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Compton’s ’22
The New Yorker
Three years before Stonewall, in August 1966, a group of young trans and gender nonconforming people (mostly trans women, mostly precariously housed sex workers) rioted against police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Unsurprisingly, the media neglected the riot, and for decades it remained largely unknown even inside the local queer community. In the early 2000s, historians Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman unearthed the history of the riot and interviewed surviving Compton’s Queens.
Compton’s ’22 documents a collaborative effort of artists, archivists, and activists to create an intergenerational conversation between these oral histories and trans San Francisco today, and to imagine an interpretive archive that stands in for the absence of documentation. It aims to move beyond an identitarian relationship to the history and heed Susan Stryker’s call to “‘re-member’ [Compton’s] as part of a broader anti-carceral undertaking — a composite response, decades in the making, by many sorts of subjugated people, advancing additional sorts of cultural, economic, and political resistance.”
The film traces police violence against the Compton’s Queens through time to the site of the former Compton’s Cafeteria building, now owned and operated by one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S. Through weaving threads of emotional, creative, and political connection, I hope the project can contribute a small piece to a much larger project of looking to the past to understand the present and build the future.
Oral histories: Tamara Ching, Felicia Elizondo, Amanda St. Jaymes
Featuring: Beni “Ali” Avalos, Mia Diosdado, Manny Mendoza aka PrettyPlz, Tory Teasley, Matta Haide Zheng
Producers: Azza Cohen, Victor Silverman, Susan Stryker
Archive: Isaac Fellman, GLBT Historical Society, Jason Lee, Labor Video Project
DPs: Jes Gallegos, Drew de Pinto
Music: Jennifer Vanilla, Boy Pussy, Ariel Zetina, transcriptions01
Color: Marika Litz
Mix: Dan Olmsted
Sound, camera, & grip: Max Mueller, Kyle Myers-Haugh, Connor Lee O’Keefe