Filmmaker-Historian Susan Stryker to Screen
Film on Key Moment in Transgender History

Susan Stryker, a historian, filmmaker and theorist whose work has been influential in determining the direction of the emerging field of transgender studies, will visit Bryn Mawr next week.

After meeting with students in two seminars in the College's program in gender and sexuality studies, Stryker will present and discuss her award-winning documentary, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria on Thursday, Oct. 11, at 4:30 p.m. in Carpenter B21.

Screaming Queens tells the story of a little-known uprising by transgender people in San Francisco's Tenderloin district in 1966, three years before the famous Stonewall incident in New York.

The Tenderloin was a red-light district and a ghetto for gender rebels who were subject to regular harassment by police. In the summer of 1966, a budding transgender-rights movement focused on the neighborhood tensions that burst out at Compton's Cafeteria one August night.

The cafeteria was populated by its usual clientele of drag performers and street hustlers when the management summoned police to subdue a noisy crowd at one table. But on this occasion, a drag queen surprised police and onlookers by throwing her coffee in an officer's face.

The melee that ensued, Stryker says, was a pivotal moment in the history of transgender activism.

The film examines the incident through the first-person narratives of people who were present: drag performers, prostitutes and police officers.
It also presents the story of Stryker's rediscovery of the hitherto unrecorded uprising and the research that allowed her to document it.

Placing the riot and the transgender-rights movement that grew out of it in the context of other social-justice movements of the period, Screaming Queens notes the "dramatic changes in medical practices, urban politics, neighborhood geography and public consciousness" that followed it.

Stryker herself is an important figure in transgender activism. After earning a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, she created a performance piece that grew out of her work with Transgender nation, a direct-action advocacy group. A text adaptation of the piece, titled "My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix — Performing Transgender Rage," appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1994 and quickly became a staple of gender-and-sexuality-studies reading lists.

Since then, the prolific Stryker has produced a number of important works. In 1998, she edited the "Transgender Issue" of The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, a watershed in transgender studies. Among the books she has published are Gay By the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions From the Golden Age of the Paperback, and The Transgender Studies Reader. She was featured in Monika Treut's film Gendernauts and was scenarist and scriptwriter for Brandon, Shu Lea Cheang's online multimedia installation examining gender, embodiment, violence and media at the SoHo Guggenheim.

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