It Is Our History

The times they are a changing and we need to hold onto our history and not forget our roots.

Back in 1966 three years before Stonewall there us another uprising against our oppression,  it was one of many such uprising where we had enough and fought back.

San Francisco Creates World’s First Ever Transgender Cultural District
The creation of Compton’s Transgender Cultural District is to stop the displacement of trans people from a place they were traditionally welcomed in, and to teach trans history.
The Daily Beast
By Emily Wilson
December 11, 2018

Honey Mahogany walked down 6th Street in San Francisco, pointing to single room occupancy hotels, the dance and performance space Counterpulse, and gay bars, OMG and Aunt Charlie’s Lounge.

She passed by the Golden Gate Theatre where A Bronx Tale was playing and came to site of the former all-night diner, Gene’s Compton Cafeteria (now transitional housing), where in August 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of coffee at a police officer trying to arrest her, which turned into a riot with trans people fighting back against police harassment, flipping over tables and throwing cutlery.
[…]
The area Mahogany was walking through makes up part of the first legally recognized transgender district in the world, Compton's Transgender Cultural District.
[…]
“The Tenderloin has always held a really special place in my heart as a trans person with the way the community is accepting of gender variant and trans people of color,” she said. “There’s friendliness and an energy to the Castro District. People say hello and good morning and how are you and check in with each other, which I think often gets lost in a big city.”

Many people when they think about San Francisco they think about the Castro District which was made famous in the movie “Milk” about the first out gay city alderman Harvey Milk but there were other areas in the city where there was a major concentration of LGBT people. One of those areas was the Tenderloin where the Gene’s Compton Cafeteria was located.

Here is the movie Screaming Queens about the Compton Uprising...

To learn more about our history I suggest starting off by reading:

• Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender History. Berkley CA. Seal Press.
• Fienberg, L. (1998). 'I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot'. Worker’s World. Retrieved August 1, 2009. From http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php
• MacKenzie, G. (1994). Transgender Nation. Bowling Green OH. Popular Press
• Meyerowitz, J. (2002). How Sex Changed. Boston, MA. Harvard Press