Willfully ignorant "queer historians" give an inaccurate retelling of our history. Know your heroes.
This man was a hero to me and one of the co-founders of ACTUP NY.
I had no gay heroes when I was a kid, other than fantasizing about the well-oiled Hercules played by Steve Reeves. When "The Boys in the Band" was released, I was 14 and Time magazine had a spread on it. It sent me into an elongated depression that only food could relieve. I still hate bitchy queens like Harold.
Vito Russo (1946–1990), photographed in Sheridan Square, was a film scholar, a journalist, and a passionate advocate for gay rights. Born into a close-knit Italian American family and raised in East Harlem, Russo was in many ways a quintessential New Yorker—but above all, as his brother Charles Russo remembered, “Vito was a teacher.” In the mid-1970s, Russo developed a series of informative lectures on Hollywood homophobia, which he refined and expanded over many years, presenting them at over 200 venues—universities, film festivals, community centers, and museums—throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. These lectures evolved into his landmark exposé, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, which was published in 1981, revised in 1987, and became the basis of an award-winning 1995 documentary film. Russo, wrote biographer Michael Schiavi, “taught gay readers that the bigotry they suffered offscreen correlated directly to the lies perpetuated about them onscreen.”
Russo began sharing his knowledge and love of film with others in the mid-1960s through the Film Arts Club he hosted as an undergraduate at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. But by June 1969, he was back in New York City, where he witnessed the first night of the Stonewall uprising, watching as patrons of the Mafia-owned bar fought back during a routine police raid. Galvanized, Russo returned as a participant during the subsequent nights of unrest. In 1970, he joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) as the organization protested another violent police raid, this time on the Snake Pit bar. By June 1970—the first anniversary of Stonewall—Russo was helping carry the GAA banner during the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, forerunner of Pride. (Columnist Arthur Bell, one of GAA’s founders, became a friend of Russo’s, and the two participated in several of GAA's high-profile “zaps.”) Russo also served as chair of the GAA Arts Committee, arguing that “you don't change people by changing laws… the way you reach people was through media.” One of his most popular initiatives was the “Firehouse Flicks,” a series of film screenings at the GAA Firehouse, which sparked discussions about “machismo, sexism, gender role-playing, romance, violence, and the denigration of gays and lesbians in Hollywood.”
Read and share about our gay heroes who came before us.
nyhistory.org/blogs/gay-prid…