Transition Times: Re-Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin is an exhibit that contextualizes the story of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, a queer grassroots uprising against police brutality in August 1966, as recovered by historian Susan Stryker, whose decades of research and her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria provided the evidence to write a new and urgent chapter in an emerging history. The exhibition shows selected material from the outstanding collection that Stryker has compiled since the 1990s, including when she was the executive director at the GLBT Historical Society.

The exhibition examines the urban space around the riot’s site, a four-story building at the intersection of Turk and Taylor Streets in the Tenderloin. It also shows, through our own lenses, what a transformation toward liberation can mean in the context of place, people, and the preservation of a historian’s powerful archive and diligent research.

The archival collection and the physical model identifying historical queer sites in the Tenderloin’s urban landscape are further complemented in the exhibition with a series of ephemera and art pieces that demonstrate the riot’s ripple effect in the present.

The exhibition’s title references performance artist Julian Carter’s article “Embracing Transition, or Dancing in the Folds of Time,” in which he explains how gender transition as an embodied experience is related to the technical vocabulary in dance when referring to transitional movements in spacetime. Transitions, as physical strategies, join time and space in ways that consider an embodied relationality that involves movement and change. Transitional time relates to the way queer temporality opposes normative time, folding back towards the past body that no longer exists while propelling society forward toward an embodied future. As we re-member Compton's Cafeteria riot as a pivotal time of anticarceral resistance in the Tenderloin, we perceive the present once again as another transitional time toward liberation and justice.

Our main objective is to illuminate the site’s historical significance and to share its current condition with broader audiences. In doing so, we aim to build a robust coalition comprised of organizations and individuals to imagine an alternative future for the building, one that honors its unique historical significance as the site of a consequential act of mass resistance to police abuse of trans people and other marginalized, stigmatized groups in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. We seek to activate public memory of the riot’s legacy as a catalyst for building a campaign to change the use of the building, through which we can challenge overarching structures of social oppression and advocate for justice in the most profound and broadest sense possible. Our collective endeavor is to synthesize varied perspectives to determine the most beneficial path forward that could include the acquisition, management, and other future functionalities of the building.

 The exhibitions will hold special events including an informational coalition meeting panel, a workshop on queerness, abolition & letter-writing by Flying Over Walls, a workshop about prison abolition at Turk and Taylor by Critical Resistance, and closing performances curated by artists Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur.