Compton's Cafeteria Riot: Exclusion, Erasure, and Empowerment
Background and Purpose
The 1969 Stonewall riots in NYC symbolize the beginning of a movement for “gay liberation” and equal rights for LGBT people. However, Stonewall was not the first militant riot for LGBT rights. In San Francisco a few years earlier, a group of queer youth, drag queens, and transsexual hustlers rioted after police officers tried to eject a drag queen eating at Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner in a poor inner city neighborhood. This riot, the first known act of militant resistance to police harassment and discrimination, became a turning point for the LGBT community in the west coast, especially poor, working class gender nonconforming gay men, lesbians, and transsexuals. Despite its significance, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot has been grossly overshadowed by the Stonewall Riots, and its history mostly erased from collective memory.
Methods
This historical case study of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot examines the dynamics among exclusion, erasure, and empowerment. The research questions are: (1) How did exclusion play a role in the development of the Riot and its erasure?; and (2) How do the relationships between exclusion, erasure, and empowerment inform social work practice, policy, and research?
Empirical evidence includes original source materials, including contemporaneous newspaper articles, publications, ephemera, photographs, meeting notes, and interviews of riot participants, community leaders, social workers, and police officers. I methodically evaluated, interpreted, and analyzed my data consistent with historical methods (Williams 2011).
Results
Prior to the Riot, queer youth, drag queens, and transsexual hustlers faced dual exclusion: from mainstream culture and from an emerging lesbian and gay resistance movement. While bar raids, arrests, and police entrapment plagued gay and lesbian communities, a tiered LGBT community resulted in exclusion of gender non-conforming men and women from mainstream resistance movements. Exclusion from the mainstream lesbian and gay movement coincided with social change and empowerment for the poor and people of color—thus planting the seeds for the Riot and a surge of social services for transgender persons. Despite more services, social recognition, and community empowerment, however, the same mechanisms of marginalization that led to dual exclusion prior to the Riot resulted in erasure of the Riot—and its significance for social movements and LGBT history—and a marked void in social work practice, policy, and research on transgender persons. By systematically examining historical records, I found a symbiotic and cyclical relationship between exclusion, erasure, and empowerment that helps explain the origins of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and its subsequent erasure from collective memory and social work practice, policy, and research.
Conclusions and Implications
This case study highlights one example of how historical exclusion can spark a revolution. It also demonstrates a cyclical relationship between exclusion, erasure, and empowerment that can help researchers, social workers, and policymakers understand many present-day social problems. Understanding this complex relationship will help social work practitioners and scholars better serve and untangle multifaceted social dynamics in marginalized communities.