Compton’s ’22
The New Yorker

Director, co-DP, editor

Three years before Stonewall, in August 1966, a group of young trans and gender nonconforming people (mostly trans women, mostly precariously housed sex workers) collectively fought back against police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. For decades this history 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 responds to absences in documentation and historical memory. The project aims to “‘re-member’ [Compton’s] as part of a broader anti-carceral undertaking,” tracing the legacy of the Compton’s Queens to modern organizing against GEO Group, the current owner of the historic building and one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the world. (For more information, see the short documentary One Eleven Taylor.)

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