For decades, Cooper Do-nuts — a 24-hour shop on Downtown LA’s South Main Street — was one of the few places the city’s queer and trans communities could gather openly after dark. Drag queens, hustlers, poets, and night-shift workers shared its counter, and in 1959 its patrons pushed back against police harassment in what’s often remembered as one of the earliest LGBTQ uprisings in the country — a decade before Stonewall.

This virtual presentation traces that history through the people who lived it and the family who ran it. Drawing on oral histories, family records, and years of archival research, we reconstruct a vanished corner of Los Angeles after dark — and ask what it takes to keep a community’s memory alive when the record itself has tried to forget it. A short Q&A will follow.

Participant Bios

Keith Evans is the grandson of Jack Evans, who built Cooper Do-nuts into a chain of more than thirty locations across Los Angeles County, with a handful more in Northern California. The family’s primary voice and researcher, Keith has spent years reconstructing the story — digging through archival records and family memory, and scouring the internet and any printed material he can find for clues about what may or may not have happened at the chain’s Los Angeles locations, including accounts of a 1959 uprising he continues to investigate.

Jacquie Evans is a marketing and communications professional who partnered with her husband, Keith Evans, to bring his family’s history to a wider audience. Drawing on Keith’s research and the Evans family’s records, she shapes the project’s writing, public storytelling, and online presence — telling the story of Cooper Do-nuts, the 24-hour donut chain that grew to more than thirty locations across Los Angeles County and a handful in Northern California, and became an after-dark gathering place for the city’s queer and trans communities in the mid-twentieth century.

Cooper Do-nuts: A Living Archive of Los Angeles After Dark is organized by Cooper Do-nuts Foundation as a part of the 2026 Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute.

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  The Cooper Do-nuts Foundation preserves and activates the legacy of Cooper Do-nuts—an early safe haven for marginalized communities in Los Angeles—by combining cultural preservation with direct community impact. Through oral histories, public programming, and community support initiatives, the Foundation amplifies underrepresented voices, creates inclusive spaces for connection, and continues a legacy rooted in dignity, access, and belonging.