The director submitted dummy scripts to get funding, and to be allowed access to military locations He even used serving soldiers as actors. It would be nice to report that his audacity enabled him to make a masterpiece. The fact is that the dummy scripts he first submitted can only have been more coherent than what he substituted for them.His film is being marketed (in a low-key British Film Institute way) as an indictment of militarism with a strong homoerotic strain, but it could be an indictment of almost anything. In the words of the immortal Shangri-Las, "at the moment, it'll never happen again".Hussein Erkenov's 100 Days Before the Command was made in 1990, but has only been seen outside Russia since 1994. Bostonia, leaving with style a restaurant from which he and his lover have been expelled, leans back into the coat that is being held for him with a campy grace that would make Jackie O seem like a raw girl. Two lesbians dressing femmy for a demonstration glance shyly at each other as if they're just discovering a new turn-on.Stonewall is a worthy monument to its director, and also to a minority's discovery of itself.

There are constant touches of pleasure, too, in design and in performance. It would be better to leave the immediate impulse ambiguous, a gesture that can be claimed imaginatively by anyone who needs to. But the strengths of the film far outweigh its weaknesses.Screenwriter Rikki Beadle Blair writes better dialogue for New York drag queens than anyone called Rikki Beadle Blair has a right to. He's been too busy fighting for the right to dance to do any dancing.It may be a mistake for Stonewall to psychologise the moment of first resistance that led to the Stonewall riot, to make so clear the motivations of the drag queen who struck the first blow. Another man of his generation, though, dances with a man after years devoted to political organisation. Stonewall is particularly good and funny on the restrictions that gay people had to endure in the 1960s in supposed havens such as Fire Island - the ban on revealing swimsuits on the beach, the prohibition at the tea dance on male dancing until a token woman had started things going.The romance between Matty and LaMiranda is counterpointed by one between another drag queen, Bostonia (Duane Boutte), and the closeted bar owner Skinny Vinnie (Bruce MacVittie) Vinnie tries to come out, but is destroyed by guilt. He can hope to overcome the drawbacks of each: the defeatism of drag (preferring to wallow rather than follow through), the grinding caution and willingness to compromise of the homophiles.

He can bring together high and low, progressive politics and trash culture - the way the Shangri-Las' "Past Present and Future" takes off from the Moonlight Sonata.His political eclecticism is a virtue, but what it means in practice is sleeping with both sides, with spontaneous, outrageous, brave LaMiranda and with bespectacled brainy conservative Ethan (Brendan Corbalis) In the end, he has to choose. More than one way of being brave.Matty Dean is in a position to combine the best of what he sees around him, the emotional directness and dramatic instincts of the drag queens, and the political analysis of the homophile organisations. The police get paid off to leave gay bars alone, or at least to schedule their raids with a little consideration, but they get too much fun out of bullying the faggots They keep forgetting. But it isn't crude, and it succeeds in showing that there was more than one way of resisting injustice in those days. By the end of the summer he's broken them all.Make no mistake, Stonewall is an attempt to rehabilitate early gay liberation, a historical moment that is now routinely trashed by a later politics. That summer, LaMiranda meets Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), this cute kid right off the bus who thinks it's time that queers said enough is enough LaMiranda has three rules: I don't do tears I don't do love I don't do angry.