Director Roland Emmerich has recently come under fire for making moronic remarks about needing a ‘straight-acting’ lead for straight audiences to sympathise with in his gay rights movie, Stonewall. Emmerich vehemently denied that he had rewritten LGBT history by casting a white actor as the lead, despite the actual Stonewall riots being kicked off by trans people of colour. Yet, when reviews of the film came out, it became clear that it was centred on the sad plight of one ‘straight-acting’ white boy. It has since been called “terribly offensive” and, quite simply, a “bad movie”.
Someone cleverly took this bad press surrounding Emmerich’s history white-washing and ran with it, creating a parody Twitter account for the director called @RolandMovies that casts vanilla white people in biopics about landmark historic events led by POC. Here are just a sprinkling of the most gut-busting:
Five gay films to watch instead of Stonewall