You’ve Seen The ‘Gay Rights Movement’ Trailer. What’s Missing?

The trailer for Ryan James Yezak’s documentary project on anti-gay discrimination has gone viral, racking up more than 1.7 million hits on YouTube. It’s become so popular that his Second Class Citizens documentary has received more than twice the funding he requested on Kickstarter, assuring its complete funding. The trailer, titled “The Gay Rights Movement,” has been linked repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter and praised as an overview of the modern struggle for LGBT rights.

The problem? It’s missing some key events—everything from the Mattachine Society to the Stonewall riots to the Gay Liberation Front to the pivotal Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision that overturned anti-sodomy laws. 

Obviously, a seven-minute video can only cover so many topics; the extended documentary may well cover missing components. But the specific events chosen to portray the gay rights movement paint a misleading picture of gay people as passive, helpless victims of a homophobic society, and deny the community activism and organizing that has paved the way for recent progress.

If one isn’t familiar with the story of American gay rights and the modern movement, Yezak’s video paints a sad picture: From mid-20^th century broadcasts about electroshock therapy used to “treat” homosexuality and quotes from “experts” about homosexuality as a mental illness, the film segues to clips of martyrs Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard, then intersperses discussion of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, marriage equality, and the spate of high-profile gay suicides. The recognizable gay figures who did not die of murder or suicide can be tallied on one hand; even out of those, Lt. Dan Choi is featured not for his unwavering pursuit of gay rights in America and abroad, but because he lost his job.

It’s true that gay history in America is full of tragic discrimination, but Yezak’s video tells only half of the story.

Where are the gay organizers in the video? Where is veteran campaigner, Milk friend, and AIDS Quilt creator Cleve Jones? Or Dr. John Fryer, whose ‘Dr. Anonymous’ testimony at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association conference proved instrumental in the association’s decision to no longer consider homosexuality a mental illness?

Where is Stonewall, the GLBT community’s organized response to police repression? Where are the centers for the dying, the communities of care built in the thick of the AIDS epidemic when straight America turned its back?

Gay and lesbian history—to say nothing of transgender history!—is so poorly known that reducing sexual minorities to passive victims causes active harm to the movement, severing its own powerful roots.

The most amazing part of gay history, and the true story of the gay rights movement, lies in the strength and courage of ordinary men and women coming together and demanding freedom. It lies in the secret but proud Daughters of Bilitis, in the Cooper’s Donuts riot in frustrated response to police harassment and brutality, in the tireless campaign by gay activists (including Harvey Milk) to get people to come out of the closet and become visible.

LGBT rights in America are not the product of a few benevolent straight allies, but of the unceasing work by organizers and dreamers, often thankless except for gradually shifting public opinion.

But as the music swells, the crescendo of Yezak’s trailer—the apex of the movement, according to the flow of the movie—comes with a spate of straight allies speaking on behalf of the nearly infantilized gay community. Straight lawmakers vote for gay marriage, and unnamed masses of gay men in New York erupt in cheers. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ends with the signature of a straight President. A straight young man in Iowa defends his gay mothers to the legislature. The peak, and then the denouement: Dan Savage, one of that handful of still-living gay men, tells the viewer that it is getting better.

But nowhere in this supposed history of the gay rights movement is the real reason it has gotten better: The loving and angry struggles of gays, lesbians, and transgender people for a power denied to them, the power to be themselves and still survive.

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel.

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