Years before Stonewall, a cafeteria riot became a breakthrough for trans rights

This story is part of History is Queer, an Advocate series examining key LGBTQ+ moments, events, and people in history and their ongoing impact. Is there a piece of LGBTQ+ history we should write about? Email us at history@advocate.com.

Before Stonewall, before the Black Cat protests, there was the Compton’s Cafeteria riot.

In August 1966 — the exact date is unknown — drag queens and transgender women (then called transsexual or by some other term) who frequented Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco rose up against police harassment.

Here are the facts as we know them about the riot and its aftermath.

Harassment and hot coffee: What happened?

The restaurant, open 24 hours, was popular with trans women and drag queens; they were not welcome in many of the nearby gay bars. Some of them were sex workers, and they could be arrested not only for that but for cross-dressing. One night, a police officer tried to arrest one of Compton’s trans patrons on some charge or other, and she responded by throwing hot coffee in his face. Others started tossing chairs, dishes, and sugar shakers around the cafeteria. Outside, they smashed squad cars’ windows and set fire to a newsstand.

“We were tired of being arrested for nothing,” Felicia “Flames” Elizondo, a trans woman who lived in San Francisco at the time, told The Advocate in 2018. “Arrested for being who we wanted to be. Thrown in jail for obstructing the sidewalk. Thrown in jail for dressing like a woman, because in those days it was illegal. Anything they could think of to make their quota or just to make our lives a living hell, they would do.” Flames often visited Compton’s, but given the fog of time, she couldn’t remember if she was there that night.

She did remember how difficult life was for LGBTQ+ people then, especially drag queens and trans women, even in supposedly liberal San Francisco. “[LGBTQ+] people were thrown out of hotels, they were stabbed, they had their breasts cut, they were mutilated because of their genitalia,” she said in the 2018 interview. “We were something that could be thrown away in a trash can.”

Amanda St. Jaymes, who did participate in the uprising, was interviewed for the 2005 documentary Screaming Queens, written and directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. “Oh, the sugar shakers went through the windows and the glass doors,” she said in the film. “I think I put a sugar shaker through one of those windows.” Outside, the fighting continued, and many of the restaurant’s customers were taken away in police vehicles.

Related: Beyond Stonewall: 9 Lesser-Known LGBT Uprisings

Nevertheless, “there was a lot of joy after it happened,” St. Jaymes told Stryker. “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.’”

The owners of Compton’s responded to the uprising by barring drag queens and trans women from the restaurant, a decision that immediately led to protests. But life got marginally better for this community, according to some sources.

“The developments in the Tenderloin following that night attest to its impact,” Johnny Damm wrote in Guernica Magazine in 2020. “After Compton’s, the city could no longer claim not to see the Tenderloin trans community. Tenderloin residents also suggest police harassment lessened in those months following the riot, but the law forbidding ‘dress not belonging to his or her sex’ continued as a basis for arrest until finally removed from the municipal code book in July, 1974.”

Preserving a legacy

No local media outlet reported on the Compton’s uprising; the subject was considered unworthy of attention. Police claim to have no arrest records from that night. But LGBTQ+ activists and historians wouldn’t let it be forgotten.

Stryker is chief among them. She found a scrap of information on the riot while going through some archives, then realized, “There’s a story here that I need to tell,” she told The Guardian in 2019.

“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,’” The Guardian noted. She met St. Jaymes and others, and the Screaming Queens documentary was the result.

The Compton’s riot has been memorialized in other sources. It figures prominently in the permanent collection of the Tenderloin Museum, which opened in 2015. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, an interactive play, has been presented at the museum’s Larkin Street Cafe; it’s on hiatus now, but performances will resume Friday and Saturday nights beginning January 16.

The overall history of the Tenderloin district is recounted in the book The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco by Randy Shaw. An updated edition came out this year, and the book is on sale through the museum.

Six blocks in the Tenderloin have been designated as the Transgender District, the first legally recognized trans district in the world. It was founded in 2017 by three black trans women, Honey Mahogany, Janetta Johnson, and Aria Sa’id, and originally named Compton’s Transgender Cultural District. Transgender District staffers work to bring economic empowerment and stable housing to the community, promote cultural competency, and offer arts and culture programs.

The current tenant is controversial

Compton’s Cafeteria closed in 1972, and its site is now home to a halfway house for formerly incarcerated people, operated by the private prison firm Geo Group. Geo Group also runs Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Many local activists say a private prison firm should not be involved with a site of resistance by marginalized people. They have sought to have the building’s zoning designation changed so that Geo Group could no longer operate there, without success. There have been allegations of mistreatment at the halfway house, and a resident was found dead on the sidewalk there last summer.

Related: Preserving LGBT History Means Saving These Spaces

Activists would like to reclaim the Compton’s site as a community center or supportive housing. Janetta Johnson envisions “studio apartments and one-bedroom apartments for people with mental health issues, with mental health providers on staff, not a prison,” according to San Francisco public broadcaster KQED. Advocates have vowed to go on working for such a use of the site.