MF

If you’re working in a factory, in a public school, in municipal government, or in a hospital, these are all places where unions have been active and successful. These are also places where queer people work. One of the truths of our world and slogans of our movement is that we are everywhere. There really aren’t a lot of places where you can say there are no gay people. There are gay bosses and gay people leading corporations, but you can’t say there aren’t gay people working in the mines, in the building trades, as housekeepers — we are! The macro thing about being queer is that we are everywhere, and more often than not, we are working everywhere.

When Studs Turkel wrote his wonderful book of interviews with working people, he never asked that question in the 1960s, but that’s one of the reasons I started interviewing people about working while gay, working while being a lesbian, or being a union official while being a closeted gay man. How did that affect people as workers? How did that affect how they got along with people in their organizations? Everybody I interviewed was involved with a union in some way or another, and all of the people knew full well what it was like to be without a union. They knew that it was different than what work is like when you do have a union and when you have a contract. And unions aren’t just the contract you sign and the wage increase you get, but it’s also an ethic of how people relate to each other in the workplace.

I was living in San Francisco in 1981, and union activists in the hospitals were among the first to get involved in talking to the public about AIDS. Queer activists in the Castro, the gay neighborhood in San Francisco, had been at the center of the struggle against Coors. The Coors boycott was a real conduit to the development of AIDS activism. There were people with AIDS who had been involved with this beer boycott, people who were losing their lovers, it was all connected!

The domestic partnership fight started with gay couples wanting to marry, and that was not possible by law, and some cities approved of domestic partnerships and certain civil rights connected with that. These rights were very minimal things — unless you needed them, and then they were absolutely life and death. Visiting your partner in the hospital, domestic partnership made that possible. What that meant for people that were sick with AIDS, and were not in good standing with their families of origin, and did not have a husband or a wife, was that their domestic partners could visit them in the hospital and help make decisions.

By 1985 or so, there were movements all over the West Coast to have domestic partnership! That made a lot of sense, people were worried about dying and what would happen to their lovers. The need for civil rights, the need for health care rights, all of those things were supported by unions.

The teachers played a role in this fight too. They had to go into the classrooms and look at what was going on in the curriculum. They had to ask “What do we say about gay people in San Francisco?” There were all of these different books like Heather has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate and there was blowback everywhere at all times, but unions have the resources to sustain a struggle.

Bernie Sanders has a Marxist understanding of the working class and the capitalist class, and it has stood him well in his politics. Sometimes, he has a less sophisticated framing of women’s issues or queer issues, but he’s deeply sympathetic. It’s not an accident that Vermont was one of the first places to allow gay marriage, and he’s learned a lot from the young people recently. I don’t use Twitter, so I probably wouldn’t have been very useful to him when he was trying to defend that remark.