In a 2005 interview, John Rechy, author of City of Night and other classic mid-twentieth-century novels set in the gritty urban underworlds where sexual outlaws and gender nonconformists carved out spaces they could call their own, spoke of a previously undocumented incident in May of 1959, when transgender and gay resentment of police oppression erupted into collective resistance. According to Rechy, it happened at Cooper Do-Nut, a doughnut and coffee hangout that stayed open all night on a rough stretch of Main Street in Los Angeles
