C H A P T E R 4

Direct Action, Collective Histories, and Collective Activism: What a Riot! All of us were working for so many movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women’s movement, the peace movement, the Civil Rights movement. We were all radicals. I believe that’s what brought it around.SYLVIA RIVERA*

Key Questions

1. Does rioting work?

2. Does protest work?

3. What kind of person would you expect to lead a political and social movement?

4. How do intersecting identities work in the context of riots and protests?

5. How did the split between L, G, B, and T come about?

6. How do we honor all histories of activism without privileging one group over

another?

Chapter Overview

This chapter looks at political activism in the United States during the turbu-lent and politically charged 1950s and 1960s. The story of transgender activism, political movements, and coalition building is very much the story of intersect-ing identities and intersecting oppressions. In many cases, the beginnings of the legal reforms that support LGBTQ+ people in the United States today were brought about by trans people of color who lived at the poverty level or who were home-less. This convergence of being gender nonconforming or a gender outlaw, being

Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, Introduction to Transgender Studies dx.doi.org/10.17312/harringtonparkpress/2019.01.itts.004 © 2019 by Harrington Park Press

* Sylvia Rivera’s interview, “I’m Glad I Was in the Stonewall Riot,” in Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond

Pink or Blue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 107.

Copyright 2019. Harrington Park Press, LLC.

All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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a person of color, and being someone who did not have financial security moti-vated and gave strength to these early activists. But this chapter does not solely focus on individuals who were part of historic activism; it also underscores the importance of collective histories and collective activism.

This chapter is not just about recovering lost heroes or arguing which exact person was responsible for a certain action. Rather, it is about the collective conditions and collective disruptions that helped shape activism. At the same time, it is also crucial to understand the ways that the LGBTQ+ community winds up becoming split, often in such a way that bisexual people are left out of conversations and transgender people are left out of important legislation, such as employment nondiscrimination protection. Infighting within the LGBTQ+ rights movement weakens us all; however, almost all civil rights and human rights movements have become divided. In minority histories, there is often an idea that there isn’t enough pie to go around. This sort of thinking further silences marginalized people.

In looking at various forms of political action, from protests and riots to picket lines, you will also be examining how various groups of sexual and gender out- laws approached their need for recognition and rights. In many cases, another binary is set up: people who worked within existing political systems and people who fought for liberation outside existing political systems. Some questions to keep in mind as you read this chapter: Can a person be radical and still work with- in the system? Can those who work outside the system still bring about systemic change? These were critical questions not only for the LGBTQ+ rights move-ment of the 1950s and 1960s but also for other social and political movements like the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the United Farm-workers’ movement, the American Indian Movement, and the peace movement.

Ultimately, this chapter asks you to think more expansively about history and to understand that there is room for multiple histories. History is a living thing. As such, it is ever-expansive and can be empowering if we truly let it be all-inclusive.

Introduction: A Need for Collective Histories

Have you read or heard former President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address, which he gave on January 21, 2013? If not, here is a portion of what he said that evening: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”1 With this reference to Stonewall, President Obama’s speech marked a specific his-

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toric moment for the LGBTQ+ community. No sitting president in U.S. history had ever made a direct reference to the LGBTQ+ rights movement and struggle. Certainly, no sitting president before President Obama did so in a positive light and in the context of two other major historic moments in U.S. history.

Do you already know what happened at the three places President Obama mentioned in his speech: Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall? Aside from the nice use of alliteration (each of the places begins with the same consonant, “s”), they also mark three specific sites, in order of occurrence, where major battles for social justice took place.

On July 19 and 20, 1848, over two hundred women and forty men gathered at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in support of women’s suffrage (women’s right to vote). The two women who organized the event, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, were also abolitionists (people against slavery). One of the men in attendance was Frederick Douglass, a former slave, an activist, and a writer in the abolition movement. Like many others who attended the conven-tion, Douglass understood the connections between the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement. The result of the Seneca Falls Convention (figure 4.1) was “The Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances” modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The writing made the convention’s purpose crys-tal clear: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”2

On March 7, 1965, a group of civil rights workers, which included people of many ethnicities and walks of life (including several religious leaders), were marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to secure voting rights for Afri-can Americans in the Jim Crow South (figure 4.2). A group of state troopers and other white county leaders physically attacked and beat them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Although many of the marchers were left bleeding and unconscious, on March 9 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led another group back to the bridge in protest.3 By March 25, and bolstered by military police and thou-sands of supporters, the marchers made it to the Alabama state capitol, where they delivered their petition to Governor George Wallace, who did not support the movement. By August 6 of that year, however, President Lyndon Baines John-son signed the Voting Rights Act into law.4

On June 28, 1969, in the very early hours of the morning, the police carried out a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, a dive bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, that was often patronized by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and drag queens (the word transgender was not in common use yet).5 This was not a wealthy neighbor-hood, and the clientele of the Stonewall Inn (figure 4.3) reflected the neighbor-hood’s racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity. Because the Stonewall

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F I G U R E 4 . 1 “Seneca Falls,” by Cameron Rains. The gathering at Seneca

Falls, New York, in 1848 was the first women’s rights convention in the

United States. Although the former slave, abolitionist, activist, and prolific

writer Frederick Douglass was an honored guest who underscored the

similarities between women’s suffrage and abolition, a group of African

American women was banned from attending.

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F I G U R E 4 . 2 “Selma,” by Cameron Rains. In March 1965 John Lewis and

Hosea Williams organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery,

Alabama, as part of a Civil Rights protest. When the group of marchers

reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by white law enforce-

ment officers, who beat them with clubs and attempted to drive them

back with tear gas. This incident was one of many critical moments in

the Civil Rights struggle.

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F I G U R E 4 . 3 “Stonewall,” by Cameron Rains. Like Seneca Falls and

Selma before it, the uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969 is

seen as the critical moment that sparked the “gay liberation” movement.

If you look closely at the illustration, you can see that the other protests

covered in this chapter are also depicted. What stories can be told by

focusing on single historical moments like Stonewall? And what other

stories get lost when we focus on just one event?

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Inn had a reputation as a bar that would serve homosexuals, drag queens, and trans people (remember that these categories were not separated at the time and that the word trans was not a category for anyone yet), it was a relatively safe space for a variety of people who might not otherwise gather in the same social settings. The mere fact that the police and the public saw them as sexual and/or gender outlaws ensured that the inn’s clientele, on any given night, was likely to be varied. The police raid itself was nothing new because in 1969 it was still illegal for any place, including bars, to allow more than three “known homo-sexuals” to gather together at one time. What was different was that in the early hours of this particular Sunday morning, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn refused to be bullied by the police. Their acts of resistance sparked a week of unrest in the streets of Greenwich Village. To this day, we mark the events of that night as the beginning of the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States.

President Obama was right to call out Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall to help him exemplify moments in history when everyday people in the United States stood up to oppressive governmental and legal systems and said, “Enough is enough!” In specifying these three locations, however, President Obama inad-vertently underscored the cultural myth that one exact historic moment defines a movement. But history is fluid; history is alive. The Seneca Falls Convention was an extremely important stop on the long road to women’s suffrage in the United States; but how many other discussions, meetings, and acts of resis-tance among various women and men had already taken place before Seneca Falls? (Certainly, there were many.) The march from Selma to Montgomery for racial equality and voting rights was monumental. But how many other acts of resistance in the wake of beatings and lynchings had already taken place across the United States before Selma? (Again, there were many.) The Stonewall Rebel-lion may have broken open the closet doors to usher in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement; however, on how many other days and nights did LGBTQ+ people stand up in both small and large ways against police brutality? Trans people of color were often at the forefront of these actions, but both main-stream culture and gay and lesbian culture often paint these momentous and courageous acts of defiance as white and cisgender. Doing so further marginal-izes LGBTQ+ people of color, particularly trans people of color.

Go back to the beginning of this chapter and look at Sylvia Rivera’s quote. Like so many other people, she was involved in numerous other political move-ments during the 1950s and 1960s. Rivera’s point is that these movements, although given separate names, were related — especially for some of the most marginalized people in our society.

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S E X U A L O R I E N T A T I O N 1 3 7

Would You Like a Protest with Your Coffee?

When you think of the “all-American” diner or the “always open” doughnut shop, the first things that come to your mind are probably not police raids, riots, and protests. Chances are, you have a favorite late-night place to study or meet up with friends. Why is it your favorite place? The answer could be as simple as “It’s the only place open late” or “It’s the cheapest place in town.” Whether your favorite spot is a student-run café on your campus, a quirky little espresso bar around the corner, or the local diner, imagine yourself there with a group of friends unwinding after a long day.

Now, imagine police officers suddenly coming into the café. They have their batons in hand and demand that you all stand, go over to the corner, pull up your skirt or pull down your pants, and show them that you are wearing under-garments that are gender appropriate. You may wonder what the phrase “gen-der appropriate” even means. Let’s say that the police decide your clothes are not gender appropriate. They have a van waiting outside. They arrest you and shove you into the van with a bunch of other people whom they deemed as not wearing “gender appropriate” clothing.

The three protests you will read about in this section have several things in common. First, they all happened in neighborhoods located in the impoverished part of an urban center. In the two West Coast cities, the neighborhoods had nick-names that exemplified the stereotype that they were poor and “dangerous.” In Los Angeles, the neighborhood was Skid Row, which to this day in American slang denotes a dirty and unfavorable place. In San Francisco, the neighborhood was the Tenderloin; a tenderloin is a cut of beef. There is a lot of speculation about exactly how the neighborhood got this name. Many speculate that the Tenderloin was an area where vice cops took bribes to “not see” crimes (and because they got rich by doing this, they were able to afford tenderloin for dinner instead of ground beef). Another theory is that Tenderloin refers to a neighborhood known for sex work (prostitution) and that the “tender loin” referred to the flesh trade. In Phila-delphia, the neighborhood was downtown at 13th and 17th Streets near Ritten-house Square. In the case of Philadelphia, the neighborhood itself did not have a negative nickname, but the café on 13th Street in downtown Philadelphia was called “fag Dewey’s” not only by people within the LGBTQ+ community who frequented the café but also by the police.

In each of these places, the café or shop where the protest or riot erupted was a twenty-four-hour spot that, because of its location, served a diverse group of people especially at night. For example, it was not at all uncommon for police

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officers, sex workers, and people leaving bars after closing time to all wind up in the same café at the same time.

These neighborhoods also shared socioeconomic characteristics. After World War II and the decade following (the 1950s), the middle class in the United States (more specifically, heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle-class people) no longer wanted to live in urban centers. Anyone who could afford to leave downtown areas for the suburbs did so, and the collective result is known as white flight. (Even blue-collar communities that were situated closer to downtown areas were still not located in the urban centers, and they were still recognized as what we would call “neighborhoods.”) So, how did white flight affect the city centers?

By the late 1950s, the majority of people living in the downtown areas of major U.S. cities were some of the country’s poorest people: specifically, people of color (particularly African American and Latinx, the gender-neutral form for Latino/a); recent immigrants; and white gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Certainly, some LGBTQ+ people (particularly white but also some peo-ple of color) who were in the closet lived outside the urban centers, but if they wanted to find other people like themselves, they needed to go into the city, to the “wrong side of the tracks,” to find the bars and clubs where they were at least marginally welcome. Police often raided these bars because it was illegal for two men or two women to dance together, and it was also illegal for some-one to wear more than three pieces of “wrong gender” clothing.

The third, and possibly the most important, thing that these urban enclaves had in common was their population of people whose intersecting identities were part of the reason they were relegated to these areas. As noted earlier, these areas were extremely diverse. For example, a young and poor transgender African American person might have found a place like the Tenderloin or Skid Row to be the only relatively safe space to live. It might have been the only com-munity where the person could find a landlord to rent to them. And it might very well have been the only place where that person could also find a commu-nity. Suburbs were the home of homogeneous, mostly white, populations. Even the more affluent neighborhoods or working-class neighborhoods with people of color were still focused on heterosexual nuclear families. Thus, people of color, the poor, the homeless, recent immigrants, and those who were either “out” as LGBTQ+ or who went out seeking other LGBTQ+ people wound up in the same places. Many of the poor people of color were also gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender and might even have been homeless because their families of origin had rejected them and kicked them out of the house — in many cases, when these people were teenagers.

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It is also critical to remember that, at this time in the United States, several anti-cross-dressing or anti-masquerading laws were on the books. If you were not wearing the “correct” gender clothing, the police could arrest you. Note that the word masquerade carries the assumption that the person is being deceptive. In most states, being gay, lesbian, or bisexual was illegal. (These laws were known as sodomy laws, and definitions varied from state to state.)6 As far as the police were concerned, there really was no differentiation between sexual orientation and gender identity. Often, people who would define themselves as trans today historically called themselves queens, transvestites, cross-dressers, or butches. This is not to say that all people who identify as queens or butches are trans, but it is important to remember that queens and butches were read not only as homo-sexual, but also as gender outlaws. We can make the argument that butches and queens trouble the gender binary.

Homosexual acts were a sex crime in the same way that being a sex worker was a sex crime. And many people who were LGBTQ+ also did sex work. These areas of urban neglect were home to rich and complex layers of diversity, and the people who inhabited and frequented these areas often did not have much to lose socially. Many of them, like the pioneer Sylvia Rivera, had been kicked out of their homes of origin at a young age. (Queer and trans youth still make up a disproportionate number of homeless youth in the United States today, and many of those youth are people of color.) The inhabitants of Skid Row, Rit-tenhouse Square, the Tenderloin, and Greenwich Village had little more than their dignity, which ultimately enabled and empowered them.

May 1959: The Little Doughnut Shop That Could!

Cooper’s Donuts symbolized a sanctuary for not just the gay population of Los Angeles, but also for the overlooked transgender population. Their presence brought irrational prejudice, violence, and judgement, but Cooper’s allowed them a space to take part in conversations and be who they were without the fear of scrutiny. The gathering and joint effort of LGBTQ+ people on the night of the riot is representative of the family that Cooper’s created.*

Not long after it opened in Los Angeles’s Skid Row (a poor, predominantly Latinx area), Cooper’s Donuts became the site of one of the first-known LGBTQ+ upris-ings in the United States. During the day, the little downtown doughnut and coffee shop was popular with the Los Angeles Police Department. At night, not

* Cooper’s Donuts, http://cdonuts1959.weebly.com/paper.html (accessed 2 March 2016).

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only were the “graveyard shift” police officers customers at Cooper’s, but from all historical accounts, it appears that this shop was also very welcoming to drag queens and other gender nonconforming customers.7

Interestingly, Cooper’s sat between two gay bars: Harold’s and the Waldorf, nei-ther of which allowed drags (another name for queens, cross-dressers, and trans people) access because they were afraid that the LAPD would target and harass bar patrons even more than they already did if the bars allowed gender outlaws inside. There was an idea that if everyone came to the bar wearing gender- appropriate clothing, then the police might not raid as often. (At the time, Los Angeles had strict anti-cross-dressing and anti-masquerading laws.) So if trans people were denied access to the gay bars, then the bars might not fall under police scrutiny. In reality, the police merely waited outside the bars and then followed male couples and arrested them under the anti-sodomy laws.

Although there was some racial segregation at the gay bars, generally speak-ing, the lines of exclusion fell more on the “gender-appropriate” dress spectrum. In fact, in Los Angeles as early as 1951, a group known as Knights of the Clock was formed to help support interracial gay couples who faced racist and homophobic discrimination in housing and other services.8

By all accounts, though, Cooper’s was a friendly place for many people who had nowhere else safe to go in the middle of the night: sex workers, hustlers, trans people, drag queens, butch lesbians — and most of the people in these categories were people of color. Then, one evening in May 1959, the police entered the shop and demanded that everyone show their identification. It should also be noted here that the LAPD in 1959 was white, presumed to be heterosexual, and cisgender male. If the sex on the customer’s I.D. did not match their gender presentation, they were arrested. The group arrested that night were predominantly people of color, and all were wearing enough “wrong clothing” to be hauled out to the police cruiser.

One of those arrested was the now-famous Chicano author John Rechy, who wrote about the event in his classic 1963 novel, City of Night.9 Once out at the patrol car, the group resisted. The other patrons of Cooper’s, who had watched the arrests with anger and horror but resignation because they were used to such harassment, became empowered when the arrestees at the patrol car began to resist. Bolstered by the shift in energy, they ran out of Cooper’s and started throwing doughnuts, cups of coffee, and garbage at the officers. The police dumped the people they had arrested onto the pavement and fled the scene, only to return with reinforcements.

The police went to get more help, but the people at Cooper’s also wound up with

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reinforcements: people started streaming out of Harold’s and the Waldorf, and they tried to overturn the police vehicle. According to one account, a couple of the drag queens enlivened everyone’s mood as they danced around the police car. The riot ended when Main Street was closed to clean up the mess the next day.10

The incident at Cooper’s Donuts may seem to be a small blip on the radar, but it is a representative moment in L.A.’s history of clashes between white, male, heteronormative uniformed authorities and minority groups violating the anti- masquerading laws, which the police enforced very broadly. The decade before the riot at Cooper’s, over a ten-day period in June 1943, the Los Angeles neigh-borhoods of Chinatown, Chavez Ravine, East Los Angeles, and Watts (all neighbor-hoods and communities that were predominantly immigrant, Asian American, Mexican American, and/or African American) were swarmed by white military men who came from bases around Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas and were joined by other white civilians. These squads of servicemen and civilians broke into private homes, dragged people off public transit, and bombarded businesses to physically assault people because of their clothing. This ten-day period in L.A.’s history is now known as the Zoot Suit Riots.11

Zoot suits were a fashion in the 1940s. A zoot suit was basically a nice man’s suit that was made overly large and baggy. Although young people of all ethnic-ities and races wore this style, Mexican Americans, in particular, were targeted by the white authorities because the clothes were seen as “un-American,” not “gen-der normative” (because they exaggerated a gender “norm”), and a violation of anti-masquerading laws. During the Zoot Suit Riots, the servicemen hauled the youths out into the street, forced them onto the ground, shaved their heads, ripped their clothing off, and beat them up. The servicemen were making a violent statement that the “Zoot Suiters” were not wearing the “appropriate” clothing.

In one instance, the police arrested a group of three Mexican American women for what we could call a double anti-masquerading law violation: not only were the women wearing zoot suits, but instead of wearing the women’s version of the suit that included a skirt, these women were wearing pants, which was viewed as masculine and as an act of cross-dressing rebellion.12

Although she was too young to have been a part of the Zoot Suit Riots, Nancy Valverde, a butch Chicanx barber in East Los Angeles, was repeatedly arrested throughout the 1950s by LAPD on these same anti-masquerading laws: “When I was about seventeen, I got picked up for masquerading . . . [by the police]. I said, ‘What the heck is that?’” Nancy always wore trousers and loose button-down shirts. Although her outfit was not exactly the same as a zoot suit, the similarity was there. One of her arrests led to a three-month imprisonment.

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April 1965: The Quaker City’s Collaborative Sit-In

This Dewey’s was near to the bars on 13th, Camac, and Chancellor Streets and it was open all night. It was the perfect hangout after the bars and the after hours clubs closed. Widely known as the “fag” Dewey’s, it was noisily packed late into the night with a whole spectrum of drag queens, hustlers, dykes, leather men and Philly cops looking for a cup of coffee, a cross section of life on 13th Street.*

Like Cooper’s Donuts on Skid Row in Los Angeles, the all-night counter service restaurant Dewey’s Famous on 13th Street in Philadelphia was a bustling and welcoming place for people from all walks of life. Although the writer uses the derogatory term “fag,” it is clear from the above quote that the term is being used by someone from within the LGBTQ+ community. “Fag” Dewey’s was probably the nickname given to the coffee shop by people from that community. Note that the author describes this location as a “perfect hangout” and points out that a very diverse group of people felt comfortable there, including police officers.

Philadelphia has been deeply influenced by Quaker philosophy, which, in its broadest ideals, embraces pacifism and focuses on making decisions through discussion and consent rather than hierarchy. Along with the Quakers, Philadel-phia, also known as “The City of Brotherly Love,” was home to over half a million African Americans by 1965. It was also home to over 60,000 Puerto Ricans and a growing Jewish community. So it stands to reason that the clientele at Dewey’s was ethnically diverse. Like L.A.’s Skid Row, inner-city Philadelphia was home to a predominantly poor population.13

According to various accounts, the managers of other Dewey’s Famous loca-tions all knew that the 13th Street Dewey’s was welcoming to all people; how-ever, they did not want their other lunch counters to be quite so accommodating. When the Dewey’s Famous only a few blocks away on 17th Street near Ritten-house Square also started to attract a large homosexual clientele (remember that homosexual was the general term used for all gender and sexual minorities), the management told the wait staff to refuse service to anyone who looked homosexual or who was wearing gender-nonconforming clothing — in other words, anyone who looked as though they were transgressing the gender binary.14

According to one newspaper account at that time, some of the people work-ing at the 17th Street Dewey’s got carried away with the management’s request and began refusing service to all sorts of people. In this instance, instead of a

* Bob Skiba, “Dewey’s Famous,” Philadelphia Gayborhood Guru, https://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com

/2013/01/28/deweys-famous/ (accessed 29 February 2016).

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riot’s erupting, the Janus Society (one of Philadelphia’s early gay-rights groups) stood outside Dewey’s handing out information about why a lunch counter sit-in was planned for the following week.

True to their word, the following week, 150 people from the various commu-nities in that area of Philadelphia — people of different ethnicities, sexual orien-tations, and gender identities — came into Dewey’s Famous cross-dressed, or wearing “gender inappropriate” clothing, and sat in until the police arrived. Almost everyone left peacefully, but a small number of people were arrested and then released. “The concept of a sit-in was really tied to the 1960s black civil- rights protests that were going on and with the era of civil disobedience,” says Bob Skiba, archivist at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia. “There were so many demonstrations around the city [Philadelphia], for racial equality and against the Vietnam War.”15

The Dewey’s sit-in was a success on two fronts. First, employees at Dewey’s Famous locations throughout Philadelphia started serving everyone who came in regardless of their gender expression. Second, and perhaps more important, the sit-in at Dewey’s underscores what happens when many parts of a commu-nity come together to make change. Imagine that: in 1965, 150 people regard-less of their identity chose to wear “gender inappropriate” clothing and have a sit-in at a twenty-four-hour diner. They may not have been aware of it at the time, but their actions were the latest in a long line of historical social-justice-ori-ented protests carried out by everyday people against oppressive systems in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The African American trans activist, scholar, and blogger Monica Roberts writes the following about the importance of the Dewey’s protests: “As a person who has been involved for a decade in the struggle for transgender rights, it is deeply gratifying to know that African-American transgender activism isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m estatic [sic] to discover another nugget of my African- American transgender history. I’m gratified to know that I’m a link in a chain that will eventually expand the ‘We The People’ in the constitution to include transgender ones as well.”16

A little more than five years after Monica Roberts wrote this on her blog, TransGriot, in 2007, President Obama echoed her sentiment when he referred to Stonewall. In response to Monica Roberts’s blog, however, some commenters claimed that it was specifically white cisgender gay men and lesbians who car-ried out the sit-in at Dewey’s Famous in 1965, even though other historians, such as Mark Stein and Susan Stryker, have persuasively argued that the crowd was gender and racially diverse.17

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There are some interesting questions that this disagreement over the history of the sit-in at Dewey’s raises: Who gets to record history? Why are some parts of history saved while other parts fall to the wayside? What is at stake when peo-ple are denied a history? Why would people who are already marginalized want to silence other members of their community?

August 1966: The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot — “All the Sugar Shakers Went through the Windows! ”18

Despite its relatively small size, San Francisco is a bustling international city. Its forty-seven square miles encompass immigrants from all over the world. By the 1960s, it had one of the largest Chinatowns in the West. As a port city, San Fran-cisco had a reputation for being a little more “loose” than other major American cities. In 1967 San Francisco was home to the “Summer of Love” as over 100,000 hippies, flower children, and other people protesting against “the establish-ment” descended on the city. A year earlier, however, in 1966, San Francisco was the site of yet another riot involving gender transgression.

The summer after the peaceful sit-in at Dewey’s Famous in Philadelphia, another uprising against police harassment occurred in the Tenderloin neigh-borhood in San Francisco, a neighborhood very similar to Skid Row in Los Angeles. Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a twenty-four-hour diner on the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, was a safe space for many people in San Francisco, especially the large number of trans women and queer street youths, many of whom had been kicked out of their homes of origin because they were LGBTQ+. As Felicia Flame, a Vietnam navy combat veteran, AIDS activist and survivor, and trans resident in the Tenderloin in 1966 says: “It was just one of those ordinary nights when all of the girls would come to Compton’s to drink coffee or just hang around to see what the night would bring. Every night at around two or three, we [“the girls,” that is, trans women] would gather around to make sure we had made it through the night.”19

For Felicia Flame, her trans sisters, and many LGBTQ+ street youths, Comp-ton’s was a beacon in the night. The café offered a bright, clean, and safe place for people who often had nowhere else to go to stay warm, dry, and protected. Here patrons could get a cup of coffee, some toast, and an egg for under two dollars.20 Just as the night at Cooper’s Donuts had seven years earlier, the night of the Compton’s riot started like so many others. The police officers from the vice squad decided to enter the diner and require anyone who looked like they were violating the anti-masquerading laws to show identification. But on this night in August 1966, Compton’s erupted in violence when the patrons fought

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back against the police. Grabbing cups of coffee, saucers, purses, shoes, and any-thing else they could get their hands on, they chased the police out of Compton’s. Then the group from the café and other LGBTQ+ street youths outside Compton’s turned over a police car and set it on fire.

Interestingly, the newspapers did not report on the incident in detail. In fact, as the historian and filmmaker Susan Stryker explains in the beginning of her documentary film about the riot, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s, the inci-dent would have remained hidden from history if Stryker had not come across an archived program for San Francisco’s first Pride Parade in 1972 at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society. Both the riots at Compton’s and at Stonewall were commemorated in this program. Until Stryker’s 2006 documentary, how-ever, Compton’s had been all but forgotten by the larger LGBTQ+ community.

The underlying history of Compton’s offers another layer of complexity in that one of the police officers, Elliott Blackstone, supported the trans community that gathered at the coffee shop. Throughout his police career, he worked on a task force that tried to help unite the beat cops in the Tenderloin with the trans community they served. As Stryker notes in an interview, “He was a visionary . . . ahead of his time.”21 Although Blackstone often humbly claimed that he was just doing his job, it is clear that he took looking after the transgender community to heart. He conducted police sensitivity training, and he helped raise money for hormones for trans people through his church group. Many other police officers shunned Blackstone because of his openness to the LGBTQ+ community.

These three “coffee shop” protests — two violent and one peaceful — show a progression in the ways that protests were carried out. They also show a progres-sion of support from other people in the community who had some power.

June 1969: One Police Raid Too Many at the Stonewall Inn

A heterogeneous street crowd started the resistance at Stonewall, not a particular person.�SUSAN STRYKER*

Over-emphasis on that single event distorts our history and renders as lesser other acts of equal — and even greater — courage, when circumstances of the time of occurrence are considered.JOHN RECHY†

* Susan Stryker, quoted in Ernesto Londoño, “Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall?” New York Times,

26 August 2015, https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/who-threw-the-first-brick-at-stone

wall/?_r=0 (accessed 15 July 2017).† John Rechy, talk given at Adelante Gay Pride Gala, 24 June 2006, www.johnrechy.com/so_adel.htm

(accessed 2 March 2016).

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On June 28, 1969, the last Sunday of the month, the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, was being patronized by the usual people: young gay male hustlers, drag queens, and other people from the neighborhood. It was an eth-nically diverse crowd, as usual. The Stonewall was a grungy bar where people could get a drink, listen to music, and get off the street for a while. It was also probably a place where sex workers met their clients. On this particular Sunday evening, the New York police raided the bar. Such raids were not uncommon. The police entered with their clubs and demanded that all the people in drag begin to strip off their clothes so that the officers could count how many pieces of gender inappropriate clothing they were wearing. The police certainly did not expect the ensuing riot.

Nobody is sure who threw the first cocktail or the first shoe, but we do know that the fighting began in the bar and then erupted out on the streets of Green-wich Village. We also know that other people, many of whom were LGBTQ+, rushed out into the streets from surrounding bars in the neighborhood to help the rioters beat the police back. The Stonewall Rebellion differed from the L.A. and San Francisco riots in that the protest continued on and off for over a week and garnered attention across the United States and the world. As Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a Stonewall veteran and African American trans woman and activ-ist for incarcerated trans people, states, “There is no ‘what it was and why it happened.’ It was just the right time and the right place because when they came to get us out of there [the Stonewall Inn], nobody moved.”22

Cooper’s Donuts, Dewey’s Famous, Compton’s Cafeteria, and Stonewall all took place within the United States; however, the ramifications were global. To this day, most LGBTQ+ communities around the world from the most open and progressive to the most necessarily closeted and oppressed point to the Stonewall Rebellion, specifically, as the moment that the closet doors blew open. Ultimately, all these events were brought about by groups of marginal-ized people who had nothing to lose by standing up for their rights. Sylvia Rivera says:

I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot. I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought: “My god, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!” I always believed that we would have to fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn’t know it would be that night. I am proud of myself as being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kind of hurt because that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people. Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.23

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The Split between LGB and T in the United States

Think back to the Cooper’s Donuts riot in 1959. What made Cooper’s a special place? If you recall, the little doughnut shop was welcoming to everyone. Although Skid Row was a pretty rough area of Los Angeles, many of the estab-lishments that were safe spaces for some people were not safe spaces for other people. Although Cooper’s Donuts was located between two gay bars, even those bars discriminated against gender outlaws.

Does this discrimination mean that the gay people in those bars did not like drag queens, cross-dressers, or gender-nonconforming people? There are prob-ably as many answers to this question as there were people in the bars. Ulti-mately, it was not the bars’ patrons, but rather the bars’ owners and hired bouncers, who decided who could enter.

Why would one marginalized group further marginalize another group within their own larger community? We need to remember that being gay in 1959 Los Angeles was illegal. We also need to remember that the LAPD was becoming more and more vigilant against “homosexuals” and other “deviants,” and that one of the easiest ways to target gay people was to focus on those who did not wear “gender normative” clothing — that is, people violating the anti-masquer-ading laws. It is most likely that the clientele at Harold’s and the Waldorf (peo-ple who were also vulnerable to being beaten and arrested by the police, having their names printed in the newspaper, and then finding themselves fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments) were acting out of fear. The two bars wanted people to dress in “gender normative” clothing so they would not attract police attention. It is also important to remember, however, that when the ethnically and gender-diverse riot broke out at Cooper’s, the gay people came running out of Harold’s and the Waldorf to help with the riot.

Each of the three riots and the one sit-in that we’ve explored started with people being either arrested for or banned from a place becauseof their gender expression. And yet, many of the books and essays written about these protests have categorized them as “gay.” Thankfully, many researchers and writers are attempting to paint a more detailed picture of the people who had the courage to stand up and say “No more!”

This is not to say that groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, both homophile movement groups that took to the sidewalks in “gen-der appropriate” clothing to protest federal laws that discriminated against homosexuals, were not courageous and were not fighting oppression. (The word

homophile was used by these earlier groups as a positive and politically for-

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ward-thinking term for homosexuals. After the Stonewall Rebellion, the word fell into disuse.) They were courageous in fighting oppression. Their methods were different, however, and their early ideas about how to carry out pickets and protests made their work inaccessible to many people who did not conform to rigid gender binary stereotypes of masculine and feminine. Gay and bisexual men who were seen as “too feminine” and lesbians and bisexual women who were seen as “too masculine” were often asked not to participate.24

Were there any rules about who could and could not participate in the Coo-per’s Donuts, Dewey’s Famous, Compton’s Cafeteria, and Stonewall events? The answer is no. One of the reasons that these protests were so inclusive was their spur-of-the-moment nature. It’s a protest, and anyone and everyone is invited! Other types of protests, such as those by various homophile groups, not only were well planned-out in advance, but also had strict rules about who could participate. If you go online and study the photographs from these organized protests, you will see that the participants are wearing “gender appropriate” clothing, and the majority are white. Given the fact that these organized protests were conducted by people wearing either suits and ties or dresses, and that they were visible to everyone passing by, you can probably begin to make assump-tions about their socioeconomic status. They wore nice clothes, and they had some kind of job or financial security that enabled them to be out in the middle of the day protesting. In other words, there was some kind of privilege at work.

One of the founders of Daughters of Bilitis, the lesbian activist Barbara Git-tings, discusses the issue of “choosing visibility” in the film Out of the Past. She says that she always stopped to think about being so out. For her it was a calcu-lated risk, but one she knew she had to take. Gittings understood her privileged financial situation and knew that she could be out without enduring the same consequences as many of her counterparts. Gittings was also aware that she represented hundreds of other people like herself who could not be out. (On another note, we can thank Barbara Gittings as a tireless advocate; she was one of the people who worked to get homosexuality removed from the DSM, which it was, in 1973. As you recall from Chapter 3, however, the DSM still considers some trans people to suffer from a psychological disorder.)

The LGBTQ+ rights movement has depended on both types of protest and advo-cacy: people working within the system and people working outside the system. Both forms of political activism are critical. The LGBTQ+ movement gets into trouble, and we begin to see damaging splits between LGB and T, when trans peo-ple are denigrated, ignored, and erased by people who are cisgender lesbian, gay, or bisexual. From all accounts, several of the people rioting at Stonewall were

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gender-nonconforming people of color like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson (both of whom are on the cover of this book), and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. As we’ve seen, however, Stonewall has often been regarded as a “gay” rebellion. The histo-rian Jessi Gan observes: “Though the iconography of Stonewall enabled mid-dle-class white gays and lesbians to view themselves as resistant and transgressive, Stonewall narratives, in depicting agents of the riots as ‘gay,’ elided the central role of poor gender-variant people of color in that night’s acts of resistance against New York City police.”25 Gan’s comment underscores the split among cis gays, lesbians, bi people (although, arguably, cis and trans bisexuals are often left out of the conversations), and trans people of all sexual orientations.

Shortly after the Stonewall Rebellion, Sylvia Rivera and her soul mate, the African American trans revolutionary Marsha P. Johnson, and other trans peo-ple were often purposefully excluded from the newly forming gay political groups. By 1973, when New York City’s Pride March included speeches from people in the community, Rivera was nearly forced off the stage by gay men and lesbians heckling her. The irony was painful: one of the revolutionaries whose actions on the night of the Stonewall Rebellion had made the 1973 Pride March possible was nearly dragged off the stage!26 In response to the heckling, Rivera commented: “I am not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus. . . . Gay liber-ation but transgender nothing!”27 Similarly, Miss Major noted: “I feel like we’ve been pushed to the outside and then prevented from looking in. It’s the stares, the non-inclusion over decision-making, exclusion from events that would build this movement.”28

Both Rivera and Johnson spent their adult lives working to help homeless LGBTQ+ youths in New York have a safe place to stay, even though Sylvia and Marsha were often homeless themselves. In many ways, the plight of people like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson highlights the devastation that the ruptures within the LGBTQ+ community can cause.

SONDA and ENDA: Everyone Needs a Seat on the Bus

These ruptures have been evident in various struggles at the city, state, and national levels as LGBTQ+ rights groups have attempted to codify nondiscrimi-nation policies into law. Various local, state, and federal bills have been pro-posed to make sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression protected categories, like race and religion. Some cis gay and lesbian advocates have argued, however, that gender identity and gender expression should be

removed from the bills so that they have a better chance of becoming law.

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In the early 2000s, the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) was heading to the New York State capitol in Albany for a historic vote by the state senate. Many people within the LGBTQ+ community, however, felt that the bill did not go far enough because it left “gender identity” and “gender expression” out of the language. Thus, if the bill were to pass, it would not protect transgen-der people. To understand the irony of the situation, consider that Sylvia Rivera would be protected on the basis of her sexual orientation but not on the basis of her gender identity as a trans woman. The New York group trying to get the bill passed, Pride Agenda, refused to amend it to include gender identity and expres-sion. In fact, Pride Agenda raised millions of dollars from within the LGBTQ+ community in an attempt to get the bill passed.

Quite literally on her deathbed in the hospital, Sylvia Rivera gathered local New York City politicians to plead with them to change the bill. Rivera was still struggling with an issue that she had faced within the LGBTQ+ community since 1969 (for thirty-three years).29 One of the people who came to her hospital bed that day was the Reverend Elder Pat Bumgardner of the Metropolitan Com-munity Church in New York City. Bumgardner is the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Memorial Food Pantry and Sylvia’s Place, which is a safe house for LGBTQ+ street youths. In a discussion leading up to the vote for SONDA, Rev. Bumgard-ner discussed her support of a fully inclusive SONDA: “She [Sylvia Rivera] came to me one day and asked me if I understood what I was doing in terms of calling for an all-inclusive SONDA, if I knew what that meant. And I said that I did. It meant that I wouldn’t leave her behind.”30 SONDA passed, but a trans-inclusive version of SONDA did not.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is a piece of proposed leg-islation that would prohibit discrimination in hiring or employment on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2007 Barney Frank, an out gay congressman from Massachusetts, originally proposed a fully inclusive ENDA, one that covered both sexual orientation and gender identity. The stakes for ENDA were high because this bill was at the federal level, much like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination in housing and employment based on race illegal in all fifty states, regardless of state laws that permitted discrimination on the basis of race. Fearing that the bill would not pass with transgender inclusion, the sponsors dropped gender identity from the bill. This was Barney Frank’s argument that reflects his change of stance: “To take the position that if we are now able to enact legislation that will protect millions of Americans now and in the future from discrimination based on sexual orientation, we should decline to do so because we are not able to include transgender people as well is to fly

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in the face of every successful strategy ever used in expanding antidiscrimina-tion laws. Even from the standpoint of ultimately including transgender people, it makes far more sense to go forward in a partial way if that is all we can do.”31

With this controversial stand, Barney Frank and Elizabeth Birch (who was at that time executive director of the Human Rights Commission [HRC] and who was also against trans inclusion) faced immediate criticism not only from the trans community, but also from Tammy Baldwin, an out lesbian congress-woman, and many LGBTQ+ nonprofits like the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). It is critical to note here that the LGBTQ+ community in this case did not directly split along the lines of L, G, B, and T. Rather, several cis gay, lesbian, and bisexual allies denounced Frank and the HRC for their actions, pointing out that gender discrimination is ultimately at the root of discrimination that is based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.

ENDA still has not passed; but after 2007 Barney Frank reintroduced all- inclusive ENDA bills.

New Zealand’s Example: Georgina Beyer

Georgina Beyer, who is Maori and a trans woman, became the world’s first-known trans person to be elected to a major government office. She was elected to the New Zealand Parliament in 1999.

How did Beyer make her way to Parliament? Having worked within the sys-tem in New Zealand — not an easy feat given the long and violent imperial silencing of Maori people in that country — Beyer became the Labour Party’s candidate for the conservative Wairarapa electorate. Everyone was stunned when she won. On her first day on the Parliament floor, she said in her introduc-tory speech: “I am the first transsexual in New Zealand to be standing in this House of Parliament. This is a first not only in New Zealand, ladies and gentle-men, but also in the world. This is an historic moment. We need to acknowledge that this country of ours leads the way in so many aspects. We have led the way for women getting the vote. We have led the way in the past, and I hope we will do so again in the future in social policy and certainly in human rights.”32 In this same speech, Beyer discussed the need for marginalized communities to stand up for one another and to work together.

During her eight-year tenure in New Zealand’s Parliament, Beyer used her position to introduce and advocate for some of the most radical social justice laws in the world. She dedicated her time in Parliament to passing fully inclu-sive LGBTQ+ laws and progressive laws to help sex workers. As a former sex worker herself, she had an inside understanding of the legal protections that

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sex workers need. She received a surprising amount of respect and support from her fellow members of Parliament.

If you think about the saying “No one is free when others are oppressed,” you will see that it applies to our discussion of the splits in the LGB and T commu-nities. History is filled with examples of the ways that transgender people (espe-cially transgender people of color) have been left out of human rights conversations. We must remember, however, the people who have refused to get on the bus if everyone could not ride: the Reverend Elder Pat Bumgardner, Con-gresswoman Tammy Baldwin, Parliamentarian Georgina Beyer, and the thou-sands of LGBTQ+ people who cried out against the noninclusive SONDA and the noninclusive ENDA.

Pioneers and activists like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Marsha P. Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera have all been a large part of why LGBTQ+ rights and LGBTQ+ issues have been in the news since 1969. Without a combination of Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, the trans women at Compton’s, homeless trans street youths, our unidentified sit-in participants at Dewey’s, and our fierce dough-nut throwers at Cooper’s, President Obama would not have had Stonewall to add to Seneca Falls and Selma.

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PAULINA ANGEL

Becoming an Activist

Paulina Angel is a trans woman of color from the Coachella Valley in Southern California.

She is an LGBTQ+ rights activist and songwriter-musician. She serves as the executive

director of Trans* Community Project, board member of Palm Springs Pride, and a vol-

unteer member for both the Human Rights Campaign and Trans Student Educational

Resources.

Coming Out in the Desert

I was born in a town called Indio, which is located within the Coachella Valley, about thirty minutes south of Palm Springs. When I was growing up, Palm Springs wasn’t the gay mecca that we know today. Even as it became an LGBT destination, it was totally behind the times. Indio was also light years from being a progressive town; it was a city that was made up of a vast majority of Hispanics with old-fashioned ideals. In layman’s terms: it wasn’t the best place to live if you were different.

Coming out in the desert, you had little to no resources as an LGBTQ person. Our valley was stuck for the longest time to ideals from the mid-1980s. The “T” in LGBTQ barely existed, and the “Q” was basically a derogatory term that every-one — including myself — had an aversion to. Palm Springs is an area where people — including many wealthy, white gay men — came to retire. The city is removed from any activism, so I understand why the San Francisco activist Cleve Jones chose to live here for a moment.

When I originally came out as gay, I didn’t know what transgender was, or if there was such a term. It wasn’t until I started attending an LGBT youth drop-in center where I was told, “Oh, honey, you are not gay, you’re transgender.” I was always attracted to women and was never was really interested in guys (unless you include Darren Hayes of Savage Garden). When I came out as transgender, I thought I had to like men since I was becoming a woman, so I was stuck with this ideology until I made the journey to San Francisco. As I was starting to learn a lot about different parts of our community, especially as we got into the subdivisions of both trans and queer, I found that I actually identify as lesbian and as queer.

WRITINGS FROM THE COMMUNITY

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Activism

It was never my intention to become an activist or to be a leader. I always meant to be like Paul McCartney, not Harvey Milk. It was my ideology that activists and lead-ers were special people, and I never thought of myself as anybody extraordinary.

When you grow up in a place like the Coachella Valley, where dreams usually die, it doesn’t give you much room to try to accomplish special things. A few peo-ple from Indio made their marks elsewhere, but never stuck around. For me, advocacy was something that happened by pure accident, and it began during my first year in college. I was attending College of the Desert in Palm Desert as a music major. I was recording my first album at the time, and I knew that I needed voice lessons because I couldn’t sing that well. Shortly after being fired from Walmart, I enrolled in voice classes during the fall of 2006. My initial plans were to go for one semester, perfect my vocals, and then find a proper job. One day, I saw a couple of students making posters for Club Rush, the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) group. I asked them about their group and they encouraged me to join, so I figured, why not?

I decided to extend my time at the college to be more involved with the GSA. As the only transgender student, I felt it was my responsibility to be involved. It was around this time that I discovered certain flaws in my college when it came to transgender students. There was one incident when my professor divided the class by gender: girls on the left and boys on the right. I knew where I wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to. The girls called me to join them, so I did. My professor asked me what I was doing. Before I could say anything, some of the girls told him, “She can be with us.” I hadn’t transitioned yet, but the class had an understanding about me, so the professor allowed me to join the girls. The beautiful thing about the students is that they all got it — they all didn’t need any explanation, they just knew. From that point on, I decided to help my college become more trans-friendly, so I stuck around and accepted the nomi-nation to become the president of our GSA.

Within the next two years, I met with Board of Trustees members, the diver-sity campus group, and organized events that raised awareness about transgen-der issues and promoted LGBTQ visibility. At this time, I was given the name “the Harvey Milk of the College of the Desert.” My work led me to become the first trans person elected to the student body organization of my college in an External Affairs position. I was then invited to participate in the Student Senate for California Community Colleges (SSCCC) in Sacramento.

While I was president of the GSA, I attended a student general assembly hosted by the SSCCC in Los Angeles in 2008. The event taught me how to have political power in education. I attended a few workshops, learned how to com-pose resolutions, and got a feel of how other campuses in California dealt with

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LGBTQ student issues. After being elected External Affairs Officer in mid-2009, I attended the general assembly in San Francisco. I presented the first-ever stu-dent resolution dealing with gender identity equality. I spent the weekend lob-bying for student leaders to support and vote on the resolution. I also hosted a special-interest meeting about my resolution and another resolution that got left over from the previous general assembly. Without serious opposition, both resolutions passed by a landslide.

After the general assembly, I became the first trans person elected to serve as a senator for the SSCCC. I served two terms; the first term I worked as a regional senator representing both Riverside and San Bernardino County. I was assigned an at-large position during my second term, which made me one of ten senators representing all 112 California community colleges in Sacramento. During my two terms, I worked feverishly on student bills as well as equity and diversity issues. I presented and facilitated workshops on how to advocate for LGBTQ equality on campus and passed a resolution for community colleges to recognize Harvey Milk Day. I’ve also co-authored a recommendation to Governor Jerry Brown to pass Senate Bill 48: FAIR Education Act.

One of my fellow senators called me an “activist” around this time. We were having a discussion about people who had overcome adversity and pursued opportunities that people in their situation wouldn’t normally be able to. My friend Shawn said that there is one person who comes to mind that truly defines this term, and that person was me. It was true: I was a lower middle-class His-panic trans woman and a survivor of child abuse. Somehow, despite every obstacle that was thrown at me, I found a way to do great work for the commu-nity and became an activist.

I briefly relocated to San Francisco to continue my studies in 2012. Sadly, because of personal hardship, I had to drop out of college and take a semiretire-ment from my work. When I returned to the desert, I thought my work as an activist was done. I went back to my music, completed two albums, and continued to write songs.

In 2014 I met a dynamic trans woman activist. She had recently moved to the desert after living in Seattle for years. I had no intention of becoming an activist again. I thought activism was behind me, and I was focused on finding a way to get back to San Francisco to continue my education. The trans woman activist told me that I could make a difference for our community in the desert. I had never been involved in the Palm Springs community before and was terri-fied of the idea. I’ve always said that the Palm Springs LGBTQ community was behind the times and was basically stuck in 1985. I wasn’t sure if I was the person to bring it up to speed, but we did it.

I’m currently executive director of the Trans* Community Project, which has allowed me to help bring visibility to trans and queer issues by putting to the

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test everything I’ve learned as a student leader and a brief resident of San Fran-cisco. I’m also a member of the Palm Springs Steering Committee for the Human Rights Campaign, which allowed me to really help the organization do more work for the trans community alongside members of other steering committees across America. I’m the first-ever trans person to join the Greater Palm Springs Pride Board of Directors, and possibly the youngest person as well. Since 2014 I’ve helped our community become more progressive and current on LGBT issues through educational events and town hall rallies. My work led me to be awarded the Spirit of Stonewall Emerging Leaders award at last year’s Pride celebration. I’m also a volunteer member for both Equality California and Trans Students Educational Resources. I love the work I do.

Intersectionalities

As a woman of color, it had taken me years to fully embrace my Hispanic heri-tage. When you live in a town like Indio, you didn’t really feel that out of place. It wasn’t till I started to get involved in things in Palm Springs and Sacramento that I started to realize the difference. In Palm Springs, the majority of the trans community is white, and many have privilege because a lot have either had the surgeries or have money that has allowed them to pass. I don’t have such priv-ileges, so when I’m around them I feel out of place, although a few of them have accepted me into their circle of friends. However, most of the time I feel I have to work harder to prove that I belong in their community.

JESUS CORONADO

Coming Out as a Trans Man

I am a Mexican trans man, going to school for the first time since the third grade in my

thirties, finishing community college, and getting ready to transfer to UC Berkeley. I have

overcome many challenges thanks to my resourcefulness, strong work ethic, and will to

fight and live. Making a difference is important to me. I want to work against the oppres-

sion that I have lived through as a trans person of color and an immigrant. In my jour-

ney I hope to inspire trans youth and find a way to support them in their journey.

When I first arrived in the U.S. from Guadalajara, Mexico, I learned that there were many parts of the LGBT community. For example: butch, stud, femme, gay, and transgender. When I was in Mexico, the only thing I knew was that I liked girls. My best friend and his partner introduced me and my girlfriend to the queer community and everything it had to offer. It was the first time someone gave me a label: they told me I was a “stud.” The only thing I knew about being a “stud” was that they look and act like guys, so I agreed.

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W H A T A R I O T ! 1 5 7

As time went on, I became depressed. My depression just kept getting worse, my seven-year relationship ended, and I was a mess. No doctor, medicine, girl-friend, or friend could have helped me at the time.

Then one of my best friends told us that he was transitioning. I was confused because I had seen what happens to other folks who transition. Many people in the queer community no longer saw those who transitioned as a part of the community — they became “straight.”

After my friend’s announcement, I decided to speak with my doctor and coun-selor and tell them what I had been experiencing throughout my life — I am a trans man. My doctor and I began to consider options, and, after three years, she finally agreed to help me transition. She wanted to help sooner, but we had to get my depression under control, just enough to deal with the testosterone.

The next step was coming out to my friends and family. I didn’t have to come out when I had been perceived as a “stud.” My family and friends knew that I was “gay” before I knew myself. I knew the coming-out process would take time, but I just didn’t expect the consequences. I never realized that giving myself permission to be me would bring with it so much loss.

I had something important to tell my friends, and my heart raced every time I got ready to speak. Each time, I would hear again all the bad things they had to say about trans people, and so I waited. The longer I waited to speak, the angrier and more resentful I became. When I finally told them that I am a trans man and I wanted to transition, there was a weird silence in the room. Some-how, after I saw their faces, I allowed myself to be convinced to go back into the closet. We talked about how bad being transgender was and how it supposedly had ruined our other friend’s life. I admitted to them that maybe I was wrong. Maybe because I feared what was about to happen.

My anger built and built, until it finally exploded on my “best friend’s” birth-day. Our friendship ended. After that I moved out of his house.

My friends were the people who had promised to love me and be there for me no matter what. But after I decided to come out as a trans man, I received no support from them, including many friends in the queer community. For trans folks, it can be difficult because we have often felt rejected by both the queer and straight community — at least until recently. When I came out, I lost almost every friend around me. Not only because of my transition, but also because of the depression and anger that had built up in me.

Not long after I moved out, I finally began my transition, which I had planned with my doctor a year before. For me, the transition was the greatest thing that’s ever happened. I’m finally happy and present in the world that I tried to leave so many times. I don’t regret my coming out as trans and losing friends, but I regret not realizing who my true friends were sooner.

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Key Concepts

drags ( p. 140 )

ENDA ( p. 150 )

homophile ( p. 147 )

Selma ( p. 132 )

Seneca Falls ( p. 132 )

sodomy laws ( p. 139 )

SONDA ( p. 150 )

Stonewall Inn ( p. 132 )

Activities, Discussion Questions, and Observations

1. Both Paulina and Jesus discuss various ways that they have struggled as out-siders within different communities. Look at both their stories and discuss the ways that they have dealt with being outsiders. If you could ask either of them a question, what would that question be?

2. Like many political and social movements in the United States in the 1960s, the modern LGBTQ+ movement and, more specifically, early involvement by transgender activists came about through riots. Think of other riots in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Who was rioting and why? What are some of the advantages to rioting? What are some of the disadvantages?

3. For this assignment, you will need to view two different Stonewall films: the 1995 film entitled Stonewall and the 2015 film also entitled. Both films are docudramas, which means that they are fictional documentaries. Conduct a bit of background research on the directors of the two films and then, after you have viewed them both, compare the films. How did they choose to tell the story of the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City in the summer of 1969?

4. Research the history of anti-masquerading or anti-cross-dressing laws in two states of your choice. When did the laws go into effect? Why? When were the laws abolished?

5. Think of everything you know about the Civil Rights movement in the United States. At what moment do you think the movement started? Was it when people like Harriet Tubman ferried enslaved people to safety via the Under-ground Railroad? Was it when the former slave and abolitionist Frederick

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W H A T A R I O T ! 1 5 9

Douglass was invited to speak at the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, where he drew parallels between the plight of slaves and the plight of white women? Did you choose that moment in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat? Or did you choose Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech given at the 1963 March on Washington? If you chose any of these moments (or others not mentioned here), you are correct. The important point is that when we think about history, it is often easier to put it into the context of one exact historic moment. Pick another human rights movement or social justice movement in the United States or in another country. When do you think the movement began? Then research and trace the history of that movement.

6. What is at stake in trying to claim any one place or any one moment as a starting point for a history? How can we help these histories all work together rather than continue fighting over who started what? Isn’t the end result, or where we are now and where we are going, equally important?

7. In social and political movements, there is often tension between people who want to work within the existing power structures and systems, and people who want nothing to do with that system and would rather start over. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? Which are you more comfortable with and why?

8. In the following section, “Film and Television of Interest,” three items in the list focus on the life of the trans activist Marsha P. Johnson: one film from 2012 entitled Pay It No Mind, one film from 2016 entitled The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, and one film from 2018 entitled Happy Birthday, Marsha!

Watch two or three of these films and focus on comparisons between them. If you conduct some research, you will find that there has been controversy, in particular between the filmmakers of the 2016 and 2017 films. The contro-versy centers on the idea that trans people should be at the forefront of tell-ing trans stories and on accusations of a trans filmmaker’s long, hard work in the archives being usurped by a cis filmmaker. How does each film approach the subject matter of Marsha P. Johnson, her life, and her love for and work with Sylvia Rivera? What are the differences in the ways that their stories are told? Can you tell what is at stake for each filmmaker? Which film is your favorite? Why? And why might it be important to have several different explorations of the same topic?

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Film and Television of Interest

After Stonewall (1999, U.S., 88 minutes)This documentary looks at the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the thirty years between 1969 and 1999. Several leaders in the LGBTQ+ community are interviewed.

Before Stonewall (1984, U.S., 87 minutes)This documentary looks at early LGBTQ+ rights leaders in the years leading up to the Stone- wall Rebellion. Of particular note, the film interviews Barbara Gittings from the Daughters of Bilitis and Harry Hay from the Mattachine Society. The main focus of the film is on the early homophile movement. Transgender people are, more or less, left out of the film.

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003, U.S., 83 minutes)This documentary film explores the lifelong activism of Bayard Rustin, an African Amer-ican, Quaker, pacifist, and gay activist. Rustin is one of the unsung heroes of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. He almost singlehandedly organized the historic 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Coming Out in the 1950s (2011, U.S., 15 minutes)Phil Siegel’s first documentary in a series of four explores the lives of people who came out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender in the 1950s. The sexual orientation and/or gender identity of most of the people interviewed in the film was illegal when they first came out of the closet.

Coming Out in the 1960s (2013, U.S., 26 minutes)This second documentary by Phil Siegel explores the changing times from the 1950s into the 1960s as different people are interviewed about coming out of the closet during the decade of the Civil Rights movement, women’s movement, the peace movement, the United Farmworkers’ movement, and the beginning of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2016, U.S., 105 minutes)David France’s documentary film uses rare archival footage and interviews to explore the tragic death of Marsha P. Johnson and the ways that the New York City police quickly ruled her death a suicide. People within the trans community, in particular, know that the police viewed Marsha P. Johnson as just another trans woman of color. This docu-mentary follows Victoria Cruz, a social justice advocate and trans woman, as she goes all over the city trying to seek justice for Marsha’s murder.

Envisioning Justice (2013, U.S., 32 minutes)Pauline Park is a Korean-born trans woman who was adopted by white parents in the United States. This short documentary features Park talking about coming out as trans

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W H A T A R I O T ! 1 6 1

and her activist work in New York. Pauline Park has worked on the same issues of trans equality that Sylvia Rivera worked on. Pauline Park continues the fight for trans rights.

Georgie Girl (2001, New Zealand, 69 minutes)Georgina Beyer, who is Maori and lives in New Zealand, became the first openly trans-gender elected member of Parliament in the world. This award-winning documentary follows her life and her groundbreaking work in politics as an advocate for equity and access for all people.

Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018, U.S., 14 minutes)This film was researched, written, and directed by queer and trans artists and historians Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel. This short drama uses archival footage as well as dra-matization to explore the lives of and love between Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Hope along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay (2002, U.S., 57 minutes)This biopic and documentary focuses on the life of Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, a gay men’s group that promoted gay rights beginning in the 1950s.

The Lavender Scare (2016, U.S., 88 minutes)In 1953 President Eisenhower signed an executive order that banned gay and lesbian people from working in the federal government. This documentary looks at the time in the 1950s when being gay or lesbian was equated with being communist; not only was there a red scare in the United States, but there was also a lavender scare. This film also helps show the ways that early movements working within the system, such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, first started to form in response to these federal mandates.

Major! (2015, U.S., 95 minutes)This multiple award–winning documentary focuses on the life and continued pioneering work of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. The film includes outstanding archival footage and interviews with Miss Major and her support network. Of particular note is her work with TGI Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for trans people in prison.

No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (2003, U.S., 57 minutes)Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, lifetime partners, were also two of the founding members of the Daughters of Bilitis. They worked both within and outside systems of power and focused on lesbian rights.

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On These Shoulders We Stand (2010, U.S., 75 minutes)Glenne McElhinney’s documentary looks at LGBTQ+ elders in Los Angeles. Of special note is the interview with Nancy Valverde, which examines the intersections of racial, gender, and sexual orientation oppression in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

Pay It No Mind — The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson (2012, U.S., 54 minutes)This documentary looks at the life of Marsha P. Johnson and the joy she brought to the community in Greenwich Village — especially the LGBTQ+ community — in New York City. The film discusses her love relationship with Sylvia Rivera, who was also one of the pioneers of the LGBTQ+ rights movement and a Stonewall Rebellion veteran.

Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s (2005, U.S., 57 minutes)Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker directed this documentary, which brought the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riots out of silence. Using archival footage and oral histories from trans women who lived in the Tenderloin during the 1960s, the film gives the viewer a full picture of the events that led up to the night of the riots.

S.T.A.R. (2016, U.S., 30 minutes)

The trans filmmaker Rhys Ernst has a series of short film documentaries entitled We’ve Been Around that explore historic trans figures who are mostly unknown. In this docu-mentary, Ernst explores Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and the founding of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.).

Stonewall (1995, U.S., 99 minutes)The Stonewall Rebellion is reimagined in this fictionalization of the events leading up to and taking place at the Stonewall Inn on the last Sunday in June 1969. The film looks at a diverse group of characters and includes people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, includ-ing LGBTQ+ people of color. Part drama and part musical, the film also includes a group of African American and Latinx drag queens who serve as the Greek chorus in the back-ground of the film.

Stonewall (2015, U.K., 129 minutes)In this fictionalization of the night of the Stonewall Rebellion, the filmmaker Roland Emmerich envisions Stonewall as a predominantly white and cisgender gay riot. This film faced controversy and a picket in the United States.

Stonewall Uprising (2011, television, U.S., 80 minutes)This documentary made for public television in the United States uses archival footage to examine the Stonewall Rebellion. The film has interesting interviews with veterans of the riots as well as an interview with a police officer who was on duty the night the riots broke out.

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W H A T A R I O T ! 1 6 3

Sylvia Rivera Trans Movement Founder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybnH0H B0lqc, 2011, U.S., 25 minutes)This YouTube video has some stunning interviews with Sylvia Rivera. From her being booed off the stage at the liberation march in the 1970s to her discussing the death of her beloved Marsha P. Johnson, this video is full of raw footage. Most notably, Rivera takes the filmmaker into her cardboard house in an abandoned and garbage-strewn area near the Hudson River. Rivera discusses her struggle with addiction and her desire and work to help other homeless people.

Umbrella (2017, U.S., 15 minutes)From the trans director Rhys Ernst comes this powerful documentary that focuses on trans political activism and the desire to create change at the beginning of the Trump administration.

U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Georgia

sodomy laws by a 5 – 4 vote. It took seven-

teen years for these laws to finally fall in

2003. Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U.S. 186

(1986), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/

federal /us/478/186/case.html; Lawrence

v. Texas (2003), https://www.supreme

court.gov/oral_arguments/argument_

transcripts /2002/02-102.pdf (both

accessed 15 July 2017).

7. Cooper’s Donuts, http://cdonuts1959

.weebly.com/paper.html (accessed 2

March 2016).

8. Tom De Simone, Teresa Wang, Melissa

Lopez, Diem Tran, Andy Sacher, Kersu

Dalal, and Justin Emerick, Lavender Los

Angeles: Roots of Equality (Charleston, S.C.:

Arcadia Publishing, 2011), 86.

9. John Rechy identifies specifically as Chi-

cano. Because this term refers to a specific

person, it is respectful to use the term he

uses. When speaking in a general sense,

though, Chicanx works like Latinx to be

inclusive of all gender identities of people

who identify as Chicanx and/or Latinx.

N O T E S

1. White House, Office of the Press Secretary,

“Inaugural Address by President Barack

Obama,” 21 January 2013, https://obama

whitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office

/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president

-barack-obama (accessed 14 July 2017).

2. Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776,

www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document

/(accessed 14 July 2017).

3. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, with illus-

trations by Nate Powell, March: Book One

(Marietta, Ga.: Top Shelf Productions, 2013).

This is the first in a trilogy on the Civil

Rights movement by Senator John Lewis.

4. Voting Rights Act, https://www.ourdocu

ments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=100&

page=transcript (accessed 19 June 2018).

5. David Carter, Stonewall (New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 2004), 290.

6. In 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the

case of Lawrence et al. v. Texas. The ruling

overturned all the remaining sodomy laws

in the United States. Before this ruling, in

1986, in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, the

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1 6 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T R A N S G E N D E R S T U D I E S

17. Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly

Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–

1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2000); Stryker, Transgender History.

18. Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman,

Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s

(film), Frameline, 2005.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Stryker is quoted in Wyatt Buchanan, “Pride

Parade Salute for an Unlikely Ally/Police

Officer Who Reached Out in 1960s to Be

Grand Marshal,” SFGate, 23 June 2006,

www.sfgate .com/bayarea/article/SAN-

FRANCISCO-Pride-parade-salute-for

-an-2532708.php (accessed 18 April 2016).

22. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, interview by

Andrea Jenkins for the Transgender Oral

History Project, Tretter Collection, Univer-

sity of Minnesota, https://www.youtube

.com/watch?v=O8gKdAOQyyI (accessed

16 March 2016).

23. “I’m Glad I Was in the Stonewall Riot,”

interview with Sylvia Rivera, in Street

Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival,

Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle (N.p.:

Untorelli Press, n.d.), 14, https://untorelli

press.noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR.pdf

(accessed 16 April 2016).

24. Teresa Theophano, “Daughters of Bilitis,”

glbtq encyclopedia, www.glbtqarchive.com/

ssh/daughters_bilitis_S.pdf; and Craig

Kaczorowski, “The Mattachine Society,”

glbtq encyclopedia, www.glbtqarchive.com/

ssh/mattachine_society_S.pdf (both

accessed 15 July 2017).

25. Jessi Gan, “‘Still at the Back of the Bus’:

Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle,” in The Transgen-

der Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and

Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge,

2013), 292.

10. De Simone et al., Lavender Los Angeles, 99.

See also Susan Stryker, Transgender His-

tory: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, rev.

ed.(Berkeley: Seal Press, 2017), 80 – 84;

“Cooper’s Donuts,” http://cdonuts1959

.weebly.com/paper.html; and Eric Bright-

well, “The Cooper Do-nuts Uprising,”

Amoeblog, 17 June 2013, www.amoeba

.com/blog/2013/06/eric-s-blog/the-cooper-

do-nuts-uprising-lgbt-heritage-month

.html (accessed 3 February 2016).

11. Catherine S. Ramírez, The Woman in the

Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cul-

tural Politics of Memory (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2009), ix – x.

12. Ibid., 75 – 76.

13. James Wolfinger, “African American Migra-

tion,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia,

philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/

african-american-migration/; “Virtual Jew-

ish World, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,”

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw

/philadelphia.html#7; “Latino Philadelphia

at a Glance,” Historical Society of Penn-

sylvania, hsp.org/sites/default/files/leg

acy_files/migrated/latinophiladelphiaata

glance.pdf (all accessed 4 April 2016).

14. Bob Skiba, “Dewey’s Famous,” Philadelphia

Gayborhood Guru, https://thegayborhood

guru.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/deweys

-famous/ (accessed 29 February 2016).

15. Bob Skiba, quoted in Jen Colletta, “Fifty

Years Pass since Seminal Dewey’s Sit-Ins,”

Philadelphia Gay News, 23 April 2015, www

.epgn.com/news/local/8754-fifty-years-

pass-since-seminal-dewey-s-sit-ins

(accessed March 2016).

16. Monica Roberts, “The 1965 Dewey’s Lunch

Counter Sit-In,” TransGriot,18 October

2007, http://transgriot.blogspot.

com/2007/10/1965-deweys-lunch-counter-

sit-it.html (accessed 21 February 2016).

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W H A T A R I O T ! 1 6 5

26. Randolfe Wicker, Sylvia Rivera Trans Movement

Founder, https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=ybnH0HB0lqc (accessed 15 July

2017). This information is also available in

David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P.

Johnson (film), Frameline, 2017.

27. Sylvia Rivera, Speech to the Latino Gay Men of

New York, June 2001, Centro Journal 19.1 (2007):

120.

28. Jessica Stern, “This Is What Pride Looks Like:

Miss Major and the Violence, Poverty, and

Incarceration of Low-Income Transgender

Women,” S&F Online 10.1–2 (2011–2012), http://

sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda /

this-is-what-pride-looks-like-miss-major

-and-the-violence-poverty-and-incarcera-

tion-of-low-income-transgender-women /2/

(accessed 3 February 2016).

29. Wicker, Sylvia Rivera Trans Movement Founder.

30. Rev. Elder Pat Bumgardner, interview on

Sylvia Rivera and SONDA, ibid.

31. John Aravosis, “Barney on ENDA Transgender

Controversy. And, He’s Right,” Americablog,

28 September 2007, http://america

blog.com/2007/09/barney-on-enda-trans

gender-controversy-and-hes-right.html

(accessed 16 April 2016).

32. Georgina Beyer speaking to the New Zealand

Parliament on her first day. Annie Goldson

and Peter Wells, Georgie Girl (film), Women

Make Movies, 2001.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Aravosis, John. “Barney on ENDA Transgender Controversy. And, He’s Right.” Americablog, 28 September 2007. http://americablog.com/2007/09/barney-on-enda-transgender -controversy-and-hes-right.html. Accessed 16 April 2016

Avery, Dan. “5 Pre-Stonewall Moments That Changed the Course of LGBT History.” Logo, 1 June 2014. www.newnownext.com/5-pre-stonewall-events-that-shaped-the-lgbt-community-trailblazers/06/2014/. Accessed 4 March 2016.

Beyer, Georgina. “Assume Nothing—Georgina Beyer.” https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=fdC5F1EFLQo. Accessed 4 April 2018.

Bigelow, Bill. “Seneca Falls, 1848: Women Organize for Equality.” Zinn Education Project. http://zinnedproject.org/materials/seneca-falls/. Accessed 2 March 2016.

Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/478 /186/case.html. Accessed 15 July 2017.

Brightwell, Eric. “The Cooper’s Do-nuts Uprising—LGBT Heritage Month.” Amoeblog, 17 June 2013. www.amoeba.com/blog/2013/06/eric-s-blog/the-cooper-do-nuts-up-rising-lgbt-heritage-month.html. Accessed 3 February 2016.

Buchanan, Wyatt. “Pride Parade Salute for an Unlikely Ally/Police Officer Who Reached Out in 1960s to Be Grand Marshal.” SFGate, 23 June 2006. www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Pride-parade-salute-for-an-2532708.php. Accessed 18 April 2016.

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1 6 6 I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T R A N S G E N D E R S T U D I E S

Bumgardner, Rev. Elder Pat. Interview on Sylvia Rivera and SONDA. In Randolfe Wicker, Sylvia Rivera Trans Movement Founder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybn-H0HB0lqc. Accessed 15 July 2017.

Carter, David. Stonewall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Casey, Forest. “How Los Angeles Created Skid Row.” Daily Beast, 8 March 2015. https://

www.thedailybeast.com/how-los-angeles-created-skid-row. Accessed 5 April 2018.Colletta, Jen. “Fifty Years Pass since Seminal Dewey’s Sit-Ins.” Philadelphia Gay News, 23

April 2015. www.epgn.com/news/local/8754-fifty-years-pass-since-seminal-dewey-s-sit-ins. Accessed March 2016.

Cooper’s Donuts. http://cdonuts1959.weebly.com/paper.html. Accessed 2 March 2016.Declaration of Independence. www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/. Accessed 14

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