Trans landmark added to National Register of Historic Places despite Trump’s anti-trans attacks
by Curated February 15, 2025 · Gay News / Gay Pride / Gay Rights / LGBTQ Nation
Author: John Russell
A San Francisco address that was once the site of a pre-Stonewall transgender uprising has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of historic sites, buildings, and objects in the United States.
The address was the location of Compton’s Cafeteria in the 1960s. One night in August 1966, a riot broke out at the 24-hour eatery between its trans and queer patrons and police officers after a drag queen threw a cup of coffee at a cop who was trying to arrest her. The café’s windows were shattered and a police car destroyed amid the protest against police harassment, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
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In 2017, San Francisco designated an area in the Tenderloin the nation’s first transgender historic district, renaming it the Compton’s TLGBT District in honor of the August 1966 uprising. The riot was cited last year when San Diego declared August as Transgender History Month.
The site is likely the first landmark to be registered specifically for its connection to the history of the transgender community, trans scholar and historian Susan Stryker, whose 2005 documentary Screaming Queen details the riot, told The Bay Area Reporter.
“There is Stonewall and sites connected to individual people like Pauli Murray, who was nonbinary,” Stryker noted. “But this is the first thing put on the register specifically because of its connection to the history of the transgender movement.”
Madison Levesque, an architectural historian with the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, first submitted a request for the site to be added to the national registry in 2022 as part of their master’s thesis in public history.
“Today, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot is remembered as a turning point towards militant resistance in the LGBTQ, and particularly transgender, community,” Levesque wrote in their 2022 application. “The property is significant at the national level because of its influence on the future political and social representation of transgender and gender-variant people within the United States.”
Stryker, whose work informed Levesque’s initial application and a revised version submitted late last year, credited Levesque with making the registration happen.
Historian and historic preservation planner Shayne Watson said that the news was “something to celebrate” amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on transgender rights. In just his first two weeks in office, President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders intended to further marginalize transgender Americans.
Earlier this week, the National Parks Service removed the letters T and Q from the “LGBTQ+” initials on its website for New York City’s Stonewall National Monument, effectively erasing trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people’s leading role in the 1969 uprising that is widely recognized as the beginning of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The move appears to be an effort to comply with Trump’s executive orders prohibiting any federal recognition of trans people in any aspect of civic life.
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Author: John Russell
