As the right wing and the Trump administration move full steam ahead with their attempts to roll back the rights of LGBTQ people, it is more important than ever to learn from the history of the struggle that won these rights.
This year alone, more than 500 legislative bills have been presented for consideration in Congress and in state legislatures. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has moved to end gender identity protections in temporary housing shelters. Federal health care plans now explicitly restrict coverage for gender affirming care. The Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar that conversion therapy bans for minors violate the First Amendment. These are just a few of the attacks LGBTQ people are enduring across the nation.
The rollback of LGBTQ rights is not inevitable. LGBTQ people have fought for more than a century to win landmark Supreme Court cases legalizing marriage equality, the expansion of health care coverage for gender affirming care, the right to adoption and more. While LGBTQ people led these struggles, they did not fight alone. Working people across sexual orientation and gender fought hand-in-hand during the Civil Rights Revolution, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s and well into this decade with the 2020 uprisings demanding an end to violence against Black trans women.
While today, the LGBTQ struggle is often presented as an issue in need of its own movement, the history of LGBTQ organizing shows that the path to defeating homophobia and transphobia requires the organization of the united working class. The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union Great Waterfront Strikes of 1901 and the Anti-Coors Boycotts of the 1950s to 1970s provide critical lessons in organizing for LGBTQ liberation today. Both labor struggles fostered the development of multinational, pro-LGBTQ solidarity, bridging the divisions enforced by the billionaire class and demonstrating that the path toward LGBTQ liberation requires merging the struggle for LGBTQ rights with the many other people’s movements of the working class and oppressed.
The Great Depression and the Great Waterfront strikes
The National Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) was formed in 1901 as a segregated union that organized only white workers. By 1933, up to 15 million people were unemployed — around 25% of the entire U.S working class. Factory owners took full advantage of the dire economy, whipping up racism by trying to use Black and immigrant workers as strikebreakers and backing up scabs with police, private thugs and the National Guard.
Despite the vast unemployment and the dire circumstances of the Great Depression, millions of workers went on strike between 1933 and 1937. In 1934, Harry Bridges, a union leader with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and a member of the Communist Party, began going door-to-door in Black communities, asking for support for a coming strike and promising an end to discrimination in hiring on the docks. Bridges, alongside other organizers, began to turn what was a company-run union into a fighting union, capable of beating the bosses and winning improved conditions for all workers.
The MCS joined forces with the ILA at this time, similarly working to overcome historical divisions of race and sexual orientation. Like many other unions at the time, the MCS excluded Black, Asian/Asian American and LGBTQ workers who made up the majority of cooks and stewards. Despite their exclusionary policies, a majority of cooks and stewards were Black and Asian and a sizable percentage were gay men (or “queens”). Cooks and stewards were forced to work 16-hour days, seven days a week with the lowest wages in the maritime trades, and the union refused to fight against discriminatory treatment and policies.
This changed as the workers during the waterfront strikes of the early 1930s. The union, like the ILA, was heavily influenced and led by communists and communist sympathizers who recognized the need to unite workers of all backgrounds. These efforts led to the union establishing a slogan, “If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. That’s why we all have to stick together.”
In 1934, their solidarity and cross-union coalitions were put to the test as nearly all maritime workers went on strike. As the bosses attempted to bring in scabs to fill their jobs, Teamsters rank-and-file workers refused to handle scab goods, scabs faced tense show-downs each day as they attempted to cross the picket-line, and the unity of the workers kept the strike alive for 83 days.
Faced with state violence that escalated into what came to be known as “Bloody Thursday,” with two workers killed and more than 100 more injured, the workers marched forward, organizing the San Francisco General Strike. One-hundred and twenty unions voted for the general strike, non-union workers stayed home, and more than 100,000 workers walked out of multiple industries, shutting down the city.
Following the successful victory of coastwide contracts for maritime workers, the MCS joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), rewrote their constitution to reflect their unity with nationally oppressed and LGBTQ workers, walked off the job when a Black woman, Luella Lawhorn, was refused a position by the passenger liner Lurline, and multinationalized its leadership.
Despite its later expulsion from the CIO during the McCarthy era, the MCS demonstrated that, through joint struggle, workers are able to overcome divisions created by the bosses and forge their unity into the sharpest weapon in the class struggle.
The Teamsters boycott Coors
Like the Great Waterfront Strikes, the Coors boycott represented a historic partnership between labor, anti racist and LGBTQ movements. The union boycotts of Coors went as far back as the 1950s for various reasons; first, while the brewery industry was heavily unionized, the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company was a long-standing holdout, notorious for its discriminatory practices against Black, Mexican and gay workers and for its union-busting. To apply for a job at Coors, you were forced to answer questions about your sexual orientation and whether you were pro-union. The Coors family, itself, has long held close ties to conservative politicians and funded right-wing organizations, like the Heritage Foundation.
In 1973, the struggle was renewed when San Francisco beer delivery drivers, unionized with the Teamsters Local 888, decided to strike and call for another boycott. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was founded in 1903 to represent the men who drove horse-drawn wagons and stable hands. Over time, the union branched out to represent a wider variety of occupations including gravel haulers, beer wagon drivers and drivers of the new “motor trucks.”
A key leader of the 1970s Coors Boycott was Allan Baird, then-president of Teamsters Local 921, who organized pickets and boycott actions out of his home in the Castro District, a stronghold of the working class with a growing LGBTQ population at this time. With the help of dozens of other Teamsters, he dispatched striking beer drivers to local grocery stores with picket signs, leaflets and bullhorns to convince stores to remove Coors from their shelves and began to form strong alliances with aspiring politician and gay activist Harvey Milk, and his assistant Howard Wallace, an openly gay Teamster truck driver and co-founder of the Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL). BAGL members started hitting local gay bars to convince patrons and owners alike to join the fight.
By November 1974, more organizations joined the struggle, including the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers, who endorsed both the boycott and a ground-breaking Teamsters affirmative action plan that prioritized LGBTQ and nationally oppressed applicants for open beer driver positions. Shortly thereafter, Milk wrote in the Bay Area Reporter that “the union of beer drivers, Blacks, Chicanos and Latinos and gays fighting together” had planted “the seeds of joint battles.”
The struggle was successful in bringing together workers across racial, sexual, gender and political lines of division. The Teamsters, known at that time as a more “socially conservative” union, joined forces with workers of all backgrounds, realizing that they all shared one fight: the fight against the ruling class. After a decade of active boycotting, Coors was forced to change its employment practices along with infusing hundreds of millions of dollars back into boycotting communities.
Building unity through the class struggle
The MCS strikes and the Teamsters’ anti-Coors boycott both demonstrated the possibility and necessity of a united working class confronting powerful corporations, the ruling elite and facism. These struggles showed us that when workers organize collectively they can even challenge the most powerful corporations and win. These victories were achieved through collective action, solidarity across movements and a unified vision. The prominent role that communists played in both struggles demonstrates the need for an organized working-class party to provide leadership, give shape to the movement and bridge individual struggles.
As attacks on workers rights and marginalized people continue, the labor movement must be multinational and pro-LGBTQ liberation, and the LGBTQ movement must merge with the many other people’s struggles of the oppressed and working class. The ongoing effort to roll back the rights won through the LGBTQ struggle is framed as a means through which to protect the “ordinary,” working-class man and woman. “Parents’ rights” are said to be under attack. Gender affirming health care is “a product of Big Pharma” and doctors are “lacking” greater regulation. People’s rightful anger at an underfunded education system and a capitalist health care industry is used as a vehicle for anti-trans legislation. This is ultimately a fight that impacts us all, LGBTQ or not, as access to health care, a quality education and the right to bodily autonomy are rights that all people should be guaranteed. As communist and transgender activist Leslie Feinberg said, “What unites us is not a common sexuality or experiences or identities or self-expression. It’s that we are up against a common enemy.”
The lessons of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and the Coors Boycott extend far beyond their historical period. They demonstrate the need for commitment to struggle, sustained organization, discipline and working-class unity. The far-right agenda of the Trump administration can be defeated if the struggles for LGBTQ liberation, Black liberation, immigrant rights and more unite as part of a larger fight to defend our democratic rights and to build a new world that guarantees the rights, dignity and liberation for all oppressed people.
