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Photograph: Azha Ayanna/The Guardian Creating a trans district: ‘We need ownership’ Left: Collette LeGrande, a 68-year-old performer, used to visit Compton’s as a teen, and Aunt Charlie’s, a popular queer bar, where Colette sometimes performs. The night ended with overturned tables, a destroyed police car, a newsstand set on fire, and the women hauled off in officers’ paddy wagons.
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The women recalled throwing sugar shakers through the glass windows and drag queens beating police with their purses. Their anger at the abuse erupted in the 1966 riot, prompted by an officer putting his hand on a woman at Compton’s. In Stryker’s film, the women talked about being arrested for all kinds of “crimes”, including “female impersonation” and “obstructing the sidewalk”. But police would bother them wherever they went.Ĭollette LeGrande, a 68-year-old performer, recalled visiting Compton’s at age 15: “Meeting some of those girls, I thought they must have to be really strong.” She remembered seeing a policeman drag a trans woman and beat her with a club: “There was not much we could do about it.” The Tenderloin – two miles from the famous Castro gayborhood, which has long attracted white gay men – was in some ways safer for the women. The women often faced intense violence from clients and police, and would check up on each other and hang at the restaurant, Personna recalled. Trans women talked in the documentary about their struggles as sex workers in the neighborhood, and the ways they found brief refuge at Compton’s. They were just so sweet to me and to each other.” “It was like I’m home, in a way … I really felt like I was in wonderland. “They were the most beautiful women I’d ever seen,” said Personna, who was raised in a large Mexican family, with a Baptist minister father. When she was around 17, she hopped on a Greyhound bus from San Jose to San Francisco – and eventually wound up being a regular at Compton’s Cafeteria.
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St Jaymes and others told their stories in Stryker’s 2005 documentary, Screaming Queens, which included archival footage of a fearmongering TV news report that described the Tenderloin as a hotbed for “homosexuals and transvestites” to engage in the “marketplace of vice, degradation and human misery” – where “screaming queens” fought at Compton’s, a local diner. Eventually, she met Amanda St Jaymes, a trans woman who had lived in a hotel in the area and was present at the riot.ĭr Susan Stryker Photograph: Azha Ayanna/The Guardian So she slowly built her own paper trail and learned how the corner of Turk and Taylor streets, where Compton’s was located, was “trans central”. A city archivist told her there were no arrest reports, that the “records have been disappeared”.
It took Stryker years to figure out what happened. “There’s a story here that I need to tell,” she recalled in a recent interview in a coffee shop on San Francisco’s bustling Market Street, not far from the building where she first made that discovery. The file included almost no additional information, and Stryker was determined to find out more. The trans historian was rifling through the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society archives in 1991 when she stumbled on a timeline of historic events that referenced an August 1966 event: “Drag queens protest police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria”.
In fact, if it wasn’t for Dr Susan Stryker, the event might have been almost entirely forgotten. No one knows the exact date of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot.
Photograph: Azha Ayanna/The Guardian Discovering the ‘screaming queens’ The Tenderloin neighborhood, where a group of trans women stood up to police in 1966. The cultural district is also mobilizing to protect black trans women from displacement, as the San Francisco neighborhood rapidly gentrifies. “Everyone in our community stands on their shoulders.”Īs LGBT people across the US celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall this month, trans community organizers in San Francisco are fighting to cement the legacy of their own groundbreaking riot – and have officially designated the world’s first-ever “trans cultural district” in the Tenderloin. “These ladies took the bullets for us,” said Personna, a performer and activist who went to Compton’s Cafeteria as a teenager in the 1960s and now lives down the street. A trans woman fed up with the harassment and abuse is said to have thrown a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic riot and unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.
In 1966, three years before the world-famous Stonewall riot in New York, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood and popular queer gathering spot.
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It’s time to act up” – honors the transgender women who, more than 50 years ago, showed her how to live and fight back.