In this era of gay marriage and highly populated Gay Pride events, it’s sometimes easy to forget the struggles and unenviable lives of our queer forebears. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s Stonewall Uprising spends much of its running time exploring the treatment of homosexual men and women in America, culminating in the Stonewall riots of June1969. Before Stonewall, even a visit to one of New York’s gay village bars — the only safe haven where men could dance with men and drag queens could show off their latest styles — often ended in police harassment and arrest.

In both the popular media and the professional field of psychology, homosexuality was considered a disease abhorrent to the American way. Atascadero State Hospital in California, nicknamed “the Dachau for queers,” developed a chemical form of treatment to “cure” homosexuality that gave victims the full-body sensation of drowning. Others were lobotomized, castrated or subjected to electroshock therapy while forced to look at images of gay pornography.

The men and women (and those blurring the lines between both classifications) who assembled at the Stonewall Inn, New York City’s popular Greenwich Village gay bar, on June 28, 1969 had long been familiar with the outside world’s threats. Yet, as expressed by the witnesses and participants interviewed for this film (all still wide-eyed with pride over what they accomplished), when the cops burst through the doorway for another raid, another interrupted evening, things had reached a turning point.

What started with tossed pennies at the coppers’ feet soon turned to Molotov cocktails and overturned patrol cars. The offending officers were soon barricaded inside the Stonewall Inn by the neighbourhood crowd, which had grown to more than 1,000 protesters. Enough was enough, and the riots raged for two fiery nights. Within days, the first Gay Pride march made its way from Greenwich Village to Central Park.

Davis and Heilbroner weave together period-pieces of anti-gay propaganda with interview subjects ranging from a dishonoured marine, one of the policemen responsible (closing the film with a simple, moving change of heart), and a trans woman who went to the Stonewall to celebrate her 18th birthday; she ended up walking away two days later, a first-hand participant of the gay rights movement. As admitted by onscreen titles, however, very little photography remains of the actual riots, necessitating occasionally clunky re-creations. It’s a minor quibble, but one that leaves one wishing they’d simply left the camera rolling on those talking.

In these aged faces, Stonewall Uprising makes its own impact. One man, face wrinkled and hair turned white, grows tearful when expressing the initial rush of looking back and witnessing the very first Pride parade following the riots. Marching at the front of 2,000 other gay citizens in New York City, he finally realizes that despite the years of pain and defeat, he was no longer alone.

The Stonewall riots were much more than a mere symbol of the gay rights movement – put simply, they were the event that gave movement to the very idea of gay rights. Learn, and learn it well.