The Coffee Cup That Started a Riot

On this corner of the Tenderloin, in August of nineteen sixty six, an all night cafeteria called Compton's became the site of what historians now call the first known collective uprising by queer people against police harassment in American history, three years before the far more famous riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York.

Compton's stayed open late and served the Tenderloin's transgender women and drag queens, who had few other places willing to serve them at all. On the night in question, police arrived and tried to arrest one of the transgender women inside. When an officer grabbed her, she threw her cup of coffee directly in his face, and the room went off like a switch had been thrown. Patrons grabbed sugar shakers, plates, and furniture and hurled them at the police. The fight spilled out onto the sidewalk here, where a police car had its windows smashed and a nearby newsstand was set on fire.

No one wrote it down as it happened. There was no television coverage, no newspaper reporter standing on the corner, which is part of why the exact date has been lost to history even though the event itself was remembered clearly by the people who lived through it. It took decades, and the research of historian Susan Stryker, for Compton's riot to take its place in the official record of the gay rights movement, alongside Stonewall rather than forgotten beneath it. The cafeteria itself is gone, but this stretch of Turk and Taylor Streets is now marked as the birthplace of transgender resistance in the United States, a corner where women with almost nothing left to lose decided they had lost enough.