Next on Truly California. In 1966, drag queens fed up with abuse rioted against the San Francisco police. All those fight glasses windows here were broken out.
And inspired a wave of transgender activism. We had to fight for our rights as not gay people, but as human beings. A revolutionary act uncovered in Screaming Queens. This is Gay San Francisco, an inside look at the life of San Francisco's homosexuals. They number 90,000 at least, according to police department figures.
They work to conceal their sexual orientation by day, and only at night do they show their true colors. The city's downtown Tenderloin district is the home ground of the always visible segment of the city's homosexuals and transvestites. The drag queens are here at Turk and Taylor. So frequent were the fights between screaming queens in the 2 to 3 a.m.
period that police, even in permissive San Francisco, had had enough and asked an all-night cafeteria to close by midnight. What really happened that night at Compton's Cafeteria has been all but forgotten. It wasn't a catfight between screaming queens.
It was a riot, and it kicked off a new movement for human rights. We had to fight for our rights as not gay people, but as human beings. We fought for one cause.
The cause that we fought for was for individual rights for freedom. Funding for this program was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, Pomona College, California Council for the Humanities, the LGBT Film Donor Circle of Horizons Foundation, the Horizons Frameline Film and Video Completion Fund, and the Bridges Larson Foundation. Additional funding was provided by these generous contributors. The 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York have been remembered as the beginnings of gay militancy.
But three years earlier, on a hot August night in 1966, dozens of drag queens and gay hustlers made history by fighting for their right simply to gather at a San Francisco restaurant called Gene Compton's Cafeteria. That story has never been told, until now. Compton's cafeteria was this hangout. It would be open all night. You can go to Compton's and it was its own little fairyland.
I remember the waitresses with the little doily napkins on their chest. It was beautiful because it was clean. In the back of my mind, I remember when hell was raised, Comptons is certainly one of the sources.
Everybody would die for window seats, just to show off. Jehovah's Witnesses used to drag crosses down the street in front of Comptons and tell us we were going to burn in hell. But we ignored them.
Comptons was fabulous. It was like Oz. Something like the Wizard of Oz. When I first came across the story of the riot at Compton's, I had no idea how deeply it would affect my life.
I had recently finished my PhD in history, come out as transsexual, and started my transition from man to woman, all in the same year. I felt alone at first. and really hungry for a community.
Researching transgender history helped me find that sense of belonging. In 1995, I stumbled upon a document in the archives of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society that described an event I'd never even heard of, the riot at Compton's Cafeteria. The story had been written down several years after the fact, and I wasn't sure if it was accurate or even true.
But if it was, that riot might represent the transgender community's debut on the stage of American political history. I tried every way I could to verify that story. I scoured the archives looking for clues, and I searched the streets of the Tenderloin for people who might remember what happened that night.
It was a weekend night, I believe. When I finally pulled it all together, the story was even bigger than I imagined. Ladies and gentlemen, you're about to see the results of a six-month psychological project, a research project that took us all over the country.
In my office today, I'm Jay Martin, we have four contestants in a recent beauty contest. Now, for reasons which will become very clear, we're going to use first names only. The reason for using first names only for these very, very charming contestants is that right now, each one of them is breaking the law.
The contest in which they were runners-up was a masquerade. Actually, in the vernacular, it's called a drag ball. It was the party time. It was before the war really got started. There was so many nightclubs and bars and everything.
It was quite festive. It was like Camelot back then. It was still wonderful. There were so many beautiful people that came through there that, you know, you just met people from all over the world. We had Hell's Angels that came in, and they would line their bikes up and down the street and party with the girls.
And we used to have the most beautiful boys come to see us just to party with us. And there was really no sex involved. We just partied, you know.
And then of course there was sex involved sometimes. Then a lot of people were out walking around in the Tenderloin, just walking, looking around. And Compton was the place, one of the places to be. And we had quite a time in Compton. It was a meeting place, like I said, a watering...
for people. It was open all night. Compton's was a well-established local restaurant chain with several San Francisco locations. Compton's cafeteria was this place that had been around for years, I don't know how long, but it was fairly reasonably priced food and a variety of food.
I would get like a poached egg on toast or and juice and bacon strips for $1.99. It wasn't a big place. I don't know how many people had seated, but 50 or 60, something like that. This was the front here. These doors were set back in here, so you had to go through in here to get into Comptons.
Everybody that lived in the turn line ate at Comptons, and it was just packed. I would not have gone to Compton's. The lights were very bright, I think. I think that they were those neon things, you know, those fluorescent lights. Very bad on makeup.
Boy, I wouldn't have wanted to run that coffee shop, I'll tell you. Somebody would come in and they'd buy a cup of coffee. They'd spend hours sitting in this coffee shop, waiting for their friends to come in and talk with them. Every time the door opened, everybody looked to see who was coming. Because you know, as soon as that door opened, everybody went to parade their fashion.
It was a delightful time. It's like a fairy tale that you wouldn't believe. But there's the nightmare of the truth of it all. Now Simone, you openly admit that you're a homosexual. What do your parents think about this?
Well, I think my parents really don't know. You could say I live a double life, that on weekends I dress up like a girl, and then when I come home on Sunday afternoons or so, I look like a normal boy in the neighborhood. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I have an older brother.
Does he know that you're homosexual? No. What do you think he'd do if he found out? Probably kill me. Back in 1965 and 66, that year that I was in San Francisco, I didn't know the word transgender at that time.
So in terms of having any kind of helpful concepts or understanding, there wasn't much there. It was just that some like to dress as women and others don't. And some are even interested in enhancing their breasts and taking hormones and so on to try to...
Be more as a woman. And my encounters with them were just as I would with anybody. You know, here's another child of God, someone to listen to, talk to, and without any judgment, just listen to their stories and let them tell me what they were experiencing. Every great city of the world seems to have an area given over to the fleshly needs of men. In San Francisco, this area is called the Tenderloin.
It is a marketplace of vice, degradation, and human misery. I looked up the word Tenderloin in the dictionary, and the first definition was familiar. A prime cut of meat.
But the second definition surprised me. A vice-ridden district controlled by corrupt policemen. That's exactly how it was in San Francisco.
The Tenderloin looked lawless and out of control. But the police actually ran the place. They allowed the prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling, and then demanded payoffs from people involved in those activities.
Well, the police came to Finocchio's nightly. I don't know for sure that there was a payola or whatever that was, but they were certainly well-welcomed and well taken care of. Finocchio's began in the 1920s as an illegal Tenderloin speakeasy.
The club moved up to North Beach when Prohibition ended, but its backstage connections with the old Tenderloin vice racket were kept very much intact. We were allowed to work because of Mr. Finocchio's association with the police. You knew.
You knew not to take risks, not to offend. Quite frankly, I never made a gratuity in the police department, but I was aware that some people did. Since I didn't give it to them and they didn't spend it on me, I'm not sure that it happened. But I can say that having been a policeman for 26 years, I could certainly understand some of it.
The Tenderloin was widely known as the place to go for sex, drugs, and late-night fun. While others came and went with relative ease, transgender people lacked the freedom to leave. Police would give the people who were of indeterminate gender the message that they belonged pretty much in the Tenderloin, which at the time was kind of a gay ghetto, a very slummy gay ghetto.
I think transsexuals find the tenderloin more acceptable simply because they are more acceptable in the tenderloin. Why are they more acceptable in the tenderloin? Well, because they're amidst their own kind, I guess. The tenderloin was populated by the pimps and the whores and the drug addicts and the drag queens and, yes, that's that element and I felt very comfortable there. Turk Street was our street and the buildings that were on it, the hotels, that's where we lived.
That was our home. We had no other place to go. Other hotels wouldn't rent to the queens, the drag queens or the transsexuals or transvestites. So that was basically why we were put down in the Tenderloin. You know if you come around on this side of the building and you look up you can still see right there, El Rosa Hotel, 166 Turk Street.
The El Rosa was really like a wayward home for girls. There were so many of us that was there that our families had disowned us. This is the place where Amanda was the mother queen.
I managed it at night. We allowed the girls to bring in one guest a night. for five dollars and of course after Mama Della Rosa she was the owner we'd go to bed I'd let him bring in several more so we could make a little extra money it was a wonderful place we spent our holidays together there we became each other's family we held on to each other There was a beauty shop that was over there where all the girls got their hair done, where that Club 65 is next to it. The place that's the novelties and gifts store? Right.
Yeah, that was the Chuckers, and this was the Ross. here on the corner which was a transsexual bar. And of course on this corner over here we have where Jean Compton's was.
And it was a magnificent cafeteria, it was a great time. Comptons was a great place to meet because it was like centralized. Right next door was the bath house for the gay men and it was convenient to the corner.
If you wanted to have a drink at the corner bar, you could. Or you could tiptoe down to Woolworths and get more eyelashes. There were tables of drag queens, female impersonators, transgenders, hustlers. It had been a place where people had gone after the bars had closed, and it was a hotbed of prostitution.
Most of the transsexuals were prostitutes because they didn't have jobs. There was no way to get jobs then. See it was very popular because we worked all the streets from here all the way down. Uh-huh. Down to Leavenworth.
Yeah. We never did work, none of the girls worked past Leavenworth. Yeah. But then worked Turr, Eddy, Ellis, O'Farrill.
And Mason, back this way. And Mason, up to Mason. Never passed Powell Street. Any on Market?
Or was that more like gay male hustling? No, never, no TGs hustled on Market Street, that was off limits. As for me and other girls, we never thought of looking for a job because maybe in back of our heads we knew that they wouldn't hire us anywhere. Only the pretty girls that were entertainers or something like that.
Most of the girls that were female impersonators were like in another level from the gutter girls that we were. They were earning a living and they were snobs. I had the freedom. to be a big sissy on stage, yes, but I did not have the freedom to live my life outside or off of stage. Had I not been born with the face and I had great legs and could sing a bit, you know, dance a bit, all of those attributes that That was such an embarrassment when I was growing up.
Too pretty to be a boy. The complexion. All of those things that I hated so as a child saved me. That's exactly what saved me. Or I'm sure that, yeah, I'd have been selling my ass on Turk Street, saving those pennies and looking for a John to take me through it.
I went out to try to get a job in men's clothing. No, you're too effeminate, you're a faggot, you're a sissy, you're this, you're that. So I said, well, groovy. So I put on the clothes I usually wear, which is girls'clothes.
I went out and tried to get a job as a woman. Yes. This doesn't work.
You get a job, you work for a day or two, a week, a month, or whatever it boils down. Somebody comes along that recognizes you who prefers to be a hooker and a tramp, turns around and turns your name into the boss and says, like, so-and-so is such-and-such, and that's the end of that job. So finally you reach the point where you get disgusted with the whole damn bit, and what you do is you turn around and you go out on the street. And you find out that you can make a hundred bucks a night, and you say, well, to hell with it.
Why should I be legit? Why should I be legitimate? Why should I be respectable?
Why should I be anything? We sold ourselves because we needed to make a living. But we sold ourselves because we wanted to be loved. I remember having a conversation with a hustler, a queen hustler dressed in drag, saying that some of their customers assume they're a female instead of a male. They would risk violence.
I mean, somebody, in fact, would become violent with them, and there was this fear that that would be the reaction of somebody. It was dangerous dressing up like a girl and still having men's parts there. It was, it was, it was dangerous for all of us.
Some girls were getting beaten up for being men. Some girls have been killed for being men. The threat of violent death was very real.
I discovered newspaper stories about a serial killer who targeted transgender women in the Tenderloin. This guy did more than just kill his victims. He would slit their throats, ritualistically mutilate their genitals, and then dump their bodies in an alley. You'd hear about murders or you know somebody but still the next night you didn't care you had to make your money. I think going with the trick the first five minutes with them is the scariest because you don't know if you're gonna go to jail or if someone's gonna pull a knife or gun on you.
That's why a lot of the girls were taking drugs so they can work the streets. We just live from day to day and met our needs from day to day. You did what you did to survive. We always had to load our handbags up.
I'd drink a pint or half pint of Southern Comfort and put the empty bottle in my bag. When people got out of line, we'd crack it over their head. And if that didn't put them down, then we took off our shoes, our heels. Because if they were going to mess with us, we weren't going to let people hurt us.
And especially these girls that had their faces pumped up with silicone, if you touch their face, and try to hurt their face, they'll kill you. You had to be either able to kick ass or get your ass kicked. If somebody was on your turf, you just lay them out and keep walking and keep your eye on your back. That's how it was in the Tenderloin. You had to be that way.
Compton's was one of the few places in the neighborhood to get away from the constant violence. Basically, we went there to gossip about what we did and to let people know that we were alive. We survived the night.
Sadly, even there, the Queens were not completely safe. We got harassed quite a bit by the police in Compton. So a lot of times they would come in and just pick us up if we were eating for no reason and put us in jail for female impersonation.
I had one policeman that hated me with a passion. And every time he'd see me, he says, get in the paddy wagon. I said, I just got my hamburger.
He says, eat it Monday when you get out. The police were out to get us. The police were very, very bad. You could be taken to jail at any time, at any second, for no reason at all. If we had lipstick on, if we had mascara on, or if our hair was too long, we had to put it under a cap.
If the buttons was on the wrong side, like a blouse, they would take you to jail because they felt that it was female impersonation. It wasn't too many years ago. When I went to the grocery store once and got thrown into jail for being a female impersonator and I've never felt as though I was impersonating a female until I am a female. As is typical for most of us that are middle class white men or women in our culture today that look fairly usual, we don't get treated by the police this way.
So it's sort of like it goes right past us and we don't see it. But those who are on the streets, who dress different, act different, in this case it was the drag queen kind of crowd, they were very aware. that they seem to be targeted. First night I got in San Francisco, I was taken and arrested for one of those famous crimes, obstructing the sidewalk, which was my introduction to the infamous Tack Squad, which was a roving band of thug cops which patrolled the...
various and sundry neighborhoods in San Francisco and generally made life unpleasant for people who didn't particularly fit their definition of what a decent human being was. And I was one of these people who looked so in-between that the police were provoked by my being. I don't remember a policeman being that obnoxious.
That doesn't mean they weren't. It means I don't remember them being that obnoxious. They would drive us all around North Beach, all around the Tenderloin before they'd even take us to jail.
Then they'd strip us when they got us in the drunk tank for drugs, you know, they'd search for drugs. And it was a little embarrassing being in full drag. You were isolated on a tier with other transsexuals. You had no contact.
With any of the other prisoners on the outside, we were in lockdown most of the time. And it wasn't that I had done anything wrong. It was female impersonation. I wasn't bothering anybody.
But I was dressing as a woman the way I feel, so they put me in jail, shaved my head, or I refused to let them shave my head, and they put me in the hole, in lockup. One girl was in there 60 days in the hole. Because she wouldn't let them cut their hair. That's how important it was to us back then. They were, you know, it was like they were trying to humiliate us.
That we weren't human beings, so they should humiliate us. The war in Vietnam shaped everything that happened in the 1960s, and it changed American culture in some unexpected ways. Gender itself became a form of politics. Long hair and love beads were signs that said a man opposed the war, while a woman wearing blue jeans was making a feminist manifesto.
The war was a political war. Challenging traditional gender launched a social revolution that would give Tenderloin Queens new ammunition to fight the discrimination they faced. Discrimination that deepened as the war in Vietnam progressed.
It changed quite a bit once the war started, and they started chipping a lot of young men through here. We partied with those boys that went off to Vietnam. I met a lot of soldiers that came through here and they left San Francisco with a smile on their face, believe me. They had a good time and we showed it to them. I decided to do my country by being a hoe and giving it away to our servicemen, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.
Wartime is always a boom time for prostitution. As soldiers and sailors descended on the Tenderloin, police crackdowns intensified, especially at drag queen hangouts along Turk Street at places like Rossi's and the Chuckers Club. They had a sign up over that said, Interest your own risk.
This establishment is due to be raided at any time. I remember when the cops used to go in the bar and say, You. You, you and you, come with us.
As police raids escalated along with the war, life in the Tenderloin became even worse. Urban planners and developers intent on remaking the city tore down nearby neighborhoods where black and working class people lived, turning the Tenderloin into the last pocket of affordable housing in the central city. New people moving in squeezed the Queens out of the neighborhood's cheapest rooms, leaving them literally no place else to go.
Just then, the Queens found a new hope in a totally unexpected development, the sudden availability of a transsexual identity. That changed everything. I come from a, you know, a rather small town, a gold mining community in fact, you know. And it was a place where boys had to be boys because that's all there was for boys to become is boys.
All this agony and all this pain, all that I had been going through, I finally put a name to it. Where I knew where I was going, I didn't know how I was going to get there. But I knew that this is what I wanted to be.
I found out about the word transsexual by reading things about Christine Jorgensen. She was a high celebrity, so everyone could relate to her. Christine Jorgensen was the first famous American transsexual.
She made headlines in 1952 when she had genital conversion surgery in Denmark. Transsexual operations had been carried out in Europe since the 1930s, but most American doctors considered the procedures unethical and refused to perform them. That began to change a month before the Comptons riot, when a San Francisco medical reformer published a path-breaking book.
Dr. Harry Benjamin wrote a book called The Transsexual Phenomenon, which was published in 1966, I believe. Harry Benjamin, hmm, doctor, hmm, he gave hormones to everybody. Oh, Harry Benjamin was a delightful little gentleman, and his book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, was...
like a guidebook for us. Benjamin believed a person's gender identity could not be changed, but their bodily sex could. As a result of his work, the first surgical sex reassignment clinic in America would open on the East Coast later that year.
Many drag queens in the Tenderloin began to envision a new life for themselves, one that fit better. with who they thought they were and what they wanted to be. If society would let me live my life as I want to live it, which is as a respectable, normal, ordinary woman, period.
I don't wear mini skirts. I don't run around with my hair sticking seven foot off my head and all the rest of the stuff that the queens do, which is a category that I'm classified in as being a common queen, period. Yeah, well, that's true. I cannot...
Yeah. Get away from it. No matter what I do, I'm put into this category.
I'm labeled as this. I was just interested in getting my hormones, getting off the streets, getting an education, fitting into society, getting married and having a life. A quote-unquote, some kind of normal life, rather than living in the Tenderloin.
I think I lasted with my boyfriend for about two months. He left me for a real girl. That really hurt me.
So I came back determined that I was going to have a sex change and have my surgery. The transsexual path to womanhood offered some tenderloin queens their first real hope for a brighter future and unleashed in them an uncompromising new attitude. The closer I came to the...
The more time for having surgery, the more risk I took. It was illegal to dress like a woman, but nobody was going to stop us. The girls got together and we just decided that we're human beings.
We're allowed to dress any way we want to, whether you accept it or not. The Civil Rights Movement fueled the Queen's newfound militancy. Glide Memorial Methodist Church, a Tenderloin institution just two blocks from Comptons, became a center of activism with the arrival of a charismatic young minister fresh from the front lines of racial struggle in the South. Cecil Williams was very active in the African American community, but it was when Cecil was moved into the position of senior pastor then.
in the summer of 66 that things radically changed in the life of the church. Because they had this money that was from an estate, the Glide family, it gave them a certain freedom to do some experimental ministry projects and the civil rights movement and all that was a part of that. Seeking justice for people was part of the inspiration.
You may be those who've been called to take America to a new test. At that time, there was a concern about trying to reach out to what was then sometimes referred to as the homophile community. Pioneering homophile groups like the Daughters of Belitis and the Mattachine Society. were early advocates for gay rights. They worked with ministers at Glide to establish several innovative projects, including a night ministry that served young people living and working on the streets.
As I began working late at night, a couple of nights a week, walking in the Tenderloin, sometimes when I would walk on Market Street, wearing my clerical collar and visiting, with some of the hustlers or one of the drag queens that, you know, where we would want to have a conversation, I would suggest we would go to Compton's. Outreach to Tenderloin Street Youth was part of a broader effort by GLIDE to qualify the neighborhood for new federal funds made available through the government's War on Poverty program. The so-called War on Poverty was created to prevent war in the streets. The question logically follows, what's the poverty program accomplished?
In San Francisco, areas like Hunters Point, the Western Addition, Mission District, and Chinatown team with unemployed members of minority groups. Poverty planners have mobilized some 35 programs in San Francisco, all told they will spend more than $8.8 million this year. You see, there were poverty programs in the Mission and in Chinatown. Well, there was nothing really covering the tenderloin. And there were a lot of people in the tenderloin that believed there should be a central city anti-poverty office.
The federal anti-poverty program was based on the assumption that minority groups were held back economically by racial prejudice. Tenderloin activists added a radical new twist. that fighting discrimination against minority sexualities should also be part of the civil rights agenda. The vision we were... Working on at that point was that there are many needs in the central city that are not being addressed because the people there do not have the political voice.
They're not organized. They're not speaking to each other and expressing their concerns in any kind of united voice that draws the attention of the powers that be. And so we knew that finally these people of the Tenderloin, of the central city, had to be addressed.
to be empowered to have their own voice. And so we were getting them together, and Vanguard was one expression of that. Vanguard was the first of a new breed of militant gay organizations to emerge from the 60s counterculture.
It formed in July 1966, and most of its members were young hustlers and drag queens drawn from the streets of the Tenderloin. Vanguard. It was an organization and that's the kindest thing I can say about them.
They were an organization. They came together to try to make changes. We heard about Vanguard but being a person of color I didn't feel like I belonged. We just felt like you know it was a bunch of white white radical people and they're just doing the whatever they want to do. Some of the hustlers and the drag queens were the ones that really took charge.
This was their organization. The Vanguard name that they chose, I think, reflected for them that they're on a cutting edge and that they needed to stand for something, create something that would give expression to their concerns and their dignity as human beings. And that to do that in basically an oppressive society, in a society that said you don't have a right to exist, was in fact...
in fact, to be on the vanguard. When I learned that Vanguard met at Compton's cafeteria, I finally understood the dynamics of the conflict. The management didn't like the uppity new political attitude some of its customers were starting to express, and that friction lit the fuse that led directly to the riot. Compton's had started not welcoming these members of Vanguard, these drag queens and young gay men.
and others that identified with some dimension of this community. There were a number of people in the community that raised all kinds of Billy Hell with Compton. Most of it was because of harassment.
We just got tired of it. We got tired of being harassed. We got tired of being made go into the men's room.
We were dressed like women. We wanted our rights. Sometimes policemen would come in. And they would talk to the management, and the management would say, see those kids over there?
Well, they've been here for hours, and they won't buy any food. Compton started saying, we don't want you here, and started kicking them out. So these members of Vanguard, they felt that they were not being treated fairly, and it was a grave injustice.
And so they organized and picketed Comptons to express their outrage at what was done. And of course, Comptons didn't like that. They tried, Vanguard tried, and they didn't win.
And I didn't support them that strongly, unfortunately, for them. I pointed out to them at the time, picket lines very seldom do accomplish much. Vanguard's July 18th picket to protest discrimination against drag queens and hustlers was the group's first major political action.
When it failed to resolve the conflict, the stage was set for a more dramatic confrontation in the days ahead. There were ways that we could have calmed things down a lot better than they were. There was unnecessary violence.
You don't tell a policeman. Get away from me. This is my restaurant. I have a right to be here.
The transsexuals got bolder because it was time to make a move. We have an old expression in the police department and that is, clubs are trumped. Well, clubs were trumped then. They come down there to raid Compton's to begin with. That's what it was all about.
What happened then was the situation got a little bit out of hand. The document that launched my research in the first place said the fighting started when a policeman grabbed one of the Queens and she threw her coffee in his face. Someone had thrown coffee in his face and there was tables turned over.
People started throwing everything they could get their hands on at the police. The hustlers kicked the police and punched them, and the drag queens beat them with their heavy purses. The cops retreated outside to call for backup, but cafeteria customers, maybe 60 in all, poured into the streets through the broken doors and windows and kept fighting as the paddy wagons pulled up.
All those flight glasses windows here were broken out. And of course they had the paddy wagons and they were putting people in the paddy wagons as they would come out and start fighting. What happened?
I mean, what did people do? Did they run around out here? Just like all up and down the streets? Before it was over, a police car was destroyed, the corner newsstand was set on fire, and years of pent-up resentment boiled out into the night. It was the first known instance of collective...
militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history. There was a lot of joy after it happened. A lot of them went to jail, but there was a lot of, I really don't give a damn, this is what needs to happen.
These young adults just, I think... took a great delight in the fact that they could combine their efforts together to address some of their concerns and maybe together do some things that they couldn't do otherwise. Compton started closing at midnight after the riot, and business never quite recovered. A pornography shop took its place when the restaurant folded in 1972. The transgender community moved on too in many ways.
The circumstances of their lives had been forever changed by what happened that night at the corner of Turk and Taylor. There was a big change, and I was kind of like, okay, we can dress like women all the time. We don't have to be little feminine hair fairies anymore. We can be who we are inside.
The cops just left us alone, so we just did our thing. We bought our women's clothes. We tried our clothes on in the women's store. in the dressing room, which they wouldn't let us do it before. So it was just a matter of coming together.
As long as the police know that you aren't actually hooking and running the streets and so forth and so on, when they realize that we are sincere in our beliefs of going through the operation and becoming women, both physically as well as mentally. Well then they sort of leave us alone. They don't bother us. They allow us to live our lives.
Police treatment of transgender people began to change after the riot, when Elliot Blackstone emerged as an unlikely advocate for transgender concerns. Well my job was not to make arrests. My job was to get people to understand. How to live their lifestyle along with the rest of the city.
I think that's very important for people if they want to be left alone, that they have the right to be left alone. That's me. That's not the official police department line. Elliot was a hard one for us to figure out because here he was, this police officer with police community relations in San Francisco.
I knew very, very little about sexuality except that I enjoyed sex. But other than that, I didn't know much about it. I'd never heard of transsexuals before.
Read everything I could get my hands on on this subject. And about homosexuality. I began to understand the people a lot better.
He was a mentor. And he was instrumental in getting laws against cross-dressing changed and the like. Anyone who comes here after, who gets up and says something nice about me, I'm going to kick them in the shin. As part of his job with Community Relations, Elliot Blackstone began to coordinate a network of transgender activists and allies who came together after the riot to tackle many of the problems transgender people faced.
We got programs started for transsexuals and then we began to get these people in contact with other community services. We have no idea of how many people are suffering in the privacy of their homes or offices or schools because they are transsexual. Dr. Joel Fort pioneered innovative services for transgender people. at a unit of San Francisco's Public Health Department called the Center for Special Problems....treatment to these individuals at the Center for Special Problems to help them deal with the problems that they run into in the everyday course of living.
The center provided ID cards that reflected the new gender of their transsexual clients. This was especially important at a time when state-issued IDs could not be amended after a change of sex. It was a basic ID card, and it served its purpose, although it did identify you as being under treatment for the special problem of transsexualism. Without identification, transsexuals were undocumented workers who struggled to find legal employment.
With it, they could pursue jobs available to them through the War on Poverty's training programs. The federal government paid for my education and I appreciated it because I got to go through the neighborhood youth corps to get my education as a clerk typist and then I go on to be a secretary. It made a big difference.
It made me realize that I could achieve and get anything I wanted to. In 1968 Stanford University Medical Center opened a new clinic for surgical sex reassignment. The first in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Local access to transsexual surgery finally allowed many former queens to move on with their lives. I went and saw Dr. Benjamin, and Dr. Benjamin told me about the Stanford program, which was just starting at that particular point, and offered to help me get into the Stanford program. Was cute and sincere and earnest and intelligent and everything that they were looking for as their ideal candidate.
After surgery, well I'm very fond of saying that life began more than I ever even dreamed or anticipated that it could be. I've come into my own and I think that's the greatest reward there has been. Then I was able to go back to school as Alicia. As a woman I was a good student. I was able to focus.
I was able to to blossom, to be myself. Early transgender activism was part of a larger transformation of gender conventions that began in the 1960s. It was part of the same social upheaval that gave us unisex fashions and radical feminism, glam rock, and gay liberation. The riot at Compton's was an unsung episode in that momentous shift.
The gay movement started in the Tenderloin, basically in the 60s, when we decided to fight back. This was even pre-Stonewall. We decided to fight back because we were tired of being harassed by the police or to be used as scapegoats, as being called derelicts and degenerates. So we stuck up for gay people and we were all one community. These things that we were enabling and encouraging, like Vanguard, were perhaps helping to awaken that, first of all, that yes, we can love ourselves, and we can affirm ourselves, and yes, we have a right to exist, and we can grab hold of that and claim that.
The healing happens in people's lives. That's when we can begin to see the larger picture. I am so proud of those women who fought at Compton's on that hot August night back in 1966. Learning about their lives taught me lessons I never learned in graduate school about how powerful history can be.
Transgender people today need to change a world that still denies us many of our basic human rights. Knowing what happened that night at Compton's brings the power of our history to bear on that struggle. Out of Comptons came some very beautiful, beautiful women.
We felt good. And that's the most interesting part of it, because once you feel good about yourself, nobody can hurt you. Nobody can come in and turn anything around that you don't want. I don't look at my life as being tragic or having a lot of tragedy or if I did I just looked at it it was this is just a stepping stone keep moving That's why, like I said, if I ever wrote a book, I would call it Wild as the Wind, because that's how I felt.
The wind just would sweep you away, and you could never get caught. And you just keep flying on like you're just out there, and you're yourself.