Drew De Pinto | Compton's '22 / 2023 [documentary]

trying to unbury the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew De Pinto (director) Compton's '22 / 2023 [17 minutes] [documentary]

 

As with all landmark incidents, an attending mythology has arisen regarding the events at Stonewall at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969 in the early morning hours when the police raided the bar for the first time without giving notice.

     Legend now has it that the raid, which supposedly was based on the fact that the bar was illegally serving liquor, was actually about the fact that the bar’s owner, four Mafioso members of the Genovese family, has been trading stolen bonds.

      This raid was different, however, in nearly all respects, since when a butch lesbian was taken away in handcuffs, the gay, lesbians, trans, and drag queens that frequented the bar began to fight back, particularly the transsexual and lesbian patrons, who eventual surrounded the police so that they were forced back inside the bar while large crowds began to grow on the outside. For the first time in memory, the LGBTQ+ fought back and refused to be cowed by police control. The riots continued sporadically over the next two days because of bad weather, but on July 2nd broke out again, continuing through the next day. By October or December of that year the bar has closed down, not to be reopened until the 1990s.

       The anger of the local LGBTQ+ community was noted in all the newspapers, and a transformation began to occur, making it clear to authorities that patrons of the several gay bars in the Village and elsewhere were no longer passive fairies, drinking and dancing the evenings away for pleasure, but were serious about their sacred shrines and were violently angry both by the mafioso control of the bars and the police actions. Something had radically changed, and eventually would help in altering the attitudes of the entire LGBTQ+ communities across the nation. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and others of their kind now represented begin to speak with a strong voice, no longer closeted, that eventually began to express itself in annual gay pride parades, in politics, and in the marketplace. The small event at the little Christopher Street bar had, so to speak, broken the proverbial “camel’s back,” creating a new voice for the LGBTQ community not only throughout the US, but in other countries as well.

      Yet, of course, we all know that wasn’t the complete truth. I was there at that very moment, having left New York City to return to the University of Wisconsin only a couple of weeks earlier, and I can say that I easily moved between Julius’, where I often ate dinner, a block away from Stonewall, occasionally stopping at Stonewall (a bar I didn’t find particularly welcoming) on my way to my favorite large bar on Christopher Street across the highway from the Christopher Street Piers, Badlands.* That bar, a spacious one, had an even larger backroom which, at late hours, opened up so for any denizens who might enjoy a huge gay public orgy. I remained there several nights until the back room opened.

      I’ve read since that visitors to Stonewall were first greeted by bouncers at the door, who also attempted to sell tickets, only two allowed, for drinks. But I remember no bouncers or tickets. It was simply too small for my taste and didn’t have the pretty preppy looking boys I sought out—although if I’d have known that my artist friend Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt hung out there, I might have stayed.

      But over most of the year in 1969, I attended the Village bars (the Ramrod and others included) almost every night and never once encountered a police raid. Moreover, by 1969, most the bars I attended were no longer filled with closeted or what we described as “nervous nellies.” We were all out and proud long before the Stonewall riots. In the Village, particularly, but throughout New York, a good-looking young man of 21 or 22 such as I was, could easily fall under the delusion that nearly everyone was gay, and there seemed absolutely no need to hide my sexual identity. Men lined up at the Grand Central Station urinals to jack off with other men. The toilets in the subway system were nearly all filled with men enjoying gay sex. The bathrooms in Central Park were equally filled with gay stranglers as was the public bathroom in Washington Square Park. And you truly could go to the Sloane House YMCA for any kind of gay sex.

     The idea, accordingly, that everything changed after the Stonewall riots is pure nonsense. If anything, in some respects, the public outing of the vast community only made it more conservative, helped along in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of course, with the beginning of the AIDS crisis. The celebratory Gay Pride Days soon became something for more necessarily political. But much of the joy of open sex had disappeared.

      My point is not to argue that the Stonewall riots were not an important turning point in LGBTQ+ history, but that not all the changes it caused were positive, and that not everything so radically changed from what had been occurring in Village when I arrived in 1969 for some years previous—although I must say that I arrived in the City at a particularly fortuitous moment. And by the time I had reinstalled myself in Madison, Wisconsin gays in that community were ready to establish one of the first Gay Literation Groups, at whose very first meeting I met my husband of today, 55 years later, Howard N. Fox.

     This lengthy preface, however, is simply to make the point that not everything began with Stonewall. A full three years prior to the Stonewall events, transgender sex workers and drag queens revolted against police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the subject of Drew De Pinto’s 2023 short documentary, Compton’s 22.

     One of the interviewees describes the fact that many of the figures who used to visit Compton’s were true outsiders, most of them transsexuals, a great number of whom, having been already rejected by their own families, perceive the group that gathered at Compton’s as their family. “If you hurt one of us, you hurt us all,” she concludes. 

      Another describes the situation of the day, pointing out that no one knew in those days about transsexuals or transgender people. “We were known as queens, or the girls. We were very proud to be known as queens, because we were queens. We were queens of the street.

        We had to walk the streets. That was our turf.”

      The cafeteria, Compton’s—filled with not only drag queens but with gay guys and straight people who had come there simply to gawk—was their favorite hangout.

     “We went there to gossip and describe what we did, that we were still alive. We survived the night.” 

     Since it was open 24 hours, most of the queens gathered at Compton’s at around 6:00 in the morning, but they went there anytime they wanted to eat, breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

    Unfortunately, De Pinto evidently felt the need to interrupt his now elderly queens and their memories of the event, with discussions by current transgender performers such as Matthew Zheng who performs in Beijing Opera drag, as well as contemporary queer observers and interpreters.

    One can well understand that through this approach De Pinto is attempting to put the early streetwalker’s and drag artist’s actions in context, but for me it breaks the more important historical approach that is of most interest. With all the coverage of contemporary transsexual and transgender experiences of which we now almost daily read, do we truly need to begin all over again by putting the original actors within a contemporary context?

      Part of the reason that De Pinto alternates his narrative with the old and new, moreover, is that he has been forced to use VHS tapes made by historians Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. His goal was surely to get out of the TV set and into the spirit of the actual period. But again, the colorful representations of current drag performers seem at odds with what film is actually trying to tell us. Do I really need these contemporary visitations to imagine how the habitants of Compton’s paraded their wares as they entered the cafeteria? Certainly, I don’t need a current transsexual to present a rather tame and mediocre dance to comprehend how, as one of the early figures describes it, they were often joined by beautiful boys to simply party.

      Finally, the original figures get down to real business again by describing the dangers of the street, noting that there were murders all the time. They couldn’t complain to the police since they themselves were against the law in wearing female attire. Moreover, the police, as she points out, simply didn’t care. Indeed some of the police force, in an attempt at humiliation, beat up the “girls” with nightsticks and fists.

     And eventually, one of the queens begins to bring up the actual subject, suggesting that despite their general ostracization they did recognize themselves as part of the gay community in the Tenderloin, when we decided to fight back.

    Accordingly, in August 1966, by the day the police determined to raid Compton’s and take all the girls to jail, “we were just fed up.”

    “We screamed at the police, telling them to stop harassing us. There were tables turned over and sugar shakers flying through the glass windows and doors. Then there was a lot of fighting and people being thrown into paddy wagons.”

     One of them picked up a rock to throw at the police, who cursed her, “you damn little faggot.”

     Another adds, “Although we were the gutter girls, we had pride too.”

     “It felt good that this transformation had happened,” concludes one the original figures.

     None of the newspapers carried information about any of the events, however, and the acts of these brave women were almost entirely forgotten.

    In the work, unfortunately, their voices are almost again drowned out by the contemporary performers singing songs, making unrelated comments, and roiling about on the floor as if they were performing in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, along with the insertion of footage from a contemporary protest against the GEO company that is now located in the spot where the original Compton’s used to stand.

      De Pinto, finally, attempts to justify his approach by speaking of the need, particularly for the trans community, to know its history and what proceeded their own difficult battles. But I would still argue that a purer presentation of these transsexuals’ lives and statements might have provided a better record of their achievements.

 

*That bar was closed, so Rob Frydlewicz has reported, when two individuals where shot and killed there in the winter of 1981.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).