An original OutHistory feature, June 11, 2020

Pride month opens in 2020 at a moment of crisis for the USA and for its unions. The chief of the police union in Minneapolis has called Black Lives Matter a "terrorist organization."[1] Unions everywhere are under pressure from their membership to exile police unions, which have a long history of racism, cover-ups, and corruption. Unionized transit workers have refused to transport arrested protestors for the police.[2] Public calls to defund the police are mounting.

Unions today struggle to stay afloat and attract members. Some focus on organizing the working class understood as people who wear uniforms and perform low status, high risk, secure jobs. Others concentrate on marginalized, precarious, low-wage workers.

Queer workers live on both sides of this divide, but we cluster in the second group, and our unions support the anti-racist movement in progress. The revolution sparked by the murder of George Floyd is ongoing. For it to result in real, lasting change it must be a social movement that transforms capitalism and its centuries of sedimented racism and class hierarchies. Unions have done that work before, and queer, anti-racist, revolutionary unions are joining that movement now. We’re good at disrupting.

I’m a union organizer, a writer, and a troublemaker, and I believe that organized labor in the US can learn from its history. We can build a union movement that challenges hierarchical, capitalist power. Queer activism, anti-racist activism, and worker organizing overlap. This is the moment to strengthen these movements’ ties.

But neither organized labor leaders nor labor historians have centered gay people. If you check the index of almost any book on labor or working-class history for mention of queer or trans people, or of sexuality or desire more generally, you’ll come up empty. “Labor History,” while often written by progressive, activist historians and sociologists, leaves us out almost entirely.

Two works that specifically address LGBT interventions in the labor movement are Miriam Frank’s wonderful Out in the Union, which enlivens almost a century of queer labor advocacy, and the fine public history of Allan Berube. His book, My Desire for History, includes the story of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which drew its strength from bragging about its many queer members
rather than hiding them.

Those works demonstrate that queer work is often precarious, black market, and contingent. As an oral historian and as a worker I know this too well. Getting hired while queer is hard and staying hired is even harder. There are no federal protections for us, many states and cities offer no legal redress and management? Please! Organized labor can offer workers some practical safety in this otherwise brutal context.

Unfortunately, there has been little overlap between the labor movement and queer liberation. That’s because, as the movement for gay, lesbian, queer, and trans rights grew, labor union power and density dropped precipitously. Those setting policies for queer activism didn’t want to hop on that sinking ship. Urvashi Vaid warned that white, urban, middle-class elites ignored working-class queers, misunderstanding themselves as the center of and LGBT movement. As if.

A labor organizer once told me that I should make every effort to meet with members or potential members in their homes, where they could relax and be themselves. I disagreed and still do. For many queer and trans people, home is scary and confining, and work offers freedom.

Imagine a lesbian steelworker passing through the mill gates, putting on work clothes and tucking her hair under her hard hat, then striding into the 80-inch hot strip like she owns the world. Now imagine that same worker at home, squashed by domestic roles and (maybe) well-meaning relatives.

Or imagine a transwoman walking from the fuel island into the truck stop. Many transwomen who drive trucks have told me that they know they are passing when they get harassed at truck stops. Which feels icky, but also like a victory. When this same transwoman trucker finally gets some home time, the weight of expectations from relatives and her local community often makes her long for the gender-freedom of the open road.

Or the mother of a preschooler who’s a welder and feels effective and skilled and valued at work . . . and then goes home to resolutely gendered domesticity.

People do their sexuality and their desire at work, yet too often labor history focuses on their jobs, not on their bodies. In my experience, dangerous jobs are the most fun – fear is a powerful rush . . . your whole body feels the pleasure of swinging an ax or driving an 18-wheeler. You don’t have to be queer to feel a very queer arousal from doing work that makes your body sing.

Labor historians don’t just leave out queers. They exclude pleasure and bodies. And this matters because labor organizing works if it arises from a person’s individual, embodied experience. Learning what happens to each worker, and how they feel and what they want is the first, most essential part of organizing. And that’s where it overlaps with oral history. Capitalism separates us from our desires, interposing capital between us and our feelings: capitalism mediates our lives. Organizing resists that when it gets workers to think about desire: hey wait a minute, what do I want? That question needs time and space to ferment.

This parallels the disruptive power of queerness. We’re all told what to want, and expected to proceed voluntarily down a predetermined life path. Queer resisting, our chasing forbidden dreams and pleasures demonstrate to people who follow their assigned path that there are other options. Queerness and gender nonconformity demonstrate that doing the gender you were assigned is optional. That there are infinite genders. That your desire can be loosed from its “appropriate” target and find itself . . . anywhere. Queerness demonstrates that you can resist your assigned path and that doing so is fun, and hot.

There’s so much energy in the streets these days. Fear and anger, experienced in community, create surging adrenaline. The embodied experience of Black Lives Matter, worker organizing, and queer life is in these streets. Our streets.

Notes

[1] “Police Union Head Calls BLM `Terrorist Group,’” Officer.com, June 2, 2020.

[2] Jason Koebler, “NYC Bus Drivers Refuses to Transport Protestors for NYPD,” Vice, May 29, 2020.

See also:

Anne Balay, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Anne Balay, Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Allan Berube, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Mirian Frank, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).