Geo Group facility under city probe after man’s death near 111 Taylor in July
The Compton’s x Coalition is asking San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to declare the interior of 111 Taylor Street a historic landmark, part of a broader campaign to push Geo Group out of the building. The for-profit prison company runs a 240-bed halfway house at the site and is one of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s largest contractors. The building at the corner of Turk and Taylor streets in the Tenderloin once housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where a drag queen’s coffee mug became a symbol of resistance against police targeting trans San Franciscans in August 1966. Geo Group did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
City officials have been investigating Geo Group’s operations at 111 Taylor since last July, when a man was found dead near the building after being held at the facility, according to the Guardian. The investigation is the backdrop against which organizers are pursuing both street protest and the slower route of historic designation.
The Compton’s Cafeteria uprising predated New York City’s 1969 Stonewall riots and grew out of years of police harassment of trans women and drag performers in the Tenderloin, where Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour chain of greasy spoons, served as a community hub. Police often arrested trans women in the neighborhood for wearing female clothing and “obstructing the sidewalk,” according to historical accounts cited by the Guardian. When officers attempted to raid the cafeteria on a hot summer night in August 1966, a drag queen threw a coffee mug at an officer; others threw dishes and chairs outside.
“The Compton’s story and the significance of that site are not nearly as well-known, by an order of magnitude, as the Stonewall story,” historian Susan Stryker, who unearthed the incident in her 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens,” told the Guardian. “But it is something that is increasingly known and, particularly in San Francisco, is something that’s become part of cultural memory, trans community memory, San Francisco civic memory.”
Stryker’s earlier book, “Transgender History,” characterized the Compton’s riot as “the first time direct action in the streets by trans people resulted in long-lasting institutional change.” That change came with support from local churches and groups such as the Mattachine Society, against the backdrop of Vietnam-era protests and weakening gender norms, and over the following decades San Francisco expanded access to identification and healthcare for trans residents.
Today, the Tenderloin is home to the world’s first official Transgender District, initially called the Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, and the 1966 riot is memorialized in a historical marker on the building’s facade. But inside 111 Taylor, the space that once held the cafeteria is occupied by Geo Group. “Sometimes we think about the corner of Turk and Taylor [streets, where Compton’s was located] almost as a microcosm of the world,” Compton’s x Coalition organizer Chandra Laborde told the Guardian. “What Susan [Stryker] says is, if we can change the corner, we can change the world.”
The coalition appealed the building’s zoning last year, with hundreds attending public hearings in support of designating the entire building a historical landmark. The next hearing has not been rescheduled. The group envisions the space becoming a cultural hub centered on safety and justice. Janetta Johnson, a Transgender District founder and CEO of the anti-carceral advocacy group TGI Justice Project who was once held at 111 Taylor, said she hopes the building becomes LGBTQ+ senior housing.
The coalition’s organizing connects current civil rights fights to the original resistance. In July, the group hosted a solidarity protest for hunger strikers in ICE detention facilities, including those at Delaney Hall in New Jersey and the Adelanto facility in southern California. Stryker spoke at the event alongside a local drag queen who had been abducted by ICE and people formerly held at 111 Taylor; protesters held signs reading “Geo Out,” “Liberate Compton’s” and “Free Them All!”
“Within activist circles, there’s certainly a lot that’s connected and lines drawn between anti-police resistance, police harassment of trans populations and the current history of the building that’s owned by Geo Group,” Stryker told the Guardian. Organizers frame the fight over the building as a continuation of the original struggle, with the city’s tech-driven economy reshaping who can afford to remain in the Tenderloin.
The campaign comes amid broader tensions between San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city for trans people — declared in 2024 — and federal immigration enforcement. “We’re never going to be able to do enough,” Honey Mahogany, a Trans District founder who now directs the city’s Office of Transgender Initiatives, told the Guardian last fall. “I’m continuing to work with the current [city] administration to do more for our community, because I think it is one of the most vulnerable. It is one of the ones being most targeted by the federal administration.”
San Francisco organizers remain attuned to the 2023 killing of Banko Brown, a 24-year-old unhoused Black trans man shot by a Walgreens private security guard during a dispute over shoplifting snacks. When the district attorney declined to press charges, citing self-defense, protesters took to the streets. More recently, police drew guns and batons on protesters at the city’s June Trans March after some people covered the lenses of nearby Flock surveillance cameras, and nearly two dozen more were arrested the following night of Pride weekend on charges of unlawful assembly and resisting arrest that their attorneys dispute.
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, the body considering the landmark proposal, is currently in recess. On August 14, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, was removed from the city’s land use committee, leaving the coalition’s proposal with one fewer advocate. “We have every intention of proceeding with the historical landmarking of 111 Taylor,” Mahmood told the Guardian.
Later this month, the Transgender District and the Compton’s x Coalition are hosting 60th-anniversary celebrations of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, including a screening of Stryker’s “Screaming Queens” with a panel discussion. Ach Kabal, another coalition organizer, noted the resonance with the year of the fire horse in the Chinese zodiac — a symbol of independence and intensity that recurs every 60 years. “It feels kind of random that in many ways, 60 years later, we’re in a very similar place,” Kabal told the Guardian. “But the world does move in cycles.”