Compton's Cafeteria Riot

Christopher Street West SF - 1972

In the streets of the Tenderloin, at Turk and Taylor on a hot August night in 1966, Gays rose up angry at the constant police harassment of the drag-queens by the police. It had to be the first ever recorded violence by Gays against police anywhere. For on that evening when the SFPD paddy wagon drove up to make their “usual” sweeps of the streets, Gays this time did not go willingly. It began when the police came into a cafeteria, still located there at Turk and Taylor, Compton’s, to do their usual job of hassling the drag-queens and hair-fairies and hustlers setting at the table. This was with the permission of management, of course. But when the police grabbed the arm of one of the transvestites, he threw his cup of coffee in the cop’s face, and with that, cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place, and all directed at the police. They retreated outside until reinforcements arrived, and the Compton’s management ordered the place closed, and with that, the Gays began breaking out every window in the place, and as they ran outside to escape the breaking glass, the police tried to grab them and throw them into the paddy wagon, but they found this no easy task for Gays began hitting them “below the belt” and drag-queens smashing them in the face with their extremely heavy purses. A police car had every window broken, a newspaper shack outside the cafeteria was burned to the ground, and general havoc was raised that night in the Tenderloin. The next night drag-queens, hair-fairies, conservative Gays, and hustlers joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow drags back in again. It ended with the newly installed plate glass windows once more being smashed.

The Police Community Relations Unit began mediating the conflict, which was never fully resolved, which ended in a group called VANGUARD being formed of the street-peoples and a lesbian group of street people being formed called the STREET ORPHANS, both of which later became the old GAY LIBERATION FRONT in San Francisco, and is today called the GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE.

So, on Wednesday night, March 8, 1972, at Glide Church, at a meeting called by Reverend Bob Humphries (a huge hulk of a man who resembles the Jolly Green Giant and the lovable Phineas T. Phogg), and the Reverend Raymond RAY Broshears, forty-one persons gathered to make plans for the first ever GAY FREEDOM DAY PARADE and DANCE to be held in the City of Queens, San Francisco. As Reverend Humphries noted the last Sunday in June has become Gay Freedom Day in America and we San Franciscans should join in with a Parade also. The last Sunday in June was the day in 1969 that Gays rose up angry in New York City at a bar called the Stonewall Inn on a street called Christopher and gave the police a taste of what their fellow law officers had received three years earlier in San Francisco, a little GAY PRIDE.

--Gay Pride: The Official Voice of the Christopher Street West Parade ’72 Committee of San Francisco, California