Recent historical work reveals that Stonewall was not a singular moment of queer insurgency and that the mid-to-late 1960s was an era of queer radical political potential. According to Susan Stryker, professor of women’s studies at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, the 1966 police raid at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria, in the Tenderloin district, helped launch a national movement for transgender rights. For Stryker, the term ‘transgender’ doesn’t name a kind of person but means ‘anything that breaks apart and makes visible’ the ways in which people define their roles in society, such as through their gender or sexual identity and kinship structures. Events like the Compton’s raid reveal the radical potential of queer politics in general.
Stryker’s May 8 presentation at the Chicago History Museum was part of its Out at CHM series. She located the formation of transgender community within the urban industrial era of the mid-19th century. People could now leave the confines of small-town existence and carve out new modes of existence that included living outside their designated gender categories. The 1850s also saw the advent of safer surgical techniques that allowed transgender people to make desired physical changes to their bodies.
Stryker asserted a connection between the ‘macropolitical’ issues of the organization of labor and urban politics and the ‘micropolitical’ ones of bodily manipulation now available. The confluence of these resulted in the concentration of trans communities in low-cost areas like the Tenderloin district. Transgender people were subject to housing and employment discrimination, she said, and the Tenderloin was the only place where they could live and work, usually as sex workers who were continually harassed and exploited by corrupt police.
The immediate effect of the Compton raid was a riot by trans prostitutes against the police, but it also marked a period of radical queer politics, according to Stryker. San Francisco saw the formation of the Lavender Panthers and Vanguard, groups that patrolled the Tenderloin to defend against anti-queer violence; protested consumerist culture; and resisted the displacement of the urban poor. Vanguard’s slogan was ‘You’ve heard about Black Power. You’ve heard about White Power. Get Ready for Street Power,’ and it was part of ‘the first successful multi-racial, queer-straight alliance for social justice.’ Such coalition politics eventually dissipated, according to Stryker. For her, ‘remembering’ such moments enables us to ‘carry our radical vision of a democratic future forward.’