How the Stonewall riots changed history
A bar raid in Manhattan in 1969 sparked a rights movement with international impact a new documentary shows.
'Stonewall Uprising'
By Gary Goldstein, Special to the Los Angeles Times
June 20, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-stonewall-20100620,0,7973686.storyThe summer of 1969, which saw the first moonwalk, Woodstock and the Manson murders, was marked by another watershed moment: a police raid on a Mafia-run Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn that would spark a three-day riot and, in many eyes, launch the gay rights movement. This rebellion — it's been called the "Rosa Parks moment for gays" — and the decades of oppression that led up to it are vividly chronicled in the documentary "Stonewall Uprising."
What began as a one-hour PBS special evolved into a feature-length film for married co-directors David Heilbroner and Kate Davis, whose previous documentary collaborations include "Pucker Up" and the recent "Waiting for Armageddon" (co-directed with Franco Sacchi). "Stonewall," which opened this weekend at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles, "grew beyond the story of the riots," Heilbroner said by phone from Manhattan. "Very quickly we realized if you're going to understand the Stonewall riots you have to understand American homophobia in the 1950s and '60s."
