Today in Labor History June 28, 1969: The Stonewall Uprising began after an early morning police raid of the Stonewall Inn, in New York. Initially led by trans women, lesbians and gay street kids, the riot grew into several days of street battles with the cops with thousands of LGBTQ people participating. At one point, when the riot squad tried to clear the streets, the crowd formed kick lines and sang: We are the Stonewall girls/We wear our hair in curls/We don't wear underwear/We show our pubic hair. In the days that followed, residents of Greenwich Village and members of the LGBTQ community began demanding the right to live openly, regardless of their sexual orientation, and without fear of being arrested. As the police beat and arrested people, protesters overturned police vehicles, smashed windows, and fought back. Some of those in the vanguard of the resistance were Marsha P. Johnson, Zazu Nova and Jackie Hormona. The next year, to commemorate the uprising, the first Pride Parades were held in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
One month later, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was founded in New York City. Members of the GLF would go on to found other radical queer activist groups like the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Youth New York, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and later groups such as ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The GLF had a broad political platform, that was anti-racist and anti-capitalist. They supported various “Third World” struggles and the Black Panthers. They attacked the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. Some of their earliest direct actions were protests against the negative portrayal of queer people in the media, with an early focus on the homophobia of the Village Voice. Later in 1969, they started publishing their own magazine, “Come Out!”
Today, it is well known that Pride commemorates the Stonewall uprising. However, there were other queer uprisings that preceded it, like the Cooper Do-nuts Riots (1959), when the cops tried to arrest two drag queens and 2 male sex workers outside of Cooper Do-nuts, in Los Angeles. Onlookers began throwing coffee, donuts, and trash at the police until the cops fled without making any arrests. People continued to riot and celebrate, drawing even larger crowds until police backup came and began to savage beat people.
And there was the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, in response to the constant violent police harassment of drag queens and trans women in the area. Many were sex workers, out of necessity, due to job discrimination against them in other lines of work. Compton’s was one of the few places where trans women could socialize publicly, as they were often unwelcome at gay bars, also due to transphobia. In those days, you could get arrested simply for wearing clothes of the “wrong” sex, including even just having the buttons on the “wrong” side of your shirt. Many of those involved in the riot were members of Vanguard, one of the first known gay youth organizations in the U.S. Because they refused to buy anything, management would routinely kick Vanguard members out and call the police on them, leading to a picket of Compton’s July 19, 1966, one of the first demonstrations against transphobic police harassment. One night in August, a Compton’s employee called the police on an “unruly” trans woman, who threw coffee in his face when he tried to arrest her. The cafeteria erupted, with people throwing tables, dining ware and other items at the cops and smashing windows. They hit the cops with their purses and shoes. The cops fled and called for backup. The next day, larger crowds showed up to picket Compton’s again.
The annual Trans March, held in many cities on the Friday before Pride weekend, commemorates the Compton’s Cafeteria riot. One of the goals of the Trans March is to increase visibility, activism and acceptance of all gender-variant people. In San Francisco’s Trans march, people meet in Dolores Park for music, speeches, and celebration, before marching to the corner of Turk and Taylor, in the Tenderloin, the site of the now defunct Compton’s Cafeteria.
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