With the support of San Francisco’s leaders, transgender activists have enacted the world’s first “Transgender Cultural District” in the Tenderloin area of the city to “create a safe, welcoming and empowering neighborhood lead by trans people for trans people” and to “preserve the places where transgender history took place for future generations.”
Reports claim that Jane Kim, who is an active member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and represents the district that includes the Tenderloin, proposed legislation last year that would enable and assert the creation of “Compton’s Transgender Cultural District.”
“The lower Tenderloin is the most important neighborhood in America for transgender history, culture, and civil rights,” Kim said in a statement. “By creating the Compton’s TLGB District we are honoring this vibrant community built by transgender people, and are sending a message to the world that trans people are welcome here.”
The area stretches across six blocks in the southeastern Tenderloin as well as two blocks of 6th Street, includes the site of the now former Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a dining establishment that would frequently make phone calls to the police in the 1960’s since it had the idea that the lingering of men dressed as women would have a negative impact on business, and worked to drive them to leave.
In 1966, as numerous transgender supporters worked to challenge what they felt was police harassment, Compton’s Cafeteria called the authorities to report unruly behavior. When one officer sought to arrest one protestor who was dressed in feminine attire, the man resisted arrest and rather threw his coffee in the officer’s face.
A few of those present then started to riot, tossing furniture, dishes, and breaking the windows of the restaurant, along with those of a police car sitting outside. The uproar is said to have gone on for two days.
Today, the cafeteria is used for transitional housing. Last year, a developer agreed to use a sum of $300,000 for the creation of the transgender district, which will include a community center at the site of a former homosexual bathhouse, The Daily Beast notes.
In November 2017, San Francisco approved a proposal to allocate $3 million for the numerous cultural areas, and the Compton’s district was later designated $215,000 for its plan.
The district’s manager goes by the drag name of Honey Mahogany, and is famous for his time of the popular show “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“The Tenderloin has always held a really special place in my heart as a trans person with the way the community is accepting of gender variant and trans people of color,” he revealed to the Daily Beast.
Mahogany is supposedly among those who joined forces to buy the homosexual bar known as “The Stud,” when it faced closure.
“Many of our traditions are passed down through queer bars because those are the places where our elders interact with younger generations,” he said. “Drag is often seen as a way of storytelling and passing on stories of previous generations.”
In continuing the project’s goal to “stabilize and economically empower the transgender community through ownership of buildings, business, homes, historic sites, and community space,” Supervisor Kim stated that San Francisco will contribute grants for small business in the district.
“The first transgender commemorative neighborhood in the nation’s history is well timed given the president’s attack on transgender people,” she commented. “We will have grants for small businesses and we need to be intentional to make the district an anti-displacement strategy.”
Proverbs 14:34 declares, “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”
In his book “Holiness,” the late Anglican preacher J.C. Ryle explained, “Let us remember … that every part of the world bears testimony to the fact that sin is the universal disease of all mankind. Search the globe from east to west and from pole to pole, search every nation in every climate in the four quarters of the earth, search every rank and class in our own country from the highest to the lowest, and under every circumstance and condition, the report will always be the same.”
“… Everywhere the human heart is naturally ‘deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’”
Photo courtesy: Jesse Yelin/Pexels
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