In honor of the anniversary month of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, Susan Stryker previews her forthcoming essay At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor: Re-Membering Legacies of Opposition to Carceral Power in San Francisco. This event is supported by funding from California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
On August 18th, the Tenderloin Museum is honored to host Susan Stryker for a lecture on the occasion of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot anniversary month, previewing her forthcoming publication, At the Crossroads of Turk and Taylor: Re-Membering Legacies of Opposition to Carceral Power in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Stryker will frame the Compton’s Riot through a comprehensive, hyper-local, place-based history of the 101-121 Taylor Street Properties that reveals the systemic nature of carceral power, the insidious flexibility of carceral logic, and the vital witnessing of resistance to the carceral state in imagining a more just and empowering society. Stryker’s talk will be accompanied by a screening of One Eleven Taylor (During a Pandemic), the first installment of DEFENDER – Vol. 00 — a new film, art, and media project revealing the inequities of the U.S. criminal legal system — and produced by The Adachi Project, the seminal media and justice initiative of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, Even/Odd, and Compound.
One hot August night in 1966, a drag queen under duress from police harassment threw a hot cup of coffee at an officer, setting off a seminal act of militant queer resistance now known as The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. The participants in the riot were from some of the most marginalized communities--transgender, queer, sex-working, and unhoused youth--which was why the event was nearly slipped from public consciousness; yet, through the documentary work of Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman’s film Screaming Queens (and the testaments of Felicia Flames, Tamara Ching, Amanda St. Jaymes, Donna Personna, Raymond Broshears, et. al.), the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot has accumulated a powerful significance for trans folk and the broader queer community.
Compton’s was an inflection point in an inspiring movement of coalition building in the Tenderloin, driven by Glide Memorial Church and groups like The Vanguard; however, Stryker zooms out to survey the entire history of the building at the crossroads of Turk & Taylor to highlight the coalitional anti-carceral activism that has been fomenting since the very origin of the Tenderloin and continues to this day. The Adachi Project’s short film One Eleven Taylor (During a Pandemic) bears evidence this struggle, documenting the plight of residents at the former address of the Compton’s Cafeteria--now a re-entry facility operated by private prison corporation GEO Group--as COVID-19 grips the vulnerable Tenderloin community. Drawing on a thorough historical investigation of the Tenderloin’s history as an urban containment zone and San Francisco’s unique range (and less unique treatment) of gender variance, Stryker leads her project to a place of aspirational inquiry: how can collective action be leveraged to meet the real needs of the incarcerated, to imagine prison abolition, to meaningfully empower Black trans lives, and to realize 101-121 Taylor Street as low-income housing instead of an extension of the carceral system?
This event is supported by funding from California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
photo credit: Clay Geerdes