Compton's cafeteria riot

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Three years before the famous rioting at New York's Stonewall Inn, there was a riot in San Francisco at Gene Compton's Cafeteria. It was a hot August night in San Francisco in 1966 -- three years before the famed Stonewall. Compton's Cafeteria, in the seedy Tenderloin district, was hopping with its usual assortment of transgender people, young street hustlers, and down-and-out regulars. The management, annoyed by the noisy crowd at one table, called the police. When a surly cop, accustomed to manhandling Compton's clientele, attempted to arrest one of the queens, she threw her coffee in his face. Mayhem erupted -- windows were broken, furniture flew through the air. Police reinforcements arrived, and the fighting spilled into the street. For the first time, the drag queens banded together to fight back, getting the better of the cops, whom they kicked and stomped with their high-heeled shoes and beat with their heavy purses. For everyone at Compton's that night, one thing was certain -- things would never be the same again.

The next night drag-queens, hair-fairies, conservative gays, and hustlers joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow drags back in again. It ended with the newly installed plate glass windows once more being smashed.

The Police Community Relations Unit began mediating the conflict, which was never fully resolved. Many of the militant hustlers and street queens involved in the riot were members of Vanguard, the first known gay youth organization in the United States, which had been organized earlier that year with the help of radical ministers working with Glide Memorial Methodist Church, a center for progressive social activism in the Tenderloin for many years. A lesbian group of street people was also formed called the Street Orphans, both of which later became the old Gay Liberation Front in San Francisco, and is today called the Gay Activists Alliance.

In the aftermath of the riot at Compton's, a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services was established, which culminated in 1968 with the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first such peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world.

The new style of gay liberation politics, which began in San Francisco with the formation of Vanguard and the riot at Compton's Cafeteria, gained further momentum with the formation of the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) in the spring of 1969, a few months before the Stonewall riots, which initially received scant coverage in the San Francisco media. The CHF was established in response to the firing of an openly gay man by a steamship company, and helped popularize the new strategy of "coming out" as a means of agitating for gay rights.

The new style of gay liberation drew heavily on the youth-oriented, rock-music-infused counterculture that took root in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where the prevailing ethos of sexual revolution and "letting it all hang out" created a welcoming environment for many baby boomer gay men and lesbians.

This act of resistance was a dramatic turning point for the transgender community, and the beginning of a new human rights struggle that continues to this very day. For almost 40 years, it was an almost-forgotten footnote until the recent film documentary Screaming Queens recovered the story for today's audiences.

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