Cooper Do-nuts Riot

Gay Americans in the 1950s and 1960s faced an anti-gay legal system. Very few establishments welcomed gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. This environment was driven by several factors.

1. Political climate. Spurred by the national emphasis on anti-communism following World War II, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted hearings searching for communists and other security risks in U.S. government offices and institutions, leading to a national paranoia. Anarchists, communists, and other people deemed un-American and subversive were considered security risks. Gay men and lesbians were included in this list by the U.S. State Department on the theory that they were susceptible to blackmail.[2] Between 1947 and 1950, 1,700 federal job applications were denied, 4,380 people were discharged from the military, and 420 were fired from their government jobs for being suspected homosexuals.[3]
2. Psychiatric practice. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder, a classification which remained until 1974.[4]

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and police departments kept lists of known homosexuals, their favored establishments, and friends; the U.S. Post Office kept track of addresses where material pertaining to homosexuality was mailed.[5] State and local governments followed suit: bars catering to gay men and lesbians were shut down, and their customers were arrested and exposed in newspapers. Cities performed "sweeps" to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and beaches of gay people. They outlawed the wearing of opposite gender clothes, and universities expelled instructors suspected of being homosexual.[6] It is within this environment that the Cooper Do-nuts Riot took place.

Cooper Do-nuts was a café on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles between two gay bars, Harold's and the Waldorf, and was a popular hangout for gay people.[7][8] At the time, Los Angeles law made it illegal for a person's gender presentation not to match the gender shown on their ID, and this was often used to target and arrest transgender patrons.[9] For this reason, many gay bars were hostile to transgender patrons and banned or discouraged them from entering.[10]

Cooper Do-nuts was welcoming to the gay community and this made it a target for police harassment. Many LGBT customers had been taken into custody before. "The LAPD had a reputation for brutalizing LGBT residents, one that continued well into the 1980s, and the arrests in May 1959 were the first of last straws." [11] Novelist John Rechy, who was present at the riots, described the routine arrests in his 1963 novel, City of Night: “They interrogate you, fingerprint you without booking you: an illegal L.A. cop-tactic to scare you from hanging around."[12] Rechy has the only original account of the riots, as there are no news sources or LAPD records to corroborate.

In 2020 the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (The DLANC) considered making Cooper Do-nuts a historical site and requested police records to corroborate Rechy's account of the riots. LAPD revealed that there were no records from that time, because they were either "purged or destroyed."[13] Despite not being a first person account, Nancy Valverde claims she had heard about it from a lesbian friend and that she had heard about it right away.[14]

One evening in May 1959, two police officers entered the cafe and asked for IDs from several patrons, a typical form of harassment. The officers attempted to arrest two drag queens, two male sex workers, and a gay man.[15] One person attempted to be arrested was novelist John Rechy, who describes the Los Angeles Police Department's abuse on this night as a culmination of routine targeting of the LGBTQ community.[16]

One of those arrested protested the lack of room in the police car and onlookers began throwing assorted coffee, donuts, cups, and trash at the police until they fled in their car without making the arrests.[10] People then took to rioting in the streets and police backup arrived blocking off the street for the entire night and arresting several people.[17] John Rechy was still slated for arrest, but he managed to escape.[18]

The Cooper Do-nuts uprising is often believed to be the first gay uprising in the United States.[1] Some historians contest the significance, claiming that anyone who was openly gay at the time was in rebellion and risking arrest and imprisonment. Mark Thompson, a historian who lived in the same area as Rechy, wrote: "I would not describe it as a riot but more like an isolated patch of local social unrest that had lasting repercussions. I think less in its day, more as a lesson for us today."[19]