, both white gay men, have crafted such an inaccurate depiction of the 1969 Rebellion against police brutality and transphobia that it supersedes what both men excuse as mere “fiction” to what scholars and credible sources deem as historical revisionism due to the film's whitewashing, trans-minimizing, bi-erasure and gay-washing.

Furthermore, transsexual feminists have condemned Emmerich’s ‘Hollywood trans-face casting’, a commonly used term for the stigmatizing and humiliating industry practice of non-trans directors hiring male actors to play trans* woman roles. This miscasting only reinforces institutionalized misgendering, which is a form of trans-misogynistic gender mockery.