Seeing Six Decades of LGBTQ+ History Through Donna Personna’s Eyes

Donna Personna is a San Francisco treasure. The 77-year-old transgender activist, playwright, drag performer and fine artist has borne witness to six decades of LGBTQ+ history, and made it her mission to pass its stories of resistance down to younger generations.

In 2018, the immersive play she co-wrote, Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, took viewers back to 1966, when San Francisco trans women fought back against police brutality in a landmark moment of rebellion. That was three years before a similar riot in New York City — Stonewall — kicked off the modern-day gay rights movement.

As a teenager, Personna hung out at Compton’s, where other trans women embraced her as family decades before she began living in her truth. At the time, things like dressing in women’s clothes were illegal for those assigned male at birth. And though the fight for trans rights is not over, the change Personna has witnessed and been a part of in her lifetime is nothing short of incredible.

As she prepares to bring Compton’s Cafeteria Riot back to the stage this fall, Personna stopped by KQED headquarters to share her stories of queer history, from Compton’s to her hippie era with legendary drag troupe The Cockettes to her activism during the AIDS epidemic. And she did so with her signature verve, charisma and raunchy humor.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Nastia Voynovskaya: What was San Francisco like for you in the ’60s? How was the scene and the community that you found there?

Donna Personna: As a child, I knew that I was different than all the rest. My father was a Baptist minister in San Jose, and my family was very religious. I looked at a medical book in our personal library and saw a chapter about homosexuality. One thing it said is that the child should be taken away from the family. From the age of 10 years old, I felt like I had the power to destroy my family, so I kept that a secret. But my father sometimes would come to San Francisco as a substitute preacher, so we’d all come here. I remember one time, looking through the window, I saw this guy who didn’t have any eyebrows because they were plucked. I said, “Oh, that resonates for me. That’s interesting. I’m going to come back here.” So that’s how I decided to come to San Francisco.

There weren’t technically gay bars. It was speakeasies. You had to know. I’d go into a dark alley that someone told me about. Then I’d knock on the door — “I’m looking for cross buns.” They open the door, and it was a gay bar with drag performances.

So I was here in San Francisco, looking for this faggot life that I wanted. And I came upon this diner at Turk and Taylor, and it reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting. It was nighttime, but it was lit up. And so I went there, and I saw beautiful women. It turned out that they were transgender women, some of them, and they were sex workers. I started sitting with them and made friends with them.

I feel like it wasn’t a coincidence. I was sent there by some divine power to witness this. One thing I learned there was they became family to one another. They were wonderful people, and they were good to me. And they took me on like a brother at that time.

I have to say this, and it’s the truth. They dealt in drugs. They had a criminal life. And, you know, never did they invite me to do drugs with them. So, I want to be able to tell that to the world, that they don’t recruit — I’m gonna talk dirty — like Christians do. They were wonderful human beings.

A big reason for that was because being trans or queer at the time was so stigmatized. There was rampant job and housing discrimination that pushed people into survival sex work. And not only that, but things like “impersonating a woman” were considered a crime. So there was a lot of police brutality against those women.

Yes, there was. They’d say it was to “deceive a man.” They didn’t have to deceive a man. Men would deceive themselves, you know. They were looking at something they wanted.

The women had to wear a little piece of paper that said “I’m a boy” in case a cop pulled them over. And then they’d put an artificial flower over it and strut their stuff.

It was horrible, the treatment that they went through. And I witnessed this, the police did everything they could to traumatize them. The first thing they would do is cut all their hair off, throw them in jail. Things to make them feel less human.

Why was it important for you to tell the story of Compton’s in your play?

I spent a year or two going there every weekend, and I heard their stories. I knew that I didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want to go to prison. I didn’t want to sell my body. You know, I say it this way — I’m a cheap bitch, I give it away.

I wanted to go to college. I wanted to have a career. I wanted to live in peace. And so I stepped away from that. I left them, and I turned into a hippie.

But, then in 2005, a person named Susan Stryker made a documentary about this riot that happened in 1966 at Compton’s. And I went to the world premiere, and it came back to me. Oh my God, I used to go here. That was not a coincidence.

Fast forward to another 10 years or so at the Tenderloin Museum, where I had made a movie called Beautiful By Night about three aging drag queens from Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, where I’m a regular. I’m still there, a Hot Boxx Girl.

This man named Mark Nasser, who is a playwright himself, was there. He wrote a successful play called Tony ‘N Tina’s Wedding, which had a 15-year successful run in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. He asked to speak to me, and he said that he wanted to write another play, and this time he wanted it to be of substance, and make a difference. I had a meeting with him, and the long and short of it is we decided to write a play about Compton’s Cafeteria.

It’s important to me because it happened three years before Stonewall, and it seems like everyone in the world knows about Stonewall. I want it to be known that transgender people were part of gaining justice and liberation for the entire LGBTQ community, and ultimately for human beings. Justice and liberation and rights are best gained by the demographics that needs them and wants them.

This story was hidden for over 50 years, and that’s one of my driving forces for everything I do today. Like, what if it had never been uncovered? I just break out in a sweat when I think about that.

In the ’70s you hung out with The Cockettes, who people have described as a hippie drag troupe on acid. What were you getting up to in that era?

I wanted to be frivolous. So I kept coming to San Francisco. I’ll try to make it short — some man that was after this body, well, I met him in a club in North Beach. He was producing a movie with The Cockettes. I started dating him, and he took me to the filming of Elevator Girls in Bondage.

The Cockettes only lasted a couple years, but they’re world-famous and they’re San Francisco royalty. And LSD — I don’t know if it still does — but it opens up the doors of perception. It did that for this troupe, and they got really wild. They decided that having genitals of the male ilk was OK on stage. The name Cockettes, it’s derived from the New York Rockettes.

So I hung out with them, and I met Divine and Sylvester. It was a wonderful time.

So legendary. But of course, it was also a tumultuous time in the ’70s. The first gay elected official in California, Harvey Milk, was assassinated. And the community protested in response. Can you tell us about that?

I think the whole community felt this way: I was absolutely devastated. He was a politician and an activist, and it looked like we were on our way to being normal human beings and getting what everybody deserves just by being alive and breathing. And so for him to be assassinated, I thought, OK, it’s all over. Everything that we gained is gone. I was there the night of the White Nights. I carried a little white water cup with a candle, and we walked from the Castro to City Hall. You could not see the street; it was full of people. There were people on the tops of cars. There were people hanging out of the buildings.

We were all heartbroken, but we wanted to do this to demonstrate how we felt and like, we’re not going to take this. We’re going to do something about this.

The ’80s brought the devastation of the AIDS crisis, which the federal government was ignoring and treating like a “gay disease.” How did you and other activists respond to that and rally around the people that were sick and dying?

Ronald Reagan and the government were not speaking of it at all, and were doing nothing about it. And the consensus was, “They’re getting what they deserve.” To walk around like that, I want you to try to imagine — you feel like you’ve been doing something wrong.

I joined a couple of three groups, FOG (Friends of Gays), SIR (Society for Individual Rights) and something called ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). And with those groups, we went to people suffering from AIDS, dying from AIDS, and helped them out. I personally would go to the hospitals and go into the rooms with them. At that time, everyone in the hospital had protective gear, and they gave me a mask and they said, if you want, you can go in there. I would go into this room and hold a guy’s hand, and I would do things for him, like help pay his bills, try to contact his family, things like that.

That’s at the same time that lesbians stepped in too and took care of them. That was a way for the community at large to all come together. At that time and before, lesbians and gay men did not like each other. But that’s when I believe that they kind of came together, and haven’t felt that way since.

I also want to talk about your very accomplished career as an artist and as a performer. I was surprised to learn that you only began doing drag about 20 years ago, which coincided with your journey of coming out as a trans woman. Could you tell us about that journey?

To circle back to the beginning, I was so fearful from the age of 10 years old that I could do harm to my family. So I never dressed up like a woman. And I had friends who did drag just for fun — I never did any of that.

But in 2005, I got back together with The Cockettes. Rumi Missabu, one of the founders, had what he called salons, like Gertrude Stein did in Paris, where he would have art in his apartment. And along with that, he would do something called the Blue Hour, where he would have the artists perform. So he let me show some of my art.

I was 60 years old when I started and I have now had over 20, 25 professional art exhibitions that I’m a part of. And I’m a performer. I waited a long time, but wow — I say that because I have performed in over 100 different venues in two different countries, so I’m proud.

Donna Personna performs at San Francisco City Hall on Sunday, June 30, during SF Pride. On Saturdays, she lip syncs at Hot Boxxx Girls at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco. Her play ‘Compton’s Cafeteria Riot’ returns to San Francisco this fall.