Latest news with #Compton'sCafeteria
San Francisco Chronicle
28-06-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. Trans March: Thousands kick off Pride Weekend with defiant display of ‘queer joy'
Thousands of transgender people and their allies marched defiantly through San Francisco's streets Friday evening in an annual gathering with more urgency than ever in its 21-year history. The mood at the Trans March was mostly celebratory, though with transgender rights under attack nationally, the feeling of protest was undeniable. The event consisted mostly of people in their 20s and 30s, though it also attracted children and older adults. 'This is my favorite part of Pride Weekend every year because it feels the most like a protest and the most community-building, and I think that makes it really special,' said marcher Jeremy Gottlieb. Trans March participants had plenty to protest this year, with President Donald Trump attempting to erase their existence. Upon taking office in January, the president declared that the nation will recognize only two genders, based on biology. This week, he ordered California to ban trans athletes in public schools and strip them of their awards. Legislation nationwide has sought to limit transgender visibility, legal protections and health care access. 'Our existence should not be political,' said Lucas S., another marcher. 'If you look back as far as human history dates, trans and nonbinary people have been recorded in history, so no amount of legislation or close-mindedness is going to change the fact that we were born this way and we will continue to exist and support each other as a community. That's why we're all here — to support each other.' After a day of activities and live performances in Dolores Park, a crowd that organizers estimated at more than 10,000 headed down Market Street to the Transgender District at Turk and Taylor streets in the Tenderloin. That was the site of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot, in which drag queens and trans women fought back after years of police harassment. The Trans March has grown considerably since its start in 2004 with a few hundred people who answered the call of an anonymous email circulated among activists advocating increased visibility and acceptance. 'I think it's especially important for people to show up for in person events and reach out to each other,' said Jean Vila, a postdoctoral biology scholar at UC Berkeley. 'The more we show up as a community and support each other the more we can provide resources and the more we can help resist what's happening nationwide.' The Trans March kicked off a weekend of LGBTQ Pride events, culminating with Saturday's afternoon of entertainment at Civic Center and Sunday's SF Pride Parade up Market Street from the Embarcadero to Civic Center starting at 10:30 a.m. James Irving, a trans Oakland resident, pumped their right fist in the air in somewhat of a power pose as a marching band played and a large crowd cheered from the sidelines. 'I have a feeling that most of the people here either identify as trans or fluid in some way, and same with their sexuality,' said Irving, who wore neon green 'They' and 'Them' earrings. 'These people are being so true to themselves, and they're among people that are also being true to themselves.' Some marchers carried signs, with slogans including 'God is trans,' 'Keep your fauxking hands off of my beautiful trans wife,' and 'Loving a trans person is the easiest thing I've ever done in my entire life.' Costumes included a brick, a butterfly and a lobster. Ryan Melton, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Emeryville, was impressed by the turnout of the Trans March, her first. 'I'm absolutely blown away,' she said. 'The amount of people has completely stunned me.' Matthew Ploscik of Oakland, attending his second Trans March, teared up as he described the tolerance of San Francisco, where 'people come from around the world, just to be able to be themselves.' 'There's a marching band, like, all playing for us,' he said. 'It's an all-queer marching band. You don't understand how big of a deal it is. Just to be.' James, who declined to give their last name, said: 'In the trans community, there's a saying: Mourn the dead, and fight like hell for the living. Fight like hell for the living means we keep living, we keep showing up every day in our lives with the people we love.' As the marchers passed by on Dolores Street, Ben Peterson pulled up a chair and nursed a glass of white wine, inviting his neighbors to join him. Peterson said he didn't realize it was the Trans March at first because the emphasis seemed primarily political. Jessica Bryan, a 44-year-old trans woman from Oakland, described the gathering as 'queer joy.' 'It's a bunch of people who the government is trying to make illegal coming together and telling the government to go f— themselves,' she said. 'I love coming here every year because it's so many trans and queer people in one place.'
San Francisco Chronicle
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: At ‘Compton's,' eat pancakes and spark a trans revolution
When you walk through the unassuming doorway under the neon 'Compton's Cafeteria' sign, the first thing you see after the cash register is a pearl-buttoned, baby-blue uniform whose wearer's eyeshadow matches. Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick and Little Richard are playing on the Wurlitzer jukebox. Mustard yellow, burnt orange, chartreuse and tangerine hues bedeck the walls. And almost the moment you're seated, at a table or counter, powdered sugar pancakes, Bob Evans-style sausage links and a cup of decaf coffee materialize before you. Squint just a little at 'Compton's Cafeteria Riot,' the Tenderloin Museum's immersive show I saw Saturday, May 10, and you can imagine what it was like for the sex workers and transgender outcasts for whom Gene Compton's Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor streets was an all-night oasis in the early '60s. The purpose-built venue on Larkin Street, with sugar shakers and ash trays, where one server might tease her hair into a beehive and another might tuck a cigarette behind his ear, suggests the kind of no-frills, last-resort place you might hide out from vengeful johns and power-mad, predatory cops. But in the show — set during a transformative real-life night in August 1966 — the eatery is only an oasis until it isn't. The production, directed by Ezra Reaves and updated from a 2018 run, explores what makes the oppressed decide not to take it any more but fight back, sparking the beginnings of the transgender movement. As a work of theater, 'Compton's' is only intermittently successful. Some actors have the chops and presence to pull focus in an oblong space with few clear sightlines; others suffer from characters who are more mouthpieces than personalities. Lines get mumbled and tossed away. Lip-sync numbers, while helping ensure the show needn't stay grounded in realism, look amateur next to anything you might see at the Stud or Oasis. The script, by Collette LeGrande, Mark Nassar and Donna Personna, suffers from repetition on both the micro and macro level. Individual sentences replay so close together they're crying out for an editor's red pen. And scene after scene returns to the same conflict. Vicki (Matthew Giesecke) thinks Suki (Jaylyn Abergas) outed her as a female impersonator at work because Suki's jealous of Vicki's ability to pass. Activists Dixie (Maurice André San-Chez) and Adrian (Casimir Kotarski) wish everyone could see that internecine conflict is self-defeating. Gus (Steve Menasche), the proprietor just wants everyone to stay calm so the beat cop (Tony Cardoza) doesn't decide to shut him down. It's a well-balanced conflict, but by the time you hear its third or fourth go-round, you can almost predict which character will speak when, and what they'll say. Yet 'Compton's' also shows how all struggles for liberation are interconnected and ongoing. When the transgender characters keep saying that they just want to be able to get a respectable job and have a life like everyone else, you might be reminded of our own era's undocumented immigrants or the latest ban of transgender troops ordered by President Donald Trump. And by the time the Compton's patrons finally revolt, in a balletic fight sequence choreographed by Raisa Donato, passivity is impossible. There's an unhinged crackle in the air. As our narrator, an older Vicki (Robyn Adams) looking back on her younger self, points out, it was the kind of night where 'we were laughing harder than the jokes were funny.' Something was bound to happen then. What will it take for spark to meet fuel today?
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trans People Just Got Deleted From Stonewall. Here's Why Everyone Should Be Alarmed.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On Thursday night, the National Park Service removed the words 'transgender' and 'queer' from the web pages of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. The move, taken in the wake of Trump's so-called 'gender ideology' executive order, represented yet another step in the administration's ongoing attempt to erase trans people from public life—and now, their own history. A 15-part video series about Stonewall Riots—a three-day uprising against anti-queer police harassment that occurred on the site in June 1969, which is widely celebrated as galvanizing the nascent gay rights movement—was also removed, and every use of 'LGBTQ+' was lopped down to 'LGB.' Judging from the grammatically tortured sentences left behind, this culling was probably conducted by code; it looks as though someone ran a slightly more complicated version of Find + Delete across the site. Thousands of government websites presenting information running afoul of the right's 'anti-woke' crusade have been edited or taken down in just the first few weeks of the president's tenure, raising alarm about not only the losses themselves, but the material impacts those changes portend for communities ranging from people with HIV, disabled people, those whose primary language is Spanish, and of course, queer people. But the defacing—and that's what it is—of the Stonewall Monument website has hit the LGBTQ community particularly hard, given the location's venerated status. On Friday, hundreds gathered to protest the move, bearing signs like 'No T? All Shade!' and 'Can't spell HIS-ORY without the T.' I was there myself, because as a queer historian, I know that the erasure of history, while it might seem unimportant in the moment, is in fact always a crucial step on the road to autocracy. Indeed, the specific case of 'deleting' trans people from the record is an action with a deeply troubling, almost century-old precedent—one that should motivate us all to resist its repetition aggressively today. About that record: Let's be crystal clear that trans and gender nonconforming people were crucial to the Stonewall rebellion—as were lesbians and gay men, and even some straight people. But this truth has been hard won, for several reasons. First, Stonewall lasted many nights (which is part of why it received more attention than earlier uprisings, like Compton's Cafeteria or Cooper Do-Nuts). Each night, a broader community showed up. As Stonewall vet Jay Toole told me, 'It was every form of human being, every shade of human being, every sexuality of human being, all coming together as one. It was just like, enough is e-fucking-nough.' Second, certain parts of the uprising (like the accompanying riot in the Women's House of Detention) have been routinely sidelined. Third, our language and thinking around identity have shifted, obscuring the fact that many people in previous generations used terms like 'drag queen' or 'stone butch' to discuss their gender who might now identify as trans. Fourth, because they are hard to research, comparatively little attention has been paid to the queer 'street youth' who were the most active part of the resistance, many of whom were gender nonconforming. Finally—and most tragically—there is a contingent of people even in the gay community who are actively working to distance themselves from trans people and to erase our historical connections. For them, 'LGB' is not vandalism, but a victory. However, let's be clear here too: These people are absolutely wrong, and making this argument is a sign of their willful ignorance and transphobia. Because if there is one place in American history where trans existence has been well documented for decades, it's Stonewall. David Carter, who wrote the definitive book on the Uprising, was so frustrated by the deliberate transphobic attempts to erase trans people from Stonewall that he wrote an essay about it in 2019. Meticulously documenting his evidence, Carter concluded 'the two most important groups in the vanguard on the first night—beyond the butch lesbian who resisted arrest and probably had the greatest impact—were homeless gay street youth and transgender people, including Marsha P. Johnson and Zazu Nova, both trans women, and Jackie Hormona, a member of the gay street youth. Most of the gay street youth were more or less feminine—or, in today's parlance, non-gender conforming.' So, it's settled that trans and GNC people are integral to the history of Stonewall, and they should unquestionably be part of the story told at the National Monument. But why, you might wonder, does the Trump administration care either way? All autocracies attempt to control the past in order to control the future. Their methods are ham-fisted, because they see history as a purely political endeavor, and their attempts to compete with legitimate scholarship, produced by actual historians, are risible (remember the 1776 Commission?) But laughing at the Fuhrer is perhaps the cardinal sin when living under fascism—this is no joke. Like Stalin and Putin and the Lost Causers of the Confederacy before him, Trump and his cabal are seeking to annihilate any ground that they cannot easily dominate. In the case of Stonewall, they cannot actually change the past—trans people existed there, as they do now. But if they can make it harder to remember that earlier generations of trans people shaped history, it furthers their goal of delegitimizing trans people and identities today. Thus, it becomes easy to cast trans people as a sudden contagion that must be resisted, or a mental illness that must be eradicated. You might think I'm overreacting here—are a few letters lost from a website really a crisis? I get it: Prioritizing the past can be hard, especially when the administration is making it impossible for living trans people to travel freely and threatening to pull funding from hospitals that provide appropriate and affirming medicine for trans youth. But history tells us this erasure is a trial balloon for much worse things, and it's essential we hold the line. In May, 1933, five months after being elected to power in Germany, the Nazis burned the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, including some 25,000 books. Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Institute, was queer, Jewish, an advocate for birth control, and a pioneer in gender confirming medicine. The institute held the largest collection of queer writings in the world at the time, and connected and trained queer researchers from many countries. The first documented orchiectomy, penectomy, and vagioplasty were performed at the Institute at the request of a German trans woman named Dora Richter. The burning was part of a broader policy of terrorism aimed at Jewish, queer, Communist, feminist, and left-wing scholarship. The Nazis were obsessed with the birth rates of (some) white people—sound familiar?—and their purge of sexual science and queer community was depicted as much as being pro-natal as it was anti-queer. It might surprise you to learn that no one was killed that day, or even arrested. The burning was largely conducted by Nazi-affiliated youth groups, though overseen by the party itself. Afterward, pro-Nazi newspapers and bootlicking appeasers declared the Institute 'degenerate' and 'un-German.' The lack of public outcry emboldened the Nazi campaign against queer people, which ramped up over the next two years (in part fueled by the lists of names they took from the Institute before it burned). By the end of the Holocaust, tens of thousands were arrested, and an unknown number killed. But it took many steps to get to that point, and at each one, the Nazis were testing to see how far the public would let them go. By targeting the 'worst' degenerates first, they fractured the opposition, and inadvertently created that 'First they came for …' poem that we all now memorize in middle school. On that note, I offer a cautionary tale for those LGBs in our community who are tempted to throw trans people under the bus. At the time of the burning, there were known homosexuals in the Nazi party, including its leadership, such as Ernst Röhm, head of the SA (the Nazi paramilitary). For the most part, these folks were white, German-born, Christian, gender-conforming homosexuals, who saw no connection between what they did in bed and what those degenerate gender freaks did anywhere else. But they were the weakest part of the Nazi coalition, easily sacrificed to maintain power and escalate the broader assault on civil liberties and sexual freedom. One wonders what Röhm thought about the burning of the Institute a year later, in 1934, when he was removed from power, incarcerated, and then killed by his fellow Nazis. Regardless, the message of his fate is clear: Complicity will not save you. While we may not feel much sympathy for Röhm, it's hard not to mourn what was lost when the institute was destroyed. Their archives went back decades, possibly further, and documented the birth of the 20th century ideas of what it meant to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—ideas that made new forms of life possible, even as that very flourishing drew suppression and violence from those who feared it. But for all that the burning of those treasures may have slowed queer understanding and freedom, here's what I consider the essential lesson of the incident: those Nazi losers lost. They were fighting a rear-guard action, using escalating violence to destroy a queer community that had been blossoming for decades. Fundamentally, they were trying to fight modernity. Popular understandings of sex and sexuality had already changed irrevocably by the time the Nazis came to power. In fact, they came to power in part by exploiting fears around those very changes—much like Trump and Musk have done around trans people today. Once again, we are in a moment where our global way of living has transformed rapidly. The internet-ization of the Western world at the end of the 20th century parallels the urbanization of the Western world at the end of the 19th century. New and more capacious understandings of queerness, and growing numbers of queer and trans people, are just part of this change. Conservative reactionaries can target us, make our lives awful—and they will—but unless they can somehow radically change the structure of the entire world, they will inevitably lose as well. Still, it is imperative that the queer community—and those who would be our allies—stand against every step in this death march we're on, even those as seemingly small as a deleted letter. Because to understand that you have a viable future, you have to know you have a past to be proud of. For trans and queer people, that past is rich and inspiring, full of bravery and invention and tragedy and joy—at Stonewall and far beyond it. And that's a truth that no bigoted government or hacked up website can ever take away.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pride Month is not a Google Calendar application
President Donald Trump's first few weeks in office have included an aggressive push to erase diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, a movement that has swiftly been adopted by some businesses as well. Google's parent company, Alphabet, scrubbed language about DEI initiatives from various reports. At the same time, some Google Calendar users noticed that cultural observances like Pride Month and Black History Month no longer appeared as defaults events on the app. This observation led to a surge in backlash from users decrying what seemed to be another capitulation to Trump. But Google clarified it actually removed these types of default observances back in mid-2024, because 'maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn't scalable or sustainable.' Whether causality or correlation, Google's decision to remove Pride Month from its calendar application does not mean that Pride is dead. A digital application is not reality. It does not dictate our time — how we, as a community, choose to celebrate who we are and our history. A cultural-observation tab is not a public space — that tab does not control our social interactions, or where or why or how we come together. And certainly, Pride Month's former 'inclusion' did not realize the political and social belonging — which I define not as a static feeling but as an intentional practice that creates a space of mutual respect — that the LGBT community needs and demands, now more than ever. Let us remember: The first Pride parade was a commemoration of the human dignity and the communal power found in the resistance to police brutality and intimidation at not just Stonewall in 1969 but also Compton's Cafeteria in 1966 and Dewey's restaurant in 1965. The first media mention of 'Pride Month,' according to research conducted by journalists Brooke Sopelsa and Isabela Espadas Barros Leal, was in a June 5, 1972, issue of Pennsylvania's Delaware County Daily Times. The New York Times reported in a June 2, 1989, article that 'Mayor Edward I. Koch proclaimed the month of June as Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month.' But pride is not just an event. As I wrote for the Women's Media Center, 'pride is a personal and social feeling. According to Merriam-Webster, it is both self-respect — 'confidence and satisfaction in oneself' — and the 'pleasure that comes from some relationship, association, achievement, or possession that is seen as a source of honor, respect, etc.' In a way, pride is the dignity each person finds in our creative self-determination and the pleasure and joy in sharing in the self-expression of authenticity with others.' No company or CEO or president, for that matter, determines our pride. For years, the mainstream gay community has sated itself on rainbow beads thrown from corporate Pride floats and other empty, performative gestures suggestive of some kind of real, consequential corporate accountability to the LGBTQ+ community at large. That we now look to corporations for this dignity and care also signifies a broader societal shift of relying on other sectors, including corporations, for the services — the housing, the health care, the education — that our government has the responsibility to provide to its citizens through public goods and infrastructure. (A responsibility it more egregiously shirked after the Civil Rights Movement fought, and won, to expand post-World-War-II public investments, specifically in education and housing, to include Black Americans.) That we, in America, pay taxes yet have to rely on the charity of our employers for health insurance is a disgrace and an injustice. In this reliance on the for-profit sector, we have confused the modus operandi of business — profit — for that of government. As unfortunate as it is, I have lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for more than eight years, and it was no surprise to me that many of the tech bros who own these companies — including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI's Sam Altman — donated millions of dollars to an authoritarian's inauguration fund and are already looking for ways to show their fealty. (Google, for the record, also donated $1 million to the fund.) These actions epitomize what M. Gessen brilliantly outlined as the five types of anticipatory obedience that build autocratic power. Complicity is the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's liberal corporate ethos. And the much-lauded archetype known as the 'disruptor' is not the person who disrupts systems and institutions in the name of justice. The disruptor does not disrupt hierarchies or cultural norms. No. This person is a disruptor because this person circumvents ethical and organizational rules and regulations in the name of profit. A digital calendar application tab, a rainbow profile pic frame for your social media accounts — these are virtual ephemera, neither effective nor significant as forms of representation. They do not transform institutions or eradicate the many forms of historical discrimination that plague our society. The American government is attacking its citizens, especially LGBTQ Americans and anyone else it can 'other.' Trump is signing executive order after executive order to dehumanize the trans community and strip trans Americans of their freedom to secure the health care they need. We need to focus our energy and our efforts on real harms, not virtual nothings. If anything, the significance of this calendar application's removal is that it should make us re-examine how we, as members of the LGBTQ+ community, understand our political and social power as part of a larger strategic vision to build a more free and just society. And if it's remembering holidays you're worried about, might I suggest a different calendar. I have my 2025 Astro Planner from Chani Nicholas right here as proof. 'Pride Month begins,' it reads, right on June 1. We'll be just fine. This article was originally published on
