In 2017, the City of San Francisco recognized the Compton's Transgender Cultural District, the world's first legally recognized transgender district, later renamed The Transgender District. This was the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, when trans women and drag queens fought back against police harassment and abuse. Susan Stryker called it "the first known incident of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. In 1965, a group of queer and transgender youth and sex workers formed Vanguard, the first known gay youth organization in the United States. Street kids and Vanguard members would often meet at Compton’s and hang out there without buying anything because they were all broke. In response, Compton would kick them out and call in the police for support. This led Vanguard to organize a picket of the cafeteria in July, 1966, one of the first demonstrations against police violence against transgender people in San Francisco, and a precursor to the riot that would break out there the next month.
In the wake of the riot, Vanguard orchestrated several other street actions, like their "street sweep," when Vanguard members hit the streets of the Tenderloin with push brooms to protest police "sweeps" of queer neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and to symbolically critique the police practice of treating transgender and queer sex workers like "trash." Activists used the momentum of the picket and the riot to establish several community-based support services. The most successful of these was the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, established in 1968.
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