# Cooper Donuts Riot (1959) An uprising in **May 1959** at Cooper's Donuts, a 24-hour donut shop on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles' Skid Row that served as one of the few public gathering spaces tolerant of gay men, drag queens, transgender women, and street hustlers. The riot broke out when LAPD officers attempted to arrest two drag queens, two hustlers, and a gay man — and the rest of the patrons began throwing donuts, coffee cups, and trash at the officers, forcing them to retreat without their detainees. ## Significance Cooper Donuts is the **earliest documented LGBTQ uprising in U.S. history** that involved physical resistance to police — **ten years before** the [[Stonewall Riots]], **seven years before** the [[Compton's Cafeteria Riot]], and **eight years before** the [[Black Cat Tavern Raid]] protests. The riot lasted only a few hours; police returned with reinforcements and arrested several patrons, but the event was recovered into the broader LGBTQ historical record only in the early 2000s, primarily through the work of historian John Rechy, whose 1963 novel *City of Night* drew on the Cooper's milieu. ## Cultural Geography Cooper Donuts sat in the downtown LA Skid Row strip where the bars **Harold's** and **The Waldorf** were similarly tolerant of queer patronage, in a stretch that was effectively LA's gay-of-color and trans-of-color zone in the 1950s — geographically and demographically distinct from the more middle-class West Hollywood gay enclave that would emerge in the following decades. The participants in the 1959 riot were disproportionately Black, Latino, transgender, and street-economy workers — the same demographic that would lead [[Compton's Cafeteria Riot]] in 1966 and [[Stonewall Riots]] in 1969. ## Place in the Vault Cooper Donuts is part of the **pre-Stonewall trans-and-street-economy-led resistance** tradition that the conventional gay-rights narrative for decades treated as marginal or invisible. Its recovery into LGBTQ historical memory in the 2010s is one of the corrective historical-revision projects that also produced the contemporary recognition of [[Marsha P. Johnson]] and [[Sylvia Rivera]] as central figures. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Compton's Cafeteria Riot]] - [[Stonewall Riots]]