The Tenderloin was a district left out of the urban renewal projects that were transforming much of San Francisco, one of the last places with affordable housing in the city. Into these rooms they would pile sometimes up to a dozen people so they wouldn’t have to sleep on the street that night, and they would rotate between rooms to avoid getting caught. Cooke explained that in the Tenderloin it was common for queer residents to live out of hotel rooms, unable to afford an apartment or find a landlord willing to rent to them. Housing discrimination was rife everywhere, as LGBTQ people had no protections against the bigotry of landlords. Stryker is the former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco who “rediscovered” the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and helped reintroduce it into the present-day LGBTQ political consciousness. “Police would give the people who were indeterminate gender the message that they belonged in the Tenderloin, which at the time, was kind of a gay ghetto, a very slummy gay ghetto,” Tenderloin resident Suzan Cooke told Susan Stryker in the 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria”. While the entire LGBTQ community faced discrimination, violence, and oppression at this time, trans women in particular were targeted by the police and exploitative landlords. Those who refused and adopted a permanently feminine appearance-many who would soon identify as transsexuals or transvestites, but who we would call trans women today-were derided as “hair fairies” and were often unwelcome even within the gay community. Police who arrested trans people in other parts of the city would dump them in the Tenderloin or direct them there after being released.ĭuring this time, there were few clear delineations between homosexuality and transness both were lumped under the transgressive umbrella of “gay.” Many gay men cross-dressed in private or for performance, but placed a priority on “passing” as straight men in public. In the mid-1960s there were an estimated 90,000 LGBTQ people in San Francisco, but the city’s transgender population was herded into the central Tenderloin district. Oppression and resistance in a “Gay Ghetto” The uprising reminds us that our struggles today both build on our ancestors’ fights and shape those to come. These courageous fighters turned the tables on their oppressors and ushered in a new wave of class-conscious organizing by queer youth, especially from working class and oppressed communities.Īlthough it was almost forgotten, the uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria is part of our revolutionary history, demonstrating that militant resistance is nothing new. Three years before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that galvanized a generation of LGBTQ activists, and more than a decade before Harvey Milk led the fight against the Briggs Initiative as San Francisco’s first gay city supervisor, a group of trans women and drag queens revolted against bigoted police violence in San Francisco’s heavily oppressed Tenderloin district. A Spanish translation of this article is available here. Author’s Note: Out of respect for the ways people described their identities at the time, this article uses several terms now considered archaic by the LGBTQ community.
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