Compton's Cafeteria Riot Site

Gene Compton's Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor streets was an all-night Tenderloin diner used by trans women and drag queens who had few other places to go. One night in August 1966, the exact date unrecorded, a police officer grabbed a trans woman inside. She threw her coffee in his face and the room fought back: crockery flew, windows broke and a police car was damaged. It is the first known collective trans and queer uprising against police in US history, three years before Stonewall. The story was largely forgotten until Susan Stryker's documentary Screaming Queens (2005). A sidewalk plaque marks the corner, and the area is now the Compton's Transgender Cultural District.