Ray is an odder case. He seems to flit back and forth between genders, occasionally called Ramona by friends, though Danny insists on using his male name. After Marsha’s first appearance, when she greets Ray and his friends, Ray says, “Marsha’s the only drag queen that’s nice to us” — implying that he is a feminine gay man and Marsha is the Other. But when Marsha later gets arrested during a raid at the Stonewall because she presents as female — violating the New York penal code that, in 1969, required people to wear at least three articles of clothing “appropriate” to their gender — Ray gets arrested along with her. It’s an indication of how the movie wants Ray to be just gender-nonconforming enough so that he at least has some relationship to historical reality, but not so gender-variant that he couldn’t be claimed as a cisgender gay person. Marking him as fully trans would undermine the popular ideology that portrays the riots as led by “gay” people. Even if gender nonconforming people called themselves “gay” or “queens” in 1969, they were policed and marginalized the way trans people — especially trans women of color — are today.



While people protested the trailer because Danny is depicted as throwing the first brick to incite the riots, that scene is actually one of the less cringe-inducing moments in Stonewall. Danny’s brick-throwing was clearly done with the support and collaboration of the street hustler femmes around him, particularly Cong. The movie also keeps with historical accounts that an anonymous butch dyke was the riot’s first agitator. And even though Marsha Johnson herself has been credited by some as the first brick-thrower, the truth of who actually did it has been lost in history — though the chances that it was a strapping white guy from Indiana are pretty slim.

It would have been nice if male-assigned feminine people could have played an even more prominent role in Stonewall, especially since they are presented as so debased that they do not deserve to be loved. Ray, the gender-nonconforming Latino, has little agency in the film beyond striving for Danny’s affection, in the tired trope of male-assigned femme serving as ultimate victim who can only potentially be saved by the love and protection of a good man (harkening back to films like The Crying Game and Dallas Buyers Club). When, after the riots, Danny tells Ray he can't possibly return his love, he consoles him by saying, “You’ll always be my sister.” Then Danny proceeds to leave Christopher Street behind for a presumably much higher quality of life at Columbia — only coming back to his old haunt a year later when there’s a gay parade.

Ray and the gang seem happy to see him upon his return, even though Ray accused Danny of “just slumming it” for the sake of a "funny story" when he once lived among the hustlers. There’s no sign that Ray or his street friends are in any better condition than when Danny met them, though at least Danny has learned from his experience and grown to be a better person, as cis white people tend to do after spending time with the downtrodden.