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Title: Relevant Queer Mythology Author: Mary Nardini Gang Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: queer, Insurrectionary, myth Source: *Be Gay Do Crime*, December, 2018, Contagion Press
Cooper’s Donuts was an all night donut shop on a seedy stretch of Main
Street in Los Angeles. It was a regular hangout for street queens and
queer hustlers at all hours of the night. Police harassment was a
regular fixture of the Cooper’s, but one May night in 1959, the queers
fought back. What started with customers throwing donuts at the police
escalated into full-on street fighting. In the ensuing chaos, all of the
donut-wielding rebels escaped into the night.
One weekend in August of 1966, Compton’s — a twenty-four-hour cafeteria
in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood — was buzzing with its usual
late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruisers, runaway
teens and neighborhood regulars. The restaurant’s management became
annoyed by a noisy young crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be
spending a lot of time without spending a lot of money, and it called
the police to roust them. A surly police officer, accustomed to
manhandling Compton’s clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of
the queens and tried to drag her away. She unexpectedly threw her coffee
in his face, however, and a melee erupted: Plates, trays, cups, and
silverware flew through the air at the startled police who ran outside
and called for backup. The customers turned over the tables, smashed the
plate-glass windows, and poured onto the streets. When the police
reinforcements arrived, street fighting broke out all throughout the
Compton’s vicinity. Drag queens beat the police with their heavy purses
and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes. A police car was
vandalized, a newspaper box was burnt to the ground, and general havoc
was raised all throughout the Tenderloin.
What began as an early morning raid on June 28^(th), 1969, at New York’s
Stonewall Inn, escalated to four days of rioting throughout Greenwich
Village. Police conducted the raid as usual; targeting people of color,
transpeople, and gender variants for harassment and violence. It all
changed, though, when a bull-dyke resisted her arrest and several street
queens began throwing bottles and rocks at the police. The police began
beating folks, but soon people from all over the neighborhood rushed to
the scene, swelling the rioters’ numbers to over two thousand. The
vastly outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the bar, while an
uprooted parking meter was used as a battering ram by the crowd. Molotov
cocktails were thrown at the bar. Riot police arrived on scene, but were
unable to regain control of the situation. Drag queens danced a conga
line and sang songs amidst the street fighting to mock the inability of
the police to re-establish order. The rioting continued until dawn, only
to be picked up again at nightfall of the subsequent days.
On the night of May 21^(st) 1979, in what has come to be known as the
White Night Riots, the queer community of San Francisco was outraged and
wanted justice for the murder of Harvey Milk. The outraged queers went
to city hall where they smashed the windows and glass door of the
building. The riotous crowd took to the streets, disrupting traffic,
smashing storefronts and car windows, disabling buses, and setting
twelve San Francisco Police cruisers on fire. The rioting spread
throughout the city as others joined in on the fun!
In 1970, Stonewall veterans Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded
STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. They opened the STAR
house, a radical version of the “house” culture of black and latina
queer communities. The house provided a safe and free place for queer
and trans street kids to stay. Marsha and Sylvia as the “House Mothers”
hustled to pay rent so that the kids would not be forced to. Their
“children” scavenged and stole food so that everyone in the house could
eat. That’s what we call mutual aid!
In the time between the Stonewall Riots and the outbreak of HIV, the
queer community of New York saw the rise of a culture of public sex.
Queers had orgies in squatted buildings, in abandoned semi-trucks, on
the piers and in bars and clubs all along Christopher street. This is
our idea of voluntary association of free individuals! Many mark this as
the most sexually liberated time this country has ever seen. Though the
authors of this essay wholeheartedly believe we can outdo them.