The Stonewall Nation
Sille Storihle
(2014)
In this video work, Sille Storihle investigates the story of Stonewall Nation, a gay community proposed by American gay-rights activist Don Jackson (1932-1998). In the 1970s he searched for a place where people like himself could live and function in freedom. His settlement was supposed to be located in Alpine County, Northern California, but never materialised here.
Storihle’s creative documentary recreates a 1986 interview with Jackson, in which he describes his utopia. She drew on archive material from the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives for the documentary. In addition to focusing attention on Jackson’s story, the artist aims to shed light on the contrast between her own ideas about sexuality and the perception of this topic at the time of gay-rights activism in the United States in the 1970s. In the film, Don Jackson is portrayed by Michael Kearns, an actor and AIDS activist from Los Angeles, who adds an extra perception to the work through his own background. In this way, Storihle transforms historical documentation into a new narrative form that lies between fiction and non-fiction.
The film shows, on the one hand, a man who longs for his own community, a place where he belongs, but also challenges his ideology about the promised land. The fact that the commune never materialised leaves the form it would have had to the imagination. Storihle describes Jackson as “a cowboy in pursuit of the gay American dream” – an enviable dream that was at the same time colonialist and intended only for the white, middle-class American man.
The film owes its title to the 1969 Stonewall riots at the New York Stonewall Inn gay bar, a bar that was besieged by the police for days and was the scene of riots between police and the LGBTQ+ community.