The Compton’s Cafeteria riot

[Shana A]

The Compton's Cafeteria riot
by Autumn Sandeen
Published Thursday, 07-Oct-2010 in issue 1189

http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=17476

"This is gay San Francisco. An inside look at the life of San Francisco's homosexuals. They number 90,000— at least according to police department figures. They work to hide their sexual orientation by day, and only at night do they show their true colors.
The city's downtown Tenderloin District is the home ground of the always visible segment of the city's homosexuals and ->-bleeped-<-s. The drag queens are here at Turk and Taylor.
So frequent were the fights between screaming queens in the 2 to 3 a.m. period that police — even in permissive San Francisco — had had enough, and asked an all night cafeteria to close by midnight."
So began the 2005 documentary "Screaming Queens; The Riot at the Compton's Cafeteria." It's a documentary of an event that transgender historian Susan Stryker described as the "first queer uprising" in the United States.