I have not seen the movie yet. I am sure that there will be a lot of fiction as well as non-fiction. If you really want to know the facts, ask me. I was 17 at the time, dancing the night away in Stonewall. We had no idea or even a thought we would be making history. This was not planned nor was it ever in anyway rehearsed. It was a sad time, a very scary time. We were always under the threat of the police dept, under the mayors office. We were never sure if we were going to be taken outside one more time for a shake down. I read a lot of the reviews here and some were on and off. I can tell you this though, Judy Garlands death had NOTHING what so ever to do with Stonewall.

Having been the the Village in the 1960's, I can vouch for the accuracy of this film and the depiction of the Village during that era, except for a sort of inaccurate image of the exterior of the Stonewall bar.The characters are representations of real people (the head of the Mattachine Society, the leader of the Daughters of Bilitis, the mafioso and the queen coming out) that I knew in the movement back then.Being gay or trans gender back then was very rough: the scenes of police brutality are frank and graphic, especially the cops' dunking La Miranda's head under water... The cops did a similar thing to me.If you want to see how far the LGBT movement has progressed, see this film.

A young gay man from the sticks comes to New York City in 1969 hoping for a better life, but finds the homosexual lifestyle just as stifled in the big city under police pressure, corruption and harassment. The legendary gay riots near the Stonewall Inn take up just five minutes of the film's running-time, the final five minutes. This low-budget, brightly-colored film is more interested in the lives that would soon be affected by the riots than in the aftermath of the violence--and so we get stock characters like the naive blond cowboy, the underworld group controlling the club, the straight-seeming activists for a Homosexual Alliance, and lots and lots of drag queens. Director Nigel Finch seems to make a concerted effort to equate homosexuality with drag behavior, and drag behavior with (ultimately) prostitution. Perhaps this was true of the times, but Finch's presentation (though not campy) has cartoonish leanings and nostalgic overtures that don't express anything more than what most people already realize: the cops were corrupt, the gays were not saints, and they clashed. There's a good movie to be made about Stonewall, but this one just scratches the surface. There are some sweet moments (a sing-along on a bus, a dance between a drag queen and a gay conservative), but just as many scenes where the tone intended hasn't a hope in hell of coming through. ** from ****

While Stonewall hits upon some facts about the Stonewall Riots, it is pretty much based upon fiction. Much of this movie is apocryphal. For example, the who idea that the Stonewall Riots were somehow influenced by Judy Garland's death was suggested by the homophobic police-- as a bigoted joke. New research shows that the Stonewall Riots were started by what most people would classify as sissies from nearby bars after hearing that police were beating up Stonewall patrons. There weren't very many drag queens allowed in the Stonewall.The police who conducted the bust were not from the precinct that was in charge of the area; but a separate group dealing with morals violation. In fact, once barricaded inside the bar, they called for help, but the Sixth Precint wouldn't help, having already been paid off by the mob who owned the bar.