But We LovedSusan Stryker is a historian who unearthed the story of Compton's Cafeteria, the first known full-scale queer riot against police harassment in American history. She describes the events of the riot and how her discovery impacted her own life.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Outspoken podcast Network.
She was sitting at a table with some friends and the police pull up and one of the queens threw coffee in the CoP's face, and the other cop pulls out as billy club and somebody clocked him in the head with one of those big round sugar shakers and knocks them down, and the place just erupted. Trans women would like they'd have liquor bottles and they're big heavy purses. They would use that purse to like clock people with it, or like you take off a high heeled shoe and it's like, oh, stiletto heels is like they can punch a hole in your skull if you hit somebody with them. The idea that street queens would fight back against the cops just blew people's minds.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Susan Striker, the historian who discovered the buried story of the nineteen sixty six Compton's Cafeteria riot, the first known full scale queer riot against police harassment in American history. We'll learn about the incident and why it was never talked about for almost forty years from my Heart podcast. I'm Jordan and Solve and this is what we loved. Right after college, I moved to San Francisco for a job. I used to get my haircut in this neighborhood called the Tenderlin, and one day, as I was about to cross the street to my barber, I realized that I was standing on a plaque that told me I was at a historic site, the site of Compton's Cafeteria. It said it was the first known full scale riot for transgender and gay rights in American history. I thought Stonewall was the first, so I went home and googled it and a documentary came up called Screaming Queens. It was about a queer historian who happened to find a document that referenced a queer riot before Stonewall and her journey to realize that it was actually the first known instance of collective, militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history. My next guest is that historian Susan Striker. In the nineties, she went to UC Berkeley for her PhD, and around that time she came out as transgender. As a result, it became extremely difficult to find work, putting her into poverty. It was then, when she was at her lowest, that she unearthed the courageous story of Compton's Cafeteria. What was your story around coming out?
Well, you know, it's it's hard to say exactly.
I think being a trans person, it's a little different than what I would think of as more like a cis gay coming out story. It's not like I just said like, hey, I'm trans and then that was all there was to it, because you know, a transition is is not something that happens overnight. So I just feel like I had a very gradual process. There was the moment that I came out to my mother, who lives in Oklahoma, and I told her that I needed to come home and that I had some big news that wasn't bad news.
And I'd been on hormones.
For I don't know, maybe close to a year at that point, and it was getting to the point where, you know, it's like it was noticeable. So when I went home, I said to Mom, I'm just going to put it right out there. It's just like I'm trans and I'm in the process of changing my gender. And she says, well, I thought you were going to tell me that you were gay in HIV positive, so I guess that's good news. And I said, well, you know, I told you it was big news, not bad news. Having an HIV diagnosis and you know, ninety one ninety two would have been would have been very bad news. But you know, Mom took it pretty well. Honestly. We had a big conversation and she wound up say like, well, Okay, this wasn't what I was expecting, but I actually have to go back to work now, so why don't you just go to my closet pick out anything I have that you know fits you, and you can just have it and it'll just give me an excuse to go shopping for more clothes. So, you know, ultimately, that was a pretty good response.
That's pretty awesome. I wonder what it was like for you to transition in the nineties, given that the landscape of role models was so different from what it is today.
Yeah, you know, there weren't a lot of role models in the early nineties for me, and it was a really different historical moment where it's like, however hard things still are for trans people, and however much we are right now in the crosshairs of a really vicious backlash that there are more visible role models. And back in the nineties, if you came out as trans, that meant, you know, you were a mentally ill person and you were going to lose your job, and you're going to lose your family, and you could be legally discriminated against. It was a hard decision to make in the sense that, you know, I knew that I needed to do it for myself, but I was very aware of what the social cost was going to be. I was transitioning right at the end of finishing up a PhD in US History at UC Berkeley. That to come out as trans was pretty much to say, I have chosen to be unemployable, you know. And I call my first seven years post PhD my unpaid internship and transgender studies because I think I was making, you know, by hook or by crook, I was able to scrape together you know, usually less than about ten thousand dollars a year to live on. It was difficult, but I was also doing some of the work, not compensated in terms of salary, but sort of doing the work of putting together my sort of basic understanding of what the Bay Area's transgender history was. And so it's all right, well, this is sort of what I'm going to do. I'm going to figure out how to try to do a kind of historical work that served me personally and kind of by extension, I hoped would serve anybody who was in a similar set of life circumstances, you know, other trans people and queer people who really needed to know that we are a people with a past. We didn't just sort of, you know, PLoP down from Mars. So even though I wasn't necessarily getting paid to do that work, it's like it totally rewarded me and compensated me to do that work at an emotional and political level. And I was just happy to be able to share what I was learning by doing that research with other people.
Well, how did you first hear about Compton's Cafeteria.
Well, when I was in early transition, I just showed up at this organization that was then called the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, which was a community based archives and history project in San Francisco. And I said, hey, I'm actually an academically trained historian.
I'm trans.
I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting an academic job right now, and I just want to show up and volunteer, which I did, and it was doing work there that I came across. One of the founders of the organization was this guy named Greg Pennington, and he had been collecting gay and lesbian community newspapers back into the fifties and sixties, and he had started working on a chronology of San Francisco's gay history. So like, there was this page that said, like August nineteen sixty six, and he was listing all of these things that had happened in nineteen sixty six, and there was one that said drag Queen's riot against police at Compton's Cafeteria. It's like what And I asked Greg about it. He said, oh, yeah, that was something I came across in some publication that was called Gay Pride Quarterly number one. And I could not find that publication to learn any more about it, and I was keeping my eye out for anything that I could find about that story because I was just intrigued by it. And in nineteen ninety five, a friend of mine and I were working on a book called Gay by the Bay, a History of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I just had this question in my mind.
It's like, well, you know, we should.
Definitely say something about the first Pride parade that happens in San Francisco. And so there was a box of materials from San Francisco Gay Pride and looking through that material the program for the very first gay Pride parade in San Francisco from nineteen seventy two. I opened it up, opened the program up, and in the centerfold of that program there was this story. It says, hey, people were here to celebrate Stonewall, but don't forget gay Pride started in San Francisco three years earlier. It all started with a hot August night in nineteen sixty six when drag queens fought the cops at Compton's Cafeteria at the corner of Turk and Taylor Street. It's like, Ah, there's the story, but now do I believe it. It's like, how come I've never heard about this before? And it took me, i would say, about three more years of research to piece things together.
Susan had just discovered a document about a riot led by drag queens in the sixties at a local diner. She figured that drag queens probably meant transgender women. If it was true, this was a big deal because it would have predated the Stonewall riots by three years. That diner, Jene Compton's Cafeteria, was in San Francisco's red light district called the Tenderloin, where many transgender women would perform sex work for survival. The twenty four hour diner was their respite for a warm cup of coffe or a visit with friends in between clients. Because Comptons served so many people in the criminal class, like sex workers and drug dealers, it was a target for police harassment. But according to Susan's research, one night, these queens had had enough. On an August night in nineteen sixty six, a fight broke out at Compton's cafeteria between those transgender diners and the cops. Before we get to actually what happened at Compton's cafeteria. I want to talk about what you discovered about the context of that time. What was it like for trans women living in San Francisco in the fifties and sixties.
Well, you know, in some ways, it's like it is now. It's like the trans community, even the trans women community, is not monolithic.
I mean, you've.
Got people who are impoverished who are like doing survival sex works on the streets, and you've got people who are amorous quasi celebrities. But the people who were involved in the riot at Compton's, it's like they were people who were more socially marginalized. I think one of the things that was really different back in the nineteen fifties and sixties is that it was much more likely that if you were known to be trans, you would wind up living in a tenderloin like neighborhood, kind of a red light district. And that is certainly the way it worked in San Francisco. The tenderloin was a part of the city that was set aside for all kinds of illegal activities, criminalized activities that were tacitly allowed to take place by corrupt police officers.
It's like where drug dealing would happen, and you know, maybe the dealer like pays off the cops.
There was prostitution and then you know, madam gives the cops a little slice.
Of the pie.
Lots of corruption, lots of corruption, and those kinds of districts you called red light districts, tenderloin districts, whatever you want to call them. For most people, they were parts of the city that people would come into and leave. It's like, it's where you'd go to the after hours bars, it's where you'd go see a drag show, it's where you'd go score drugs, it's where you would, you know, go to buy sex for money. But for trans women, they were residential ghettos because of housing discrimination, employment discrimination, general social stigma. If you were out as trans and were transfeminine, it's that you would wind up in a sex work economy, living in a tenderloin style neighborhood and so to like live in what we're called queen's hotels, to be involved in sex work and to be brutalized by the police. That was a very common story for trans women.
And how did Compton's Cafeteria fit into this scene.
Compton's cafeteria was just you know, I think of it, it's like a clean, well lighted place for cheap food, you know, that would open twenty four hours a day, and everybody in the neighborhood went there. It's where the hustlers would hang out, It's where the street queens would hang out. Compton's was their safe space. It was a really important, unofficial community gathering spot. And it was just a cheap, well lighted place for food in a poor neighborhood that catered to people who were there for quote unquote vice activities. So for all of those reasons, it was a place that often drew police attention.
And speaking of which this is a story about standing up to police harassment. What was the relationship between the cops and these queens in those days.
Well, one of the interviewees in the film Screaming Queens Tomorrow Chank. She talks about how the police would come in and say you you, you, and you like come with us and just you know, throw them in the police wagon and take them off to jail.
I remember when when the cops used to go in the bar and say you you, you, and you come with us.
Or Amanda Saint James. Also in that film, she said there was this one cop who had it.
In for her.
I had one policeman that hated me with a passionate Every time you see me, he says, get in the paddy wagons. I just had my hamburger, he says, ed it Monday when you get out.
So the general vibe was that transfeminine sex workers were just regarded as the bottom of the barrel, lowest rung of the social ladder, who could be abused with impunity. These women would tell me stories of how, like, you know, the police would raid for some kind of quality of life disturbance. It's like, oh, you're creating a public nuisance, or you're gauging and lude and lascivious behavior in public. These these kinds of laws that were basically like we can bust you for being trans in public.
They talked about being.
Driven around in the back of a police car for hours and hours, of being forced to perform oral.
Sex, of being raped.
Like you get to jail and it's like they would sort of strip you in front of, you know, other prisoners, Like they would shave women's heads.
I didn't know wasn't bothering anybody but I was dressing as a woman the way I feel. So they put me in jail, shave my head, or I refuse to let them shave my head, and they put me in the hole and lock up. One girl was in there sixty days in the hole because she wouldn't let them cut their hair. That's how important it was to us back then. They were you know, it was like they were trying to humiliate us, that we weren't human beings, so they should humiliate us.
Trans women could be violated with impunity at the time, nobody gave a damn. I read the gay press from that time, and there was a newspaper called Citizens News, and the guy who edited that newspaper, he would talk about what he called the walking eye sores along Market Street, and he met trans women. You look at the gay organizing that was happened at the time, and they would say, like these queens, you know, give gay people a bad name. It's like trans women were just the bottom of the barrel and they had nothing to lose when they fought back. I really think police violence and police targeting of queer people is the single biggest driver of queer history. I mean, that's the Stonewall story as well as the Compton story. That's the story of many bar fights and street actions. Our history is really motivated, I think, by resistance to prejudicial state actions carried out by the police through the criminalization of our life. There's a you know, we can tell a story about why on that night? Why was that night different from all other nights? Because the oppression that trans women were facing from the police and their exclusion and stigmatization within a broader public, it was chronic, it was routine. So like, why on one night did they fight back?
How did the riot start?
As near as I can make out, there was a little precursor incident. There was a woman named Dixie McClain who got into some kind of altercation with a police officer at another eatery, this place called the Doggie Diner, which was a few blocks away from Compton's, and she managed to leave that altercation and go to comptence and apparently she was sitting at a table with some friends and the police pull up. There were two cops who went into the restaurant apparently looking for her. We have eyewitness accounts of like the cops come in and they seem to be looking for someone. They focus on this one queen sitting at a table with her friends, and that they came over to her and one of the queens threw coffee in the CoP's face, you know, and he stumbles and falls over backwards, and the other cop who's there pulls out his billy club and somebody clocked him in the head with one of those big round sugar shakers and knocks them down. But then there were already sirens that people hurt. It's like there were other police officers pulling up, and it's like, oh, like this was a planned raid. These two cops were coming in for this one particular person, but that they were planning on doing more of a sweep.
All of the sugar shakers went through the windows and the glass doors. I think I've put a sugar shaker through one of those.
And the place just erupted. The patrons broke out the windows of the diner. They were like fighting with the two cops who were there, who get pushed out under the streets. They were breaking out the windows. Other cop cars are pulling up, and the best account that I have found says that there were a few hundred people in the streets fighting with the police. Trans women would take like they'd have liquor bottles and they're big, heavy purses, and like they would use that purse or like clock people with it, or like you take off a high heeled shoe and it's like those stiletto heels is like they can punch a hole in your skull if you hit somebody with them. So I actually kind of love that sense of trans women turning these like accoutrement of femininity into weapons for fighting the police who are trying to oppress them. Not only did they trash the interior of Compton's, but they burned down a newspaper stand that was at the corner that people were taking the newspapers and lighting them on fire, and the little fires all over the intersection. Police cards are being vandalized. It was a major, major incident. It probably went on for you know, it's say at least an hour, and that eventually there were some people who were arrested taken to jail.
So there was this tremendous.
Sense of a pent up rage at how people were treated.
Susan, the story you're telling sounds like it was such a pivotal moment in queer history, So why do you think it was never told for almost forty years.
One of the things that really surprises me, it's like, why is this not something that is recorded in the mainstream press. Why was there no footage of the riot itself. Well, it turns out that back in the day, the television news agencies they really only had filmed cruise out six days a week, and so like after midnight on Saturday, if it happened on Sunday, there wasn't going to be a crew out there, which leads me to think Riyat happened on Sunday. We have still not been able to pin down definitively exactly what the date was, because people remember things, but there was no contemporary written documentation of it. The police records have been disappeared. I looked at the television news logs. There was no film crew out there for it, There was no coverage of it in the mainstream newspapers. And I think mostly it was because it just kind of seemed like an impossible thing, just like there was the idea that street queens would fight back against the cops just blew people's minds. It was this moment of a really unprecedented political response on the part of one of the most marginalized people in society to fighting back against the structural oppression that just kept a boot on their neck. Nobody had seen anything like that. I know that the police had good relations with the press, and I honestly think they killed the story.
On a late summer night in nineteen sixty six, a group of transgender women who had been regularly harassed by the cops stood up to them by fighting back. They destroyed a police car, set the corner newspaper stand on fire, and broke the windows at Compton's enrage. No one had ever seen anything like this, a bunch of queens standing up to the cops. The Compton's riot was a big deal. Many of the women involved said. The police largely left them alone after that night, which is what they'd always wanted to live without being harassed. So after the riot, how did the relationship between the queens and the cops change.
It's really hard as a historian to say one thing caused another thing. I do think the riot was something that gave notice to some of the powers that be in the city that there was a social issue that they needed to deal with. I think because people on the street demanded something, the city responded. There was a police officer, Elliott Blackstone, who was the liaison to the you know what was then called the homophile community, and he was able to help put through some changes in police practices like of not you know, in trapping people in bathrooms or not arresting somebody just because they knew that they were trans. There was a unit of the San Francisco Public Health Department called the Center for Special Problems that started doing support groups and helping trans people access hormones and changes in their identity documents. You know, they issued ideas that said so and so is under the care of Center for Special Problems for the treatment of transsexualism. And so it both stigmatized and minoritized people as suffering from some kind of health condition called transsexualism. And on the other hand, it let people do things like open checking accounts at a bank. It helped them do things that were useful in their lives. So there was this moment of real hopefulness. But within a couple of years, you know, I think it had kind of gotten back to what it was before. It's like, there was this moment of police officers going like, oh wait, it's not like a crime, it's a medical condition. Oh okay, we'll treat that a little differently, and then like within a few years it's like, yeah, no, we're still just going to treat it like it's a crime.
Well, Susan, if I could step away from the history and ask you what was going through your mind as you were learning all of this incredible history. This is at a moment in your life where you're sort of transitioning and experiencing transgender discrimination in your own way, and here you are learning about all of these women that came before you, that are standing up to the same system in a lot of ways. What was that like for you?
You know, when I found the story of the Competence Cafeteria riot, it just felt very validating to me because I knew in my own direct experience the kind of social oppression and stigma that can land on you as a transperson. So there was this way that when I found that story, it was just kind of like a hell yeah moment, like you go girls, like right on. So it just I felt very jazzed by finding the story. I also felt pride, the sense of at whatever cost to you to just stand up to.
Power and to say like, no, I'm not going to take that. I am a person of worth. My life matters.
I consider that all Night Cafeteria and Eta Hamburger just like anybody else. To just assert that very fundamental sense of like, I am a being who exists in this world, and I'm going to take up the space inside my own skin, and I'm going to be in public and it's just like I am just not going to settle for anything less than that. It's just such a fundamental assertion of one's capacity to be in the world. And I certainly understand some of the things that land on you just for being trans And to have people in a community that I identify with to just assert their existence and to say like I exist, I am, and I'm going to hold my space. That's a very that's a very powerful thing to have found. In some ways, I feel like I found what I was looking for. I just knew in my heart that there was going to be a story like that somewhere, and I found it, and I thought, this is a story that I need to tell in the most public way possible.
In two thousand and five, Susan released the documentary Screaming Queens on PBS. It was about the untold story of Compton's Cafeteria. It prominently featured transgender people that were actually at the riot who've since passed away. The film would go on to win an Emmy. Earlier this year, The New Yorker published a new documentary called Compton's twenty two by a young transgender filmmaker, Drew Depinto. He documented other transgender people his age watching Screaming Queens for the first time as they react to the bravery of those that came before them. What do you think is the impact of the Compton's Cafeteria riot on today's queer youth.
Well, you know, I hope it's something that queer youth today can take pride and inspiration from, particularly in this moment when trans people are just in the eye of the storm, this big, huge legal backlash, this moral panic around the existence of trans people. To put out a story of trans survival and resistance and joy as well as fierceness, I just think that's really important, and I hope that that's something that people younger than me can latch onto and take inspiration from.
And my last question is just around that what came to your mind and to your heart as you were starting to understand that the history that you unearthed is now being passed down to new generations. The history that in a lot of ways came to you from a previous generation is now leaving you and going to the next generation.
Well, you know that it's really gratifying to me that me doing my work as a historian, it's like I unearthed news that I could use from the past that served me somehow, and then to be able to transmit that to the generations that are coming up, it just, yeah, I just take such pleasure in that. And I feel like there's this like tremendous sense of responsibility to have become an elder and to take what my elders bequeathed to me and to pass that along. I can't think of anything that I would rather have done and to continue to be doing with my life, to be a sort of a culture bearer and storyteller for what trans life has been like in the United States. So I hope it's something that serves the people who I am.
Bequeathing it to passing it along too.
But we Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolvis. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us but we Loved at gmail dot com or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at What we Loved. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our. Executive producers are Me and Maya Howard. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Rockqua Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
