On June 28, 1969, police raids of the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village, set off six days of violent protests that marked a major turning point in the LGBT movement.
Nationwide, preservationists are beginning to think about how to remember and protect places where gay, lesbian, and transgender people socialized and organized, often in secret, and at times violently clashed with law enforcement. “And I see the importance of preserving the built environment in a way that really preserves the history and doesn’t just sort of gesture towards it.” “I see the need for more housing in San Francisco,” said Susan Stryker, a historian who unearthed much of the story of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot and co-directed a 2005 Emmy-winning documentary about it. And this particular fight is exacerbated by San Francisco’s housing crisis: The development would build hundreds of housing units on a historically blighted stretch of corridor in the city, where housing is in critical short supply. In a nation that has only recently started to officially recognize and protect sites of LGBT resistance, this small-scale local battle highlights a broader debate about how a historic landmark should be defined when little of a building’s architecture has survived decades of renovation and wear and tear. Now, 50 years after the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, a group of LGBT activists seeking to preserve the area’s history are rankled by a development that would pave over property where some of those bars long ago stood. Transgender people were outcasts and outlaws virtually everywhere in the early to mid-20th century, but in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, hundreds of them sought refuge in clubs, bars, hotels, and restaurants like Compton’s.
It was three years before the larger, more widely memorialized Stonewall uprising in New York City - and as far as historians know, the first time queer people mounted a violent resistance to police brutality in the United States.
The crowd rallied to her defense, smashing windows and rushing into the streets of San Francisco. Arrests were a common enough occurrence at the time, but the unnamed queen’s response wasn’t: Instead of quietly going to jail, she threw her coffee in his face. In August 1966, a police officer tried to arrest a drag queen in Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood frequented by the city’s transgender population, who were often refused entry to the city’s gay bars.