Hello, and welcome to Queer as Fiction, where we talk about queer history in the media.

I'm Jason.

I'm Alice.

I'm Eli.

And today we're going to be talking about two depictions of the Stonewall riots,

the 2015 Roland Emmerick film Stonewall and the 2016 drunk history segment presented by Chrysler West.

Music Cristle West. The content warnings for this episode are as follows.

Homophobia, transphobia, police violence, sex work and allusions to sex trafficking,

and racism.

Before we start talking about these two pieces

of media, it's important to talk about the history behind Stonewall and do a brief overview

of what actually happened in the Stonewall riots. Obviously, we already recently published

an entire episode on the Stonewall riots, and we would highly recommend that you go and listen

to that episode before listening to this one. But if you don't want to, then Alice is going to

give a brief rundown. This is going to be very, very brief, and I'm going to focus mostly

on the question of who instigated the Stonewall riots, because that's something that is

depicted very differently in the two pieces of media we're going to be discussing today.

But to talk about Stonewall first, Stonewall was a mafia-run Underground Gabor in New York in the late 1960s.

The patrons of Stonewall were a very diverse mix of people across race and class.

There is debate about specific ratios of who went to Stonewall, but we can at least say that

it was diverse across race and class.

Most patrons were assigned male at birth, so there were some cis women who went to Stonewall,

...