Hidden Herstories of Queer Liberation

The trans women and drag queens who led the fight in the Compton Cafeteria Uprising — three years before Stonewall!

Still from Susan Stryker’s documentary film, “Screaming Queens — The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria” found in this story from the California African American History Museum

Many of us who have read even a snippet of queer history know about a bar called the Stonewall Inn and the uprising that ensued there in 1969; the Stonewall Uprising, or as it is deemed in the oppressor’s narrative, “the Stonewall Riot,” created a domino-effect to become what is known today as Pride, celebrated in the month of June. The Stonewall Uprising spurred a mass social movement in the span of mere weeks, which eventually led to the formation of the Gay Activist Alliance and the passage of laws advancing and protecting the human rights of LGBTQ people.

But the Stonewall Uprising did not rise out of nowhere, and it was not an isolated incident. This CNN article highlights multiple incidents of the policing and criminalization that was prevalent against the queer community in the late 1960’s, including uprisings in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. One of those incidents of hyper-policing occurred in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco in 1966, leading to an uprising that was coined The Compton Cafeteria Riot.

San Francisco’s Tenderloin District in the 1960’s