- by Cynthia Laird, News Editor
- Monday, August 25, 2025 (ebar.com)
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111 Taylor Street once housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, the site of an August 1966 riot by drag queens and trans people against the police.
Photo: Cynthia Laird
San Francisco’s Transgender History Month, observed in August for the past several years, often brings attention to the fact that an exact date of the 1966 riot at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin remains elusive. The former eatery, which was frequented by drag queens and trans people, among others, has been in the news this year, as activists work to reclaim the historic site that is now a reentry facility for formerly incarcerated people.
The ground floor commercial space at 111 Taylor Street had housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where one night in August 1966 a drag queen reportedly threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of a police officer who tried to arrest her without a warrant. The exact date of the altercation has been lost to time. But the incident sparked a riot by trans and queer patrons of the 24-hour diner and cops, as detailed in the 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens” by transgender scholar and historian Susan Stryker, Ph.D. .
The property earlier this year became the first one of its kind granted federal landmark status specifically for its connection to the transgender movement in the U.S. It is also now on the California Register of Historical Resources.
In 2022, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declared the intersection in front of Compton’s and the exterior walls of 111 Taylor Street as the city’s 307th landmark . It provides some level of protection to the building facade from being altered.
Today, 111 Taylor Street houses the facility operated by GEO Reentry Services, a subsidiary of GEO Group Inc. Activists with the Compton’s x Coalition want to reclaim the site and have tried to get GEO Group’s zoning determination revoked, which would require it to vacate the premises. Thus far, they have been unsuccessful, as the Bay Area Reporter has noted. https://www.ebar.com/story/155930
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Several dates offered
Dates for when the Compton’s riot occurred that the Bay Area Reporter have heard about or seen recently range from August 12, to the 14th, to later in the month. Stryker, an academic and professor emerita at University of Arizona, is now a visiting professor at Stanford’s Clayman Institute. She is credited with being an expert on the riot, even as she has been unable to find the date of it.
“I have no question that it did happen,” Stryker said in a recent phone interview. “The date thing is curious.”
She’s convinced the demonstration occurred August 21 or 28, both of which would have been Sunday nights, based on conversations she’s had with people around at the time. One was with a guy whose birthday was the first week of September and he’d have to report for the draft. Additionally, the Tenderloin became more racially mixed later in the month, when “the Brown girls would go to the Tenderloin to hustle at the end of the month,” Stryker said.
“We also know a more racially mixed spot is more likely to be raided,” she added.
Another thing, said Stryker, is the absence of evidence. At the time, KGO-TV had its studios right down the street from Compton’s. The station filmed a picket outside of Compton’s on July 17. “It’s recorded in the handwritten logs for July 17, 1966,” said Stryker.
But the TV station didn’t film news on Sundays back then, she explained.
“That, to me, suggests the wee hours of the morning on a Sunday at the end of the month,” said Stryker. “August 21 or 28, probably the 28th.”
Stryker said that there are no city archives of police records for that time, and there was no coverage in the San Francisco Examiner or San Francisco Chronicle.
“At the time, the gay press did not cover trans people in the Tenderloin,” Stryker said. (The B.A.R. didn’t begin publishing until April 1971.)
Another interesting tidbit Stryker came across is that the KGO-TV reporter who covered the July 1966 pickets at Compton’s was Dick Carlson, a transphobe who later outed Renée Richards, the trans tennis star. He also outed Liz Carmichael, a trans woman who created the Dale, a three-wheeled, low-cost, high-efficiency car she was convinced would upend the auto industry. (HBO aired a documentary, “The Lady and the Dale,” about Carmichael’s life.) Dick Carlson, who died in March, was the father of conservative anti-LGBTQ media figure Tucker Carlson.
Adrian Ravarour, Ph.D., a gay man and former San Francisco resident, told the B.A.R. that the riot happened August 12 “to the best of my knowledge.” He based that on the Vanguard organization holding its first dance the following day, he said in a phone interview this spring. Vanguard was an early LGBTQ organization based in the Tenderloin. It operated from 1965-67 and focused on social justice and trying to gain acceptance for LGBTQ people. Keith St Clare, a gay man who published the Vanguard magazine even after the organization ended, died earlier this year. https://www.ebar.com/story/154014
Joseph Plaster, a queer academic and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, told the B.A.R. he has done quite a bit of research on the Vanguard organization. He noted Vanguard held a picket outside Compton’s in July 1966, before the riot. And he said the organization held a dance that month as well.
“A dance on Saturday, July 23, a few days after Vanguard picketed Compton’s Cafeteria, attracted ‘over 100 young people,’ Glide’s Ed Hansen wrote a few days later. ‘The kids all had a good time, and no one caused any trouble. Channel 7 – T.V. – had been there taking pictures and interviewing some of the TL kids.’ Unearthed Channel 7 footage from that dance shows a barebones basement, crowded with roughly 50 people,” Plaster wrote in an email. “This is all to say that the first dance would not have been held in mid-August.”
“In the wake of the riots, Vanguard appeared to gain traction in its efforts to curb police harassment and exclusion,” Plaster wrote. “In late 1966, a reporter noted that Vanguard worked with a police [official], likely Elliott Blackstone, to ‘act as an intermediary between Vanguard and Compton’s.’ Raymond Broshears also recalled that Blackstone and cafeteria management negotiated ‘a settlement’ at Glide Methodist Church.”
Blackstone, who is featured in Stryker’s documentary, was a straight ally who worked with the trans community. He was a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department and its first liaison to the LGBTQ community when he was named to the position in 1962.
After the Compton’s riot, he helped organize the first U.S. transsexual support group, Conversion Our Goal, at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and, with funding from transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson, established the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first-ever peer-staffed transgender social services agency, as the B.A.R. reported in June 2006 when Blackstone was honored by the trans community. (Blackstone died that October.)
Things appeared to change at Compton’s after the riot, according to Plaster’s research.
“At a Vanguard organizational meeting in late 1966, Vice President John Colvin explained that Compton’s ‘had agreed to end discrimination, more or less,’ according to a reporter,” Plaster stated. “‘The kids would not be specifically harassed, but, if they lingered an hour over a cup of coffee or invited non-paying friends to the tables, they would be – well, pushing their luck.’ Meanwhile, the policemen ‘who had been roughing the kids up had been removed, and the new ones had orders not to use force.’”
Ravarour was reached last week and told of Plaster’s research. He continues to maintain the August 12 date for the riot.
“I am 100% confident that the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot occurred on Friday night, August 12, 1966,” he wrote in an email. “Around 1:45 a.m. Saturday morning after the riot, after leaving the Vanguard dance, my boyfriend and I stood outside Compton’s assessing the damage.
“Late Saturday afternoon, Dixie Russo, who had been a participant inside the riot, met with me and disclosed further details,” Ravarour added.
Broshears, a gay man who published the Gay Crusader newspaper, also published a San Francisco Pride Guide, the first one of which was June 25, 1972. There was a parade that year, and in the guide, Broshears writes about the 1966 Compton’s riot, six years after the fact.
“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 police,” Broshears wrote. “It had to be the first ever recorded violence by Gays against the 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.”
Broshears wrote that the dispute did begin once they entered the cafeteria.
“But when the police grabbed the arm of one of the transvestites, he threw his hot coffee in the cop’s face, and with that, cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place and all directed at the police,” he wrote.
He reported that a police car “had every window broken,” a newspaper shack outside the cafeteria “was burned to the ground and general havoc raised that night in the Tenderloin.”
Greg Pennington, a co-founder with the late Willie Walker of the GLBT Historical Society, told the B.A.R. that as an amateur historian he compiled a chronology of early gay history. It is now in the archives of the historical society. The B.A.R. was unable to locate it while visiting the archives recently, likely due to it being combined with other documents, according to archivists.
“I never had any formal training in archives,” Pennington said in a recent phone interview. But he recalled that his timeline indicates August 1966 for the Compton’s riot, though without an exact date. His chronology also cited Broshears’ Gay Crusader newspaper, he said, adding that Broshears mentioned the riot “after the fact.”
The Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer, a transgender man whose book “Images of America: San Francisco’s Transgender District” was published this month, was also unable to find a date for the Compton’s riot, Rohrer told the B.A.R.
“I went through the police records at the library for that full year surrounding it – it is not listed in the police report. I think the only mention of it is from the Reverend Ray Broshears in his Gay Crusader paper,” Rohrer stated.
Stryker said that SFPD’s records from that time “disappeared.”
“There are no files for Central Station,” she said, referring to the police station that oversees the Tenderloin. “Nothing in newspapers.”
An outlier
Adding to the hunt for a date, Equality California, the statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization, sent out an email two weeks ago indicating the riot occurred on August 14.
“59 years ago today, in a San Francisco diner, a hot cup of coffee ignited a revolution,” the email stated. “Three years before Stonewall, drag queens and transgender women stood up against police harassment – and refused to back down. That August night in 1966 was loud, unapologetic, and the beginning of the movement we’re still fighting for today.”
The fundraising message was signed by Tom Temprano, a gay man who is EQCA’s managing director and a San Francisco resident. He was asked how EQCA determined the date.
In response, Jorge Reyes Salinas, a gay man who is communications director for the organization, clarified the date issue in a message to the B.A.R.
“To clarify, we meant ‘today’ as in ‘at this moment,’ not specifically August 14. Our social media also does the same,” Reyes Salinas stated. “Saying ‘today’ was to uplift this moment and event in history, was not meant to be specific. Hope that clarifies since there is no specific date of when the Compton Cafeteria took place.”
As for Stryker, she said that she would like to solve this puzzle.
“I would love to find a date,” she said, adding that its absence allows others to question whether the Compton’s riot happened.
“I do see right-wing chatter that it’s all made up,” she said, but she added, “the Compton’s story has been told for a very, very long time.”
“I’ve got all these stories about why it’s forgotten and why it’s not recorded,” she said. “I wish I could find the one definitive date.”
