Compton’s Cafeteria, 1966

Technically, it began with a single cup of coffee thrown in a policeman’s face. But as with almost all riots, the one at Compton’s Cafeteria centered less on a particular moment than the years of abuses that led to it.

There are no reports of the temperature of that coffee—all details from the riot remain sketchy—but I like to imagine that when it hit the officer’s skin, the coffee sizzled like a pan of chicken grease. That this police officer carried the burns for the rest of his life. That on his death bed, his children gazed down at his face and wondered—for the millionth time—where their father had gotten this constellation of scars he’d forbidden mention of.

Who, his children wondered, had fought back?

Suzan Cooke:

Amanda St. Jaymes:

We don’t know the name of the trans woman who threw the coffee in that early morning hour of August, 1966, but back then Gene Compton’s Cafeteria was spot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district for trans women and drag queens to, patron Felicia Elizondo described Compton’s as “the center of the universe for a whole bunch of the queens, the sissies, the hustlers, the kids who were thrown away by their families like trash.”