8/10/2023 0 Comments Compton place sf![]() ![]() Transwomen who wished to live as women had other problems as well. “Female impersonation” was a crime, so cross-dressing was an offense that could easily land a queen in jail, in some cases for a couple of months, where they were likely to be subjected to humiliating treatment such as forced head-shaving. Even wearing a shirt that buttoned up on the wrong side was enough to justify being stopped by a cop. Suspected transvestites could be detained by any police offer and forced to undergo humiliating inspections. It was illegal for those considered men to appear in public in women’s clothing apart from professional female impersonation the basic legal rule at the time was that a man had to be wearing at least three items of male apparel in order to be legal. ![]() Thus comparatively trans women were able to pursue that option.) Female impersonation also required some degree of talent as a singer and dancer. There was some room for female impersonators, who performed cabaret acts professionally, but for the transwomen among these performers, the stage was a brief and limited opportunity to express their gender identity, since performers were expected to arrive and leave in men’s clothing, and the only ones who could practically pursue this occupation were those capable of ‘passing’, meaning they were sufficiently feminine that they could appear to be women by post-War standards. (The now-derogatory ‘tranny’ originated in the 1980s within the community as an affirmative term to include both drag queens and trans women.) ‘Queen’ included both modern drag queens and modern transwomen, since the concept of a distinct transwoman identity barely existed at the time. Things were particularly tough for the city’s community of transwomen, who in the parlance of the time were referred to as cross-dressers, transvestites, or ‘drags’. Police raids on the few bars that catered to gays and lesbians were a regular feature of the 1950s and 60s. However while the LGBT community began to grow, it met with little acceptance. Because being homosexual was socially unacceptable in the post-War period (when American culture was entering an aggressively heterosexual phase that permitted only one normative version of male identity), many of these men chose to remain in San Francisco rather than return home and have to face their families. At the end of the war, it began a crackdown on homosexuals in the Navy, many of whom wound up dishonorably discharged at San Francisco. The US Navy used San Francisco as one of its most important West Coast bases. San Francisco began to develop into the gay mecca we think of today at the end of WWII. Spoiler Alert: This post discusses episode 8, which reveals a critical plot point for the season, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to put off reading this post. It looks at Anna’s arrival in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and the climax of the episode is the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, an important but not well-known moment in the history of San Francisco’s LGBT community. Unlike the rest of the show, episode 8 is not an ensemble piece but rather a stand-alone episode that focuses on the history of Anna Madrigal, the free-spirited transwoman who is the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. My favorite part of the new Netflix season of Tales of the City(2019, based on the novels of Armistead Maupin) is episode 8. ![]()
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