I am in Manchester for the final leg of this year’s LGBT History Festival. Tomorrow I am giving a talk and an academic paper, but today I had the pleasure of sitting through Susan Stryker’s film on the Compton Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco, and then listening to Susan talk about the film.

For those of you who don’t know, The Compton Riot took place at a diner in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in 1966. It involved mainly drag queens and gay hustlers, and was a reaction to police harassment. It happened several years before Stonewall (though after a similar event in Philadelphia).

Two things stood out for me from the film. The first was that the riot was no accident. It was partly a result of the gay night manager at the cafeteria having died a few months previously and the new management being less friendly to the trans hookers for whom the establishment was a welcome haven from the San Francisco weather. But it was also a result of deliberate radicalization of the trans community by a militant gay rights organization called Vanguard which met at the cafe, and a result of self-radicalization by the trans community in the wake of Harry Benjamin having set up a gender clinic in the Bay Area. There’s nothing quite like being offered the possibility of legal supply of hormones and surgery to galvanize a bunch of street girls.

The other thing that I noticed was the reaction of San Francisco to the riot. Stonewall was, in many legitimate ways, the start of the gay rights movement, because it did actually result in a world-wide reaction. Compton did not get much notice. What actually happened was that a bunch of trans women complained about being badly treated by the police, the City shrugged it’s collective shoulders and apologized, and life got back to normal with the police promising to be nicer in future. Of course this was San Francisco at the height of the Hippy movement, and things didn’t stay that way, but it is kind of cool that it happened.