The drag queens in the Compton’s Cafeteria riot were just tired of being harassed
‘We didn’t give a shit about organizing…We were just trying to survive.’
When a drag queen threw a hot cup of coffee in a cop’s face late one hot August night in 1966, things, predictably, got out of hand.
The police officer had grabbed the drag queen during a typical raid of Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a restaurant and transgender hangout in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. This type of harassment was normal, but for some reason, things went differently that night. The place erupted in chaos. People hurled cutlery. Tables were turned over. Windows shattered, and a full scale riot spilled out onto Taylor Street. A police car was destroyed and the corner newsstand set ablaze. The Compton’s customers, about 60 people in all, refused to be rounded up peacefully. That night, they weren’t getting into paddy wagons without a fight.
“We just got tired of it,” said Amanda St. Jaymes, a longtime Tenderloin resident and Compton’s Cafeteria regular. “We got tired of being harassed. We got tired of being made to go into the men’s room when we were dressed like women. We wanted our rights.”
In the origin story of the American gay rights movement, it’s the Stonewall uprising of 1969 that’s typically hailed as the moment that started it all. But riots like the one at Compton’s, or even earlier dustups at Los Angeles’s Cooper’s Donuts in 1959 and Dewey’s coffeehouse in Philadelphia in 1965, were key flashpoints that galvanized members of these violently marginalized communities and laid the groundwork for more coordinated resistance.
Compton’s, which was located at Taylor and Turk Streets in the heart of the TL, was vibrant and bustling, the epicenter of the transgender social scene in the 1960s. “Every time the door opened, everybody looked to see who was coming…everybody wanted to parade their fashion,” says Felicia Elizondo in the 2005 documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. “There were tables of drag queens, female impersonators, transgenders, hustlers.”
The eatery was conveniently located near a beauty shop, a bath house, and a couple of bars, so a window seat meant a view of the comings and goings of the tight knit neighborhood. And it was open all night, the kind of place where you could buy one cup of coffee and sit for hours, smoking and talking with friends.
The Tenderloin was a rough, dangerous red-light neighborhood. As in most cities, police were paid off to tolerate “vice” in various forms, and some were even regulars at drag shows at clubs like Finocchio’s. But they also intermittently terrorized the gay and transgender communities, arresting people for everything from cross-dressing to loitering to drunkenness to prostitution. There was also the daily and very real possibility of brutality at the hands of a stranger. The girls carried empty liquor bottles and other DIY weapons in their purses, and had to always be ready for a fight. “If someone was on your turf, you’d just lay them out and keep walking, and keep your eye on your back,” says St. Jaymes.
Trans women were “thrown out of hotels, they were stabbed, they had their breasts cut, they were mutilated because of their genitalia,” remembers Felicia Flames, a self-described transsexual who frequented Compton’s Cafeteria in the ’60s and still lives in San Francisco. “We were something that could be thrown away in a trash can.”
Still, many of the women interviewed in Screaming Queens recall having a lot of fun. “Hell’s Angels would line their bikes up and down the street and party with the girls. We used to have the most beautiful boys who would come just to party with us,” St. Jaymes recalls. “Jehovah’s Witnesses used to drive crosses down the street and tell us we were gonna burn in hell. But we ignored them. Compton’s was fabulous, it was like Oz. Something like the Wizard of Oz.”
There was a hierarchy, wherein “gutter girls” who couldn’t easily pass as women were consigned to a precarious life of street prostitution and those better able to appear feminine could find work performing as female impersonators in cabaret shows at more upscale clubs. Many queer residents of the Tenderloin could not or did not seek to “pass.” They had been kicked out of the homes they grew up in. Some lived in constant fear for the lives. Most were sex workers — there were almost no other options for employment — and as such, were especially vulnerable to violence at the hands of police, johns, and others. They were forced to protect themselves and each other by any means necessary.
Most of the girls lived together in hotels like the El Rosa, and they became like family. One woman recalls in Screaming Queens that meeting daily at Compton’s Cafeteria was more than a way to socialize; showing up was a way to say “you’d survived the night.”
Perhaps defending one of their very few safe spaces was part of the impetus for the riot that August day. They weren’t activists, but they were angry. “We didn’t give a shit about organizing,” Felicia Flames told the Advocate. “We were just trying to survive.”
Amanda St. Jaymes describes the mood following the riot as one of “joy.” “A lot of them went to jail, but there was a lot of ‘I don’t give a damn, this is what needs to happen,’” she says. Compton’s started closing at midnight following the riot, and shuttered for good in 1972. Two years later, laws against cross-dressing were repealed.
It would be years before the gay liberation movement secured civil rights for LGBT people — and sadly, it’s a struggle that continues — but according to scholar Susan Stryker, who brought the riot to national attention and directed the documentary Screaming Queens, the Compton’s riot was “the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history” and “the transgender community’s debut on the stage of American political history.”
What a debut it was.
