Compton's cafeteria riot
Encyclopedia
Tenderloin, San Francisco, California
The Tenderloin is a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, California, in the flatlands on the southern slope of Nob Hill, nestled between the Union Square shopping district to the northeast and the Civic Center office district to the southwest...
district of San Francisco. This incident was one of the first recorded transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall Riots
Stonewall riots
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.A smaller-scale riot broke out in 1959 in Los Angeles, when the drag queens and street hustlers
Male prostitution
Male prostitution is the practice of engaging in sexual acts for money. Compared to female sex workers, male sex workers have been far less studied by researchers, and while studies suggest that there are differences between the ways these two groups look at their work, more research is needed.Male...
who hung out at Cooper's Donuts and who were frequently harassed by the LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
fought back after police arrested three people, including John Rechy
John Rechy
John Francis Rechy, , is an American author, the child of a half-Scottish and half-Mexican father, Roberto Rechy, and a Mexican-American mother, Guadalupe Flores. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern...
. Patrons began pelting the police with donuts and coffee cups. The LAPD called for back-up and arrested a number of rioters. Rechy and the other two original detainees were able to escape (Faderman and Timmons, pp. 1–2).
Background
Compton's Cafeteria was one of a chain of cafeteriaCafeteria
A cafeteria is a type of food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service, whether a restaurant or within an institution such as a large office building or school; a school dining location is also referred to as a dining hall or canteen...
s, owned by Gene Compton, in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 1970s. The Tenderloin location of Compton's at 101 Taylor Street (at Turk)—open from 1954 to 1972—was one of the few places where transgender people could congregate publicly in the city, because they were unwelcome in gay bar
Gay bar
A gay bar is a drinking establishment that caters to an exclusively or predominantly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender clientele; the term gay is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBT and queer communities...
s. In addition, the cafeteria was open all hours until the riots occurred. Back then, trangender people were commonly referred to as Hair Fairies. Because cross-dressing
Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing is the wearing of clothing and other accoutrement commonly associated with a gender within a particular society that is seen as different than the one usually presented by the dresser...
was illegal at the time, police could use the presence of transgender people in a bar as a pretext for making a raid and closing the bar.
Many of the militant hustlers and street queens involved in the riot were members of Vanguard, the first known gay youth organization in the United States, which had been organized earlier that year with the help of radical ministers working with Glide Memorial Church
Glide Memorial Church
Glide Memorial Church is a church in San Francisco, California, affiliated with the United Methodist Church that opened in 1929. Although conservative until the 1960s, since then it has served as a counter-culture rallying point and has been one of the most prominently liberal churches in the...
, a center for progressive social activism in the Tenderloin for many years. A lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
group of street people was also formed called the Street Orphans.
Cause of the riot
On the first night of the riot, the management of Compton's called the police when some transgender customers became raucous. When a police officer accustomed to manhandling the Compton's clientele attempted to arrest one of the trans women, she threw her coffee in his face. At that point the riot began, dishes and furniture were thrown, and the restaurant's plate-glass windows were smashed. Police called for reinforcements as the fighting spilled into the street, where a police car had all its windows broken out and a sidewalk newsstand was burned down.The next night, more transgender people, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow transgender people back in. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again.
Effects of the riot
The riot marked a turning point in the local LGBT movement. According to the online encyclopedia glbtq.comGlbtq.com
glbtq.com is an online encyclopedia that presents detailed biographies of notable gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. It was named one of the "Best Free Reference Web Sites" in 2005 by the American Library Association....
:
In the aftermath of the riot at Compton's, a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services was established, which culminated in 1968 with the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit [NTCU], the first such peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world.Serving as an overseer to the NTCU was Sergeant Elliott Blackstone
Elliott Blackstone
Elliott R. Blackstone , a sergeant in the San Francisco Police Department, was a longtime advocate for the lesbian, gay and transgender community in that city....
, designated in 1962 as the first San Francisco Police Department
San Francisco Police Department
The San Francisco Police Department, also known as the SFPD and San Francisco Department Of Police, is the police department of the City and County of San Francisco, California...
liaison to what was then called the "homophile
Homophile
The word homophile is an alternative to the word for homosexual or gay. The homophile movement also refers to the gay rights movement of the 1950s and '60s....
community."