What does the Riot at Compton's Cafeteria Mean?
Marcus de Maria Arana
I will always be grateful to the courageous transwomen and their allies for fighting back, and to the heroic SFPD Officer who came forward to help raise awareness of their plight. Thank you for giving us so much, at a time when your effort was not widely praised for its proper place in the venerated history of civil rights movements. Compton's Cafeteria Riot was the birthplace of the transgender rights movement in America!
Gayle Roberts
The 40th Anniversary of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood provides the transgender community an opportunity recovers lost history, celebrate community leaders and allies, inspire a new generation and share our challenges and achievements with a broader audience. Compton’s gives my life a frame of reference, a horizon that helps ground my actions within a larger historical civil rights struggle. Compton’s helps demonstrate how far we have come, and how much farther we have to go, until the day when each of us—transgender or not—is free to choose our own destiny.
Jamison Green
There are many reasons why it's important to commemorate Compton 's Cafeteria and the events of the summer of 1966, but two reasons stand out as most important from my perspective. First is to recognize the fact that trans and genderqueer people have been clearly engaged in the struggle for their civil rights and social safety for much longer than most people (including the mainstream LGB communities) realize, and to honor those brave individuals who fought back against oppression and those who tried to work within the system to help trans and genderqueer people find dignity and receive respect. And second is to reclaim the history that has been obscured from all of us.
By placing a commemorative plaque on the corner of Turk and Taylor, where Gene Compton's Cafeteria once stood, and where the first known transgender uprising against police harassment took place 40 years ago, we reclaim the memories that were ignored by the press, and lost within the civic records of the time. For far too long, trans people and genderqueer people have been told we don't matter, told that we are insignificant mutants whose existence ravages the neat, clean categories into which human beings are theoretically supposed to fit. Our voices have been silenced and our resistance ignored because we were supposed to go away and stop troubling the “normal” people, the people who “matter.” It is important to commemorate Compton's Cafeteria and the anger, desperation and defiance that took place here because to remember is a symbol of our hope and determination, of our endurance, and, above all, of our collective courage to be ourselves and to care about each other.
Martin Rawlings-Fein
Connecting with the past continues to be of the utmost importance to me. When I first saw Susan Stryker's documentary Screaming Queens and heard the stories of struggle and triumph I thought about how hard it must have been to be transgender 40 years ago. Comparing the Compton's Cafeteria era to today, where California has the most protections for transgender people, we need to remember how we came to this time and place. We need to remember the people who struggled to make the road a little less rocky for those of us who came along in their footsteps. The Compton's Cafeteria Riots Commemoration Committee is remembering all those people who made a difference in the paving of those roads we travel now and I am a member of the Compton’s committee because I want to make sure we never forget our elders or what they set in motion.
