The Night the 'T' in 'LGBT' Spoke: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria
By Jason Clement
Though widely credited as the start of the LGBT civil rights movement, the riots at New York City's Stonewall Inn weren't the first instance of LGBT people standing up against discrimination. Similar riots in front of Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco predate the event by three years.
Credit: "Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria"
here did the LGBT civil rights movement begin?
Ask most people, and they will firmly plant the first bullet point on the timeline at New York City's Stonewall Inn, which is where a series of violent head-to-heads with police made national headlines in June 1969.
While the significance of Stonewall as a defining moment in the LGBT community's fight for visibility, equality and acceptance cannot possibly be overstated, it was not actually the first instance of the community literally fighting back against government-sponsored persecution.
Flashback to 1960s San Francisco.
On the corner of major intersection after major intersection, a chorus of wrecking balls and jack hammers joined the everyday white noise of the city as aging neighborhoods accepted their fate under the banner of a new buzz word – urban renewal. On paper, the movement's early goal was "redevelopment," which – for the Golden Gate City and beyond – translated largely to all-out demolition.
As the cranes soared higher, housing options grew narrower for the poor and disenfranchised. Squeezed between Union Station and the Financial District, a neighborhood known as The Tenderloin – or sometimes just the "The Loin" – became a shelter of last resort for a working class that was closer than ever to homelessness.
Avoided by many because of squalid conditions and rampant crime, the area was already home to a large transgender community that shared its violent, liquor store-lined streets with hustlers and the down-and-out. At the time, cross-dressing was illegal in the City of San Francisco, making it difficult for transgender people to secure steady employment. The Loin's low-income housing, dark alleys and seedy bars represented one of the few places in the city where they could do what they had to do to get by.
With an influx of new tenants, the belt tightened dramatically in the neighborhood's vertical villages, creating a housing crisis that forced many transgender people out onto streets where, technically, it was against the law to be who they were. As a result, an already heated relationship between the "queens," as they were called, and the city's law enforcement got closer and closer to reaching a rolling boil.
In August 1966, the water officially bubbled over, landing with a sear that was heard throughout the city's historically-large LGBT community.
Located in the heart of The Loin at the intersection or Turk and Taylor, Gene Compton's Cafeteria was a late-night refuge of sorts for people straddling – or already between – the cracks of society. One evening, the restaurant's manger phoned the police on a table of loud transgender patrons. Accustomed to manhandling Compton's clientele, an officer arrived and attempted to arrest one of the women. What he wasn't expecting in return was a symbolic first punch in the form of a piping-hot cup of coffee to the face.
As if on cue, the dining room erupted. Tables were overturned, dishes and sugar shakers were hurled through the air, and purses and high heals became weapons. As enforcements were radioed in, the building's plate-glass windows were smashed. What had quickly escalated into a riot spilled onto the streets, where a police car was destroyed and a newspaper stand was set on fire.
Unveiled in June 2006, a small plaque at the site of the now-closed Compton's Cafeteria recognizes the "transgender women and gay men stood up for their rights and fought against police brutality, poverty, oppression and discrimination."
That night, some three years before the 1969 riots at New York City's Stonewall Inn, the "T" in "LGBT" spoke, and their message was clear – no more. In addition to forcing a critical conversation about urban politics and police practices, the riot at Compton's Cafeteria was a dramatic turning point in a decades-long process of community formation and political mobilization for transgender people.
As for the restaurant, it closed its doors in the early 1970s, gradually becoming – like this story – a faded memory. Not until 2005 would that night be retold, when a documentary entitled Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria was released at the Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theatre.
On June 22, 2006, a memorial plaque was placed in the sidewalk in front of the cafeteria site which reads: "Here marks the site of Gene Compton's Cafeteria, where a riot took place one August night when transgender women and gay men stood up for their rights and fought against police brutality, poverty, oppression and discrimination in The Tenderloin. We, the transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual community, are dedicating this plaque to these heroes of our civil rights movement."
To offer more insight into the riot and its short- and long-term impact, Susan Stryker, transgender historian and co-director of Screaming Queens, joins us for a Q&A.
In your opinion, why is Compton's Cafeteria different than Stonewall? What type of feedback did you get from the film?
Although the structure of both events was very similar, the Compton's incident was much smaller and didn't get any media coverage, and therefore wasn't "remembered" in the same way. It was a local event that remained a local event, rather than becoming iconic. Nevertheless, it left a trace in the historical record.
The feedback was very positive. Many people think of being transgender as something that's very new, so the idea of it having a history is unexpected. Also, there's a tendency to look at being transgender as a private, individual matter, so the idea that there's a politicized community is also unexpected. As a consequence – especially since we were able to find such amazing archival footage – most general audiences come away feeling both educated and entertained. Transgender audiences have been uniformly appreciative, and are very happy to have such an important episode in their history represented in such an accessible and broadly available way.
Before Screaming Queens brought it back into the spotlight, why do you think the story of Compton's Cafeteria struggled to survive?
Because things done by poor people of color in the ghetto are not as remembered as things that happen across the street from the Village Voice. Also, I think in many ways, the incident at Compton's happened too soon – the war, and thus the anti-war movement, was just starting to radicalize the baby-boomers; the counter-culture was just getting underway; the student movement was still relatively peaceful; the new left hadn't spawned the Weather Underground; the racial struggle was just beginning to turn from civil rights activism to black power. MLK and RFK had not yet been assassinated. There was not yet, in 1966, a critical mass of LGBT folks ready for the gay revolution. By 1969, I think people were primed for an inciting incident. The "spark" was the same at Compton's and Stonewall, but the context changed remarkably over the course of three short years.
In producing Screaming Queens, you conducted a series of interviews with people who were part of the events leading up to the riot. What did you learn from them about what it was like to be a transgender person living in The Tenderloin in the 1960s?
What stuck me the most was the common decency of the people involved; they were fighting for very basic human dignity and respect, and for fundamentals like a place to live, meaningful work to do, physical safety, and opportunities to improve their lives. Understanding what they had to face on a daily basis, their militant resistance seems to me entirely appropriate.
Tell us a little more about the conflict between the San Francisco Police Department and the city's transgender community. How did it evolve to the point where punches were thrown, and how did things change after the riot?
Not all cops are crooked, of course, but the name "Tenderloin," which was the name of the neighborhood where Compton's was located, is a generic name for an urban district controlled by corrupt police officers who profit from the gambling, drug dealing and prostitution that goes on there. Many transgender women lived in San Francisco's Tenderloin because nobody would rent to them in other parts of the city. Many of them worked as prostitutes because they couldn't find any other work. As a consequence, they were constantly having run-ins with the police, who treated them as bottom-of-the-barrel gutter trash. Transgender women were routinely harassed by the police – assumed to be prostitutes even if they weren't; randomly arrested while walking down the street or socializing with friends; abused while in custody; subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The fact that the riot against police oppression happened in 1966 is not the surprise; it's that it didn't happen sooner, or more often, because these kinds of problems really were endemic.
I would say that the biggest consequence of the riot was that the City of San Francisco started to deal with its transgender citizens differently. Even though there were – and still are – recurring problems, transgender people came to be seen increasingly as just another minority population with its own needs and challenges.
While we're talking about the impact of the riot, what do you think were the reverberations – both large and small – of the event?
On a small scale, I would say that the riot brought transgender social justice issues to the attention of a sympathetic police community relations officer who helped make changes in police practices. A unit of the public health department called the Center for Special Problems started providing hormones and support groups for transgender people, as well as issuing ID cards that let transgender people do things like open bank accounts. Job training programs allowed some trans folks to get out of the illegal sex work economy. A private philanthropy started funding transgender social services. These were small but concrete steps that created a better quality of life for many transgender people in the second half of the 1960s. In a way, I don't think the large-scale reverberations happened until we brought the story to a mass audience through the film.
As a historian, what specific challenges did you face in telling the story of Compton's Cafeteria for the documentary?
There was very little documentation – one important retrospective account (which turned out to be substantively correct) written six years after the fact and a few tantalizing clues in contemporary LGBT publications, but no police records or mainstream media accounts. A lot of the initial research was based on an analysis of the neighborhood's built environment and on historical urban geography, rather than traditional historical documents. It's almost as if the space was constructed in such a way that made the event possible, and we were able to read that. Subsequently, doing oral history work, we were able to find people who could corroborate what we figured out by looking at the urban space. They told us some amazing personal stories.
Compton's Cafeteria is, undeniably, a place that matters for transgender people. Name one other place – existing or demolished – that is critical to telling their story.
Just one? That's hard. There are numerous bars and clubs all across the country, some of them quite opulent in their day, that featured transgender entertainment of one sort or another – Club 82 in New York, the My-Oh-My in New Orleans, Mona's and Finocchio's in San Francisco. Or how about the New York office of Dr. Harry Benjamin, who popularized the word "transsexual" and was one of the leading medical advocates for transgender people from the 1940s through 1980s? Or the childhood home, in the Bronx, of Christine Jorgensen, the first internationally famous transgender person, whose "sex change" in 1952 made headlines around the world? As you can see, the history of transgender people in the United States is really rich, and it is only now beginning to be appreciated, recovered and preserved.
Jason Clement is an online content provider for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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