Film: Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria
Victor Silverman & Susan Stryker
Running time: 57 minutes
To many, the 1969 riots around New York City's Stonewall Inn represent the beginning of the modern GLBT movement for equality. However, three summers before the phenomenon that came to be known simply as "Stonewall" there was a similar uprising of mostly transgender individuals in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.
In her film, Screaming Queens, historian Susan Stryker documents the 1966 riot at Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night diner that provided a sort of refuge for the neighborhood's transgender, gay and lesbian communities, and more broadly anyone else who did not fit in.
Similar to patrons of the Stonewall Inn, diners at Compton's felt they were being unfairly targeted by the police and harassed. Community tensions brewed during the summer of '66 among the neighborhood's police, transgender, gay and queer communities until they finally came to a tipping point on an August night when transgender patrons had had enough of the police harassment and overturned the restaurant.
Stryker goes back to the neighborhood, conducting interviews with community leaders, police and witnesses to show how the little referenced riot at Compton's may have in fact been the first organized resistance by the GLBT community in modern American history. With first-person recollections, Screaming Queens shows how the spirit of other social justice movements, namely the Chicano/a, African-American and anti-Vietnam protests was alive and well within the racially and ethnically diverse GLBT community in San Francisco.
- Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria [www.screamingqueensmovie.com]
- Frameline Educational Distribution [www.frameline.org]
