Latest news with #Compton'sCafeteriaRiot
Axios
07-08-2025
- Health
- Axios
How SF became the heart of the trans rights movement
San Francisco kicked off Transgender History Month this week with a flag-raising ceremony that emphasized the urgency of protecting trans rights while serving as a reminder that the city has played a crucial role in advancing the movement. The big picture: SF is believed to be the first U.S. city to officially observe the commemorative month. It began doing so in 2021 after activist Jupiter Peraza led an effort to celebrate the city's rich history of trans pioneers. Between the lines: While trans people in the U.S. continue to face disproportionately high rates of violence, suicidal ideation and homelessness, advocates say these realities do not define the community. Catch up quick: August was designated Transgender History Month to honor the legacy of the Compton's Cafeteria Riot in August 1966, when a trans woman resisted police harassment by throwing a cup of coffee at an officer at Gene Compton's Cafeteria in the Tenderloin. The move sparked a revolt, marking "the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment" in the country — years before the Stonewall Riots, historian Susan Stryker said in a 2015 episode of the "Code Switch" podcast. Flashback: SF has also been the heart of several other pivotal moments in American trans history: In 1965, the San Francisco Department of Public Health established the Center for Special Problems. Led by doctor Joel Fort and trans activist Wendy Kohler, the center provided mental health counseling and hormone prescriptions. It also issued ID cards, signed by a public health doctor, that matched trans people's gender instead of their sex assigned at birth, allowing them to open bank accounts and seek employment in alignment with their identity, per Stryker's book"Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution." Trans activists Jamison Green and Kiki Whitlock, among others, worked with San Francisco's Human Rights Commission to publish a landmark report in 1994 documenting human rights abuses against the trans community. The investigation found that trans people faced significant barriers to obtaining medical and social services, securing stable employment and accessing rape crisis resources and homeless shelters. The document served as the basis for a 1995 city ordinance banning discrimination against trans people. Theresa Sparks made history in 2007 when she was elected president of the San Francisco Police Commission, becoming the first openly trans city department head as well as the highest-ranking trans official. In 2017, three Black trans women — Honey Mahogany, Janetta Johnson and Aria Sa'id — founded Compton's Transgender Cultural District, now known as The Transgender District, the first of its kind in the world, KQED reports.
San Francisco Chronicle
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: At ‘Compton's,' eat pancakes and spark a trans revolution
When you walk through the unassuming doorway under the neon 'Compton's Cafeteria' sign, the first thing you see after the cash register is a pearl-buttoned, baby-blue uniform whose wearer's eyeshadow matches. Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick and Little Richard are playing on the Wurlitzer jukebox. Mustard yellow, burnt orange, chartreuse and tangerine hues bedeck the walls. And almost the moment you're seated, at a table or counter, powdered sugar pancakes, Bob Evans-style sausage links and a cup of decaf coffee materialize before you. Squint just a little at 'Compton's Cafeteria Riot,' the Tenderloin Museum's immersive show I saw Saturday, May 10, and you can imagine what it was like for the sex workers and transgender outcasts for whom Gene Compton's Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor streets was an all-night oasis in the early '60s. The purpose-built venue on Larkin Street, with sugar shakers and ash trays, where one server might tease her hair into a beehive and another might tuck a cigarette behind his ear, suggests the kind of no-frills, last-resort place you might hide out from vengeful johns and power-mad, predatory cops. But in the show — set during a transformative real-life night in August 1966 — the eatery is only an oasis until it isn't. The production, directed by Ezra Reaves and updated from a 2018 run, explores what makes the oppressed decide not to take it any more but fight back, sparking the beginnings of the transgender movement. As a work of theater, 'Compton's' is only intermittently successful. Some actors have the chops and presence to pull focus in an oblong space with few clear sightlines; others suffer from characters who are more mouthpieces than personalities. Lines get mumbled and tossed away. Lip-sync numbers, while helping ensure the show needn't stay grounded in realism, look amateur next to anything you might see at the Stud or Oasis. The script, by Collette LeGrande, Mark Nassar and Donna Personna, suffers from repetition on both the micro and macro level. Individual sentences replay so close together they're crying out for an editor's red pen. And scene after scene returns to the same conflict. Vicki (Matthew Giesecke) thinks Suki (Jaylyn Abergas) outed her as a female impersonator at work because Suki's jealous of Vicki's ability to pass. Activists Dixie (Maurice André San-Chez) and Adrian (Casimir Kotarski) wish everyone could see that internecine conflict is self-defeating. Gus (Steve Menasche), the proprietor just wants everyone to stay calm so the beat cop (Tony Cardoza) doesn't decide to shut him down. It's a well-balanced conflict, but by the time you hear its third or fourth go-round, you can almost predict which character will speak when, and what they'll say. Yet 'Compton's' also shows how all struggles for liberation are interconnected and ongoing. When the transgender characters keep saying that they just want to be able to get a respectable job and have a life like everyone else, you might be reminded of our own era's undocumented immigrants or the latest ban of transgender troops ordered by President Donald Trump. And by the time the Compton's patrons finally revolt, in a balletic fight sequence choreographed by Raisa Donato, passivity is impossible. There's an unhinged crackle in the air. As our narrator, an older Vicki (Robyn Adams) looking back on her younger self, points out, it was the kind of night where 'we were laughing harder than the jokes were funny.' Something was bound to happen then. What will it take for spark to meet fuel today?
