Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005)

Co-presented by the Tenderloin Museum and Frameline

Post screening discussion with filmmakers Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman moderated by Katie Conry, Executive Director of the Tenderloin Museum. 

Directors Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman’s award winning documentary, The Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, tells the forgotten story of the first collective act of militant resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States–a 1966 riot by transgender prostitutes at a late night cafeteria in San Francisco.

In the summer of 1966, a drag queen patron of the Tenderloin’s Compton’s Cafeteria threw her cup of hot coffee in the face of an police officer as he made an unwarranted attempted to arrest her. The riot that followed would be come to known as the United States’ first recorded act of militant queer resistance to social oppression and police harassment in history. Three years before the famous gay riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn, the neighborhood’s drag queens and allies banded together to fight back against their ongoing discrimination, beating the cops with their high heels and throwing furniture out of the cafeteria windows.

Courtesy of the filmmakers

Part of the series 40 Years of Queer