Susan Stryker on the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, Trans History, and Protest
Susan Stryker is an academic, historian, and writer in San Francisco. She is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona.
Among the accolades Stryker has collected over the years is an Emmy for her 2005 documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, which chronicled the tensions between San Francisco Police and the patrons of the Compton’s Cafeteria restaurant. Largely forgotten, Stryker uncovered the story while combing through archives.
As told to Andy Wright:
My contribution to the trans movement was to start disseminating its history. It’s not that it wasn’t known; it’s just that it was known in very small circles of people. There was a huge periodical literature that came out of transgender communities. Every little group in the country and Canada and elsewhere in the world had zines and newsletters; there were all kinds of historical documentation and ephemera — flyers and pamphlets and lapel pins.
There were all kinds of people who had long histories in the movements — or the community who knew a lot, they had a lot of stories in their heads. And there were people with huge amounts of media visibility, people like Renée Richards and Christine Jorgensen. There was a medical literature available from people like Harry Benjamin and John Money and Robert Stoller. There were plenty of places to start digging in, to start pulling a story together. I saw myself as somebody who could help route those conversations into bigger networks, bigger patterns of dissemination.
Stryker was doing research on the history of San Francisco’s Pride Parade when she first came across a mention the 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.
I first stumbled upon a mention of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in a 1972 document that I found twenty years later. I was working with my friend, Jim Van Buskirk, who used to run the Hormel Center at the San Francisco Public Library. We were creating a coffee table book called Gay by the Bay, a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay area. And in this box of materials on the early Pride Parades at the GLBT Historical Society, there was this program for the first Pride Parade. and I opened it up and it says, “On a hot August night in 1966 gays rose up angry for the first time ever against the police. It started when the police came in to Compton’s, an all-night cafeteria, and one of the queens threw coffee in the cop’s face.” And I just thought, really? And I started digging.
The place that I did most of my work, where I think the core of my knowledge is, is working through the vast collection at the GLBT Historical Society. It wasn’t quite as big when I started out. They had done a great job of collecting Bay Area LGBT print culture, periodicals, and newspapers. And there were some records of organizations.
What I did was read the archives against the grain — it was organized by people that had come out of gay and lesbian liberation politics and lesbian feminist politics, and trans issues were not exactly what they were paying attention to. I was reading every issue of the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter and looking at the One Institute’s publications. I was reading all these lesbian feminist zines, I was reading gay porn, I was reading what was there and going through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for anything trans-related.
The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation was a place where she formed lasting connections with other activists. “The San Francisco chapter was all in favor of it being the National March for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender rights,” says Stryker. “But they couldn’t get the national organizing committee to agree to that.” Supporters pulled together money to send activists from San Francisco to the march, which was how Stryker — who was “dead broke” at the time — was able to go.
I feel the National March on Washington was where this sort of San Francisco queer style, trans-militancy first got a national stage. It became a place that I was meeting a lot of people. That’s where I met Martine Rothblatt, that’s where I met Phyllis [Frye], that’s where I met Leslie [Feinberg]. It was a great networking event. Anne [Ogborn] and I were doing little guerrilla actions, we had some stickers printed up that said, “Fuck your transphobia”. There were lines of men’s toilets and women’s toilets and over the words “men” and “women” we were pasting these stickers that said, “Fuck your trans phobia.”
As we were marching past the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought, “We need to do something here.” As an early transitioning person in the early ‘90s, I carried on my person the letter from my therapist that said, “This person is under my care for gender identity disorder. They’re not a prostitute, they have a mental illness they’re being treated for,” basically. And I had carried that because it’s what one was told to do at the time as a precaution. And so as we were marching past the White House — it was kind of like in honor of people who went to the White House and burned their draft card — it’s like, “Yeah, I want to burn my psychiatric seal of approval letter.” And Anne took a picture of me lighting it on fire with the White House in the background. Then the picture didn’t come out.
But for the cover of the first issue of TNT [Transsexual News Telegraph, a newsletter edited by Ogborn] that she was doing, she said, “Look, I just want you to restage that image.” So there’s this picture of me on the cover of TNT No. 1 with my black leather biker jacket and my Doc Martens boots and my Crack ’n Peel stickers, burning this piece of paper.
Stryker says she feels like she is in her “third or fourth generation of trans community” and that “the only thing I kind of roll my eyes about and grin over is people who think it’s all new.”
What’s happened recently is that for the first time there’s a broader social recognition that there’s a legitimate way to be trans. It used to be that it was always on the stigmatized, marginalized, discriminated-against side. There wasn’t an approved way of being trans that wasn’t simply being diagnosed with an illness that you’ve been cured of. And I would say over the last couple of years — and particularly in the last six months — it’s been the first time that I’ve felt a change, where instead of constantly trying to make progress by tacking against the wind that’s blowing in your face, there was a moment of calm and the winds changed and now it’s like the wind’s at our back.
I have a chance to do a lot of media work. I think me and probably two dozen other people were talking with ABC News about the [Caitlyn] Jenner interview with Sawyer. What was different was they were really trying to get it right. They know [they] can’t just say, “Oh look at the guy in the dress, ha, ha, ha, isn’t that sick, what do you think America.” They knew that they had to get it right or they were going to be perceived as politically incorrect; they’d be on the wrong side of history. They didn’t know what the right thing was, necessarily, but they wanted to make sure that they were either going to do it or have a good, compelling reason for why they hadn’t done it.
What I think it means is that the category of transgender — all of those categories get divided now into the trans people who are being “good” trans citizens and those trans people who are still being disruptive, recalcitrant, wayward, messy, troublesome people of some kind. You get somebody like Kristin Beck, who’s a Navy Seal, and Chelsea Manning, who’s the Wikileaks whistleblower, and which one’s the good trans?
So I would say there’s a big bifurcation right now and that it’s a delicate line to walk, because, of course, you want less oppression, but you don’t want less oppression for some people who are the right kind and everybody else gets thrown under the bus.
So for me, really paying attention to trans of color issues, paying attention to prison issues, paying attention to poverty, paying attention to violence — those are all of the things that have to be attended to if you’re going to have a credible transgender politics, the way that being transgender intensifies those other kinds of structural oppressions. It can’t just be, “Well, you know, the world is safe for middle-class white trans people who can get all medical-ed up and get their state papers straight.”
Everybody should have the opportunity to have their sense of who they are recognized and acknowledged without penalty and discrimination.
Read more personal accounts of the trans activism movement.
Interview by Andy Wright. Parts were omitted for clarity and brevity.
