Proto-Stonewall: The Compton's Cafeteria Riot [Something Interesting #59] [Pride Month 2025 #2]

Alex Bemish
9 hours ago
2 min read

Stonewall is often the key event when talking about LGBTQ+ rights here in the United States but there was an equally important event that happened three years earlier in San Francisco: the Compton's Cafeteria riot:

Compton's management didn't want the cafeteria to be a popular late-night hangout for drag queens, trans women and hustlers. Workers would often call the police at night to clear the place out. The Tenderloin, where sex work, gambling, and drug use were commonplace, was one of only a few neighborhoods where trans women and drag queens could live openly. Yet they were still regularly subject to police harassment and arrested for the crime of "female impersonation."

And when a policeman in Compton's grabbed a drag queen, she threw a cup of coffee in his face. The cafeteria "erupted," according to Susan Stryker, a historian who directed Screaming Queens. People flipped tables and threw cutlery. Sugar shakers crashed through the restaurant's windows and doors. Drag queens swung their heavy purses at officers. Outside on the street, dozens of people fought back as police forced them into paddy wagons. The crowd trashed a cop car and set a newsstand on fire.

"We just got tired of it," [Amanda] St. Jaymes told Stryker. "We got tired of being harassed. We got tired of being made to go into the men's room when we were dressed like women. We wanted our rights."

- from Nicole Pasulka's NPR article "Ladies In The Streets: Before Stonewall, Transgender Uprising Changed Lives"

Sidelined since the primary participants were transgender, there's been a lot more talk about this event during the past decade primarily due to Susan Stryker's documentary Screaming Queens that its now becoming more central to the larger story on queer rights. For this Something Interesting, I'm collecting numerous takes here about the event to provide a larger picture of what happened. If Stonewall is your go-to starting point for Pride, I'd recommend brushing up on this event and other protests like it (like the Cooper Do-Nuts riot in 1959) to expand your scope.