![]() Stonewall is often thought of as an uprising of gay men. "It was the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history." If the famous Stonewall riots in New York City were the origin of this nation's gay rights movement, the Tenderloin upheaval three years before was "the transgender community's debut on the stage of American political history," according to Stryker. We got tired of being made to go into the men's room when we were dressed like women. The crowd trashed a cop car and set a newsstand on fire. ![]() Outside on the street, dozens of people fought back as police forced them into paddy wagons. Drag queens swung their heavy purses at officers. Sugar shakers crashed through the restaurant's windows and doors. The cafeteria "erupted," according to Susan Stryker, a historian who directed Screaming Queens. In 1966, the eatery was the site of landmark confrontations between police and transgender activists.Īnd when a policeman in Compton's grabbed a drag queen, she threw a cup of coffee in his face. Jaymes, a transgender woman who ran a residential hotel nearby, said in a documentary, Screaming Queens, which chronicles a confrontation with police that marked the start of a movement toward LGBT rights.Ī view of Gene Compton's cafeteria In San Francisco's Tenderloin District. "Everybody that lived in the Tenderloin ate at Compton's," Amanda St. She frequented the Tenderloin during the 1960s and has lived there since 1992. Ching is an Asian-American transgender woman who grew up in San Francisco. It was centrally located - adjacent to the hair salon, the corner bar and the bathhouse - and provided a well-lit and comfortable haven for trans women performing in clubs or walking the streets in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.įrom Compton's "you could walk to Woolworth's to buy eyelashes, and it was two blocks from the airline bus terminal," where Tamara Ching says many drag queens and trans women would go to change from male to female clothes. They were arresting drag queens, trans women and gay hustlers who had been sitting for hours, eating and gossiping and coming down from their highs with the help of 60-cent cups of coffee. For many people, it's the most viable access or the only access to money-not only for operations but also to live, so that's just a harsh reality.It was after the bars had closed and well into the pre-dawn hours of an August morning in 1966 when San Francisco cops were in Gene Compton's cafeteria again. Some do it as a choice of empowerment and some do it just as survival. It disproportionately affects trans women of color arguably the most, so it's not unheard of for trans women of color to be forced into, or to feel like they have to resort to survival sex work. I think many trans people in the United States and, in the world frankly, are facing discrimination and when it's a minority, discrimination frequently effects people of color disproportionately. Peppermint: Just to clarify, it's not just trans women of color. OUT: In the documentary, you discuss a time when you considered doing sex work to pay for gender reassignment surgery, which is an avenue many trans women of color often have to go through. While Peppermint finishes filming for the season finale that's guaranteed to make us all gag, we caught up with her to talk Project Peppermint, the struggles facing trans women, and how she went from violet to peppermint one drag performance at a time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |