19 MAY 2025/SF NEWS/JAY BARMANN (SFist.com)
There was a rally Sunday, echoing a similar one in March, outside the site of the former Compton’s Cafeteria — the Tenderloin diner that became the site of one of the first riots against LGBTQ+ mistreatment in the country, by mostly trans women, in August 1966 — which for decades has been home to a halfway house for the recently incarcerated.
The rally included an act of protest by the local trans community, with a banner that was unfurled and hung from the roof saying “Liberate Compton’s,” as ABC 7 reports.
The Tenderloin building at 111 Turk Street, at the corner of Taylor, in what’s now the Transgender District, is owned by WBP Leasing Inc, a subsidiary of GEO Group Inc., and functions as group housing for a federally sponsored work furlough program. Its windows were long ago frosted over and it has only blank walls to the street.
A coalition of LGBTQ groups and leaders is working on an effort to get the building’s zoning changed at the SF Board of Appeals, as we have previously reported.
“We do not consider running a for-profit carceral facility at this location to be the site’s highest and best use,” the groups bringing the appeal said in a letter to the Board of Appeals. “Our vision is to imagine an alternative future for 101-121 Taylor – one that honors the building’s unique historical significance as the site of a significant act of mass resistance to police abuse of trans people and other marginalized, stigmatized groups in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.”
The aim of the appeal is to revoke a grandfathered-in zoning allowance for the property as “non-conforming Group Housing.”
“The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot site is significant to San Francisco’s trans and queer community due to its history of resistance to unjust criminalization and the repression of trans lives,” said another protester, architect Chandra Laborde, in a request to the appeals board. “This history is precisely what renders its current use as a for-profit carceral facility unsuitable. Allowing GEO Group to operate at this historic site contradicts San Francisco’s commitments to LGBTQ+ and racial justice.”
LGBTQ activist and former Lutheran bishop Meghan Rohrer was at Sunday’s rally and spoke to ABC 7.
“We’re hoping to liberate the building in hopes that it can be used as a trans community space,” Rohrer said. “We’re hoping that we can get a permit review and have deep consideration that this historic site, that’s a historic building on the city level, on the state level, and on the federal level, will finally be liberated.”
The 1966 riot broke out in similar fashion to one that occurred three years later at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Queer and trans patrons of Compton’s Cafeteria, tired of being hassled by police, threw bottles and dishes and did battle with police, after one drag queen threw hot coffee at a cop who was making an unwarranted arrest. San Francisco cops were known to frequently raid the diner and make arrests for the crime of “female impersonation.”
The riot received a small newspaper mention weeks later, but the exact date of the riot remains in dispute
A documentary about the riot by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, titled “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,“ has aired on KQED and can be seen embedded below. The intersection outside the building was painted with a Black Trans Lives Matter mural in August 2020.
This past February, weeks after Trump took office, the Compton’s Cafeteria site received two historic landmark designations, including a listing for the riot site on the National Register of Historic Places.
