Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: A Case Study of Exclusion, Empowerment, and Collective Action of Hyper-Marginalized Communities

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Community Organizing and Mobilization

Abstract

In August 1966, a group of queer youth, drag queens, and transsexual hustlers revolted against years of discrimination and police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. Compton’s Cafeteria was an all-night diner in the heart of the Tenderloin, a poor inner city San Francisco neighborhood that was home to queer youth, drag queens, and transsexual hustlers. How did a group of hyper-marginalized poor, working class gender non-conforming gay men, lesbians, and transsexuals transition from a space of silenced subjugation to collective action? Much research on collective behavior—and specifically resource mobilization—suggests that groups most likely to engage in collective action stem from a mostly mainstream population. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot provides an interesting case study to examine how hyper-marginalization can serve as a catalyst for collective action—and more specifically—to understand relationships between exclusion, empowerment, and collective action. Through archival records, this paper will examine these dynamics by exploring responses to three questions: (1) How did exclusion play a role in the development of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, a resistance movement within the transgender community; (2) How did a hyper-marginalized population move from exclusion to empowerment in such a way to spark collective action through the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot?; and (3) What forms of collective empowerment developed in the immediate aftermath of the Riot? This paper explores answers to these questions through original source materials, including contemporaneous newspaper articles, publications, ephemera, photographs, and interviews of riot participants, community leaders, religious leaders, social workers, and police officers.

Author

• Angela Perone, University of Michigan