Episode Four: Compton Cafeteria Riots, Part Two

Welcome to Star Gays, the Queer Astrology Archives podcast, where we examine the lives of important queer artists, activists, and thinkers through the lens of their astrological birth chart. My name is Elly, and I'll be your host.

Hi everyone and welcome back to Star Gays, the Queer Astrology Archives podcast. It's been a minute and I know I left the last episode with a cliffhanger, but I needed to wait for the sun to leave my twelfth house. So happy Equinox, happy Libra season, happy almost eclipse season. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to let you all know that I have a website now. I will put a link to it in the show notes, but please go check it out.

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So today we're doing something a little bit different and looking at an event in queer history rather than a person. And this episode is part two, so if you haven't listened to part one yet, pause this episode now and go listen to that first. 

[Voiceover from archival footage]: We were in pain, and of course pain is a very good place to start. Many of the street people felt that they had nothing to lose, and so why not stand up for their rights?

EH: Welcome back to part two on the Compton Cafeteria riots. I'll give a quick recap on what we talked about last time just to settle us back into it. So the Compton Cafeteria riots were the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history.

In San Francisco, in August of 1966, queer youth fought back against police one night after weeks of mounting tension. Comptons, a 24-hour diner, had been the spot for queer and trans youth to hang out, but a change in management meant that attitudes towards the youth had changed and become more hostile. The Vanguard, a gay liberation youth group, held a picket to protest this hostility on July 18th, 1966.

But tensions would continue to rise until one evening a trans woman threw her coffee at a police officer as he tried to remove her from Compton's. The other patrons joined in and threw sugar and salt shakers and dinnerware at police, shattering the windows. They damaged a police car and burned down a sidewalk newsstand. In part one, we talked about the astrology of the July 18th picket.

We talked about Uranus and Pluto in a conjunction in Virgo, symbolizing widespread radical social and political change and often destructive upheaval, massive empowerment of revolutionary and rebellious impulses, and intensified artistic and intellectual creativity. And how Jupiter and Cancer exactly sextile to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction activated these themes by creating a sense of hope for a more just world and expanding the rebellious fervor.

And of course the new moon, symbolizing that initial spark that would eventually lead to the riots. But I decided to push the actual riots off to a second episode, because we don't have an exact date for them. The only information that we have about the riots is that they took place on a hot weekend night in August. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about the astrology of the month of August, 1966, and see what broader themes were playing out, and if we can narrow down the options for dates.

And I want to apologize in advance because this is going to be an astrology heavy episode, so if you're wanting the queer history, I would go back and listen to episode 1, because I talk more extensively about the riots there. The one thing I will add in terms of history is that I did find a new source that tells a slightly different version of the story of Compton's.

And this comes from Adrian Raviror, who was a member of the Vanguard. And by his account, he was the founder of Vanguard, but most of the other sources don't name him as a founder. So I'm taking that claim and this version of the Compton's riots with a grain of salt, but he said, quote, "In August, a spontaneous morning sit-in occurred at the Doggie Diner, when the clerk refused to serve Vanguard member Dixie Russo. A half dozen Vanguard members were surrounded in a standoff that lasted several hours, and was the talk of the Tenderloin because it felt as if new liberties had been won.

That evening, Vanguard member Dixie Russo was inside Compton's and had been recognized for the morning standoff. Hours later, when a street queen was disrespected, she hit the clerk with a tray that launched the Compton's riot and uprising. “

So this story, you know, we have the same general idea, but slightly different details. So I just wanted to share that version of the story. Okay, so for August.

We are going to talk about the whole month, but I did want to try to narrow down our options. And the first thing I did to do that actually wasn't astrological, but meteorological. So I pulled up the weather for San Francisco in August 1966 and found that the hottest weekend nights were August 6th, August 26th, and August 27th.

So we're going to look in particular at those dates. 

So throughout the course of the month of August, Pluto and Uranus are still at 16, 17, and 18 degrees of Virgo. Kind of moving around in those degrees. Neptune is at 19 degrees of Scorpio the whole month. Saturn and Chiron are hanging out at the end of Pisces.

Jupiter, Mars, and Venus start out the month in Cancer, but Mars and Venus both move into Leo by August 31st. Mercury is stationing direct in Leo at the beginning of the month and is retracing its steps through Leo post-retrograde for the whole month. And then of course the Sun starts out in Leo and moves into Virgo.

I'm gonna go through the exact transits in a second, but we have a couple of big themes playing out that I wanna just point out first. One is that Uranus and Pluto are still pretty close to an exact conjunction, and also pretty close to an exact sextile with Neptune the whole month. Neptune is moving into a conjunction with the south node of the moon all month, and so Pluto and Uranus are also moving into that sextile with the south node, and therefore trining the north node.

Venus and Mars are traveling in tandem for the early part of the month, and Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are basically in a triple conjunction in Cancer for most of the month. As these three planets move through Cancer, they each sextile the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, then make a trine to Neptune and Scorpio, and then another trine to Chiron and finally Saturn in Pisces before moving into Leo. So now I'm going to go through a bunch of important alignments. So this is gonna be a lot of data all at once, but here we go. So on August 1st, Jupiter at 19 degrees of cancer is trining Neptune at 19 degrees of Scorpio. On August 3rd, Venus and Mars have an exact conjunction at 15 degrees of cancer. Mars and Venus are then traveling together and sextile the Uranus-Pluto conjunction on August 5th from 16 and 17 degrees of 16 and 17 degrees of Virgo. On August 6th, Venus moves into the trine with Neptune and is also squaring the moon in Aries at 19 degrees. August 7th, Venus is conjunct Jupiter at 20 degrees of Cancer with Mars only one degree away and Mercury stations direct. On August 8th, Mars trines Neptune. On August 11th, Venus trines Chiron. On August 12th Mars is conjunct Jupiter at 21 degrees of cancer. And on August 13th Venus trines Saturn at 28 degrees of cancer to 28 degrees of Pisces. And the moon conjoins Jupiter, Mars, and then Venus. On August 15th Venus enters Leo. And then on August 18th Mars trines Chiron.

On August 21st, the moon is conjunct Neptune and the south node in Scorpio at 19 degrees. On August 22nd, Mars is trining Saturn in Pisces and the sun moves into Virgo on the 23rd. On August 25th, Mars moves into Leo. On August 28th, Jupiter is trine to Chiron in Pisces and Neptune is exactly conjunct the south node. And finally, on August 30th, Venus squares the nodes and Neptune and then on September 1st Mercury moves into Virgo. Okay, so that's a lot of astrology. So let's zoom in and look at the dates that were the hottest and see if we can narrow down an exact date. So we're looking in particular at August 6th and then the weekend of August 26th and 27th. For the weekend of August 6th we have Mars and Venus conjunct in cancer, sextiling Pluto and Uranus the day before on August 5th. And if you remember from the last episode, Jupiter was exactly sextile to Uranus and Pluto on the July 18th picket day. So with this, we could have Venus and Mars creating the same kind of activation that Jupiter did for the picketing.

And if on the night of the picket Jupiter's presence was indicative of a hopeful optimism that the Vanguard's activism could lead to Pluto and Uranus's widespread social change, Venus as the planet of connection and Mars as the planet of severing coming together to activate Uranus and Pluto might indicate more of a kind of like enough is enough attitude.

Like Venus is bringing all the people who frequented Compton's together, and Mars is saying, let's take action, let's fight. So rather than the more Jupiterian, righteous picketing protest, Venus and Mars' version of a protest is, let's fight together. Jupiter and the picket line helped to create the idea that change was possible, that the Vanguard could stand up to harassment. And Venus and Mars took that idea and said,

because we have relationships with each other, (Venus), we're going to stand together and fight (Mars). Interestingly, on August 6th, the moon is traversing through Aries, which means that Mars as the ruler of Aries, and the moon as the ruler of Cancer, are in a mutual reception. Essentially, they are staying in each other's homes, and therefore able to communicate clearly and offer each other more resources.

In the last episode we spoke about Mars being in its fall in cancer, about how the crab moves sideways and so Mars isn't able to take action directly, but has to kind of sublimate the action. But with the mutual reception Mars is able to get some more assistance and perhaps able to take more direct action even though it's in its fall. And this is a big weekend because Venus is exactly trine to Neptune on the 6th, with Mars following suit two days later on the 8th. And if you remember, Jupiter was trine to Neptune on the 1st of the month. So this beginning part of the month, we have Jupiter and then Venus and Mars hitting that trine with Neptune in rapid succession. And of course, because Neptune is at 19 degrees of Scorpio, it's also within a two degree orb of sextiling the Uranus-Pluto conjunction this whole time too.

So what's Neptune about? And for this, I'm gonna pull again from Richard Tarnas's Cosmo and Psyche. And he says, Neptune is associated with the “transcendent, spiritual, ideal, symbolic, and imaginative dimensions of life. With the subtle, formless, intangible, and invisible, with the unitive, timeless, immaterial, and infinite, with all that transcends the material world. Myth and religion, art and inspiration, ideals and aspirations, images and reflections. It is associated with the impulse to surrender separative existence and egoic control, to dissolve boundaries and structures in favor of underlying unities and undifferentiated wholes.” So with all these planets making their supportive connections with Neptune, there is this infusion of the spiritual connective energy that arises from collective action. The way the story of the Compton cafeteria riots is told, it's as if there was a sudden wave of energy that overtook the people in Compton's that night. Some invisible thread connected them and they all knew it was time to fight back. And I know we didn't talk about Neptune in the last episode, but I just checked and Neptune is also at 19 degrees of Scorpio on the picket date. Neptune was retrograde then and station direct at 19 degrees of Scorpio. So Neptune actually didn't leave 19 degrees of Scorpio from June 11th through September 17th. And interestingly, the Vanguard became officially sponsored by the Glide Memorial Church in June of 1966, and they held their other big protest, the Street Sweep, in September of 1966.

So we can see how Neptune at 19 degrees of Scorpio is kind of encompassing this larger timeframe of the lead up to the first picket through the riots and then the fallout after that. And that's not even all the astrology of that weekend because on August 7th Venus was conjunct Jupiter and Mercury stations direct in Leo. As far as Venus meeting up with Jupiter the next day, this feels very celebratory and would make sense as the riots continued into the next day. More people showed up to protest and the glass windows of Compton's were broken a second time. With Venus and Jupiter coming together, sometimes astrologers warn about hedonism or excess, and I think the second breaking of the glass feels kind of excessive in the best way. Like, it wasn't enough to have the thrill of smashing windows once, they had to do it again. And with Mercury Stationing Direct, on the July 18th picket, Mercury Retrograde played an important role. And when Mercury is retrograde, we get delays and miscommunications that often get cleared up as Mercury Stations Direct. So if the picket was the Vanguard's attempt to communicate to Comptons, that they needed to be treated with respect, the riots were a much louder and more direct communication of that same idea. And the fact that it's in Leo, you get this kind of dramatic flare with a coffee cup being thrown into a police officer's face, and the use of high heels and weighted purses as weapons. You're going to hear what Mercury in Leo has to say. 

So let's shift to later in the month and take a look at the weekend of August 26th and 27th. For this later date, we have Mars having just moved into Leo, the Sun into Virgo, and Jupiter makes the trine to Chiron. So with Mars, we have Mars moving from the place of its fall in Cancer into Leo, where Mars has a little more capacity to move forward and act directly with some of that flair that we were just talking about. And Mars doesn't have like the most agency in the first few degrees of Leo, but I do think that shift in dignity is interesting. Mars leaving its fall is a big enough shift on its own and we could understand that as all of the frustration that had been sublimated while Mars was in cancer now has an avenue to escape and is released in the form of the riots.

At the same time, the sun moving into Virgo means that it is now in the same sign as and approaching the Uranus-Pluto conjunction and shining a spotlight on this. It's still pretty far away from the exact conjunction, but I imagine there may have been this feeling of mounting energy towards that social change and upheaval. As far as the moon...

The moon was trine to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the early evening on August 26th, and then would go on to oppose Jupiter and then Mars during the day of the 27th. The moon is the closest planetary body to Earth, and so it is often seen to take the significations of the different planets down into the material world.

So we could see this as the moon first bringing down our Uranus, Pluto, rebellious fervor, then our Jupiterian hope and sense of righteous justice, and then finally that Martian willingness to fight. In addition to all of this, on August 27th, Jupiter, Mars, Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune are all in Jupiter's bounds.

The bounds are an uneven division of a zodiacal sign into five parts, each ruled by one of the five traditional planets, excluding luminaries. If a zodiacal sign as a whole is like a house, the bounds are individual rooms in the house where one planet gets to be in charge. So all of these planets are under Jupiter's watch, and if Jupiter is setting the rules, the rules are going to be Yes and Think Bigger, which could lead pretty quickly from one cup of coffee to a newsstand being on fire. And remember that Jupiter this weekend is also trying to Chiron, the wounded healer, which also played an important role in the Vanguard picket a few weeks earlier. So Jupiter is setting the rules of Yes, More, and Think Bigger in the context of thinking about healing some deep core wounds. There's so much astrology happening in August of 1966 and we have really only touched on part of it, but I think we can see how a lot of these threads that were started in the July 18th picket found their way into the charts of August 6th and August 26th and 7th. And some of these themes continue on into other important moments of Queer Rebellion that we will return to in another episode. If there are any astrologers who want to weigh in on which date they think the riots happened based on the astrology, I would definitely welcome that feedback. But I do think that there's an argument that could be made for either weekend. Since Susan Stryker recovered the story of Compton's in the early 2000s, it has found its way more into the public lexicon. And in fact, in 2017, the city of San Francisco recognized the Compton's Transgender Cultural District, which is the world's first legally recognized transgender district.

So the Compton's riots were important for a couple of reasons. First, just because they were a moment of queer collective resistance to police harassment and violence and important because of the way that it extends the lineage of Stonewall back a few years but also important because of specifically the vanguard's involvement in it, because they were actively organizing and actively creating a collective political consciousness, both in doing direct action, like the July 18th picket and then the riots, which were not planned but still but also through their magazine where they were giving advice for how to navigate encounters with the police and also laying out a set of principles for what they wanted and drawing these connections between gender and sexuality as well as economic status and the fact that they were sex workers and the precarity that that combination created. And I'm just gonna read a little bit from the first issue of the Vanguard. So it says, 

“the needs of this area are so obvious that it seems unbelievable that the city's quote, public services agencies are not attempting to change the conditions. I can only ask one question of these people, why not? I think that this shows a very corrupt power structure in this city. A certain TV station recently made a survey of the various agencies and found that the answer was always the same. We'd rather not get involved. There is too much possibility of adverse publicity. The whole point of this article is this. We of the central city are going to have to start fighting this exploitation. Start protesting to the middle-class bureaucracy that rules this city. Vanguard has started to fight this by starting to organize the youth and young adults of this area. Now someone is going to have to do the same with the elderly residents. This is imperative if we are ever to make something of ourselves and of our area.”

[Voiceover from archival footage] “This is the first time I think any gay people at all were demonstrating, let alone gay kids, about discrimination. I felt that it was liberation. It felt like gay liberation at that point. It freed us to be ourselves, not to be afraid, not to be ashamed. It was a whole new day. It felt totally different. It was like we had transcended a point. We'd reached the top of the hill, and we're now coming down another side. And this led us to having dances, community events, community dinners, which eventually turned into the Gay and Lesbian Center, where we had our own community center. There was the poverty program, there was Clyde Methodist Church, it was the background of the peace and civil rights movement. And so us gay kids, for a moment I think, thought we were part of that. And looking back now, I realize that really that was the beginning.”

EH: And if you want to learn more about the Compton Cafeteria riots or the Vanguard, definitely watch the documentary Screaming Queens by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, which is available for free on YouTube. Also, the Vanguard Magazine, which was instrumental in developing the political consciousness of the queer youth of the Tenderloin, is available to read online, and I'll link to that in the show notes.

Alright, this has been a different type of episode, so hopefully it was interesting to look at a specific event. I'm planning to do more of these episodes as we go on, but the next one will be back to looking at one person. So thank you again for listening, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.

You can find me on social media and I'll include those links in the show notes. And please check out the website and become a supporting member if you are able to. And I will see you all again next time. Bye.