Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

Police cars regularly patrolled the vicinity and often stopped to question people in the area for no reason at all. The police would demand identification—which, for trans people whose appearance might not match the name or gender designation on their IDs, often led to arrest on suspicion of prostitution, vagrancy, loitering, or many other so-called nuisance crimes. On that night in May 1959, when the police came in and arbitrarily started rounding up the drag queens milling around Cooper’s, they and others on the scene spontaneously resisted arrest en masse. The incident started with customers throwing doughnuts at the cops and ended with fighting in the streets, as squad cars and police wagons converged at the site to make arrests. In the ensuing confusion, many people who had been arrested, including Rechy, managed to escape.