Cooper Do-nuts Riot facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Cooper Do-nuts Riot |
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| Part of events leading to the Gay liberation movement |
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A Cooper Do-nuts location in 1961
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| Date | May 1959 | ||
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Cooper Do-nuts, Los Angeles, USA
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| Goals | Gay liberation and LGBT rights in the United States | ||
| Parties to the civil conflict | |||
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The Cooper Do-nuts Riot was a small uprising in response to police harassment of LGBT people at the 24-hour Cooper Do-nuts cafe in Los Angeles in May 1959. This occurred 10 years prior to the better-known Stonewall riots in New York City and is viewed by some historians as the first modern LGBT uprising in the United States.
Legacy
The Cooper Do-nuts uprising is often cited as the first gay uprising in the United States. Hay identified it as the first specifically against police treatment of LGBT people. Some historians contest the significance, claiming that anyone who was openly gay at the time was already 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."
In 2020 the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council considered making Cooper Do-nuts a historical site and requested police records to corroborate Rechy's account of the riots. The Los Angeles Police Department revealed that there were no records from that time, because they were either "purged or destroyed". 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.
