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Stryker-TransLiberation.pdf
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SEAL PRESS
Copyright© 2008, 2017 by Susan Stryker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stryker, Susan, author. Title: Transgender history: the roots of today's revolution I Susan Stryker. Description: Second edition. IBerkeley: Seal Press, 2017. IRevised edition
of the author's Transgender history, c2008. Identifiers: LCCN 20170259641ISBN9781580056892 (paperback) IISBN
9781580056908 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Transgenderism-History. IGender identity-History. I
Transgender people-History. Classification: LCC HQ77.9 .S77 2017 IDDC 306.76/8-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025964
LSC-C
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
1his book is dedicated to the trans people who the lives that made the history I've outlined
trans people, and our friends allies living
who continue to make history by advancing cause of social justice.
CHAPTER 3
TRANS LIBERATION
AS TRANSGENDER PHENOMENA came under mounting social
and medical regulation in the United States between the 1850s and
the 1950s, daily life for some trans people shifted into increasingly
distinct public and private spheres. Class and race privilege en
couraged white people with transgender feelings, especially if they
enjoyed a measure of social respectability or financial security, to
construct their identities in isolation, to engage in cross-dressing
only furtively, and to form networks with others like themselves
only at great risk, unless they were willing to present themselves as
people in need of medical or psychiatric help. Ironically, it was the
most closeted and least political segment of the transgender popu
lation that first formed sustainable organizations and first became
targets of federal prosecution. At roughly the same time as Virginia
Prince's run-in with the postal inspectors, however, another form
of transgender political history began to take shape among people
who lacked many of the privileges enjoyed by members of Prince's
Foundation for Personality Expression. These transgender people
had a very different relationship to (or membership in) gay commu
nities and communities of color, as well as to public space and to
79
80 81
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
STREET QUEENS
John Rechy, born in 1934 in El Paso, Texas, is the author of more than
a dozen books, many of which revolve around his youthful involvement in the world of male hustlers. City of Night, excerpted below, paints a vivid portrait of "Miss Destiny" and other "street queens" ih Los Ange
les in the early 1960s.
As I stand on the corner of 6th and Main, a girlish Negro Young man with round eyes swishes up: "Honey," she says-just like that and shrilly loudly, enormous gestures punctuating her words, "you look like you jest got into town. Ifyou aint gotta place, I got a real nice pad. ... " I only stare at her. "Why, baby," she says, "dont you look so startled-this is L.A.!-and thank God for that! Even queens like me got certain rights!
" ... Well," she sighs, "I guess you wanna look around first. So I'll jest give you my number." She handed me a card, wi_th her name, telephone number, address: Elaborately Engraved. "Jest you call me-anytime!" she said ....
Looking at Chuck and Miss Destiny-as she rushes on now about the Turbulent Times-I know the scene: Chuck the mas culine cowboy and Miss Destiny the femme queen: making it from day to park to bar to day like all the others in that ratty world of downtown L.A. which I will make my own: the world of queens technically men but no one thinks of them thatway-al ways "she"-their "husbands" being the masculine vagrants fleetingly and often out of convenience sharing the queens' pads-never considering theyre involved with another man (the queen), and only for scoring (which is making or taking sexmoney, getting a meal, making a pad)-he is himself not considered "queer"-he remains, in the vocabulary of that world, "trade."
It was real-life people such as Rechy's character Miss Destiny who,
in the 1960s, were among the first gender-nonconforming people to
continues
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become militant at places such as C D . f' . ooper o-Nut H . mg 1gures such as Miss De t' · owever, cla1m troversial in some quart sb1ny as part of transgender history is con
ers, ecause some I transgender didn't exist b k· h peop e say that the word
ac t en, or that som themselves gay men rathe th e queens considered h. r an trans women B t t is period did move on to live th . 1· . u some queens from
eir 1ves as wome d hb kac on their experiences as bein a n, an ~~- ey do look many contemporary trans I g p. rt of transgender history-and
peop e certainly find · · . .determination exhibited b I . inspiration in the fierce public that challenged convy pt~op le decades ago who lived lives in
en iona expect f f be a man or a woman wh t h . a ions or what it meant to
, a ever t ose peo I th h For a good history of male h ti P ~ oug t of themselves.
us er cu1ture incl d' h . of transwomen see Mack F . d ' u mg t e involvement
' ne man's Stra d fi c American_ Hustler Culture p bl' h d . ppe or ash: A History of
. , u 1s e 1n 2003 H b S lb . an emotionally devastating portrait of . . u ert e y Jr. delivers post-World War II America . h' L w~rk1ng-class queer sexuality in in 1964), which integrates ~~e I~ ast ~x1t to Brooklyn (first published into the overarching story of /'f ~ ory o. a trans character, Georgette,
I e in a gritty urban neighborhood.
the police. They confronted on d ·1 b .. h
. a ai y as1s all the things that FPE' bmem ers ip worked so hard to avoid. s
Militant Foreshadowings
In a 2005 interview, John Rechy, author of Ci . classic mid-tw · th ty ofNight and other
ent1e -century n 1 . h worlds where sexual outlaws a::e s set mt e gritty ur~an under- out spaces they could call th . gender nonconformists carved
eir own, spoke of . l umented incident in May of 1959 h a prev10us y undoc sentment of 1' . 'w en transgender and gay re
po ice oppress10n erupted into coll . . According to Rech . h ective resistance.
and coffee hangou;~:t :::;:e~ :n~op~r Do-Nut, a doughnut of Mai S · p mght on a rough stretch
n treet m Los Angeles and that happened to be situated
82 83 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
between two popular gay bars. An ethnically mixed crowd of drag
queens and male hustlers, many of them Latino or African Ameri
can, frequented Cooper's, as the business was colloquially known,
along with the people who enjoyed their company or bought their
sexual services. Police cars regularly patrolled the vicinity and often
stopped to· question people in the area for no reason at all. The po
lice would demand identification-which, for trans people whose
appearance might not match the name or gender designation on
their IDs, often led to arrest on suspicion of prostitution, vagrancy,
loitering, or many other so-called nuisance crimes. On that night in
May 1959, when the police came in and arbitrarily started round
ing up the drag queens milling around Cooper's, they and others
on the scene spontaneously resisted arrest en masse. The incident
started with customers throwing doughnuts at the cops and ended
with fighting in the . streets, as squad cars and police wagons con
verged at the site to make arrests. In the ensuing confusion, many
people who had been arrested, including Rechy, managed to escape.
The disturbance at Cooper Do-Nut was an unplanned outburst
of frustration, and it was no doubt typical of other unrecorded and
unremembered acts of spur-of-the-moment resistance to antitrans
and antigay oppression. A similar though nonviolent incident took
place in Philadelphia in 1965 at Dewey's, a lunch counter and late-:
night coffeehouse that appealed to a crowd similar to the one that
frequented Cooper's. Since the 1940s, it had been popular with gays,
lesbians, drag queens, and street sex workers as a place to go after the
bars had closed, as well as a place for cheap food all day long. In
April 1965, Dewey's started refusing to serve young customers who
wore what one gay newspaper of the day euphemistically described
as "nonconformist clothing," claiming that "gay kids" were driving
away other business. Customers rallied to protest, and on April 25,
more than 150 patrons were turned away by the management. Three
teenagers refused to leave after being denied service in what appears
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to be the first act ofcivil
disobedience over anti
transgender discrimina
tion; they, along ~ith a gay activist who advised
them of their legal rights,
were arrested and sub
sequently found guilty
on misdemeanor charges
of disorderly conduct.
During the next week, Compton sCafeteria in San Francisco sTenDewey's patrons and de~loin neighborhood was the scene ofan early
members of Philadelphia's episode of transgender resistance to social op homophile community set pression when transgender women, gay men,
up an informational picket and sex workers fought back against police harassment in August 1966. (PHoTO CREDIT:line at the restaurant, JONATHAN PRICE.)
where they passed out
thousands of pieces of literature protesting the lunch counter's treat
ment of gender-variant young people. On May 2, activists staged
another sit-in. The police were again called in, but this time made
no arrests. The restaurant's management backed down and promised
"an immediate cessation of all indiscriminate denials ofservice."
The Dewey's incident, like the one at Cooper Do-Nut, demon
strates the overlap between gay and transgender activism in the
working-class districts of major US cities. Historian Marc Stein, in
City ofSisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia,
1945-1972, tells how the Janus Society, Philadelphia's main gay
and lesbian organization at the time, issued the following statement
in its newsletter after the events ofMay 2, 1965:
All too often, there is a tendency to be concerned with the rights
ofhomosexu~s as long as they somehow appear to be heterosexual,
Trans Liberation 85 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
84
gender and sexual expression. Long hair on men and button-fly whatever that is. The masculine woman and the feminine man of
blue jeans on women actually made political statements about the ten are looked down upon ... but the Janus Society is concerned
war, the military draft, and the general drift of mainstream soci with the worth of an individual and the manner in which she or he
ety. The African American .civil rights movement was reaching a comports himself. What is offensive today we have seen become
crescendo, buoyed by passage in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act and the style of tomorrow, and even if what is offensive today remains ,
the Voting Rights Act in 1965, as well as by the birth~of a radical offensive tomorrow to some persons, there is no reason to penalize
new Black Power movement. Similar ethnic pride and liberation non-conformist behavior unless there is direct anti-social behavior
movements were beginning to vitalize Chicano/a, Asian American, connected with it. and Native American people. To a certain extent, the simultane
ous white gay liberation and radical feminist movements modeled Tue Dewey's incident further illustrates the extent to which the themselves on these ethnic movements, conceptualizing gay people tactics of minority rights activism cross-fertilized different move and women as oppressed social minority groups. National political
ments. Lunch counter sit-ins had been developed as a form of life, which had been thrown into turmoil after the 1963 assassinaprotest ro oppose racial segregation in the South, but they proved tion of President John F. Kennedy, reached a tragic low point with
equally effective when used ro promote the interests of s"".ual and the 1968 assassinations of his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the
gender minorities. It would be a mistake,_ how":~t, to th•"!< that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The most militant phase of thethe African American civil rights struggle simply mfluenced early transgender movement for social change, from 1966 to 1973, was
gay and transgender activism at Dewey's, for to do so would be. to part of this massive social upheaval. assume that all the gay and transgender people involved were white.
The 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco's seedy Many of the queer people who patronized Dewey's were themselves Tenderloin neighborhood was similar to the incidents at Cooper people of color, and they were not "borrowing" a tactic developed Do-Nut and Dewey's. For the first time, however, direct action
by another movement. in the streets by trans people resulted in long-lasting institutional
change. One weekend night in August-the precise date remains
The Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966 tantalizingly unrecovered-Compton's, a twenty-four-hour cafe teria at the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, was buzzing with its By the middle of the 1960s, life in the United States was being usual late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruis
transformed by several large-scale social movements. The post ers, runaway teens, and down-and-out neighborhood regulars. The World War II Baby Boomer generation was coming into young restaurant's management became annoyed by a noisy young crowd adulthood at the very moment the US war in Vietnam was begin ofqueens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of time with
ning to escalate. A youth-oriented cultural rebellion be~an to un out spending a lot of money. So they called in the police to roust fold in which countercultural styles in music· and fashion-rock them-as they had been doing with increasing frequency throughand roll, psychedelic drugs, mod clothing, free love-offered sig out the summer. A surly police officer, accustomed to manhandlingnificant challenges to an older generation's notion of acceptable
86 TRANSGENDER.HISTORY
Vanguard, founded in 1965, was the first gay and transgen der youth qrganization in the United States. The members published a psychedelically il lustrated magazine (also called Vanguard) from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s. (PHoTo CREDIT: VANGUARD MAGAZINE.)
Compton's clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of the
queens and tried to drag her away. She unexpectedly threw her cof
fee in his face, and a melee erupted. Plates, trays, cups, saucers, and
silverware Rew through. the air at the startled police officers, who
ran outside and called for backup. Compton's' customers turned
over the tables and smashed the plate-glass windows before pour
ing out of the restaurant and into the streets. The police wago~s arrived, and street fighting broke out in the vicinity of Compton s,
all around the corner of Turk and Taylor. Drag queens beat the
police with their heavy purses and the sharp stiletto heels of their
shoes. A police car was vandalized, a newspaper stand was burned
to the ground, and-in the words of the best available source on
what happened that night, a retrospective account by gay liberation
activist Reverend Raymond Broshears, published in the program of
San Francisco's first Gay Pride march in 1972-"general havoc was
raised that night in the Tenderloin." The small restaurant had been
Trans Liberation 87
packed when the fighting broke out, so the riot probably involved
fifty or sixty patrons, plus police officers and any neighborhood res
idents or late-night passersby who joined the fray.
Contextualizing Compton's L
Although the exact date of the riot remains a mystery-none of
the mainstream San Francisco daily newspapers covered the story;
police reports have conveniently disappeared; surviving partici
pants who were interviewed decades later remembered only that
it happened on a summer weekend night; and Broshears' s account
(written six years after the fact) said only that the riot took place in
August-its underlying causes are clear. Understanding why the
riot happened where and when it did reveals a great deal about the
issues that have historically motivated the transgender social justice
struggle and helps us understand similar dynamics at work today.
The location of the riot was by no means random. San Fran
cisco's downtown Tenderloin neighborhood had been a sex-work
district since the early 1900s. In fact, if you look up the word ten
derloin in many dictionaries, you'll find that one slang meaning is
actually an inner-city "vice" district controlled by corrupt police
officers. As large cities formed in the United States in the nine
teenth century, they typically developed certain neighborhoods
in which activities that weren't tolerated elsewhere-prostitution,
gambling, selling and consuming criminalized drugs, and sexually
explicit entertainment-were effectively permitted. Police often
turned a blind eye to this illicit activity, often because the cops on
the beat, and sometimes their superiors in the station house, were
getting a cut of the profits in exchange for not arresting the indi
viduals engaged in those activities. Only occasionally, when civic
or religious groups mounted a morality crusade or some sex scandal
implicated a high-ranking politician, did police make "sweeps" of
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89 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
So; I left Ne~ York iuid came to 5an Francisco..I left the
stage agony and I be.carnt; aware that it was neceasacy fw 1:1e to evolve ab"ove it• My objective h t
wa:s clear.,. adjustment to w a I :really was and, finding out where l really was.
the neighborhood. Soon enough, however, it would be business as
usual again. . hb h d Much of Th Tenderloin was just this sort of ne1g or oo .
the so~called vice trade in the neighborhood was supportked by n~n- d office wor ers getting
residents of one sort or another: owntown
Trans Liberation
a "massage" on their lunch breaks, bar-hoppers looking for a place
to sober up after last call, teenage thrill seekers and out-of-town
tourists eager for some racy big-city entertainment, suburban her
oin junkies looking to score a fix. But the neighborhood's resident population tended to be those who could least afford to live else
where or who were prevented from doing so: released aonvicts and
parolees, old-timers on small pensions, recent immigrants, pimps,
prostitutes, drug addicts, alcoholics-and trans women.
Housing and employment discrimination against transgender
people is still prevalent in the United States, and this discrimination
was even more common in the past than it is now. In the 1960s,
even more so than today, a person who looked transgender would
be less likely to be rented to and would have a great deal of trouble
finding work. As a result, a great many transgender women lived
in the Tenderloin in cheap residential hotels, many of them along
Turk Street near Compton's. To meet their basic survival needs they
often worked as prostitutes or as maids in the hotels and bars where
their friends sold sex. Although most people who participated in the
Tenderloin's underground economy of sex, drugs, and after-hours
entertainment were free to come and go, the neighborhood func
tioned as more of an involuntary containment zone, or ghetto, for
transgender women. Police actually helped concentrate a popula
tion of transgender women in the Tenderloin by directing them to
go there when they were picked up in other parts of the city.
The police could be especially vicious to "street queens," whom
they considered bottom-of-the-barrel sex workers and who were the
least able to complain about mistreatment. Transgender women
working the streets were often arrested on suspicion of prostitu
tion even if they were just going to the corner store or talking with
friends; they might be driven around in squad cars for hours, forced
to perform oral sex, strip-searched, or, after arriving at the jail, hu
miliated in front of other prisoners. Transgender women in jail
90 91 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
often would have their heads forcibly shaved or, if they resisted,
be placed in solitary confinement in "the h~le." And _beca~se t~ey were legally men (with male genitalia in spite of their soc.1al h~es as women, and often in spite of having breasts and no facial hair)
they would be placed in the men's jail, where their femininity made
them especially vulnerable to sexual assault, rape, and murder.
This chronically bad situation became even worse in the mid
1960s, when US involvement in the war in Vietnam escalated.
Wartime is typically a time of heightened surveillance of commer
cial sexual activity in cities where large numbers of troops are be
ing mobilized for deployment. Military and civilian police, along
. h blic health officials, cooperate to prevent troops (many of Wlt pu · h "ld them quite eager to escape thoughts of battlefield ~eath ~It ~I sexual escapades) from acquiring sexually transmitted ~nfecn_ons that might compromise their combat readiness and which might
even be spread within the ranks by homosexual acti~ity. The~e were wartime crackdowns on prostitution in San Francisco dunng the
Spanish-American War in the Philippines in the 1890~, d_uring World War II in the 1940s, and during the Korean conflict m the
1950s. Among the hardest-hit establishments in San Fra~cisco during the crackdown associated with the 1964-1966 escalat10n of
US troops in Vietnam were the gay and drag bars. . . Yet another factor that changed an already grim s1tuat10n from
bad to worse for transgender women in the Tenderloin was the
effect of urban renewal and redevelopment. Their increasingly se
rious plight was directly related to very broad-scale soci~. a~d ec~ nomic changes. As in other major US cities, San Francisco s bmlt
environment underwent a major transformation in the two decades
after World War II as the city "modernized." Some of this redevel
opment was driven by needs created during the war years. Many
working-class and poor people had left small towns for war-related
work in the major coastal cities in the 1940s and had been housed
Trans Liberation
temporarily in quickly constructed housing projects. W'hen the war
was over, many soldiers came home from overseas to find their fam
ilies living in new cities rather than their old hometowns, putting
a further burden on city housing. Complicating things even more,
many of these new urban residents were people of color, who were
not well integrated or welcomed into the fabric ofwhite...dominated
cities once the need for their wartime labor had passed. Part of
the government's· response to the problems of postwar adjustment
was to fund big riew housing projects for working-class people
and to help former soldiers buy suburban homes with low-interest
home loans.
San Francisco business elites and city planners, like their coun
terparts elsewhere, tried to turn the necessity of solving pressing
urban problems into an opportunity to reenvision the city in ways
that reflected their own interests. They imagined a new and im
proved San Francisco Bay Area, with San Francisco itself func
tioning as the center of finance, culture, high-tech industry, and
tourism for the entire region. Surrounding San Francisco to the
east and south would be a semicircle of heavy industry and, beyond
that, residential suburbs. New freeways and public transportation
systems would have to be built to bring office workers from the
suburbs to the center of business downtown.
In the process of reorganizing the entire fabric ofdaily urban life,
old neighborhoods had to be destroyed or relocated. To one side of
the Tenderloin were the Fillmore and Western Addition neighbor
hoods that had become mostly black during the war years (after first
being emptied ofJapanese American residents who had been sent to
internment camps); residents there were forcibly removed to new
housing projects on the edge of the city, in Bayview and Hunters
Point, and entire blocks bulldozed for newer higher-density apart
ments. To the other side of the Tenderloin was the South of Market
neighborhood (sometimes called Skid Row), which had revolved
92 93
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
around the maritime economy-lots of short-term residential hotels
and rooming houses for sailors who would stay in town fot only a
few weeks or months, working-class bars and restaurants, and 'in
dustries related to shipping and commerce. During post-World
War II redevelopment, San Francisco's port was shut down and
moved across the bay to Oakland; doing so required breaking the
waterfront labor unions, which created less favorable economic
conditions for many working-class people. The waterfront-oriented
district itself started to become derelict and was then condemned
and slated for redevelopment as museums, convention facilities,
and other tourist-oriented establishments. The physical destruction
of these important black and working-class neighborhoods in the
1950s and 1960s left the Tenderloin as the last remaining enclave of
affordable housing in central San Francisco. New residents coming
in from adjacent areas began to displace the Tenderloin's most vuL nerable and at-risk residents-transgender women who worked as
street prostitutes and lived in the cheapest hotels.
In response to the massive social dislocations of urban renewal
and redevelopment, Tenderloin residents launched a grassroots
campaign for economic justice in 1965. They were inspired in equal
measures by the socially progressive gospel preached by the Rever
end Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers in the civil rights
struggle, by the federal government's new War on Poverty pro
grams, and by the vision of radically participatory democratic social
movements outlined by Saul Alinsky in his activist handbook Rev
eille for Radicals. Neighborhood activists, including many members
of San Francisco's homophile organizations and street-outreach
ministers from Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, went
door to door in the Tenderloin, organizing the neighborhood and
mobilizing it for social change. Their immediate goal was to es
tablish needed social services by qualifying the neighborhood for
federal antipoverty funding. Through a quirk of circumstances, the
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Tenderloin, one of the poorest areas of the city, was initially ex
cluded from plans to direct more federal funding toward eradicat
ing poverty in San Francisco because of the fact that its residents in
the 1960s were almost all white. The coalition of grassroots groups
that oversaw the local distribution offederal grant money was based
in the black neighborhoods of Bayview, Hunters Poiht, the Fill
more, and the Western Addition, in the predominantly Latino/a
Mission District, and in Chinatown. The Tenderloin organizers not
only had to document economic need in their neighborhood but
also had to persuade poor communities of color that adding an ad
ditional antipoverty target zone predominately populated by white
people would be the right thing to do, even if that meant the al
ready existing zones got a smaller slice of a fixed amount of money.
Compounding matters even further, most of the white people were
queer, and most of the people of color were straight. The eventual
establishment of the Central City Anti-Poverty Program thus rep
resented a singular accomplishment in the history of US progressive
politics: the first successful multiracial gay-straight alliance for eco nomic justice.
Tenderloin activists involved in the antipoverty organizing cam
paign were striving to create conditions in which people could truly
participate in structuring the society they lived in instead of just
reacting to changes created by others. One unexpected consequence
of neighborhood mobilization was the formation of Vanguard, an
organization made up mostly ofyoung gay hustlers and transgender
people. Vanguard, formed in 1965 with the encouragement of a
young minister named Adrian Ravarour, is the earliest known queer
youth organization in the United States. Its name, which signaled
members' perception that they were the cutting edge of a new so
cial movement, shows how seriously they took the ideals of radical
democracy. The group's second leader even took a nom de guerre,
Jean-Paul Marat, after a famous figure in the French Revolution.
94 95
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
By the summer of 1966, Vanguard was holding informal meeti~gs
at Compton's Cafeteria. The restaurant functioned as a chill-out
lounge for the whole neighborhood, but for young people.who of
ten had no homes, families, or legal employment, who were mar
ginalized by their gender or sexuality, it provided an especially vital
resource.
Just a block away from Compton's, Glide Memorial United
Methodist Church had been a hotbed of progressive social change
since the early 1960s, and it played an important role in weaving
together many different strands of Tenderloin activism. It was
founded in 1929 by Lilly Glide, the daughter of a prominent family
of philanthropists in San Francisco, as a "working man's mission,"
a place where down-and-out folks could go for a bowl of soup in
exchange for listening to a sermon. The congregation had dwindled
by the late 1950s, but the church still had a large endowment from
the Glide family, prompting the national Methodist leadership to
transform Glide Memorial into a model for a new kind of urban
Christian ministry, of the sort inspired by the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr.'s civil rights activism. Under the leadership of the
Reverend Cecil Williams, who became head pastor in 1966, Glide
has become one of the most famous liberal Christian churches in
the United States, supported by the likes of Maya Angelou, Oprah
Winfrey, and Bill Clinton.
One of the most daring social initiatives launched by Glide in
the early 1960s was to establish the Council on Religion and the
Homosexual (CRH), the first ecumenical organization to bring the
problem of antigay discrimination to the attention of the liberal
Protestant churches. Activist ministers at Glide worked with lead
ers of the early homophile, or gay rights, organizations, to shift the
focus of religious concern away from condemning the supposed sin
of homosexuality toward ministering to the daily needs of people
who suffered-through the loss of family, friends, work, or sense
Trans Liberation
of emotional well-being-because of their sexual orientation. A po
lice raid on a 1965 costume ball, a fund-raiser for the CRH that
featured a lot of drag and was attended by many politically pro
gressive San Franciscans, is widely credited with putting gay rights
on the agenda of straight civil rights activists in the Bay Area. That
same commitment to loving and compassionate attention to stig
matized expressions of sexuality and gender also led activist minis
ters connected with Glide to support the gay and trans youth group Vanguard.
Vanguard described itself as "an organization of, by, and for
the kids on the streets." Its goals were to promote a sense of self
worth among its members, to offer mutual support and compan
ionship, to bring youth issues to the attention of older people, and
to assert its presence in the neighborhood. One of the group's early
flyers urged people to think past racial divisions and focus instead
on shared living conditions. "You've heard about Black Power and
White Power,'' the flyer said before telling its readers to "get ready
for Street Power." Vanguard members' basic approach was to treat
the street as their home. They cleaned it up, challenged people com
ing into the neighborhood for sex and drugs to pick up their dirty
needles and empty bottles, and intervened with people acting in in
appropriate ways. Vanguard's first major political action, however,
was to confront the management of Compton's Cafeteria over its poor treatment of trans women and street queens.
Over the summer of 1966, tensions had been on the rise at
Compton's between management and customers. As the restau
rant's customers increasingly claimed its turf as their own, the man
agement asserted its property rights and business interests more and
more strongly. It instituted a "service charge" for each customer
to make up for income lost to tables of young people "camping
out" and not buying any food, but it applied the charge in a dis
criminatory and arbitrary manner. It hired security guards to harass
96 97
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
the street kids and shoo them outside, particularly the transgen?er
youth. And with greater and greater frequency, it called the cbps. In
July, Vanguard worked with ministers from Glide and with older
members of San Francisco's homophile organizations to set up a
picket line protesting the mistreatment of its members, much as the
customers and gay activists in Philadelphia had done at Dewey's. In
San Francisco, however, the restaurant's management turned a deaf ear to the complaints. Soon after the picket failed to produce any
results, frustration boiled over into militant resistance.
One thing that made the incident at Compton's different from
similar incidents at Cooper Do-Nut and Dewey's was a new atti
tude toward transgender health care in the United States. Doctors
in Europe had been using hormones and surgery for more than fifty
years to improve the quality of life for transgender people who de
sired those procedures; doctors in the United States had always been
reluctant to do so, fearing that to operate or administer hormones
would only be colluding with a deranged person's fantasy of"chang
ing sex" or would be enabling a homosexual person to engage in
perverse sexual practices. And after 1949, California Attorney Gen
eral Pat Brown's legal opinion against genital modification created
legal vulnerabilities for doctors who performed genital surgery. Th~s
situation began to change in July 1966, just before the Compton s
Cafeteria riot, when Dr. Harry Benjamin published a pathbreak
ing book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. In it, he used the research
he had conducted with transgender patients during the past seven
teen years to advocate for the same style of treatment that Magnus
Hirschfeld had promoted in Germany before the Nazi takeover.
Benjamin essentially argued that a person's gender identity could
not be changed and that the doctor's responsibility was thus to help
transgender people live fuller and happier lives in the gender they
identified as their own. Benjamin's book helped bring about a sea
change in medical and legal attitudes. Within a few months of its
Trans Liberation
publication, the first "sex change" program in the United States was
established at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.
The sudden availability of a new medical paradigm for address
ing transgender health care needs undoubtedly played a role in cre
ating a flashpoint at Compton's, where long-standing grievances
finally erupted into collective resistance. When peoplt.·struggling
against an injustice have no hope that anything will ever change,
they use their strength to survive; when they think that their actions
matter, that same strength becomes a force for positive change.
Because Benjamin worked in San Francisco for part of every year,
some of his patients were the very Tenderloin street queens who
would soon start fighting back to improve their lives. They were
intimately familiar with his work. Of course, not every person as
signed male at birth who lived and worked in women's clothes in
the Tenderloin wanted surgery or hormones, and not all of those
who did thought of themselves as women or as transsexuals. But
many of them did. And for those who did, the changes in medical
service provision that Benjamin recommended must have been an
electrifying call to action. The next time the police raided their fa
vorite neighborhood hangout, they had something to stand up for.
Looking back, it's easy to see how the Compton's Cafeteria riot
in 1966 was related to large-scale political, social, and economic
developments and was not just an isolated little incident unrelated
to other things that were going on in the world. The circumstances
that created the conditions for the riot continue to be relevant in
trans movements today: discriminatory policing practices that tar
get members of minority communities, urban land-use policies
that benefit cultural elites and displace poor people, the unsettling
domestic consequences of US foreign wars, access to health care,
civil rights activism aiming to expand individual liberties and so
cial tolerance on matters of sexuality and gender, and political co
alition building around the structural injustices that affect many
98
99 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
different communities. Collective resistance to the oppression of
trans people at Compton's Cafeteria did not automatically solve
the problems that trans people in the Tenderloin faced daily. It did, however, create a space in which it became possible for the
city of San Francisco to begin relating differently to its rransgender
citizens-to begin treating them, in fact, as citizens with legitimate
needs instead of simply as a problem to get rid of. That shift in
awareness was a crucial step for contemporary transgender social
justice movements-the beginning of a new relationship to state
power and social legitimacy. It would not have happened the way
that it did without direct action in the streets on the part of trans
gender women who were fighting for their own survival.
A New Network of Services and Organizations
Several important developments for the transgender movement
took place in San Francisco in the months after the Compton's Caf
eteria riot. The Central City Anti-Poverty Program Office opened
that fall as a result of the Tenderloin neighborhood organizing cam
paign. This multiservice agency included an office for the pol.ice
community-relations liaison officer to the homophile commumty,
a police sergeant by the name of Elliott Blackstone. One afternoo~ shortly after the agency opened, a transgender neighborhood resi
dent named Louise Ergestrasse came into Blackstone's office, threw
a copy of Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon on his desk, and demanded that Blackstone do something for "her people." Black
stone was willing to be educated on the matter, and he soon took
a leading role in changing police treatment of transgender people.
Another group of transgender Tenderloin activists, led by a trans
woman named Wendy Kohler, a patient of Harry Benjamin, started
working with activist doctor Joel Fort at a unit of the San Francisco
Public Health Department called the Center for Special Problems.
Trans Liberation
A few months later, in early 1967, a group of transgender people
began meeting at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where they
formed the first known trans support group, Conversion Our
Goal (COG).
Between 1966 and 1968, these groups and individuals formed
an interlocking network of transgender activists, allies, 1nd services.
COG, which published the short-lived COG Newsletter, provided
an initial point of contact for transgender people seeking medical
services, who were then steered toward the Center for Special Prob
lems, which offered additional group support sessions, psychologi
cal counseling, hormone prescriptions, and, eventually, when a "sex
change" clinic was established at nearby Stanford University Medi
cal School, surgery referrals. Perhaps most important, however, the
center provided ID cards for transgender clients that matched their
s~cial genders. It was a simple laminated piece of orange paper,
signed by a public health doctor, bearing the name actually used by
the client, the client's home address, and the statement: "[Client's
name] is under treatment for transsexualism at the Center for Spe
cial Problems." Although the ID card did "out" those carrying it as
transsexual, it nevertheless allowed people to open bank accounts
and do other things that required identification. Without that card,
transsexuals living in a social gender other than the one assigned to
them at birth were essentially "undocumented workers" who had
great difficulty finding legal employment.
Meanwhile, the Central City Anti-Poverty Program offered
transgender women in the Tenderloin the opportunity to leave
prostitution, teaching them clerical skills through the Neighbor
hood Youth Corps training programs. Elliott Blackstone worked
to dissuade his colleagues in the police department from arresting
transgender people on charges of cross-dressing or for using the
"wrong" toilets, and he promoted many other reformist attitudes
toward transgender issues. Significantly, a California State Supreme
100
101
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
Court ruling in 1962 had struck down laws that criminalized
cross-dressing, but the practice of arresting transgender individu
als based on those laws nevertheless persisted. Police attitudes, as
well as laws, needed to change, and Blackstone played a vital role in
challenging the actual· practices of law enforcement.
Although most of the city-funded aspects of the San Francisco
based transgender support network that developed in the mid
1960s continue to operate even now, the community-based
organizations proved ephemeral, as such groups often are. COG
split into two competing factions within a year of its founding. The
major faction regrouped as the equally short-lived National Sexual
Gender Identification Council (NSGIC) under the leadership of
Wendy Kohler, whose main accomplishment was holding a one
day conference on transsexual issues at Glide. The minor faction,
which never emerged as an effective organization and which existed
primarily on paper, regrouped as CATS (California Advancement
for Transsexuals Society) under the leadership of Louise Erge
strasse. The divisions within COG may well have reflected the split
between Kohler's more assimilationist, upwardly mobile mind-set
and Ergestrasse's orientation toward transgender street cultures. Far
more successful than either was the National Transsexual Coun
seling Unit (NTCU), which, in 1968, brought together many of
the players in San Francisco's mid-1960s transgender activist scene.
The NTCU's success resulted in large measure from the financial
support provided by one of the most influential figures in US trans
gender history-wealthy female-to-male transsexual philanthropist
Reed Erickson.
A Behind-the-Scenes Benefactor
Before Reed Erickson became a major voice on transgender mat
ters, most of the significant figures in transgender political history
Trans Liberation
Millionaire philanthropist Reed Erickson was a trans man who funded the rev olutions in transgender health care and social ser vices that blossomed in the 1960s. (PHOTO CREDIT: AR.ON DEVOR.)
were cisgender men and transgender women. A community of trans
men would become increasingly organized, active, and visible by the
.1970s, but transgender men before Erickson tended to disappear
1~~0 the. woodwork of mainstream society and tended not to par ticipate m groups and organizations. One reason for this difference
lay in the fact that it was often easier for a mature female to pass
as a young man than it was for a mature male to pass as a woman
(with. o_r without the use ofhormones and surgery). Because visually
per~e1vmg someone to be transgender is one of the main triggers for antitransgender discrimination and violence, transgender women
have been disproportionately affected by denials of employment
and housing, and by violent crimes against them, and have had
greater needs to take political and self-protective action. Transgen
der women who survive by participating in sexual street subcultures
have long banded together for mutual support, whereas transgender
men often lived without being part of a larger trans community.
As a result, the political histories of transgender men and women
which have grown increasingly intertwined since the 1990s, spran~ from very different social conditions.
Reed Erickson was assigned female at his birth in El p aso,
Texas, in 1917 and grew up near Philadelphia, where his father
owned a successful lead-smelting company, Schuylkill Industries.
Erickson attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and Temple
102
103 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
University, where he ran with a left-wing lesbian crowd. His father
subsequently moved the family business to Baton Rouge, Louis~ ana, and Erickson attended graduate school at Louisiana Stat~,Um versity, where in 1946 he became the first person assigned femal_e
at birth to get a master's degree in engineering there. Because of his
political leanings and sexual orientation, Erickson came under FBI
surveillance as a suspected communist during the McCarthy era
and was reputedly blacklisted from several jobs. Consequently, he
worked for the family business and started companies of his own,
including ones that manufactured metal folding chairs and stadium
bleacher seating. Interestingly, Schuylkill Industries owned a large
yacht, the Granma, that the company sold in the 1950s to Fidel
Castro, who sailed it from Mexico, filled with scores of armed sup
porters, to launch the Cuban Revolution. . . When Erickson's father died in 1962, Erickson mhented the
family businesses and ran them successfully until selling them
to Arrow Electronics in 1969 for roughly $5 million. Erickson's
wealth, which by the time of his death exceeded $40 million, gave
him the means to pursue many idiosyncratic projects. In addition
to being a successful businessman, he was a nudist (and owned his
own nudist colony in Florida), a New Age spiritualist, and a recre
ational psychedelic drug user with an interest in interspecies com
munication and mental telepathy. He considered his best friend
to be a leopard named Henry, and he lived most of the time in a
gated residential compound in Mazatl:in, Mexico, that he named
the Love Joy Palace. Erickson, who eventually became addicted to
the party drug ketamine (''Vitamin K") and who was under indict
ment in the United States on several drug-related charges, fled to
the Love Joy Palace permanently in 1972. He died there in 1992
after many years of deteriorating health. Within a year ofhis father's death, Erickson had contacted Harry
Benjamin and soon became his patient. He started masculinizing
Trans Liberation
his body in 1963 and began to live socially as a man at that time. In
1964, he established the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF)
to support his many interests, as well as a separate foundation that
specifically supported the work of Harry Benjamin, and a third
entity, the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR),
that quietly funded numerous other academic and medical research
programs. The EEF developed a series of educational pamphlets
that gave basic advice to transsexuals on such matters as how to
legally change one's name or where to find a competent surgeon. It
was Erickson's behind-the-scenes money that funded Benjamin to
~rite The Transsexual Phenomenon and greased the wheels at presti
gious educational institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the
University of Minnesota, UCLA, and the medical campus of the
University of Texas on Galveston Island, all of which established
major clinical research programs to develop transsexual medicine.
Erickson was also a major benefactor of the ONE Institute, an edu
~ational organization that grew out of the homophile activist group
m Los Angeles that published ONE magazine.
In funding the medical-legal-psychotherapeutic institutional
framework within which transgender concerns have been addressed
in the United States for more than fifty years, Erickson pursued the
same strategy the homophile organizations of the day pursued: pro
viding direct support to members of oppressed minority commu
nities while marshaling the powers of social legitimation to speak
about the issues in a new way. Although that model of activism
(and the institutions it helped build) has come under criticism from
later generations, Erickson seems to have accomplished what was
possible for him to accomplish at the time. In spite of his wealth
and great range of opportunity, he faced many of the same issues
other transgender people faced, such as being denied employment
and having to educate his service providers about his own health
care needs. The name Erickson chose for ISHR, his foundation to
104
105
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
promote the study of "human resources," was grounded in his own
perception ofhaving more potential for making a positive contribu
tion to the world than circumstances would allow. He thought that
transgender people such as himself represented a vastly underused
resource of talent, creativity, energy, and determination. Although
he was able to work on a scale that most people can only dream of,
Erickson in fact did what most transgender people find themselves
needing to do--working to create the conditions of daily life that
allow them to meet their needs and pursue their dreams.
Reed Erickson became aware of the unprecedented social and
political developments in San Francisco through his close contact
with Harry Benjamin, and after watching the situation there de
velop for a couple of years, he decided to fund the National Trans
sexual Counseling Unit. The EEF paid the rent and provided
office furnishings for the NTCU, and it also paid the salaries of
two full-time peer counselors who did street outreach, provided
walk-in counseling, and answered a steady stream of mail from gen
der-questioning people around the world. For the most part, the
NTCU directed its clients to the Center for Special Problems for
additional services. San Francisco police officer Elliott Blackstone,
in an unusual administrative arrangement, managed the NTCU of
fice as part of his responsibilities in the police community-relations
program but drew no salary from the EEF. Blackstone did, how
ever, travel to police professional development meetings and crim
inal justice conferences in the United States and Europe at EEF's
expense to promote his unusually critical views on police treatment
of transgender people. At the NTCU office, he worked with in
dividual transgender people to resolve conflicts they had with· the
law or with employers, and with social service agencies to encour
age them to be more responsive to transgender needs. He also con
ducted sensitivity training on gay and transgender issues for. every
San Francisco Police Academy class. By the end of the 1960s, the
Trans Liberation
combined efforts ofpolitically mobilized transgender communities,
sympathetic professionals and public servants, and a generous infu
sion ofprivate money made San Francisco the unquestioned hub of the transgender movement in the United States.
Stonewall
Meanwhile, across the continent, another important center of
transgender activism was taking shape in New york City, where,
not coincidentally, Harry Benjamin maintained his primary med
ical practice. In 1968, Mario Martino, a female-to-male transsex
ual, founded Labyrinth, the first organization in the United States devoted specifically to the
needs of transgender men.
Martino and his wife, who
both worked in the health
care field, helped other trans
sexual men navigate their way
through the often-confusing
maze of transgender-oriented
medical services just then be
ginning to emerge, which
(despite being funded primar
ily by Reed Erickson) were
geared more toward the needs
of transgender women than
transgender men. Labyrinth
was not a political organiza
tion but rather one that aimed
to help individuals make the
often-difficult transition from
one social gender to another.
Marsha P. (for "Pay It No Mind") John son was a veteran ofthe 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York and cofounder, with Sylvia Rivera, ofSTAR-Street Trans vestite Action Revolutionaries. (PHorn CREDIT: AMY COLEMAN.)
106 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
Far overshadowing the quiet work of Martino's Labyrinth
Foundation, however, were the dramatic events of June 1969 at
the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York's Greenwich Village. The
"Stonewall Riots" have been mythologized as the origin of the gay
liberation movement, and there is a great deal of truth in that char
acterization, but-as we have seen-gay, transgender, and gender
nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and
collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade by
that time. Stonewall stands out as the biggest and most consequen
tial example of a kind of event that was becoming increasingly com
mon, rather than as a unique occurrence. By 1969, as a. result of
many years of social upheaval and political agitation, large numbers
of people who were socially marginalized because of their sexual
orientation or gender identity, especially younger people who were
part of the Baby Boomer generation, were drawn to the idea of"gay
revolution" and were primed for any event that would set such a
movement off. The Stonewall Riots provided that very spark, and
they inspired the formation of Gay Liberation Front groups in big
cities, progressive towns, and college campuses all across the United
States. Ever since the sl1mmer of 1969, various groups of people
who identify with the people who participated in the rioting have
argued about what actually happened, what the riot's underlying
causes were, who participated in it, and what the movements that
point back to Stonewall as an important part of their own history
have in common with one another.
Although Greenwich Village was not as economically down
and-out as San Francisco's Tenderloin, it was nevertheless a part
of the city that appealed to the same sorts of people who resisted at
Cooper Do-Nut, Dewey's, and Compton's Cafeteria: drag queens,
hustlers, gender nonconformists of many varieties, gay men, les
bians, and countercultural types who simply "dug the scene." The
Stonewall Inn was a small, shabby, Mafia-run bar (as were many
Trans Liberation 107
RADICAL TRANSSEXUAL
Suzy Cooke was a young hippie from upstate New York who lived.
comlmunfe in Be.rkeley, California, when she started transitioning f;~~ ma e to emale in 1969 Sh context of th d' I . e came out as a bisexual transsexual in the
era 1ca counterculture. d,
I was facing being called back up for the draft. I had a/re. -d b called d h . a Y een h up once an ad just gone in and played crazy with them
t ~ year before. But that was just an excuse. I had also been domg a lot of acid and really working things out. And th D cember 31, 1968, I took something-/ don't really know:~ t ~~ was-but everything just collapsed I said "Th' . I a I
11 • , is s1mp y cannot go on. To the people that I lived with I said Ill don't 'f h t b , . ' , care 1 you
a e me, ut I m Just going to have to do something I'm g . to hav~ to work. it out over the next couple of months,· and th:;ft doesn t matter if you reject me, I just have to do it. II
As it was, the people in my commune took it very well. I intro :uc;d the cross-dressing a few days later as a way of avoiding the
ra . And they were just taken aback at how much just putting on .the clothes made me into a girl. I mean, hardly any makeu ;. little blush, a little shadow, some gloss, the right clothes, pa~~
mg. I passed. I passed really easily in public. This is like a few months before Stonewall. And by this point I was dressin u often enough that people were used to seeing it. g p
I was w_allowing in the happiness of having a lot of friends. Here I wa~ bemg accepted, this kinda cool/sorta goofy hippie kid. I was bemg accepted by all these heavy radicals. I had been rejected b my parental family, and I had never found a f. ·1 II y
h . . . am1 y at co ege, and::wA ere I w_as with this family of like eight people all surrounding wit. nd as i: t~rned out, even some of the girls that I had slept d h were thmkmg that this was really cool. All the girls would
onate c/oth~s to ~e. I really had not been expecting this. I had been expecting re1ection, I really had been. And I was real/ pleased and · d Y very
surprise . Because I thought that if I did th. th I was g · t h is en
omg o ave to go off and live with the queens. And I didn't.
108
109 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
of the gay-oriented bars in New York back in the days when being
gay or cross-dressing were crimes). It drew a racially mixed crowd and was popular mainly for its location on Christopher Street near
Sheridan Square, where many gay men "cruised" for casual sex, and
because it featured go-go boys, cheap beer, a good jukebox, and a
crowded dance floor. Then as now, there was a lively street scene
in the bar's vicinity, one that drew young and racially mixed queer
folk from through the region most weekend nights. Police raids
were relatively frequent (usually when the bar was slow to make
its payoffs to corrupt cops) and relatively routine and uneventful.
Once the bribes were sorted out, the bar would reopen, often on
the same night. But in the muggy, early morning hours of Satur
day, June 28, 1969, events departed from the familiar script when
the squad cars pulled up outside the Stonewall Inn. · A large crowd of people gathered on the street as police began
arresting workers and patrons and escorting them out ofthe bar and
into the waiting police wagons. Some people in the crowd started
throwing coins at the police officers, taunting them for taking "pay
ola." Eyewitness accounts ofwhat happened next differ in their _par
ticulars, but some witnesses claim a transmasculine person resisted
police attempts to put them in the police wagon, while others noted
that African American and Puerto Rican members of the crowd
many of them street queens, feminine gay men, transgender
women, or gender-nonconforming youth-grew increasingly angry
as they watched their "sisters" being arrested and escalated the lev~l of opposition to the police. Both stories might well be true. Sylvia
Rivera, a transgender woman who came to play an important role
in subsequent transgender political history, long maintained that,
after she was jabbed by a police baton, she threw the beer bottle that
tipped the crowd's mood from mockery to collecrive resistance. In
any case, the targeting of gender-nonconforming people, people of
Trans Liberation
color, and poor people during a police action fits the usual patterns
of police behavior in such situations.
Bottles, rocks, ,and ~ther heavy objects were soon being hurled at
the police, who, in retaliation, began grabbing people from the crowd
an~ beating them. Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay
neighborhood quickly swelled the ranks of the crowd tdmore than
two thousand people, and the outnumbered police barricaded them
selves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements. Out
side, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a battering ram to try
to break down the bar's door, while other members of the crowd at
~empted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back
mto the streets. Tactical Patrol Force officers arrived on the scene in
an attempt to contain the growing disturbance, which nevertheless
continued for hours until dissipating before dawn. That night, thou
sands ofpeople regrouped at the Stonewall Inn to protest. When the
police arrived to break up the assembled crowd, street fighting even
more violent than that of the night before ensued. One particularly
memorable sight amid the melee was a line of drag queens, arms
linked, dancing a can-can and singing campy, improvised songs that
mocked the police and their inability to regain control of the situa
tion: "We are the Stonewall girls I We wear our hair in curls / We always dress with flair I We wear clean underwear I We wear our dungarees I Above our nellie knees." Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying
down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been
galvanized into political action.
Stonewall's T ransgender Legacy
Within a month of the Stonewall Riots, gay activists inspired by
the events in Greenwich Village formed the Gay Liberation Front
110
111 TRANSGENDER HISTORY
( GLF), which modeled itself on radical Third World liberation
and anti-imperialist movements. The GLF spread quickly through
activist networks in the student and antiwar movements, primar
ily among white young people of middle-class origin. Almost as
quickly as it formed, however, divisions appeared within the GLF,
primarily taking aim at the movement's domination by white men
and its perceived marginalization of women, working-class people,
people of color, and trans people. People with more liberal, less rad
ical politics soon organized as the Gay Activists Alliance ( GAA)'
which aimed to reform laws rather than foment revolution. Many
lesbians redirected their energy toward radical feminism and the
women's movement. And trans people, after early involvement in
the GLF (and being explicitly excluded from the GAA's agenda),
quickly came to feel that they did not have a welcome place in the
movement they had done much to inspire. As a consequence, they
soon formed their own organizations. In 1970, Sylvia Rivera and another Stonewall regular, Marsha P.
Johnson, established STAR-Street Transvestite Action Revolu
tionaries. Their primary goal was to help street kids stay out of jail,
or get out of jail, and to find food, clothing, and a place to live. They
opened STAR House, an overtly politicized version of the "house"
culture that already characterized black and Latino queer kinship
networks, where dozens of trans youth could count on a free and
safe place to sleep. Rivera and Johnson, as "house mothers," would
hustle to pay the rent, while their "children" would scrounge for
food. Their goal was to educate and protect the younger people
who were coming into the kind of life they themselves led-they
even dreamed of establishing a school for kids who'd never learned
to read and write because their formal education was interrupted
by discrimination and bullying. Some STAR members, particularly
Rivera, were also active in the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto
Trans Liberation
Rican youth organization. One of the first times the STAR banner
was flown in public was at a mass demonstration against police re
pression organized by the Young Lords in East Harlem in 1970, in
which STAR participated as a group. STAR House lasted for only
two or three years and inspired a few short-lived imitators in other
cities, but its legacy lives o.q_ even now. ~. A few other transgender groups formed in New Y~rk in the
early 1970s. A trans woman named Judy Bowen organized two ex
tremely short-lived groups: Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAn
in 1970 and Transsexuals Anonymous in 1971. More significant
was the Queens' Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen
Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower. The
QLF formed in part to resist the erasure of drag and trans visibil
ity in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which
commemorated the Stonewall Riots and is now an annual event
held in New York on the last Sunday in June. In many other cities,
this weekend has become the traditional date to celebrate LGBTQ
~ride. :ne formation of the QLF demonstrates how quickly the gay
liberation movement started to push aside some of the very people
who had the greatest stake in militant resistance at Stonewall. QLF
members participated in that first Christopher Street Liberation
Day march and were involved in several other political campaigns
~hrough the next few years-including wearing drag while lobby
mg state legislators in Albany. QLF's most lasting contribution,
however, was the publication of Drag Queen magazine (later simply
~rag~, which had the best coverage of transgender news and pol
mcs m the United States, and which offered fascinating glimpses
of trans life and activism outside the major coastal cities. In New
York, QLF founder Lee Brewster's private business, Lee's Mardi
Gras Boutique, was a gathering place for segments of the city's
transgender community well into the 1990s.
112 113
TRANSGENDER HISTORY
Angela K. Douglas
One other burst of trans activist energy during this period that
deserves particular mention revolved around Angela K. Douglas.
Douglas had been involved in the countercultural scene in Los
Angeles in the mid-1960s, where she mingled with many soon-to
be-famous filmmakers and rock musicians. She herself, before her
transition in 1969, played in the obscure psychedelic rock band Eu
phoria. Douglas covered the birth of gay liberation politics for the
Los.Angeles underground press and joined GLF-LA, which she soon
left because of the transphobia she perceived in that organization.
(It should also be noted that Morris Kight, the principal architect
of the gay liberation movement in Los Angeles, suspected Dou?las
ofbeing an FBI informant.) She subsequently formed TAO (Trans
sexual Activist Organization) in 1970, which published the Moon
shadow and Mirage newsletters-always-interesting hodgepodges of
eccentric political manifestos, psychedelic art, photographs, activ
ist news, and occult beliefs. TAO was the first truly international
grassroots transgender community organization, with a worldwide
mailing list and loosely affiliated chapters in various cities, · includ
ing one in Birmingham, England, that shaped the sensibilities of
activist attorney and professor of law Stephen Whittle, who would
later lead a successful campaign for transgender legal reform in the
United Kingdom in the 1990s and establish himself as one of the
leading international authorities on transgender legal and human
rights issues.
Douglas, who suffered several psychotic breaks as a young adult,
would spend most of her life living in poverty and ill health in ru ral Florida until her death in 2007. During this later period, she
wrote a poignant autobiography, Triple jeopardy (self-published in
1982), penned a few songs, and churned out a prodigious amount
Trans Liberation
of paranoid writings directed at people she accused of "stealing
her life." Throughout ~e 1970s, however, Douglas tirelessly criss crossed the United States and wrote extensively for radical, counter
~ultural, ~nd transgender community publications. She was briefly mvolved m the New York radical scene, and her involvement there
wa_s_mentioned in Donn Teal's as:..it-happened histo7, The Gay Mtlztants. Douglas moved her base ofoperations to Miami in 1972,
where a significant part of TAO's membership was drawn from
Cuban refugees and other Caribbean immigrants. She was always
more of a gadfly and provocateur than a movement builder, and
from her alternative perspective she ceaselessly criticized the doc
tors, lawyers, and psychiatrists associated with Harry Benjamin, the
EEF, and the "police-run" NTCU in San Francisco. In spite ofher
~rowing psychiatric difficulties, Douglas's political writings offered important countercultural critiques of the emerging transgender establishment.
. By the early 1970s, transgender political activism had progressed
m ways scarcely imaginable when the 1960s had begun. On one
fr~nt, privileged white male transvestites were making community with one another in the nation's suburbs, while on another front,
multiracial groups of militant cultural revolutionaries were claim
ing space for themselves in the streets of America's major cities.
Transsexuals had taken the first crucial steps toward redefining the
relationship between their needs and life goals and state-sanctioned
medical care, social services, and legal accommodation of their
identities. In spite of those remarkable accomplishments, however,
the. decade ahead would be one of the most difficult and frustrating
periods of transgender history in the United States.
