SYMHC Classics: The Compton's Cafeteria Riot

This episode reached back to 2015 for some LGBTQ history. 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 community.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the
Stonewall Riots, which started on June and continued into the
twenty nine. We have talked about Stonewall in a couple
of past episodes, and for today's classic, we're talking about
one of its precursors, the Compton's Cafeteria Riots of nineteen
sixty six. This episode originally came out in and we

(00:24):
were a little less careful with some of our language
than we would be if we were talking about it today,
particularly with terms like prostitute and pattiwagon, which we would
be more likely to say sex worker and police band.
There's not really a great other term to replace that
second one, So enjoy. Welcome to stuff you missed in

(00:46):
history class, the production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast contrac 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

(01:08):
rights movement in the United States, and is, as is
really often the case, kind of an oversimplification. The Stonewall
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,

(01:30):
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, 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 as

(01:51):
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 to

(02:14):
talk about it has really evolved a lot since the
time that we are talking about. The word transgender wasn't
coined until 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 this term in

(02:36):
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 stressors, transgender women, and gay men,

(02:57):
we're not going to try to specifically name everyone 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 and they refer to specific

(03:19):
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. So those are

(03:41):
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 were

(04:01):
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 of what

(04:23):
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 a physically

(04:46):
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 Rshfield coined the
word transvestite in nten, and today most of us think
of this in terms of cross dressing, but at the

(05:07):
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.

(05:31):
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

(05:51):
to San Francisco or to World War Two. It happened
in other ports 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

(06:13):
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

(06:35):
at least some doctors a better idea of how to
work with lesbian, gay, and transgender patients. In nineteen 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.

(06:56):
We would call them uh sex reassignment surgeries or gender
comp formation 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

(07:17):
their gender 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

(07:37):
from all over 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 have changed their physical body from
the sex that they were assigned at birth. A number

(07:58):
of mass market novels that related to ideas of cross
dressing and gender identity were published, and 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

(08:20):
nineteen sixty six, 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 earth 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

(08:41):
sixty six. Although 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

(09:04):
to the work of 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 lead to
what has become known as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot. And
we're going to talk about this riot specifically after a

(09:25):
brieford from a sponsor, 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

(09:46):
to many of the city's trag queens, transgender people, gay men,
and others who just didn't fit into conventional ideas of
gender expression and sexual orientation. 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.

(10:08):
There were high crime rates and a thriving and not
particularly safe industry of vice. Often the police force in
the Tenderloin seemed more interested in taking advantage of the
situation than actually helping to protect 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,

(10:31):
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, 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,

(10:53):
they turned to sex work as a last resort, and
for many many reasons, this was inherently dangerous. In addition
of the risks of sexually transmitted disease or being arrested
or jailed, the people soliciting prostitutes in the Tenderloin weren't
necessarily looking for someone whose outward appearance, when closed, did
not match up with their physical sex. Transgender sex workers

(11:15):
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 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

(11:36):
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, raped, or murdered because of
how they behaved and how they were dressed. Conditions were
bad enough that in nineteen sixty five, Tenderloin residents launched

(11:56):
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 many anti
poverty programs were targeted towards racial and ethnic minorities, but
the population of the Tenderloin district was predominantly white. There

(12:18):
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, which is
a popular gathering place for the gay community drag queens
and transgender people into Tenderloin. It was a twenty four

(12:38):
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 transpeople and drag
queens used to change their clothes. So it's basically a convenient, centralized,
and relatively safe location for people to congregate twenty four

(12:59):
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 Cafeteria were there because they had
nowhere else to go. Other restaurants, clubs, and hotels wouldn't

(13:19):
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 basically a hangout for this particular crowd.
Staff started trying to discourage the ongoing hanging out by

(13:42):
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 selectively.
The people who saw it on their bills were mostly
the most obvious gay and transgender people who frequented these ablishment.
In the summer of nineteen sixty six, management and staff

(14:04):
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 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

(14:27):
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 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,

(14:48):
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
over 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

(15:10):
did happen, and we know that it happened in August
of nineteen 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 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

(15:31):
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,
and fights broke out both in and around the restaurant.
The police returned and started making arrests and filling the
Patti wagons. Property damage followed, including a vandalized police car

(15:54):
in a news stand that was burned down. So if
the riot at Compton's Cafe area had taken place somewhere
else or at a different time, it's entirely possible that
it 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

(16:17):
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 break for another word from a sponsor. So to

(16:38):
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 the police. Police Sergeant Elliott Black's Stone had been

(17:00):
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 as drag queens and transsexual since the
term transgender had yet to be coined, was largely left

(17:23):
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 transgender community. In addition to working towards
implementing programs and services that helped and protected transgender people,

(17:47):
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 Session Special Problems has
started a support group and it started working towards connecting
transgender people with medical care and other services that they needed.

(18:08):
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 who had transitioned could not get an ID
card that accurately reflected their identity, and this was not

(18:31):
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 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

(18:54):
organizations behind these changes gradually fizzled out or split into
other groups or otherwise and did a lot of the
programs themselves continued on for years until they were updated
or replaced by other social services. However, many of the
issues that the transgender community faced in the Tenderloin District
in nineteen sixty six persisted, and they still exist today.

(19:16):
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 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

(19:37):
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 National Coalition of Anti
Violence Projects, transgender people are also more than three times

(19:59):
more likely to experienced police violence than the general population.
The cafeteria closed in nine two. Elliott Blackstone, who was
then retired from the force, was the Grand Marshal of
the San Francisco Pride Parade in two thousand and six.
A plaque commemorating the riot was installed that same year. So,

(20:19):
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 in

(20:40):
a predominantly 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 leading up to Stonewall, and
then Stonewall has kind of kind of became the big

(21:02):
name out of all of them. Thank you so much
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
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something similar over the course of today's episode, since it
is from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff

(21:24):
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(21:46):
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