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Throughout the past few months, activists across the United States have called for kicking cops and corporations out of June’s annual Pride marches. This is the latest chapter in a long struggle to raise the issues of working-class queer people, queer people of color, and other groups that have been left out of the mainstream LGBTQ movement. However, there’s one critical part of this fight that hasn’t gotten as much attention: the history of queer labor activism.

Unions are some of the most powerful vehicles in the fight against workplace discrimination and harassment, and stand as some of the earliest supporters of domestic partnership and, later, marriage equality. Queer workers have played important roles within unions, valiantly fighting against both anti-queer sentiments within unions and union-busting from bosses in queer-majority workplaces. As Pride month comes to an end, this history is more important than ever.

Miriam Frank, author of Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, has interviewed hundreds of queer union members and officials about their struggles at work and beyond. Meghan Brophy, a student-labor activist at Barnard College, interviewed Frank about queer workers’ victories and challenges within the labor movement, the fight to organize queer-majority workplaces, and recent efforts to bring Pride back to its militant origins.

MB: Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders tweeted about workplace discrimination against queer workers and the importance of unions. He received backlash from those who alleged he was reducing our issues to class and that unions were disconnected from queer people’s issues. Out in the Union thoroughly dismantles the idea that these are separate struggles. Could you give a broad outline of the intersections of labor organizing and queer liberation?

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.

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