June 17, 2015 • 26 mins
In 1966, a restaurant in San Francisco's Tenderloin district was the site of a violent incident in LGBT history. After the riot, a grassroots effort grew to improve relationships between police and Tenderloin's transgender commnity.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast coun
Tray c V. Wilson and I'm Polly Frying Today. A
lot of people called the Stonewall Riots, which started on
June nineteen sixty nine, the beginning of the LGBT rights
(00:25):
movement in the United States, and is, as is really
often the case, kind of an oversimplification. The stone Wall
Uprising was more like the event that made people who
were not already fighting for LGBT rights aware that there
was a fight going on at all. In reality, gay
rights organizations, which at that point we're called homophile organizations,
(00:46):
had been actively working towards gay rights and legal protections
for well over a decade before Stonewall. Some of the
most well known examples are the Machine Society and the
Daughters of Belidas, which were focused on the rights of
gay men and lesbians are respectively. And there were also
other violent uprisings in the years before Stonewall, and the
names of these uprisings are not nearly as well known
(01:08):
as Stonewall is today. One of those was a riot
at Gene Compton's cafeteria in nineteen sixty six, in which
the restaurant's patrons, who were predominantly gay men, drag queens
and transgender women, fought back against police. And that's what
we're going to talk about today, and I do need
to give a couple of notes before we start. The
concept of gender identity and the language that we used
(01:30):
to talk about it has really evolved a lot since
the time that we are talking about. The word transgender
wasn't coined until nineteen seventy nine, after this story was
long over, and today it's an umbrella term that describes
a range of ways in which a person's gender identity
or expression doesn't match up with the sex that they
were assigned when they were born. So our use of
(01:51):
this term in this episode is a little bit anachronistic,
but it's how many, but definitely not all, of the
people in this story went on to identify later in
their lives after that word had come into common usage. Also,
because three distinctly different groups of people were all involved
in this event, and those were cross dressers, transgender women,
(02:13):
and gay men, we're not going to try to specifically
name every one of those every single time that it
might be relevant, because that becomes extremely wordy and convoluted.
We do want to make clear though, that although there
can be some overlap within these groups, such as gay
men who cross dress or transgender people who also who
are also gay as examples, these terms have specific meanings
(02:34):
and they refer to specific traits and behaviors. So transgender
refers to gender identity, cross dressing refers to a person's clothing,
and gay refers to a person's physical or emotional attractions
to other people. This episode also does include some parts
that parents and teachers might want to avoid for younger listeners,
particularly some discussion that's related to sex and sex work.
(02:56):
So those are our notes before we start the contents.
Cafeteria riot was definitely a product of its time and place,
so we have to do some stage setting on this one.
In the mid to late nineteenth century, many cities around
the United States started passing laws to make it illegal
for people to cross dress. At this point, homosexual acts
(03:17):
were already illegal in most places, so it's not entirely
clear exactly what sparked this need to regulate this type
of dress at this particular time. One theory is that
as people moved into cities and found communities of like
minded people and began to more outwardly and publicly practiced
cross dressing. The majority found this behavior quite threatening, regardless
(03:39):
of what the precise reasons were. Columbus, Ohio, passed such
a law in eighteen forty, Chicago, Illinois, did in eighteen
fifty one, and more cities followed, including San Francisco, California,
in eighteen sixty three. These laws were generally written to
forbid all cross dressing, but in practice enforcement was a
lot more focused on people with a masculine appearance or
(04:02):
a physically male body who were wearing women's clothing. It
also means that these laws were applied to both straight
and gay people who cross dressed, and to transgender people
whose dress was typical for their gender identity. Magnus Hirschfield
coined the word transvestite in nineteen and today most of
us think of this in terms of cross dressing, but
(04:23):
at the time it applied to a much broader range
of gender identities and not just a clothing. In nineteen nineteen,
Hershield would go on to found the Institute for Sexual
Science in Berlin, which was dedicated to studying sex and gender.
Through his work and the work of others. Around the
same time, people gradually developed a vocabulary to describe and
talk about the nuances of sexual orientation and gender identity.
(04:47):
During World War Two, members of the United States military
who were found to be in violation of various standards
forbidding homosexual behavior were given what was colloquially known as
a blue discharge. For those who were serving in the Pacific,
this usually meant that they were processed out of the
military in San Francisco. This pattern was definitely not unique
(05:08):
to San Francisco or to World War Two. It happened
in other port cities and other wars as well, but
the LGBT population of San Francisco grew tremendously during the
war years, as people who had been discharged because of
their sexual orientation were processed out of the army there
and then stayed in that area. A number of researchers
(05:29):
also started studying gender and sex during the nineteen forties
and nineteen fifties, including famously Alfred Kinzie at the Kinzie
Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and also Carl Bowman
at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California,
San Francisco. And while some of this research definitely did
not follow today's ethical standards, it did begin to give
(05:52):
at least some doctors a better idea of how to
work with lesbian, gay, and transgender patients. In nine fifty two,
Christine Jorgensen became a household name after having had a
series of surgeries in Copenhagen which were widely described in
the press as a sex change. Today, that's really not
the term that we would use to talk about these procedures.
(06:12):
We would call them uh, sex reassignment surgeries or gender
confirmation surgeries. Although these procedures had been available in Europe
for a while, they were really pretty widely unknown in
the United States before this point. Jorgensen became an instant celebrity,
and her story gave a lot of transgender people hope
that their bodies could be made to match their gender
(06:34):
idea identity. I want to be very clear though not
every transgender person chooses to or is able to have surgery,
but at this point in history, Jorgensen's story and the
subsequent media coverage she received were earth shattering for a
lot of transgender people. It raised a lot of awareness
on the subject, and she received letters from all over
(06:54):
from people who basically thanked her for helping them understand
their own identity and be able to talk about it
with other people. Later in the nineteen fifties, the word
transsexual came into use to describe people who wanted to
change or had changed their physical body from the sex
that they were assigned at birth. A number of mass
(07:15):
market novels that related to ideas of cross dressing and
gender identity were published in In nineteen sixty, Virginia Prince
launched Transvestia, which was the first periodical in the US
that was intended for a transgender market. Subscribers to the
magazine also formed the first known organization for transgender people
in the US. Not long after this, in nineteen sixty six,
(07:38):
Dr Harry Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which described patients
he had been working with creating a course of treatment
to help them transition from the sex they had been
assigned at birth to the gender that they felt themselves
intrinsically to be. And all of this brings us to
what happened at Compton's Cafeteria in nineteen sixty six. Although
(07:59):
California had repealed its law against cross dressing in nineteen
sixty two, people were still being arrested for it. Homosexuality
was also illegal. San Francisco itself had a growing LGBT population,
thanks in part to the military discharges during World War
Two that we discussed, and awareness of transgendering gay rights
issues was starting to grow thanks to the work of
(08:21):
various social movement organizations. There were also high profile stories
like Christine Jorgensen's and the work of doctors and psychologists
such as Dr Harry Benjamin. So all of these things
really came together and led to what has become known
as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot. And we're going to talk
about this riot specifically after a brieford from a sponsor,
(08:44):
so to get to specifically the neighborhood where Compton's Cafeteria
was located and what happened there. In nineteen sixty six.
San Francisco's Tenderloin district was home to many of the
city's trag queens, transgender people, gay men, and others who
didn't fit into conventional ideas of gender expression and sexual orientation.
(09:06):
And it wasn't a particularly nice place to live. This
was a red light district, run down c D with
hotels that advertised transient rooms. There were high crime rates
and a thriving and not particularly safe industry of vice. Often,
the police force and the Tenderloin seemed more interested in
taking advantage of the situation than actually helping to protect
(09:28):
the community, and a lot of the people who were
living in the Tenderloin just didn't have other options. As
people were turned away from jobs and housing and cleaner,
safer parts of the city, the Tenderloin effectively became a
gay ghetto. Police would even direct gay and transgender people
who were arrested in other parts of town to the Tenderloin,
(09:49):
where they might actually be able to find a place
to live, and some of its residents were unable to
find work due to their sexual orientation or gender expression,
and as a result, they turned to sex work as
a last resort, and for many many reasons, this was
inherently dangerous. In addition to the risks of sexually transmitted
(10:09):
disease or being arrested or jailed, the people soliciting prostitutes
in the Tenderloin weren't necessarily looking for someone whose outward
appearance when clothed did not match up with their physical sex.
Transgender sex workers consequently became the targets of violence and harassment.
This also led to gay and transgender people in the
Tenderloin being arrested on suspicion of prostitution, regardless of whether
(10:33):
they were prostitutes or whether they were engaged in any
activity that could even resemble prostitution at the time, and
being arrested tended to be a whole lot worse for
gay men and transgender people than for everyone else. People
who were physically male but were dressed in women women's
clothing would be sent to the men's jail, where they
were often at risk for being assaulted, rate or murdered
(10:56):
because of how they behaved and how they were dressed.
Conditions were bad enough that in nineteen sixty five, Tenderloin
residents launched a grassroots campaign to try to improve the
neighborhood and the economic conditions there, and their goals were
to bring in much needed social services and to qualify
for anti poverty funding. That last part was challenging because
(11:17):
many anti poverty programs were targeted towards racial and ethnic minorities,
but the population of the Tenderloin district was predominantly white.
There were gay activists, neighborhood organizers, and ministers at the
forefront of this effort, and it also spawned a youth
organization for gay and transgender street kids, which was known
as Vanguard. Vanguard held its meetings at Gene Compton's Cafeteria,
(11:39):
which is a popular gathering place for the gay community,
drag queens, and transgender people in the Tenderloin. It was
a twenty four hour cafeteria that was part of a
local restaurant chain. It sat at the corner of Turk
and Taylor Streets, and it was next to a gay
bathhouse and down the street from a Woolworths. Also nearby
were a bar and the airport bus terminal that many
trans people and drag queens used to change their clothes.
(12:02):
So it's basically a convenient, centralized, and relatively safe location
for people to congregate twenty four hours a day. As
one of the patrons who was interviewed in the documentary
Screaming Queens, the riot at Compton's Cafeteria quote, it was
beautiful because it was clean, as was the case for
the Tenderloin in general. Many of the regulars at Compton's
(12:22):
cafeteria were there because they had nowhere else to go.
Other restaurants, clubs, and hotels wouldn't serve them because of
their sexual orientation, their gender expression, or their dress, but
comptons would let them in. It was a place where
people routinely went to make sure their friends knew that
they were still alive. But the management at the cafeteria
did not really like the fact that it had become
(12:43):
basically a hangout for this particular crowd. Staff started trying
to discourage the ongoing hanging out by implementing a service
charge to make up for the fact that people were
taking up table space but not buying food. However, they
tended to charge this service charge kind of selective. The
people who sawed on their bills were mostly the most
(13:04):
obvious gay and transgender people who frequented the establishment. In
the summer of nineteen sixty six, management and staff at
the restaurant started calling the police to report people who
were spending too much time loitering and not enough time
eating or spending money. Regulars responded by picketing, and this
was an effort that was led by the group of Vanguard.
(13:25):
In July of nineteen sixty six. By this point, most
of the nighttime regulars at the cafeteria were really used
to being hassled by police. Police activity in general had
really been increasing because of the number of military recruits
that were passing through San Francisco on the way to Vietnam,
but the cafeteria had become a safe spot where people
felt like they didn't need to worry about being targeted
(13:47):
for what they were wearing, where they were standing, being
too loud, being mistaken for a sex worker, or basically
for any reason that somebody felt like hassling them. So
tensions really grew as police became more and more present
inside the restaurant. The exact date of the riot at
the cafeteria is not known today. The newspapers didn't cover
(14:08):
this event, and no police reports from the evening have
survived until today, although there are definitely enough eye witnesses
UH and their eyewitness reports to corroborate that this did happen,
and we know that it happened in August of nineteen
sixty six. The restaurant that night was packed. Staff at
the cafeteria decided to call the police to have some
of the patrons who were there removed and an officer
(14:31):
put his hand on somebody from the crowd. This person
is most frequently described as a drag queen, and that
person threw a cup of coffee into the police officer's face.
As more people began throwing glasses, silverware, and plates, the
police left the cafeteria to call for backup. While they
were gone, the crowd broke windows and turned over tables,
(14:51):
and fights broke out both in and around the restaurant.
The police returned and started making arrests and filling the
patti wagons. Prop Damage followed, including a vandalized police car
in a news stand that was burned down. So if
the riot at Compton's Cafeteria had taken place somewhere else
or at a different time, it's entirely possible that it
(15:12):
wouldn't have led to any kind of meaningful change for
the lives of the gay and transgender people who participated
in and afterward. But this was San Francisco. It was
during the nineteen sixties when a number of social movements
were all concurrently striving for change on a number of
different fronts. So it did actually lead to some things
getting better, and we'll talk about that after a brief
(15:36):
break for another word from a sponsor, so to get
back to what happened after the riot. These grassroots efforts
for change in the Tenderloin, which had started in the
weeks and months before the riot, grew stronger in the
wake of it. A few months later, the Central City
Anti Poverty Office opened, and one of its goals was
to improve relations between the gay and transgender communities and
(15:58):
the police. Police started at Elliott Blackstone had been named
a liaison between the police force and homophile organizations as
well as the greater gay community back in nineteen sixty two.
This focus also expanded to include transgender people following the riot.
At first, the transgender community, still at that point described
(16:18):
as drag queens and transsexual since the term transgender had
yet to be coined, was largely left out of this mission.
But Louise Ergestras, a transgender resident of the Tenderloin district,
gave Blackstone a copy of The Transsexual Phenomenon and insisted
that he read it. After he did, he played a
key role in shifting the police force's treatment of the
(16:40):
transgender community, in addition to working towards implementing programs and
services that helped and protected transgender people. He worked to
change the attitudes of the police force. Another program that
started after the riot was the Center for Special Problems,
which was part of the San Francisco Public Health Department.
The Center for Special Problems started a support group, and
(17:03):
it started working towards connecting transgender people with medical care
and other services that they needed. The center also started
issuing identification cards for transgender people, and this sounds minor,
but it was actually a huge deal. Before this, driver's
licenses and other i D could only reflect a person's
gender as it was assigned at their birth, so someone
(17:24):
who had transitioned could not get an ID card that
accurately reflected their identity, and this was not a perfect system.
Using a Center for Special Problems i D meant that
the person who carried it was publicly identified as transgender,
whether he or she wanted to be or not. But
it also meant that people could do things like open
(17:46):
bank accounts and apply for jobs without trying to use what,
by all appearances, looked like someone else's i D card.
Although some of the social movement organizations behind these changes
gradually fizzled out or split into other groups, or otherwise
ended a lot of the programs themselves continued on for
years until they were updated or replaced by other social services. However,
(18:09):
many of the issues that the transgender community faced in
the Tenderloin district in nineteen sixty six persisted, and they
still exist today. In most of the United States, being
transgender is not a protected class, so people can be
fired or refused housing, medical care, or other necessary services
because of their gender expression. Transgender people continue to have
(18:30):
a vastly higher risk of suicide than the general population,
as well as of much greater risk of being the
victim of violent crime. In the mid nineteen seventies, there
was actually a serial killer in the Tenderloin and other
LGBT neighborhoods in San Francisco who killed at least fourteen people,
most of them trans women or drag queens, and was
never apprehended. According to the Hate Violence Report from the
(18:54):
National Coalition of Anti Violence Projects, transgender people are also
more than three times more likely to experience police violence
than the general population. The cafeteria closed in nine. Elliott Blackstone,
who was then retired from the force, was the Grand
Marshal of the San Francisco Pride parade in two thousand six.
A plaque commemorating the riot was installed that same year. So,
(19:20):
as we mentioned at the top of the episode, the
Stonewall riots are so frequently pinpointed is like the start
of the gay rights movement, and this is one of
the violent uprisings that happened before that, when it was
not actually the first. There were also a couple of
similar ones at one was at Cooper's Donuts, which was
a donut shop that was uh uh in a predominantly
(19:42):
gay neighborhood and had a number of gay and transgender
people as its patrons. And there was also another one
that was at a bakery. So several similarly pushing back
against police kind of uh kind of events happened in
the years immediately le ing up to Stonewall, and then
Stonewall is kind of kind of became the big name
(20:04):
out of all of them. Yeah, even when there's any
big historical event, regardless of sort of what issue or
cultural or political thing it's attached to you, it may
be like the touchstone and the focus of a certain
um aspect of like historical telling, but there are usually
a lot of little sort of things leading up to
it that maybe don't always get the light shown on them.
(20:26):
So do you also have a little bit of listener
mail for us today? I do. This is about our
recent episode about time capsules, and it is from Alexa,
and Alexa says, high ladies, long time listener, longtime fan.
Two new history podcasts a week really improved my quality
of life. I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this.
I'm just going to pause for a second. Alexa was
(20:49):
the first and only person to mention conversely to other
corrections we have talked about lately. So she says, I'm
sure I'm not the first to mention this, but I
think I heard a little crossed wires situation in the
time capsule episode. The first Boston time capsule was found
in the Old State House, built in seventeen thirteen. This
(21:11):
building was the seat of colonial government in Massachusetts in
the first state house for the state of Massachusetts. Today,
the Old State House is a museum. The second Paul
Revere time capsule was found in the current Massachusetts State House.
That state House is the current home of the Massachusetts government.
It was built in sev is located on Boston Common
and has the big Gold dome, two different state houses
(21:33):
to time capsules. It's something that confuses Bostonians themselves all
the time. I happen to know that the Old State
House Museum visitors desk often gets calls with people asking
to speak to the Governor's office. It's a hoop to
tell people that the governor has worked in the other
state House since sevent I only mentioned it to be helpful,
not to pick apart what I think is an incredibly
(21:54):
well done podcast. The Old State House is a fascinating
building that often gets overlooked for its more popular Her
Freedom Trail cousins. In nineteen seventy six, Queen Elizabeth the
Second spoke from the Old State House balcony. It's the
side of the Boston massacre and James Otis's argument against
the writs of Assistants. In eighteen thirty five, William Lloyd Garrison,
being chased by an angry mob, found a safe hiding
(22:16):
place in the Old State House. I could go on,
thanks so much for everything, love what you do and
how you do it. Alexia in Boston. Uh, and then
she sends us a very kind note about how having
grown up in Massachusetts, Louis and May Alcott was a
hugely important part of her sense of self, which tell
us talks a little bit about going to Orchard House
(22:37):
UM and a friend of hers who this past ball
got married on the grounds of Fruitlands Museum. So thank
you so much, Alexa for being literally the only person who,
uh who told us about this mistake. That was my fault. Like,
I absolutely thought that both that both the time capsules
(22:57):
were found at the same building, and that that building
was the Old State House, which is the one with
the statues on top, which rights is right by where
the the the massacre happened. Like, I really thought that
they were the same place. Um, in part because the
uh the other state House UM time capsule was found
(23:19):
during a repair and there have just been ongoing repair
projects going on at the Old State House. I definitely
conflated them both together. Uh. I have even literally stood
outside of the Old State House and said to myself,
that's where both those time capsules were found. I was
(23:40):
super duper wrong. I'm so ignorant of like Boston's layout
and it's buildings that no bell rang for me one
way or the other. So no, this is me neither
a I mean a logically, if there's an old state House,
then there is also a new state House. But and yeah,
it did not click for me at any point when
(24:01):
when reading up on the more details of both of
those time castules, it didn't. It never clicked for me
that those were they were actually talking about two different buildings. So, uh,
thank you, Alexa, that was my error. I did not
find this to be nitpicky at all, And I actually loved,
uh learning about all these other things from the old
(24:22):
State House that I did not know about it. For example,
I did not know that it often gets overlooked for
the other stuff that's on the Freedom Trail, um because
it seems like with the Boston massacre site right there,
that people would be like, oh, let's go look at
this too, because it really is basically at the front door. Yeah,
so thank you Alexa for writing to us with that
(24:44):
correction and other cool information. If you would like to
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(25:06):
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would like to learn a little bit more about what
we talked about today, you can put the word transgender
into our search bar. At our parent company's website, you
will find the article ten Things Doctors Have Reconsidered this Century,
which talks about how the medical ideas surrounding gender expression
(25:28):
and transgender people have changed over the last century. That
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(25:50):
You can do all that and a whole lot more
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because that how stuff works dot com. In
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast coun
Tray c V. Wilson and I'm Polly Frying Today. A
lot of people called the Stonewall Riots, which started on
June nineteen sixty nine, the beginning of the LGBT rights
(00:25):
movement in the United States, and is, as is really
often the case, kind of an oversimplification. The stone Wall
Uprising was more like the event that made people who
were not already fighting for LGBT rights aware that there
was a fight going on at all. In reality, gay
rights organizations, which at that point we're called homophile organizations,
(00:46):
had been actively working towards gay rights and legal protections
for well over a decade before Stonewall. Some of the
most well known examples are the Machine Society and the
Daughters of Belidas, which were focused on the rights of
gay men and lesbians are respectively. And there were also
other violent uprisings in the years before Stonewall, and the
names of these uprisings are not nearly as well known
(01:08):
as Stonewall is today. One of those was a riot
at Gene Compton's cafeteria in nineteen sixty six, in which
the restaurant's patrons, who were predominantly gay men, drag queens
and transgender women, fought back against police. And that's what
we're going to talk about today, and I do need
to give a couple of notes before we start. The
concept of gender identity and the language that we used
(01:30):
to talk about it has really evolved a lot since
the time that we are talking about. The word transgender
wasn't coined until nineteen seventy nine, after this story was
long over, and today it's an umbrella term that describes
a range of ways in which a person's gender identity
or expression doesn't match up with the sex that they
were assigned when they were born. So our use of
(01:51):
this term in this episode is a little bit anachronistic,
but it's how many, but definitely not all, of the
people in this story went on to identify later in
their lives after that word had come into common usage. Also,
because three distinctly different groups of people were all involved
in this event, and those were cross dressers, transgender women,
(02:13):
and gay men, we're not going to try to specifically
name every one of those every single time that it
might be relevant, because that becomes extremely wordy and convoluted.
We do want to make clear though, that although there
can be some overlap within these groups, such as gay
men who cross dress or transgender people who also who
are also gay as examples, these terms have specific meanings
(02:34):
and they refer to specific traits and behaviors. So transgender
refers to gender identity, cross dressing refers to a person's clothing,
and gay refers to a person's physical or emotional attractions
to other people. This episode also does include some parts
that parents and teachers might want to avoid for younger listeners,
particularly some discussion that's related to sex and sex work.
(02:56):
So those are our notes before we start the contents.
Cafeteria riot was definitely a product of its time and place,
so we have to do some stage setting on this one.
In the mid to late nineteenth century, many cities around
the United States started passing laws to make it illegal
for people to cross dress. At this point, homosexual acts
(03:17):
were already illegal in most places, so it's not entirely
clear exactly what sparked this need to regulate this type
of dress at this particular time. One theory is that
as people moved into cities and found communities of like
minded people and began to more outwardly and publicly practiced
cross dressing. The majority found this behavior quite threatening, regardless
(03:39):
of what the precise reasons were. Columbus, Ohio, passed such
a law in eighteen forty, Chicago, Illinois, did in eighteen
fifty one, and more cities followed, including San Francisco, California,
in eighteen sixty three. These laws were generally written to
forbid all cross dressing, but in practice enforcement was a
lot more focused on people with a masculine appearance or
(04:02):
a physically male body who were wearing women's clothing. It
also means that these laws were applied to both straight
and gay people who cross dressed, and to transgender people
whose dress was typical for their gender identity. Magnus Hirschfield
coined the word transvestite in nineteen and today most of
us think of this in terms of cross dressing, but
(04:23):
at the time it applied to a much broader range
of gender identities and not just a clothing. In nineteen nineteen,
Hershield would go on to found the Institute for Sexual
Science in Berlin, which was dedicated to studying sex and gender.
Through his work and the work of others. Around the
same time, people gradually developed a vocabulary to describe and
talk about the nuances of sexual orientation and gender identity.
(04:47):
During World War Two, members of the United States military
who were found to be in violation of various standards
forbidding homosexual behavior were given what was colloquially known as
a blue discharge. For those who were serving in the Pacific,
this usually meant that they were processed out of the
military in San Francisco. This pattern was definitely not unique
(05:08):
to San Francisco or to World War Two. It happened
in other port cities and other wars as well, but
the LGBT population of San Francisco grew tremendously during the
war years, as people who had been discharged because of
their sexual orientation were processed out of the army there
and then stayed in that area. A number of researchers
(05:29):
also started studying gender and sex during the nineteen forties
and nineteen fifties, including famously Alfred Kinzie at the Kinzie
Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and also Carl Bowman
at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California,
San Francisco. And while some of this research definitely did
not follow today's ethical standards, it did begin to give
(05:52):
at least some doctors a better idea of how to
work with lesbian, gay, and transgender patients. In nine fifty two,
Christine Jorgensen became a household name after having had a
series of surgeries in Copenhagen which were widely described in
the press as a sex change. Today, that's really not
the term that we would use to talk about these procedures.
(06:12):
We would call them uh, sex reassignment surgeries or gender
confirmation surgeries. Although these procedures had been available in Europe
for a while, they were really pretty widely unknown in
the United States before this point. Jorgensen became an instant celebrity,
and her story gave a lot of transgender people hope
that their bodies could be made to match their gender
(06:34):
idea identity. I want to be very clear though not
every transgender person chooses to or is able to have surgery,
but at this point in history, Jorgensen's story and the
subsequent media coverage she received were earth shattering for a
lot of transgender people. It raised a lot of awareness
on the subject, and she received letters from all over
(06:54):
from people who basically thanked her for helping them understand
their own identity and be able to talk about it
with other people. Later in the nineteen fifties, the word
transsexual came into use to describe people who wanted to
change or had changed their physical body from the sex
that they were assigned at birth. A number of mass
(07:15):
market novels that related to ideas of cross dressing and
gender identity were published in In nineteen sixty, Virginia Prince
launched Transvestia, which was the first periodical in the US
that was intended for a transgender market. Subscribers to the
magazine also formed the first known organization for transgender people
in the US. Not long after this, in nineteen sixty six,
(07:38):
Dr Harry Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which described patients
he had been working with creating a course of treatment
to help them transition from the sex they had been
assigned at birth to the gender that they felt themselves
intrinsically to be. And all of this brings us to
what happened at Compton's Cafeteria in nineteen sixty six. Although
(07:59):
California had repealed its law against cross dressing in nineteen
sixty two, people were still being arrested for it. Homosexuality
was also illegal. San Francisco itself had a growing LGBT population,
thanks in part to the military discharges during World War
Two that we discussed, and awareness of transgendering gay rights
issues was starting to grow thanks to the work of
(08:21):
various social movement organizations. There were also high profile stories
like Christine Jorgensen's and the work of doctors and psychologists
such as Dr Harry Benjamin. So all of these things
really came together and led to what has become known
as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot. And we're going to talk
about this riot specifically after a brieford from a sponsor,
(08:44):
so to get to specifically the neighborhood where Compton's Cafeteria
was located and what happened there. In nineteen sixty six.
San Francisco's Tenderloin district was home to many of the
city's trag queens, transgender people, gay men, and others who
didn't fit into conventional ideas of gender expression and sexual orientation.
(09:06):
And it wasn't a particularly nice place to live. This
was a red light district, run down c D with
hotels that advertised transient rooms. There were high crime rates
and a thriving and not particularly safe industry of vice. Often,
the police force and the Tenderloin seemed more interested in
taking advantage of the situation than actually helping to protect
(09:28):
the community, and a lot of the people who were
living in the Tenderloin just didn't have other options. As
people were turned away from jobs and housing and cleaner,
safer parts of the city, the Tenderloin effectively became a
gay ghetto. Police would even direct gay and transgender people
who were arrested in other parts of town to the Tenderloin,
(09:49):
where they might actually be able to find a place
to live, and some of its residents were unable to
find work due to their sexual orientation or gender expression,
and as a result, they turned to sex work as
a last resort, and for many many reasons, this was
inherently dangerous. In addition to the risks of sexually transmitted
(10:09):
disease or being arrested or jailed, the people soliciting prostitutes
in the Tenderloin weren't necessarily looking for someone whose outward
appearance when clothed did not match up with their physical sex.
Transgender sex workers consequently became the targets of violence and harassment.
This also led to gay and transgender people in the
Tenderloin being arrested on suspicion of prostitution, regardless of whether
(10:33):
they were prostitutes or whether they were engaged in any
activity that could even resemble prostitution at the time, and
being arrested tended to be a whole lot worse for
gay men and transgender people than for everyone else. People
who were physically male but were dressed in women women's
clothing would be sent to the men's jail, where they
were often at risk for being assaulted, rate or murdered
(10:56):
because of how they behaved and how they were dressed.
Conditions were bad enough that in nineteen sixty five, Tenderloin
residents launched a grassroots campaign to try to improve the
neighborhood and the economic conditions there, and their goals were
to bring in much needed social services and to qualify
for anti poverty funding. That last part was challenging because
(11:17):
many anti poverty programs were targeted towards racial and ethnic minorities,
but the population of the Tenderloin district was predominantly white.
There were gay activists, neighborhood organizers, and ministers at the
forefront of this effort, and it also spawned a youth
organization for gay and transgender street kids, which was known
as Vanguard. Vanguard held its meetings at Gene Compton's Cafeteria,
(11:39):
which is a popular gathering place for the gay community,
drag queens, and transgender people in the Tenderloin. It was
a twenty four hour cafeteria that was part of a
local restaurant chain. It sat at the corner of Turk
and Taylor Streets, and it was next to a gay
bathhouse and down the street from a Woolworths. Also nearby
were a bar and the airport bus terminal that many
trans people and drag queens used to change their clothes.
(12:02):
So it's basically a convenient, centralized, and relatively safe location
for people to congregate twenty four hours a day. As
one of the patrons who was interviewed in the documentary
Screaming Queens, the riot at Compton's Cafeteria quote, it was
beautiful because it was clean, as was the case for
the Tenderloin in general. Many of the regulars at Compton's
(12:22):
cafeteria were there because they had nowhere else to go.
Other restaurants, clubs, and hotels wouldn't serve them because of
their sexual orientation, their gender expression, or their dress, but
comptons would let them in. It was a place where
people routinely went to make sure their friends knew that
they were still alive. But the management at the cafeteria
did not really like the fact that it had become
(12:43):
basically a hangout for this particular crowd. Staff started trying
to discourage the ongoing hanging out by implementing a service
charge to make up for the fact that people were
taking up table space but not buying food. However, they
tended to charge this service charge kind of selective. The
people who sawed on their bills were mostly the most
(13:04):
obvious gay and transgender people who frequented the establishment. In
the summer of nineteen sixty six, management and staff at
the restaurant started calling the police to report people who
were spending too much time loitering and not enough time
eating or spending money. Regulars responded by picketing, and this
was an effort that was led by the group of Vanguard.
(13:25):
In July of nineteen sixty six. By this point, most
of the nighttime regulars at the cafeteria were really used
to being hassled by police. Police activity in general had
really been increasing because of the number of military recruits
that were passing through San Francisco on the way to Vietnam,
but the cafeteria had become a safe spot where people
felt like they didn't need to worry about being targeted
(13:47):
for what they were wearing, where they were standing, being
too loud, being mistaken for a sex worker, or basically
for any reason that somebody felt like hassling them. So
tensions really grew as police became more and more present
inside the restaurant. The exact date of the riot at
the cafeteria is not known today. The newspapers didn't cover
(14:08):
this event, and no police reports from the evening have
survived until today, although there are definitely enough eye witnesses
UH and their eyewitness reports to corroborate that this did happen,
and we know that it happened in August of nineteen
sixty six. The restaurant that night was packed. Staff at
the cafeteria decided to call the police to have some
of the patrons who were there removed and an officer
(14:31):
put his hand on somebody from the crowd. This person
is most frequently described as a drag queen, and that
person threw a cup of coffee into the police officer's face.
As more people began throwing glasses, silverware, and plates, the
police left the cafeteria to call for backup. While they
were gone, the crowd broke windows and turned over tables,
(14:51):
and fights broke out both in and around the restaurant.
The police returned and started making arrests and filling the
patti wagons. Prop Damage followed, including a vandalized police car
in a news stand that was burned down. So if
the riot at Compton's Cafeteria had taken place somewhere else
or at a different time, it's entirely possible that it
(15:12):
wouldn't have led to any kind of meaningful change for
the lives of the gay and transgender people who participated
in and afterward. But this was San Francisco. It was
during the nineteen sixties when a number of social movements
were all concurrently striving for change on a number of
different fronts. So it did actually lead to some things
getting better, and we'll talk about that after a brief
(15:36):
break for another word from a sponsor, so to get
back to what happened after the riot. These grassroots efforts
for change in the Tenderloin, which had started in the
weeks and months before the riot, grew stronger in the
wake of it. A few months later, the Central City
Anti Poverty Office opened, and one of its goals was
to improve relations between the gay and transgender communities and
(15:58):
the police. Police started at Elliott Blackstone had been named
a liaison between the police force and homophile organizations as
well as the greater gay community back in nineteen sixty two.
This focus also expanded to include transgender people following the riot.
At first, the transgender community, still at that point described
(16:18):
as drag queens and transsexual since the term transgender had
yet to be coined, was largely left out of this mission.
But Louise Ergestras, a transgender resident of the Tenderloin district,
gave Blackstone a copy of The Transsexual Phenomenon and insisted
that he read it. After he did, he played a
key role in shifting the police force's treatment of the
(16:40):
transgender community, in addition to working towards implementing programs and
services that helped and protected transgender people. He worked to
change the attitudes of the police force. Another program that
started after the riot was the Center for Special Problems,
which was part of the San Francisco Public Health Department.
The Center for Special Problems started a support group, and
(17:03):
it started working towards connecting transgender people with medical care
and other services that they needed. The center also started
issuing identification cards for transgender people, and this sounds minor,
but it was actually a huge deal. Before this, driver's
licenses and other i D could only reflect a person's
gender as it was assigned at their birth, so someone
(17:24):
who had transitioned could not get an ID card that
accurately reflected their identity, and this was not a perfect system.
Using a Center for Special Problems i D meant that
the person who carried it was publicly identified as transgender,
whether he or she wanted to be or not. But
it also meant that people could do things like open
(17:46):
bank accounts and apply for jobs without trying to use what,
by all appearances, looked like someone else's i D card.
Although some of the social movement organizations behind these changes
gradually fizzled out or split into other groups, or otherwise
ended a lot of the programs themselves continued on for
years until they were updated or replaced by other social services. However,
(18:09):
many of the issues that the transgender community faced in
the Tenderloin district in nineteen sixty six persisted, and they
still exist today. In most of the United States, being
transgender is not a protected class, so people can be
fired or refused housing, medical care, or other necessary services
because of their gender expression. Transgender people continue to have
(18:30):
a vastly higher risk of suicide than the general population,
as well as of much greater risk of being the
victim of violent crime. In the mid nineteen seventies, there
was actually a serial killer in the Tenderloin and other
LGBT neighborhoods in San Francisco who killed at least fourteen people,
most of them trans women or drag queens, and was
never apprehended. According to the Hate Violence Report from the
(18:54):
National Coalition of Anti Violence Projects, transgender people are also
more than three times more likely to experience police violence
than the general population. The cafeteria closed in nine. Elliott Blackstone,
who was then retired from the force, was the Grand
Marshal of the San Francisco Pride parade in two thousand six.
A plaque commemorating the riot was installed that same year. So,
(19:20):
as we mentioned at the top of the episode, the
Stonewall riots are so frequently pinpointed is like the start
of the gay rights movement, and this is one of
the violent uprisings that happened before that, when it was
not actually the first. There were also a couple of
similar ones at one was at Cooper's Donuts, which was
a donut shop that was uh uh in a predominantly
(19:42):
gay neighborhood and had a number of gay and transgender
people as its patrons. And there was also another one
that was at a bakery. So several similarly pushing back
against police kind of uh kind of events happened in
the years immediately le ing up to Stonewall, and then
Stonewall is kind of kind of became the big name
(20:04):
out of all of them. Yeah, even when there's any
big historical event, regardless of sort of what issue or
cultural or political thing it's attached to you, it may
be like the touchstone and the focus of a certain
um aspect of like historical telling, but there are usually
a lot of little sort of things leading up to
it that maybe don't always get the light shown on them.
(20:26):
So do you also have a little bit of listener
mail for us today? I do. This is about our
recent episode about time capsules, and it is from Alexa,
and Alexa says, high ladies, long time listener, longtime fan.
Two new history podcasts a week really improved my quality
of life. I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this.
I'm just going to pause for a second. Alexa was
(20:49):
the first and only person to mention conversely to other
corrections we have talked about lately. So she says, I'm
sure I'm not the first to mention this, but I
think I heard a little crossed wires situation in the
time capsule episode. The first Boston time capsule was found
in the Old State House, built in seventeen thirteen. This
(21:11):
building was the seat of colonial government in Massachusetts in
the first state house for the state of Massachusetts. Today,
the Old State House is a museum. The second Paul
Revere time capsule was found in the current Massachusetts State House.
That state House is the current home of the Massachusetts government.
It was built in sev is located on Boston Common
and has the big Gold dome, two different state houses
(21:33):
to time capsules. It's something that confuses Bostonians themselves all
the time. I happen to know that the Old State
House Museum visitors desk often gets calls with people asking
to speak to the Governor's office. It's a hoop to
tell people that the governor has worked in the other
state House since sevent I only mentioned it to be helpful,
not to pick apart what I think is an incredibly
(21:54):
well done podcast. The Old State House is a fascinating
building that often gets overlooked for its more popular Her
Freedom Trail cousins. In nineteen seventy six, Queen Elizabeth the
Second spoke from the Old State House balcony. It's the
side of the Boston massacre and James Otis's argument against
the writs of Assistants. In eighteen thirty five, William Lloyd Garrison,
being chased by an angry mob, found a safe hiding
(22:16):
place in the Old State House. I could go on,
thanks so much for everything, love what you do and
how you do it. Alexia in Boston. Uh, and then
she sends us a very kind note about how having
grown up in Massachusetts, Louis and May Alcott was a
hugely important part of her sense of self, which tell
us talks a little bit about going to Orchard House
(22:37):
UM and a friend of hers who this past ball
got married on the grounds of Fruitlands Museum. So thank
you so much, Alexa for being literally the only person who,
uh who told us about this mistake. That was my fault. Like,
I absolutely thought that both that both the time capsules
(22:57):
were found at the same building, and that that building
was the Old State House, which is the one with
the statues on top, which rights is right by where
the the the massacre happened. Like, I really thought that
they were the same place. Um, in part because the
uh the other state House UM time capsule was found
(23:19):
during a repair and there have just been ongoing repair
projects going on at the Old State House. I definitely
conflated them both together. Uh. I have even literally stood
outside of the Old State House and said to myself,
that's where both those time capsules were found. I was
(23:40):
super duper wrong. I'm so ignorant of like Boston's layout
and it's buildings that no bell rang for me one
way or the other. So no, this is me neither
a I mean a logically, if there's an old state House,
then there is also a new state House. But and yeah,
it did not click for me at any point when
(24:01):
when reading up on the more details of both of
those time castules, it didn't. It never clicked for me
that those were they were actually talking about two different buildings. So, uh,
thank you, Alexa, that was my error. I did not
find this to be nitpicky at all, And I actually loved,
uh learning about all these other things from the old
(24:22):
State House that I did not know about it. For example,
I did not know that it often gets overlooked for
the other stuff that's on the Freedom Trail, um because
it seems like with the Boston massacre site right there,
that people would be like, oh, let's go look at
this too, because it really is basically at the front door. Yeah,
so thank you Alexa for writing to us with that
(24:44):
correction and other cool information. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other episode. Where
at History Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash just the History,
and on Twitter at this History are Tumbler is Missing
History dot tumbler dot com. And we're also on Pinterest
at pinchest dot com slash missed in History. We have
a spreadshirt store MS Industry at spreadshirt dot com, a
(25:06):
little t shirts and phone cases and whatnot. If you
would like to learn a little bit more about what
we talked about today, you can put the word transgender
into our search bar. At our parent company's website, you
will find the article ten Things Doctors Have Reconsidered this Century,
which talks about how the medical ideas surrounding gender expression
(25:28):
and transgender people have changed over the last century. That
is at our parent company's website, how stuff Works dot com.
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com and find show notes for all
our episodes, which is also where we correct stuff when
we get it wrong sometimes uh the uh uh an
archive of every single episode we've ever done another cool stuff.
(25:50):
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or Missed in History
dot com. We're more on this thousands of other topics
because that how stuff works dot com. In
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