Two Activists Just Painted the Stonewall Monument Brown Because the Film 'Whitewashes' History

The anonymous artists claiming credit for painting and decorating the infamous Stonewall statues aka the "Gay Liberation Monument" that stand on Christopher Street, near the infamous Stonewall Inn in New York City, spoke exclusively to Autostraddle.com.

The two activists are "two queer and gender non-conforming women in their 20s, one white and one a Latina immigrant, living in Brooklyn," reports Autostraddle.

This is what the monument looked like before it was painted: 

 

#NYC #gayliberationmonument

A photo posted by Francesco Bollorino (@bollore) on

Jul 30, 2015 at 2:17pm PDT

They claimed that they were inspired to add wigs and paint the statues after hearing what Miss Major, a Stonewall activist left out of the major motion picture film, said about the film to Autostraddle: 

"It’s so disappointing. They keep doing this! My first thought is: how dare they attempt to do this again? A few years ago they did another Stonewall movie, and I swear if I saw a black person, it had to be a shadow running against the face of somebody who was white!"

She went on to tell the blog site that young people aren't "stupid":

"It’s absolutely absurd — you know, young people today aren’t stupid. They can read the history, they know that this is not the way it happened. These people can’t let it go! Everybody can’t be white! This is a country of different colors and people and thoughts and attitudes and feelings, and they try to make all of those the same for some reason."

The anonymous artists told the queer blog site that they painted the statues because:

"We painted them because Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Storme DeLarverie and all the other Black and Brown people who led the movement deserve credit for their courage and strength. What we did was rectification, not vandalism. Those statues are bronze (brown) underneath the layer of white paint — the symbolism behind that is infuriating. I know that some people are going to be angry, but I’m not concerned with preserving bullshit art. I’m angry about the whitewashing of LGBTQ history."

Watch a video of the statues here:

Read the full interview over at Autostraddle here.