New study documents over 600 early LGBTQ protests in US

by Cynthia Laird

Anew study released Wednesday shines a light on the hundreds of protests led by LGBTQ people in the United States from 1965 to 1973.

The study, published jointly by OutHistory and Queer Pasts, documents more than 600 LGBTQ+ direct actions, stated Marc Stein, a gay man who’s a history professor at San Francisco State University and the study’s lead researcher. Stein is the new director of OutHistory and the coeditor of Queer Pasts.

“The project, completed with the support of student researchers at San Francisco State University, can be understood as a survey of more than 600 events that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies want to cancel, censor, and closet when we teach U.S. history,” Stein stated in a news release, referring to the Republican leader of the Sunshine State and potential 2024 presidential candidate.

For the nine years studied, Stein and his research team identified 646 direct action events, averaging 72 per year. The study cites more than 1,800 media sources from the 1960s and 1970s, the release noted. According to these sources, more than 200,000 people participated in these protests and nearly 200 were arrested.

Stein noted that protests during the period took place in 20 states and the District of Columbia, “challenging the notion that these only occurred in New York, California, and a few other states,” he explained. The frequency of protests increased significantly in April 1969, two months before the well-known Stonewall rebellion in New York City, which is considered the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

Stein told the Bay Area Reporter that he and his team were unable to find the exact date of the August 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The date has been lost to history, and other academic researchers over the years have also not been able to identify just when the sit-in by transgender people took place.

Last October, the California State Historical Resources Commission voted 6-0 to nominate the site of the 1966’s Compton’s Cafeteria riots for addition to the federal registry, as the B.A.R. previously reported. A month later, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved local landmark status for the Turk and Taylor intersection, which is near the long-closed cafeteria, as the B.A.R. noted at the time. The riots were one of the early uprisings by queer people against police harassment.

Stein said that he was able to find the date for a Compton’s demonstration, and that it took place July 18, 1966, about a month before the riots, according to an inventory of the documented protests that are part of the study. The inventory listed the demonstration as being reported on in the late Herb Caen’s San Francisco Chronicle column, the Berkeley Barb newspaper, and Cruise News and World Report, among other sources.

The federal office that oversees the National Register of Historic Places has yet to announce if it will approve adding 101-102 Taylor Street, where Compton’s Cafeteria was located, to the list. While it has not responded to an inquiry on the status of the listing, the California Office of Historic Preservation told the B.A.R. it has not been rejected.