June is Gay Pride month in the U.S. and there’s lots to be proud of. That’s assuming you don’t live in one of the states where you can not marry your boyfriend, or where if you decide to march in a gay pride parade your employer can fire you. Not that we haven’t made great strides over the last few years. The LGBT community added an I to its name, and Rush Limbaugh avowed he’s “been for trannies for a long time”. Which may be more to the point. ‘Cuz those trannies, who smell as sweet by any other name – which would be drag queens – are often heralded as the original champions of the gay rights movement thanks to Judy Garland over-dosing on barbiturates and the ensuing Stonewall riots in New York in 1969.

Remember Stonewall! was the rallying cry for the movement throughout the late ’60s and ’70s. Today we have to remember whether or not using the term ‘tranny’ is offensive or not. Which all depends on which tranny you listen to. Unless you are usually a listener of Rush’s. Nonetheless, and not to steal the ladies’ thunder (‘cuz pissing off drag queens is never a smart move), the third gender wannabes were not the only representatives of the community at Stonewall. But because they make for a more fabulous story, the spark that set off the riot at the Stonewall Inn is often cited as a tranny, who after being shoved by a police officer participating in the raid on the bar that night responded by hitting him on the head with her purse. A drag queen wielding her purse, of course, isn’t all that unusual of a sight and while the gathering crowd booed, their reaction may have been more about how well she pulled striking that blow off than as a sign of their growing disgruntlement. That changed when a lesbian in handcuffs being escorted by police to a waiting paddy wagon demanded the crowd “do something” after being hit on the head by an officer with a baton.

And something they did; the scene became explosive, the crowd became a mob and went berserk. Which, had the incident occurred six years later, would probably have resulted in a spontaneous group rendition of I Can Do That from A Chorus Line instead. But the sole photo that ran in local newspapers of that night’s riot showed not the angry drag queens or battered lesbian, but the “homeless youth” that slept in nearby Christopher Park, scuffling with police (‘homeless youth’ being the 1969 term for male prostitutes). In fact, The Mattachine Society newsletter a month later said the riots occurred because “The Stonewall became home to these kids. When it was raided, they fought for it. That, and the fact that they had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and broadminded gay place in town.”

So before you celebrate Gay Pride this month by giving a high five to a tranny, consider the real kudos should go to the working boys. And a night spent paying homage to male prostitutes has gotta be time better spent than hanging out with drag queens anyway. But then if you insist on dragging the drag queens into the gay rights movement’s history, you need look no further than the lesser known Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, which occurred three years before the Stonewall scuffle and which many consider the true start of transgender activism in the U.S.

Like the Stonewall Inn, which was the hang-out for gays, lesbians, drag queens, and hustlers in New York, Compton’s Cafeteria – located in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco – was a popular place for the west coast’s drag queens and hustlers. It was one of the few places where transgender people could congregate publicly in the city, because they were generally unwelcome in gay bars. Unless they were performing. The drag queens, not the hustlers that is. Not that the gay community didn’t like its trannies, but back then cross-dressing was illegal, so the police could use the presence of transgender people in a bar as a pretext for making a raid.

With a home to call their own, life should have been a rosy one in the City By The Bay, but as evidenced by the squabbling among the tranny elite of today, where the girls gather, fighting will ensue: so frequent were the fights between screaming queens at Compton’s between 2am and 3am, that the police demanded the cafeteria, which had been open 24 hours daily, shut its doors by midnight. Which was okey-dokey with Compton’s management ‘cuz they were getting real tired of the drag queen’s nightly antics anyway.

This provided the newly formed gay and trans youth group Vanguard, who were sponsored by the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, with an opportunity of getting on the 1960’s San Francisco radicals map by picketing Compton’s Cafeteria to protest the establishment’s poor treatment of transgender customers; Vanguard had been holding their meetings at Compton’s and tensions developed between the cafeteria’s management and Vanguard members. Things came to a head one hot August night in 1966, when the management of Compton’s called the police when some of the ladies became raucous. Again.

The police, who had it been decades later would have had Compton’s pre-entered on their GPS units, responded as usual. Usual meaning with rudeness, harassment and demeaning jailhouse treatment. Which really pissed off one queen. So she threw her cup of coffee in an officer’s face. Possibly incensed that she didn’t have a handbag to hit him with, the crowd went ballistic, the riot began, dishes and furniture were thrown in lieu of purses, and the restaurant’s plate-glass windows were smashed. Police called for reinforcements as the fighting spilled into the street, where a police car had all its windows smashed, and a sidewalk newsstand was burned down.

Because everybody loves a street party, the next night more drag queens, hustlers, street people, and disenfranchised members of the LGBT community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow the drag queens back inside. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again. Unlike the Stonewall riots, the protest at Compton’s was somewhat organized – many picketers were members of militant queer groups like Vanguard and the Street Orphans, a lesbian group of street people. Also, the city’s response was quite different from the reaction in New York: A network of social, mental and medical support services was established, followed in 1968 by the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, overseen by a member of the San Francisco Police Department.

The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot was one of the first recorded queer uprising in United States history and LGBT (and I) historian Professor Susan Stryker (no relation to Jeff) says the protest were an “act of anti-transgender discrimination, rather than an act of discrimination against sexual orientation”, connecting the uprising to the issues of gender, race, and class that were being downplayed by homophile organizations at that time. She says the riots created a space in which it became possible for the city of San Francisco to begin relating differently to its transgender citizens – to begin treating them, in fact, as citizens with legitimate needs instead of simply as a problem to get rid of.

On June 22, 2006, forty years after the riots, a memorial plaque was placed in the sidewalk in front of the cafeteria site, which is now a women’s free clinic, that reads: “Here marks the site of Gene Compton’s Cafeteria where a riot took place one August night when transgender women and gay men stood up for their rights and fought against police brutality, poverty, oppression and discrimination in the Tenderloin: We, the transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual community, are dedicating this plaque to these heroes of our civil rights movement.”

So yes Virginia, there is a tranny start to the gay rights movement in the USA, it just happened a few years earlier and on the opposite coast of the event most community members point to. And the SF version actually was about drag queens. Now you can get back to the argument that really matters: whether using the word tranny is offensive or a matter of owning the term as a symbol of gay pride.

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