A donut shop.
A safe haven.
A spark of resistance.

The Story

In the Los Angeles of the late 1950s, the streets after midnight belonged to those who had nowhere else to go. The gay men and transgender women, the hustlers and sex workers, the outcasts and the all-night wanderers — they gathered where they could, in the margins of a city that criminalized their existence.

Cooper Do-nuts was one of those places. Open through the night, fluorescent and warm, it became something the Evans family who built it perhaps never anticipated: a sanctuary. A room where you could be exactly who you were, for as long as your coffee held out.

Then one night in 1959, something happened. The accounts are incomplete. The records are scarce. But what took place around that shop on Main Street became, in the telling of those who were there, one of the earliest acts of resistance in LGBTQ American history — a full decade before Stonewall. This is what we know. And this is what we’re still finding out.

Jack Evans had come to California from Chicago during the Depression, chasing something. He opened cafeterias, then bought a donut name from a man named Richard Cooper, and built it into more than thirty shops stretching across the state. Small counters. Twelve, fourteen stools. Affordable prices. Open to anyone. That was the policy. That was the point.

In their own words

The Documentary

Keith Evans — grandson of Cooper Do-nuts founder Jack Evans — on the history his family built, and the night that changed it.

As covered by

This history is still being uncovered.

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We’ll only write when we have something worth saying.