As an out gay man living in Vancouver I’ve got it easy nowadays, more or less.

Compare our contemporary city to the plight of the 1960s New York City homosexual: homosexual acts are illegal (even between consenting adults), queer gathering spaces are shut down by the police , those who are caught there are arrested and their names, addresses and employers are published in the paper, media depictions mark homosexuality as illness, and many are forced into horrifying medical treatments in an attempt to “cure” them.

A lot has changed.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s haunting documentary Stonewall Uprising, based on a book by David Carter, sheds an unsettling eye-opening light on the 1969 Stonewall riots, known as the beginning of the queer rights movement.

In 1969 The Stonewall Inn was the gathering place within the East Village. Though it had seen raids before, one June evening police showed up with a vigour not previously seen and the queers inside decided enough was enough.

They resisted, and then fought back with words, with drag, and with violence, leading to the police being barricaded inside the Inn itself. It lasted hours, and then days and led to the formation of the first Gay Liberation Parade on June 28, 1970, which would usher in the Gay Pride movement.

There is little to no footage of the riots themselves and at the time, there was hardly any media attention from the mainstream press. Most of the footage in Stonewall Uprising is simply footage of the era or reconstructions of certain key events, but they are of little consequence.

The heart and soul of the film is felt through interviews with former Stonewall Inn patrons and uprising starters as well as New York politicians and police workers who offer up incredible the emotion, “There was no going back now. We’d discovered a power we didn’t even know we had”.

Yes, a lot has changed, but not as much as we’d like to think. Look at the massive mainstream media attention that five gay teen suicides have garnered in recent weeks. Look at the homophobic attack that occurred at the Stonewall only last week. In watching films like Stonewall Uprising we see what we, as a queer community, are capable of, and how much fight we still have in us.

Stonewall Uprising screened as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival.