The famous Stonewall Riots began June 28th, 1969 and officially kicked off the gay liberation
movement. But what a lot of us don’t know is how LGBTQ people have been picketing, protesting
and rioting long before that first Greenwich Village brick was hurled. Although in that
case it was just an old Glamor magazine with Karli Kloss on the cover. Sorry K. Klaw.
What many consider to be the first gay uprising in the United States took place a decade before
Stonewall and on the other side of the country in Los Angeles. This little place Cooper’s
Doughnuts had become a favorite hangout for drag queens, queer sex workers and trans women
who often were not allowed into gay bars and could be arrested if they were caught on the
streets impersonation women. One night the LAPD busted into Cooper’s Doughnuts to start
checking IDs to verify whether their biological sex matched their gender presentation and
just began arresting drag queens, gay men and trans women left and right and one gay
guy was so fed up with the whole thing he resisted arrest and with that everyone was
inspired to throw coffee and doughnuts at the police and a riot ensued. No doughnuts
were thrown that we know of on July 4th, 1965 at the country’s first organized LGBTQ protests
outside of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Organized by the East Coast Homophiles, they
hoped that their peaceful picketing would better get their message across as opposed
to say throwing doughnuts at police officers although throwing doughnuts at police officers
is just, it’s kind of too perfect. For five years every 4th of July these so-called annual
reminders demanded legislation to protect the human and civil rights of LGBTQ Americans.
But the following year in August 1966 the coffee hurling recommenced at Gene Compton’s
Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district which like Cooper’s Doughnuts in
Los Angeles had become a safe space of sorts and a favorite 24-hour hangout for black and
Latino drag queens and trans women. Late one night San Francisco cops rolled up into the
Compton Cafeteria and essentially started arresting drag queens and trans people left
and right but one drag queen was not having it and when a policeman reached out to grab
her she responded by throwing her coffee in his face and a riot ensued. Windows were broken
with sugar shakers, police were hit with purses, a telephone booth was set on fire outside
and the following night, drag queens, gay people and other allies picketed outside of
Compton’s Cafeteria to stand up against the brutality and harassment they constantly
faced from the police and the public. As a result the documentary ‘Screaming Queens:
The Riots at Compton’s Cafeteria’ says that this marked the transgender community’s
debut on the stage of American political history. Meanwhile in 1966 a group of gay men in New
York was leading an arguably more chill kind of protest called a sip-in. With press photographers
in tow, the guys went out wanting to challenge a New York State liquor authority regulation
against serving homosexuals booze because of course it would make them all disorderly,
which was based on nothing but homophobia and discrimination. The crew ends up at a
bar which is still in existence called Julius’, they sit down at the bar, the bartender puts
glasses up in front of them and is about to take their order when the guys say oh wait,
wait, no, we’re gay. To which the bartender covers the glasses, the photo is snapped,
thus documenting what is quite possibly the first act of civil disobedience on behalf
of LGBT rights in the United States. Then in 1967 the LGBTQ movement found it’s pride
for the very first time after the LAPD raided a gay bar called the Black Cat Tavern on New
Year’s Day. And in the wake of that an organization called Personal Rights in Defense and Education
or PRIDE set up a series of protests against this kind of police harassment and with that
momentum its small publication was rebranded to become the Advocate, which you’ve probably
heard of before which would then go on to report on a little something called the Stonewall
Riots. And history my friends just came full circle. Full circle, I love it when that happens.