“I never told anyone that I was gay”: Jackie Harris, an African American lesbian, reflected on her twenty-seven years (1964–1991) as a caseworker and supervisor in New York City’s welfare system. She always controlled her personal information, switching the genders of her pronouns, staying detached while mixing collegially. “The only people who knew were the few that I knew to be gay. I socialized with a gay guy on the job. If he needed a straight date, he would take me.”¹ Harris belonged to Social Service Employees Union (SSEU) Local 371, a municipal union with a reputation for political...

Marcy Johnsen, a registered nurse at the Fircrest School for developmentally disabled adults, near Seattle, was out at work. But when she stood to address her union’s delegate assembly, she felt “so strange.” As a vice-president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199 Northwest, a regional union for health care workers, she often gave speeches; however, at this meeting she was revealing her lesbianism. She knew that the 150 delegates would be reporting back to 7,000 constituents and that many of them would be uncomfortable with her message. “It was like telling people how you have sex,” she...

Coors: it was nothing more than beer, but a favorite in taverns and a best seller in package and grocery stores throughout the American West. Coors beer topped a very competitive market—and made an excellent object for a boycott.¹

The Coors beer boycott was not a single, isolated campaign but a series of protests that rolled through American working-class and ethnic communities for more than three decades, starting in 1967. For each of its constituencies, the boycott held different meanings and resulted in different outcomes. Some groups achieved their ends; others fell short. Tactical gains aside, however, the campaign...

“Pretty damn good” was how Sally Otos described contractual protections for sexual orientation that her union had negotiated with Columbia University in 1985. Otos was a secretary in the university’s Center for the Social Sciences and one of three co-chairs of the local that represented Columbia’s office workers, a chapter of District 65–United Auto Workers (UAW), a union renowned in New York City’s labor movement for brave organizing and innovative contracts. The local was a harbinger of an aggressive new wave of unionization at elite universities. To recruit 1,100 clerical and technical employees, Columbia’s activists had campaigned for five...

The election was imminent; its outcome, uncertain. Bill Olwell’s union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), was campaigning at a new meat-packing plant in a small town in the southern Midwest, one of several in the profitable company the union had targeted. The company was eager to consolidate operations in expanding markets, and this shop was key to its strategy. Olwell, the UFCW’s executive vice-president, had flown out from headquarters in Washington, DC, for a cookout in the backyard of a union supporter. The other guests would be employees from the Quality Control Department, all twenty of them gay...