You'll Never Guess Which Students Want a Pro-Gay Film Screening Cancelled Because It's Too Offensive

[+Red King Subscriber²]

You'll Never Guess Which Students Want a Pro-Gay Film Screening Cancelled Because It's Too Offensive
Colorado College queer students think 'Stonewall' film promotes violence.
Robby Soave|Nov. 3, 2015 5:46 pm

Conservative students at Colorado College think Stonewall (2015)—a pro-gay film about gay liberation in New York City that bears the tagline "where pride began"—is too offensive to be shown on campus and want the administration to cancel an upcoming screening.
Just kidding. It's actually gay student activists affiliated with the college's LGBTQIA+ group who object to the film, which was directed by openly gay filmmaker Roland Emmerich and positively depicts gay people fighting for equality in 1969.
According to The Catalyst, Colorado College's independent student newspaper:

• A group of concerned students called for a boycott of the screening and created a group, Radicals Against Institutional Damage (R.A.I.D.). The group sent a letter signed by nine to key administration on campus expressing their views.
• "This film is discursively violent," write the activists. "In a world where cisgender, white gay people have finally achieved "marriage equality" and many see the struggle as being over, it is reinforcing a hierarchy of oppression to invent someone who never existed and place them in a historically-based film with the express purpose of silencing more marginalized groups."

The film is based on historical events but is not an accurate retelling, and many have accused it of overlooking the important role that racial minorities and gay women played in the Stonewall riots; the cast is mostly white and male. But the college's Film and Media Studies Department is quite aware of the controversy, and thought a screening of the film featuring producer Adam Press would be the perfect venue for a discussion of Stonewall's cinematic shortcomings. Film criticism is, after all, a fundamental component of a college's film department—or should be, at least.
But the students aren't having any of it:

• "Critical discussion is simply a way of engaging in respectability politics," said first-year Amelia Eskani. "I think Colorado College should cancel the screening because the safety and well-being of queer and trans* students surpasses the importance of a critical discussion." ...
• "If CC is really as dedicated to diversity and inclusion," said junior Grace Montesano, "They would never have agreed to screen a film that queer students have repeatedly stated is a threat to our identity and our safety." ...
• "It is fallacious to equate the rights of students to view a movie with the rights of students to exist free of violence."

That's right: the film isn't merely offensive to gay and trans students (despite having a truly gay-affirming message), it's actively dangerous to their physical well-being, according to R.A.I.D.
This is a complaint emotionally-coddled students often make: that some kind of expression is so triggering that allowing it to proceed constitutes an act of violence. Such complaints are usually pure hyperbole, but hyperbole doesn't even begin to cover the opinions of Colorado College's precious snowflakes. If screening Stonewall on campus is an act of violence against queer students, what would students say about, I don't know, a Kirk Cameron film? Pure genocide? Would a visit to campus from Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum result in mass fainting spells?
The college initially caved to demands for censorship and indefinitely postponed the screening, according to The College Fix. But a spokesperson for the film department told me the event was back on and would take place Thursday evening.
Maybe the 2015 version of Stonewall was the wrong film to show; a quick Wikipedia search suggests superior cinematic treatments of the subject do exist. But students who demand safe-space protection from art that doesn't quite live up to expectations are truly pitiful. They will never be able to interact with anyone outside the pathetic bubble they have created for themselves.

 

https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/03/guess-which-students-want-pro-gay-film-s

EDIT: The editor here just doesn't work.... I highly suggest just going to the link for a readable article.

[Anibal P]

It is really entertaining watching the SJW set tear into each other trying to see who's most "offended" over nonsense 

[+Red King Subscriber²]

It is really entertaining watching the SJW set tear into each other trying to see who's most "offended" over nonsense 

Not interesting. You should be scared. These idiots can vote.

[Gone]

Yep Liberals love getting offended at everything. Someday when there is nothing to be offended about, they will be offended that they have nothing to be offended about nor anybody to blame for their dumbassery.

[T3X4S]

The SJW crowd is such a prickly bunch - one has no idea what will set one off - best to avoid them altogether if possible... like the Black Plague

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

Was there some law passed that gay people can't be offended or something? I don't get the premise here.

Surely it is bleating in the wind, but the article doesn't make any real attempt to talk about the film itself. The main critique is that the film does not reflect reality, which isn't something that necessarily has to be.

How do they put it.. "Wondering how you can boycott something you haven’t seen and that is a fictional movie based on a true story,” but apparently key figures were left out, minorities were left out, 

I don't really care, though I would prefer fighting this film actively, not reactively. The producers have their right to make their own movie, even if it is horribly wrong or offensive... Hollywood does it every. ########. day. Spend your own resources with your own content to combat ignorance.

Now be quiet and go watch Milk again, I guarantee that it is a far better film. Stonewall has like 9% on Rottentomatoes, and critical reception is (from Wikipedia)

Initial reviews of Stonewall have been extremely negative. Writing for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson described the film as "maddeningly, stultifyingly bungled", the script as "alarmingly clunky" and featuring "production design that makes late 1960s Christopher Street look like Sesame Street". Lawson faults the director for taking "one of the most politically charged periods of the last century" and making it into "a bland, facile coming-of-age story", and says that the role of Marsha P. Johnson is "played as comic relief, flatly". Lawson says that the treatment of Johnson is part of a wider lack of respect for non-white and "non-butch" characters in the movie; he believes they are treated with "only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention", showing the riots through a "white, bizarrely heteronormative lens".^[12]

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden said that the film "does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life" but that "its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it".^[13]

So if you had just shut up, this would have collapsed into obscurity and never be heard from again. Now, you're giving people more chances to wave their SJW phrasing around. Congratulations, you have reflected the worst of both sides. 

[wakjak]

Yep Liberals love getting offended at everything. Someday when there is nothing to be offended about, they will be offended that they have nothing to be offended about nor anybody to blame for their dumbassery.

as if it's only liberals who get offended. Let's not play stupid here. Conservatives get offended at anything to do with 21st century ideology. They'd rather live in the past.

[Anibal P]

Not interesting. You should be scared. These idiots can vote.

Good thing they are too busy being offended with something to make it to the polls 

as if it's only liberals who get offended. Let's not play stupid here. Conservatives get offended at anything to do with 21st century ideology. They'd rather live in the past.

Yet we don't see too much of those backwards conservatives pitching gits about anything in the news, and the news entertainment industry needs fake outrages to stay busy, so you know they are looking for something to cry about side does not matter to them 

[wakjak]

 

Good thing they are too busy being offended with something to make it to the polls 

 

Yet we don't see too much of those backwards conservatives pitching gits about anything in the news, and the news entertainment industry needs fake outrages to stay busy, so you know they are looking for something to cry about side does not matter to them 

Yeah, instead you're too busy pissing and crying about how much you dislike liberals to give a damn about anyone but yourself.

[MikeChipshop Member]

Not interesting. You should be scared. These idiots can vote.

These idiots are the minority thankfully.

[Veiva]

 

Yet we don't see too much of those backwards conservatives pitching gits about anything in the news, and the news entertainment industry needs fake outrages to stay busy, so you know they are looking for something to cry about side does not matter to them 

 

Ben Carson (fundamentalist, theocratic)? Donald Trump (xenophobic)? Mike Huckabee (sexist, theocratic)? Chris Christie (crime, drugs)?

For the record, these are conservatives who have been trying to become president. Two of these have majority support currently.