On a bright Sunday afternoon on May 18, a group of transgender activists gathered at the corner of Turk and Taylor streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The group, Compton’s x Coalition, invited local media, including Street Sheet, to the rally outside the 111 Taylor St. Apartments, which stands on the site of a historic riot over a half-century before.
The rally culminated in two members of a direct action group called Traction SF climbing a fire escape to the roof and dropping two vertical banners that displayed a single message: “Liberate Compton’s.”
The building at 111 Taylor St. is now a halfway house for people who were in prison. But in 1966, it housed a branch of the Compton’s Cafeteria chain that served as a socializing place for trangender people, drag queens, sex workers, activists and neighborhood denizens.
On an August night that year—no one has ever since determined the exact date—that Compton’s regulars rioted in response to police harassment and criminalization of wearing women’s clothing for men.
But in time, a place heralded—and landmarked, literally—for resistance against police violence became a building operated by a private prison corporation under state and federal contracts to house parolees.
The activists who staged the banner drop seek to end that company’s occupancy and transform 111 Taylor into a community hub for trans and gender-nonconforming people—a “just transition,” as they deem it. That process could start soon if the Compton’s x Coalition persuades the City to allow GEO Group’s lease to expire at the end of the month.
Last month, the Compton’s x Coalition won an opportunity at the Board of Appeals to challenge GEO Group’s letter of determination that classified 111 Taylor’s zoning “group housing.” The board originally scheduled a hearing for June 11, but cancelled because not enough members are expected to attend and make a quorum.
At the May 7 appeals hearing, Chandra Laborde, an organizer with the Compton’s x Coalition, told the panel that last year she requested updates from the Planning Department, but it never properly notified her of 111 Taylor’s new classification while it was in progress. Had she been updated, Laborde added, she would have had 30 days to appeal and request a public hearing about the building—something GEO Group wanted to avoid, she emphasized.
“This quietly allowed a private prison corporation with active federal and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] contracts to operate in the Tenderloin at the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot,” Laborde told the board. She also cited a history of health and safety violations, leaking sewage, broken elevators and general lack of disability access at 111 Taylor under GEO’s tenancy.
This label change is not merely an administrative oversight, Laborde added. “It’s not group housing,” she said of 111 Taylor. “It’s more of a detention center. It’s not even rehabilitation.”
GEO Group, a Florida-based multinational corporation founded in 1984, operates 129 facilities with 95,000 beds worldwide. While billing itself as a “re-entry program,” it holds a major contract with the federal government to run immigrant detention facilities. In 2004, it assumed control of 111 Taylor.
In 2019, California passed Assembly Bill 32, which effectively banned privately run detention facilities statewide, but grandfathered those companies with existing contracts with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It’s because of this exception that GEO Group continues to operate at 111 Taylor—that is until now.
GEO Group’s contract to run 111 Taylor expires on June 30, 2025.
* * *
On its website, GEO Group borrows a term that government agencies use to describe the time span over which they deliver services: “continuum of care.” It claims to be committed to “providing leading, evidence-based rehabilitation programs to individuals while in-custody and post-release into the community through GEO Continuum of Care.” But GEO Group “re-entry” houses mainly operate as carceral environments, according to people who have stayed at 111 Taylor.
“When I lived at 111 Taylor, I experienced first-hand the harm of a system that hides behind the language of ‘reentry’ while functioning more like a shadow prison,” Sister Anya Streets of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence said in a Compton’s x Coalition press release after the appeals board hearing. “I was promised support. What I got was surveillance, punishment and fear. There was no true rehabilitation, no investment in my healing. Only control, silent, suffocating control, by a corporation that profits off incarceration.”
Before she became director of the TGI Justice Project, an organization that advocates for human rights of trans and gender-nonconforming people who are entwined in the criminal justice system, Janetta Johnson lived at 111 Taylor. In an interview for the Liberate Compton’s zine, she said that the facility’s atmosphere was hostile and punitive.
“Everyone takes turns kicking your ass,” Johnson said. “The mental health people, the people that bring in the food, all tell you that you’re a prisoner, this is what you deserve. There’s a huge lack of respect, it’s really dehumanizing. If you want to return someone to society, you want to send them back as a human, not haunted by prison. Everyone who works there has to get their punishment out on you.”
Johnson also faced discrimination as a trans woman: Staff misgendered her and she was not allowed to ride the same elevator with cisgender women. People who wanted out of 111 Taylor chose returning to prison and completing their sentences there, she added.
“People preferred to serve their time out than how they were treated at GEO—it was just like prison,” Johnson said.
* * *
Historically, the intersection at Turk and Taylor has been home to low-income people and a center for LGBTQ+ sexualities at a time where cross-dressing was forbidden under City law. In addition, the Tenderloin was a Black neighborhood before redevelopment started taking place in the 1960s, as Miss Billie Cooper pointed out when she addressed people gathered for the May 18 banner drop.
Cooper describes herself as an “unapologetically Black, transgender woman” who has been involved with the neighborhood for over 40 years. “We need to talk about the Black history in the Tenderloin, because when I see publications, when I see museums and things, I don’t see anything about Black history, because back in those days, the Tenderloin was basically Black,” she said. “We had Latin people living over here, and we had other races living here, but the Tenderloin was really known as a Black neighborhood.”
That August night in 1966, the riot began when police were arresting a trans woman who resisted by throwing coffee at an officer. Soon, other trans women and drag queens spilled out onto the street and fought back against the cops, using heavy bags and high-heeled shoes.
Predating the Stonewall Inn riot in New York City by three years, the Compton’s riot became the subject of a PBS documentary by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman in 2005, and today, it has been dramatized as an immersive stage play in San Francisco.
Standing in the middle of the Transgender District established in 2017, Compton’s old site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, with two plaques commemorating the uprising.
In 2021, Laborde told Street Sheet that she heard Stryker give a lecture on GEO Group’s occupation of Compton’s former site. Stryker asked the attendees if they would be interested in imagining an alternative future for 111 Taylor. Laborde and some friends contacted her the following year and formed a working group that would coordinate the broader Compton’s x Coalition.
Through public records requests and organizing with advocates and neighborhood residents, the coalition discovered the looming expiration of GEO Group’s state contract. It also uncovered zoning violations, civil rights complaints, and disturbing patterns of harm at the site.
To grant an appeal at the Planning Commission, four of the five appeals board members must vote to modify or overturn GEO Group’s letter of determination. In an email to Street Sheet, Coalition strategist Wilder Zeiser pointed out that the board currently has only four sitting members, so the coalition’s request needs a unanimous vote to prevail, otherwise the letter will stand.
If it prevails in the hearing, the coalition will support residents currently in 111 Taylor’s transitional housing section under its “just transition” plan in finding noncarceral housing and care, Laborde said in an email to Street Sheet.
But if the board rules in GEO’s favor, Zeiser added, the coalition is prepared to take legal action, possibly challenging the decision in court.
“We are also pursuing alternative enforcement avenues with other City and state agencies and using the public pressure campaign to mobilize support for removing GEO from the site,” Zeiser said.
Still, Zeiser said they believe that the coalition presents a strong case. They also anticipate significant public turnout at the June 11 hearing.
“The widespread concern reflects how deeply people care about the future of this historical site and the city’s responsibility to prevent harm and protect vulnerable communities,” they said.
So far, Laborde is savoring these early-round victories. “This is a win for transparency, for history, and for the trans community,” she said. “We now have the opportunity to make our full case before the City, and to demand that the legacy of Compton’s be honored, not erased.”
This story has been updated from print and online versions to clarify that the people who dropped the banner from atop 111 Taylor were part of Traction SF, while Compton’s x Coalition hosted the rally below. It has also been updated to reflect the cancellation of the scheduled June 11 Board of Appeals meeting, which hasn’t been rescheduled yet.
