Compton's '22

Three years before Stonewall, on an unknown date in August 1966, trans sex workers and drag queens in San Francisco's Tenderloin district rioted against police violence at Gene Compton's Cafeteria. There was no news coverage, and the arrest records no longer exist. Decades later, trans historian Susan Stryker unearthed the history of the riot and interviewed the surviving Compton’s Queens.
Compton's ’22 creates an intergenerational conversation between these oral histories and trans artists today, using performance to imagine an interpretive archive that stands in for the absence of historical documentation. The film aims to counter the erasure and deradicalization of our history, and underscore the crucial role of intergenerational knowledge and solidarity in the ongoing struggle for queer liberation.