Reconstructing the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot

Inside Gene Compton’s cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, ca. 1966; photo by Henri Leleu, Henri Leleu Papers (1997-13), GLBT Historical Society.

From Archival Silence to Screaming Queens: Reconstructing the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot

By Isaac Fellman & Susan Stryker

On an August evening in 1966, three years before the Stonewall riot in New York City, the patrons of the Compton’s Cafeteria on Taylor and Turk Streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district fought back against police harassment. Little documentary evidence survives of this key moment in transgender history. The photograph above from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives is an extremely rare still of the interior of the Compton’s location in question, and the exact date the riot occurred has never been determined.

Our archives contain much of the documentation that does survive, which enabled historian and former GLBT Historical Society executive director Susan Stryker to research the event in the early 2000s. Together with Victor Silverman, Stryker produced the Emmy Award-winning 2005 documentary Screaming Queens, which succeeded in bringing the riot to greater public awareness. Our special program on August 5 features a screening of Screaming Queens and a conversation with Stryker.

Reference archivist Isaac Fellman, who has been working extensively with our transgender-related collections, interviewed Stryker about how she uncovered the legacy of Compton’s.

The story of Compton’s exposes gaps in archives; it exists in memory, but official sources, records and contemporary news reporting are scarce. Did this scarcity influence your process and philosophy as a historian?

The scarcity of traditional primary-document sources really did require me to embrace creative and nontraditional research methodologies. One of the most important strategies was simply walking in the neighborhood, studying San Francisco’s urban history, using the GLBT Historical Society’s sites database to map historic trans-serving bars and SROs, and reading a lot of spatial and architectural theory. I was particularly informed by the work of Bernard Tschumi, who writes a lot about the relationship between space and event — how the built environment structures what happens.

It was coming to understand the Tenderloin as a place, seeing how trans people were situated there, the conditions of their lives, that gave a depth and richness of context to the meager clues about the riot itself that were available in primary print sources. We were eventually able to corroborate those through oral-history work, and in locating some archival media sources that had not previously been considered as primary-source materials.

How did you find the interviewees for Screaming Queens?

I’d met former San Francisco Police Department officer Elliot Blackstone through Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and had done an oral history with him years before Screaming Queens. That interview is what became “MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin,” an article published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, back in 1998. Similarly, Reverend Ed Hansen was somebody I was able to connect with through Paul Gabriel’s amazing oral-history work with members of the mid-1960s homophile community. Suzy Cook, Tamara Ching and Aleshia Brevard were just women I’d met socially through the trans community. Felicia Elizondo attended an early work-in-progress presentation, and contacted Victor Silverman and me. She then put us in touch with Amanda St. Jaymes.

Have the tactics police use against trans and gender-nonconforming people changed since the 1960s?

The biggest change in police tactics directed against trans people then and now is that then the police didn’t feel the need to hide, dissemble, cover up or spin the mistreatment of trans people, because they assumed that nobody cared and they could act with impunity. Now there’s a bit more of a “cover-your-ass” attitude, and a lot of lip service to respect for diversity and equality. But nothing has fundamentally changed. They do not provide “public safety” for trans and gender-nonconforming folks. I’m very much in favor of police and prison abolitionism.