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Yes, it was my selection to pass along Olivia to help us with, but this is a listener suggestion. This came from Gigi Cowlin. Nice. And big thanks to Gigi because I, and I'm sure you will agree with me, found that not only is the story of the Comptons cafeteria riot interesting in and of itself. But the larger story or a part of the story is the fact that how we preserve history because Compton's cafeteria riot happened in 1966 and was almost lost to history.

Yeah, I agree with all that. Which is.

Crazy to think about. Something that happened in 1966 in San Francisco could be lost to history. But it almost was, if not for the efforts of one Susan Stryker.

One person.

Yeah, this may have really gone away.

Oh, totally. I mean, it had gone away, and she managed to clutch together a bunch of different tiny little scraps of mentions of it, or the neighborhood, and just over the years, cobbled together all this little stuff and finally got an idea of it and was able to corroborate it. It was Gonsville until Susan Stryker came along.

Yeah, and we'll talk about what Susan Stryker did with this information. But hats off to you, Susan Stryker, and to Gigi. Here we go with the Almost Forgotten Compton's cafeteria riot story.

Yeah, and the reason why it's significant that it's almost forgotten, or it was forgotten for a while is that the Stonewall Uprising, which was a really great episode we did on that, too, that's considered the watershed moment of gay rights in history. The riot at the Stonewall Inn, that was it. That was what started it all. The thing is, when you think of things that way, it erases the stuff that came before that. One of the things that came before Stonewall was the Compton's cafeteria riot in San Francisco in 1966. There wasn't a lot of difference between the two. It was a reaction and a response to police harassment that had been building over the time. It was a multiracial group of LGBTQ people fighting back against the police. It spilled out into the streets. It bore striking resemblance to Stonewall. And yet, like you said, there are reasons that we'll talk about that. It was just pushed into the dustbin of history.

Yeah, it's very interesting. So as a way of setting this up, we'll talk a little bit about the area at the time in San Francisco called the Tenderloin. This is in the 1960s. The Tenderloin has long had a reputation, and even still does today in some ways. In the '60s, it was a place where you could go buy drugs or deal drugs. You could go do some illegal gambling. You could get involved in sex work on either side. It was a neighborhood that didn't have a lot of money, and it was a neighborhood that attracted transients, teenagers, namely, who were either run out of their hometown because they were LGBTQ, or maybe even run out of their family, or maybe even run out of a different neighborhood in San Francisco to collect in the tenderloin where they could turn to sex work because they couldn't get other jobs, and they could turn to each other for support and community.

Yeah, community developed of essentially what one of the people Susan Stryker interviewed described as the lowest drawing on the ladder of not just society, including LGBTQ society at the time. These were unhoused, teenage, street trans people. They had no rights. They had no respect from anybody. Yet they still came together and looked out for one another and formed that community you were talking about. But they lived in really dire straits day to day, and yet they still formed that community. The reason why they all ended up in the Tenderloin is because there was a few square block section of the Tenderloin that that was the only place they could live. Even there, they got harassed. But if they strayed out of it, they were beaten. You couldn't leave that area if you were trans in San Francisco at the time. I think Susan Stryker compared it to a ghetto, essentially. That was a trans ghetto in San Francisco in the '60s.

That's right. And just the myriad people that were interviewed from the time, it's clear that the cops basically could do whatever they wanted in there. They could arrest someone for, quote-unquote, female impersonation. One was arrested, I believe, Amanda St. James, who was a trans woman there, ran a residential hotel, was arrested for obstructing the sidewalk. I saw in this documentary that we're going to talk about later, any cross dressing or drag, they could arrest you for having the buttons on your shirt on what they deemed the wrong side because traditionally, the buttons on men and women's shirts and clothing is reversed. I never understood why. Was it to draw a distinction between the two when you're shopping?

I think it's just to be difficult.

It may be a short stuff at some point, but they would say like, Oh, no, your buttons are on the wrong side. You're impersonating a female. So let me crack your skull and throw you in a jail cell where you will be abused more by fellow inmates and by the people who ran the jail.

Yeah, and one of the reasons that this group of people were in such a pickle was not just because there was a small area of the world that they could leave. It's that they couldn't even work because they couldn't get ID that reflected their gender, the gender they identified with. If they wanted to work as the gender they didn't identify with, they could just go back to their family that kicked them out in the first place. So the to be themselves, to live as themselves as the way that they were who they were, they really suffered and paid for it and were very poor, resorted to sex work almost across the board unless you were really good at singing and dancing and you could make a living that way. Even those people who were successful at entertaining very frequently were stuck in the area of the tenderloin, too. It was a tough position to be in. Just the fact that they're like, Well, if I want to be myself, it sucks that society treats me this way, but I'm going to be myself. You really have to respect that.

Oh, yeah, totally. Within this community, there was a place called Compton's Caferia, which provided a haven late at night. So it was at 101 Taylor Street right there in the Tenderloin. And it was a restaurant, and it was one of quite a few in San Francisco. It was a small chain, local chain. Started up by a man named Jean Compton in the 1940s. This one opened in '54, and it became a gathering place for these people late at night who are unwelcomes even at gay bars. It was very centrally located. It was clean. It was open 24 hours. It was well lit. It was a place where they could go and have coffee after they got done with work or doing whatever they were doing late at night. And what I really wanted, more than anything, when I was learning about this story was I wanted to learn that Compton's cafeteria was a bright spot in the haven where the owners would run the cops off and let these people do as they would and live in peace. Sadly, that was not the case. I didn't get the idea that they were just completely unwelcome there, but they did call the cops here and there over the years, and the cops would come down there and run them out.

So that was one disappointing spot for me. But that's what happened, so that's the way we have to report it.

Still, even having to face that, like Compton's was the place you went to because like I was saying, even in the LGBTQ community, the trans community and the Tenderloin were not well thought of. They couldn't even go into the gay bars in the Tenderloin. They were limited also in where they could go. But one of those places they could go was at Compton's cafeteria and go be themselves. You could check in on one another. You could give each other tips to steer clear of this guy in this car thing. Despite the setbacks and drawbacks of going there, it was a place that they could go. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and it was also a time we mentioned that they couldn't even go into certain gay bars. It was a time where the LGBTQ community was starting to organize a little bit. I'm starting to speak up a little bit for the most basic rights you could imagine. It was through the lens, though, of what were called homophile organizations. One was called the Mattasheen Society, these organizations where they were gay people, but they were like, Hey, listen, I'm middle class. I have a great job. I am gay, and I just don't want to be harassed. They were organizing, but it wasn't like... It wasn't like the kids on the streets, and they weren't rattle-rousing, they weren't radical. In fact, within homophile organizations, there were often disputes between some of the middle-aged, more, not well-healed, but sometimes well-healed people disagreeing with people in their own communities, some of these younger kids that were more radical, they're like, We don't even want you in our group anymore.

Right, yeah. And those homophile groups, they were the ones that had the connections to, say, the press, or they had a working relationship with the police department. They were trying to show the rest of society. They were respectable people living respectable lives. And so being inclusive of unhoused trans teenagers who were also sex workers, it didn't really stand up to their argument. They just pretended they weren't there. They excluded and they kept them out. But what's cool is those same unhoused, teenage, trans sex workers, they were like, Well, we'll go organize ourselves. They were really, really fortunate to have in the neighborhood a couple of blocks away from Comptons, a place called Glybe Memorial Methodist Church, probably one of the more progressive churches in the United States of all time. Yeah, I think so. There was a Reverend named Cecil Williams. He was a civil rights movement vet, and he was very much interested in supporting these trans kids who were just getting abused one way or another by every quarter of society. He helped them organize, actually. They organized into an organization called vangard.

That's right. Cesa Williams is still alive, my friend.

Oh, yeah.

He's 94 years old.

I saw footage of him preaching, and he looked pretty cool.

Yeah. That church was there, and like you said, just to have any formal organization on your side for these kids who are trying to radicalize the movement was a really, really big deal. So Vancard had formed in '65, and through the church and through Cecil, Williams, and vangard, they eventually would help get the Tenderloin recognized as a war on poverty target district in May of 66. Usually when these districts were recognized, they were impoverished communities, and usually racism was at the core of what they were facing. But these kids basically stood up with Cisa Williams, and they're like, Well, no, we're suffering the same way. And so we should be recognized thusly. And they were in May of 1966.

Yeah, that was a big deal to get those grants. And they ended up there was like a center for the kids living on the street. There was a van that doled out medical services. It had a pretty good effect, as we'll see. You said that there were times when Compton's cafeteria would call the police on their patrons, their transpatrons. Apparently, that really picked up after Vancard, after it became clear that these trans kids weren't just keeping to themselves as much as they could, that they were starting to have a little bit of self-respect, that they were organizing, that they were getting political. That's apparently when it really started to step up. Vancard, I think, at one point, picketed outside of Comptons. That was one of the things that they did. That was a month or so before the riot happened. You've got these trans kids organizing, starting to have a certain amount of self-esteem and self-respect that's coming out of their community. That usually leads to pushback from establishment, and that's what happened.

That sounds like a great place for a break, my friend.

Thank you.

All right, well, Josh set it up perfectly, and we'll be right back to knock them down right after this.

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So this is how Lost to Time, the Compton Caferia riot has been, is they're not even positive still what the exact date was. Yeah. Stryker did a lot of research, Susan Stryker, who we mentioned and who we'll talk a lot more about in this segment. Eventually, Stryker narrowed it down to August 27th, which was the last Saturday of that month. But we can safely say it was in August of 1966, probably late August, very early in the morning, as in Saturday leading into Sunday. And the story is a lot like you said, it's a lot like Stonewall. The police get called in because things are rowdy. The police get there, start being very physically aggressive with these people. And then one of them threw coffee in one of the cop's faces. And it was on after that, basically. It went downhill pretty fast. Other patrons joined in. The cops started fighting back. The cops eventually go outside and retreat, wait for reinforcements. The management closed the place up, and the people inside started breaking the windows. They started trashing the place. They flipped the tables over. They started wrecking it. And the cops showed up en masse to deal with about 60 people or so that fought the police with their purses and throwing high heels.

I think they destroyed a police car by the end of the night and set a new stand on fire. I saw.

Chuck, I saw potentially hundreds of people, like the the nearby hotels drained, the bars drained. It got serious after they left Comptons.

Yeah, so unsurprisingly, some of them were successfully arrested and taken to jail. And Comptons, for their part, basically said, from now on, they called them drag queen patrons at the time, said, You're not allowed here anymore. No more gay hustlers. Apparently, there were pickets after that. The ensuing days were a mess. Some people would still go down and picket. They wouldn't be allowed in the restaurant. They started closing at midnight instead of being 24-7. And just closed, I think, like five years after that permanently.

Yes. But it had immediate effects. First of all, it took that sense of organizing among the trans kids and the tenderloin. It bolstered it. It gave them a feeling like, Oh, we actually can make things happen together, even if it was violent in the face of police violence. Apparently, it had an effect that the police stopped so casually harassing or beating or even kidnapping the trans kids in the Tenderloin immediately after that. There was an immediate effect.

Yeah, for sure. They ended up having an ally in a community relations cop named Elliot Blackstone, who basically was like, I would like to help you folks out. I'm going to advocate for an end to these anti-cross-dressing laws, so you won't get harassed for dressing how you want to dress. I'm going to help you get the services that you need. Eventually, a public health unit called the Center for Special Problems started offering their support as well, including getting IDs that reflected their gender identities, which is what you're talking about that kept a lot of them from getting jobs, and that allowed many of them to go get legal work and they could leave sex work behind. Yeah.

I mean, it had a significant impact, especially considering that it was forgotten really quickly after that. That it was also given credit for establishing the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, which is a support group for trans people, probably the first one in history. It was a place where if you needed a place to stay, they could tell you who to go ask. They could help you fill out applications for hormones and tell you what doctor to go to. It was a mail drop for some people who had just showed up and didn't have a place to live yet. Basically, everything that supported unhoused trans kids in the Tenderloin in the late '60s, the canceling unit did. Again, this Compton's cafeteria riot is directly responsible for not just saying like, Hey, we have these needs that are being completely unmet, where the police are beating us with impunity anytime they feel like it. I read one story where this kid had just shown up to San Francisco, and one of the first things he saw was another kid laying on the street in agony saying his ribs were broken. The kid who just gotten to San Francisco was like, Well, we got to call the police.

The kid with his rib broke and said, The police are the ones that did this to me. That guy, I think he was one of the vangard founders, he's like that, just crystallized the situation for him almost immediately. But in responding to that with violence, it's sad that it took violence, but they finally stood up and said, No, we're done putting up with this. And that actually had a positive impact in drawing attention to their needs and then getting the city to start responding to those needs, or at the very least, recognizing that they exist.

Yeah, absolutely. Boy, it would be a kettle of fire as an episode, but I wonder if one day we could tackle protests, nonviolent and violent protests through the years because it is a fraught topic.

Supposedly, I don't know where I saw this, but I think I just saw it today, something like 59 % of nonviolent organizations or nonviolent movements succeed in their goals, but only a quarter of violent movements do. Usually, you want to back the nonviolent ones if you're betting on outcomes of civil movements.

We mentioned forgetting about the riot and how that could happen in 1966, not even that long ago, relatively speaking. Historically speaking, I guess I should say. And how does that happen? And here's how that happens. No one really wrote about it, even in San Francisco. The straight publications didn't write about it, and largely the gay publications didn't even write about it much. I believe there were a couple of members of the local gay community who wrote about it. A gentleman named Raymond Brosheer wrote about it in the 1972. This is five years later.

He was a local, very radical reverend who was also gay. I think he was a vangard founder, too.

He wrote about it in the 1972, Gay Pride Program, just in a program for a gay Pride event. Then a drag queen at the time named Sandy Green mentioned it, just mentioned it in a letter to the editor. Again, this is six years later. I'm sorry, five years later, I guess. Seven. Seven years.

Wow. That's pretty bad.

We got there. The 73 issue of Gay Pride Quarterly. But it wasn't even remembered in the LGBTQ community in San Francisco. Forget about the rest of San Francisco or America at large. And the question is, why did Stonewall become the thing? And there's a few reasons. One is that it was in New York and it was the center of publishing, so that certainly didn't hurt- That's a big reason. -in media. Another is that these homophile groups that we talked about in that short three-year span from '66 to '69 started to model themselves a little bit more after things like the Black power movement and the women's rights movement, and were a little more activist and action-oriented than they were before when they were just in '66 saying like, Can we just have rights like everyone else? They got a little more aggressive.

I saw it put in that there was more kindling. They were just starting to bring the kindling out at the time of the Compton riots. But by the time Stonewall happened, there's a lot more kindling to go up.

Totally. That's another really big reason.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff. Also, I think the fact that it was almost purposefully, if not purposefully ignored or just relegated to the sidelines by the larger LGBTQ community in San Francisco because it was a riot. That really, again, doesn't gybe with the idea that, Hey, we're just respectable middle-class Americans who want to live a quiet, respectable life and be left alone. Rioting doesn't really coincide with that. When you put all those things together, it definitely makes sense that the Compton's cafeteria riot was lost to history. The fact that it was written about in just two places, or it was mentioned directly, is really significant. It really underscores what Susan Stryker did when she came up with, I guess, the detective work of putting the whole thing together.

I think that's another great spot for a break.

Oh, man, I didn't even mean to do that.

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Back in, I think, the early 90s, maybe even '91, Susan Stryker, she was wrapping up her PhD at UC Berkeley. She was a trained historian. At the same time, she was also transitioning to a woman. This is 1991, so she's basically like, I might as well not even apply for jobs in academia because I'm not going to get one because I'm trans. Instead, she started volunteering. She wanted to put her historian chops to work, and she decided to volunteer at the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in San Francisco in the Castro. It was there that I think she first came across that 1972 Gay Pride parade program that Ray Brochiers wrote that mentioned the Comptons riot. And she's like, What is this guy even talking about?

Six years later. I think I said four.

Eight. Ninety-two.

Just terrible. When you see this documentary that I promise you were about to name it, Susan Stryker is struck by the fact that she was just like, I couldn't believe what I was reading, almost. How did I not know about this? I'm an active member of this community, and everyone knows about Stonewall. How did I not even know this?

Well, she questioned that it might not have even been a thing, or if it was a thing, that brochiers was maybe blowing it up out of proportion.

Yeah, but in '66, obviously way pre-internet, there's traditional media. And if traditional media didn't cover it at all, the only thing you're left with is people and oral history. So that's what Stryker did. She at first tried to go to city archivists to look for police records and arrest records, and the archivists said, In the '60s and '70s, they basically shredded and burned a lot of stuff because of police misconduct. So we don't have anything for that period or that event at least. And so Susan Stryker was like, All right, I guess I got to start finding people, like literal humans, who were either there or were nearby and knew about it firsthand. And that was really hard to do. I mean, all of a sudden, it's like real detective work going on. On, because Susan Stryker is having to track these people down, these people that were living on the margins 50 years ago, I guess at the time, about 40 years ago. Oh, no, less than that, 30 something years ago. I'm trying to think something like that. And there were plenty of different stories. In one story, she found a trans woman who was a cook at Comptons but was put in a men's prison, was not allowed an interview, and ended up dying before Susan Stryker could speak to her.

She thought about writing a book and ultimately said, You know what? I think this should be... It'll get to more people if I make a documentary out of this. So at long last, we can say that the name of the documentary that Susan Stryker, along with Victor Silverman, made was called Screaming Queens, colon, the riot at Comptonons Cafeteria in 2005, which I watched on YouTube. That was great. In full, it's under an hour. It's like 55, 56 minutes, but it's also dramatized, which I have not seen, but I'm going to check it out tonight. Netflix's show, Tale of the City in 2019 that I believe, Elliot Page stars in?

Oh, is that right?

I think I saw Elliot Page in the cast, but I didn't dive too deeply yet.

There's an unsung history podcast episode that interviews Susan Stryker, and she goes into detail about putting this whole history together. It's thrilling, actually. It turns out one of her cohorts at the Gaines, Lesbian, and Historical Society was a geographer and helped create a map of this vanished area in the Tenderloin together. She started to have a visual idea of where these things were happening. When she was able to finally talk to people who were there, she knew that this thing actually had happened because she didn't say, Hey, here's all this stuff I found out. Is this right? She was like, Have you ever heard of this? Then they would give her all the same information that she already had. She knew that she was definitely onto something. Interesting. It's definitely worth checking out. It's a great episode. Definitely watch Screamin' Queens, too. The name, I think, Chuck, was in that there's an initial newsreel about the Tenderloin, the Red Light district down there. They mentioned how Compton's cafeteria recently had to start closing at midnight, and they chalked it up to a sidewalk fight between screaming queens, is how they put it. They just basically made it sound like it was a catfight that got out of hand.

The police weren't even involved. That's how they explained how Compton started closing at midnight. Even then, this is an old newsreel. Even when right after it happened, it was being ignored.

Yeah, that's really hard to believe, but also easy to believe in some ways, sadly. So these days, you can still go over to 101 Taylor Street. That building is still there. It is obviously not the restaurant any longer. It is still a home for many trans people, and the Tenderloin itself still has that spirit and undercurrent there. It's how San Francisco has treated both this area and this riot is really interesting for a progressive city because they haven't done the right thing in many cases over the years. Some people have tried. In 2015, there was a developer called Group I that proposed building a hotel and retail project there with a nonprofit space a couple of blocks away from the location at Comptons. And different people were on board within the gay community. And then we're like, No, I don't think we should do this here because it's a historical area and we should just preserve it as that. And I think that's just like a lot of people are fighting back against that in general in San Francisco, no matter what the cause.

Yeah, for sure. So they finally, I guess they went along with it or it just was going to happen one way or another. But they got some concessions out of the developer and the city. And one of the things that came out of it was that the area on Taylor Street that Compton's cafeteria used to be along, they renamed it Jean Compton's Cafeteria Way. At first, everybody was like, Okay, that's a compromise because we wanted it called Compton's Caferia riot, I guess, Way. The city was like, No, we're not putting Rowet on an actual official street sign. They said, well, we'll call it Jean Compton's Caferia Way. Then later on, they're like, no, actually, that's a terrible name for because it commemorates one of the people who was anti-trance, who kicked us out of his cafeteria routinely. Why would we want to commemorate him? We want to commemorate this uprising instead. And they finally changed it to... What did they change it to?

Well, they dropped the name Comptons because they didn't want to honor someone who they said would frequently call the cops on them.

Right. So I can't remember what they named it. I think might be like Transgender Corridor Way or something like that. And the reason why is because there's a transgender cultural district there now. And do you remember our colleague, she was a trans woman, Raquelle Willis, I guess.

Oh, yeah, sure. I read an article about this new cultural district that she wrote in, I think, Out magazine. It's pretty good. That's great.

Yeah, I thought it was awesome. Yeah, I thought it was great, too. So it's probably the first transgender cultural district in the entire world, and it's very appropriately in the Tenderloin because this is where a lot of the ground zero was for the trans community in America. And this cultural district has, I think, an entrepreneurial incubator. It helps people looking for housing and jobs. It's everything that you would want as a start for a community that's just now starting to have its needs met. That's great.

I think so, too.

What if when the city said, We can't have the name right on a street sign, what if they were like, What about Quiet riot Boulevard on Russian Hill? You're awfully quiet about that one.

Is there really a Quiet Rowate Boulevard?

I got.

You for a while. Okay. The fact that you placed it in Russian Hill is what got me. That was well done.

Oh, thank you.

Very well done.

All right.

Okay, well, if you want to know more about the Compton's Keftyrian riot, definitely go watch Screaming Queens, and go listen to that episode of Unsung History. Thanks a lot, Gigi, for the idea. Great one. Since I thank Gigi, that means it's time for Listen or Mail.

Yeah, and you know that makes the overall gullible score, Josh with 463, Chuck won.

Hey, at least it's not a big goose egg for you.

I got points on the board.

That was a sports metaphor.

That's right. Followed byFollowing a quiet riot shout, which is probably not something you expected to hear in this podcast.

No, but they hold up.

All right, I'm going to call this the hand-burger. Quite frankly, the only reason I'm reading it is because of that word, because I think it's hysterical what this guy says. This from Danny, Hey, guys, just finished to the latest episode. And the listener, Male, Sam mentioned he was hesitant to try the show because the title of the show sounded condescending, as if it was suggesting that he should already know certain things at this point in his life. I've heard you mentioned this about other people. It always cracks me up because that's exactly why I started listening. It started about seven years ago. The person I was dating at the time would constantly poke fun and belittle me for not knowing certain things. That's abuse. Huh?

That's abuse.

It is abuse. One day, I literally typed stuff you should know into Google, hoping to find a list of things that I ought to know. Awesome. True story is what this guy says. What I found instead, thank God, was your show. Admittedly, it took me a while to realize you two weren't simply performing a public service to the world, informing idiot boyfriends of their obvious knowledge gaps and remedying the situation. It probably wasn't until the Jack cameras episode that I asked myself, Should I really know this?

That's.

Abuse, too. That is Danny. This is the best part, though. Needless to say, but I'm going to say it anyways, the relationship did not work out. What I learned, though, is that everyone has some knowledge gaps. So what if I thought it was a hand burger rather than a hamburger?

I think that's important.

There's no ham and you eat it with your hands is what Danny says.

It makes sense, but everyone else calls it a hamburger.

Or a steamed ham.

A steamed ham, right.

I'm only going to call them hand burgers from now on, though.

Yeah, because he makes a really good case for why you would call it a hamburger.

Or that I didn't know IV stood for intravenous. What am I? Doctor? Who gives a rip?

I like Danny. I like this guy, yeah.

All that to say, thanks for doing what you do, guys, for teaching me stuff I want to know, as well as some things I probably should know. Keep it up until the bitter end, Danny.

Thanks a lot, Danny. That was an excellent email. We're glad that you're on board.

I wonder what Danny thought Ivy's did for. I don't know. Or if it was like Ivy or something. Right.

He's like, Four.

Like, Why are you going to put Ivy in my arm?

Where was I? Oh, yeah. If you want to be like Danny and send us a rocking email, we would love to hear from you. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

Stuff you should know.

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Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A brand new historical true crime podcast. When you lay suffering a sudden, brutal death. Starring Allison Williams. I hope you'll think of me. Erased the murder of Elma Sands. She was a.

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If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to The Middle.

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