In 1966, San Francisco drag queens and trans women who frequented Compton’s Cafeteria were fed up with police harassment. In those days, it was common for cops to brutalize gender nonconforming people and arrest them for crimes like “female impersonation.” One night, when police showed up at Compton’s and grabbed a trans woman’s arm, the patrons fought back — coffee cups went flying, purses clunked officers’ heads and a newsstand went ablaze.
This rebellion, and the one at New York’s Stonewall Inn three years later in 1969, set the stage for the modern-day LGBTQ+ rights movement.
These days, in the age of rainbow corporate advertising at Pride, many (at least, in the Bay Area) have forgotten that queer visibility in mainstream spaces has not always been a given. But with 451 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — most of them targeting trans rights — in statehouses nationwide this year alone, the conditions that led to the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria no longer feel like echoes from the distant past.
Tennessee’s anti-drag law, the first of its kind in the nation, was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, and its fate will be decided in court. Using the archaic language of the Compton’s Cafeteria days, it categorizes “male or female impersonators” as inherently explicit — akin to strippers, no matter the content of their performance — and bans them from performing on public property or in places where minors could be present. LGBTQ+ advocates have called the law overly broad, raising fears that it could become a pretext for policing gender nonconforming people’s right to simply exist in public — an eerie callback to norms from over half a century ago.
“It’s a sliding slope,” says Honey Mahogany, the San Francisco Democratic Party chair and Transgender Cultural District co-founder who first rose to prominence as a drag performer before entering politics.
