Harvey Milk’s bullhorn honors another champion of gay rights
There are more than a few old photographs of Harvey Milk with a bullhorn in his hand — or else somebody holding the horn for him while Milk shouts into the mouthpiece, gathering a movement around him. “Harvey used many bullhorns over the years at many different marches and rallies,” says Cleve Jones, a close ally of Milk’s and a longtime LGBTQ rights activist, “but he only owned one himself.”
That bullhorn is red and white, held together by Scotch tape and full of dents — at least a few of which came from police
batons, Jones says. It’s a symbol not just of Milk’s lasting legacy, but also of crucial friendships and the importance of coalition building. Last week, at Jones’ request, it returned to the Castro from the Smithsonian, where it had been on temporary loan.
At noon this past Friday, a group of people — just a few at first, then dozens and dozens more — gathered at the Castro Street Pride flag. Some didn’t even know why, until Jones told them what he had called them there to do: They would walk down Castro, chanting and singing, as they made their way to the home of 89yearold Allan Baird, the man who gave Milk the battered bullhorn decades before, and thank Baird for his own contribution to both the gay rights and labor rights movements.
Allan Baird grew up in the Castro district and spent most of his life there, leaving for a time to serve in the Army during the Korean War before returning to a job as a newspaper delivery driver. It was during this time, in the 1960s, that he got involved with the Teamsters Union, eventually becoming a leader in a local chapter.
In the early 1970s, he was asked to help organize a growing boycott against the Coors Brewing Co., says Allyson Brantley, a historian and author of “Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors & Remade American Consumer Activism.” The boycott, she says, was a result of many factors: the stalled wages of local delivery drivers and the company’s conduct at its headquarters back in Colorado, where it would refuse negotiations and replace striking workers with college students.
Soon, Baird realized, he’d need help revitalizing the boycott, and as he looked around the Castro, he realized that the growing gay community had a tremendous amount of purchasing power. As it turns out, he and his wife, Helen, lived around the corner from a camera store that had just opened, Brantley says — Baird described the owner “as kind of hippielooking.”
This man, of course, was Harvey Milk. Baird made his way to the shop and asked for the community’s support — Milk, in turn, asked him to help get gay men and women into positions of power in the union. The alliance was struck; it didn’t hurt, either, that Coors and the family that owned the company were known, at the time, for antigay stances, sometimes going so far as to polygraphtest prospective employees.
“(The) thing about the queer community was once they got on board, they really, really pushed the boycott,” Brantley says. “They would do organizing meetings, they would leaflet the Castro, they’d go to pickets all across San Francisco and the Bay Area.
“They were able to get the (Coors) beer out of pretty much every gay bar in the Castro district for most of the 1970s.”
And this is where the bullhorn comes in: Sometime near the end of the first Coors boycott (there would be waves of them in the Castro and beyond), Baird gifted his horn to Milk, a token of the two movements’ partnership. Milk, in turn, would use the horn in his activism and political campaigns before gifting it to Jones, who went on to use it in his own HIV/AIDS activism in the years following Milk’s 1978 assassination at San Francisco City Hall.
This summer, two members of the Teamsters — Tizoc Arenas from Teamsters Local 223 and Ruben Bustillos from Teamsters Local 70 and also a member of the LGBT Caucus — reached out to Jones about this history. They wanted to know more about Baird, a person Arenas described as “being somebody ... as progressive as you could get within our organization. And he was doing it at a time when, quite frankly, you could be ostracized (for) being progressive. I had a strong interest in reaching out to Cleve ( Jones) and just finding out more about who this man was.”
Jones, in turn, offered to connect them with Baird, who he knew still lived in the Castro, but when he called Baird, what the man told him hurt to hear. “He told his caregiver that he didn’t think anybody was going to come visit him because he felt that he’d been forgotten by the union and forgotten by the LGBTQ community.”
So Jones sent out his cryptic note, got the bullhorn back from the Smithsonian and, on Friday showed it to the crowd that had amassed in the Castro. “This isn’t just about nostalgia,” Jones had said earlier in the week. “There are many people from the LGBTQ community who have now risen to extreme prominence within the labor movement, and there is a direct line from them going back to the afternoon when Harvey Milk and Allan Baird and a union organizer named Howard Wallace sat down.”
As the group marched down Castro Street, Jones led them in chants of “Long live Allan Baird!” and “Long live Harvey Milk!” When they finally got outside Baird’s house, a small contingent from the Gay Men’s Chorus and a brass band led the group in singing a tribute to union organizing.
“Yet what force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?/ But the union makes us strong/ Solidarity forever/ Solidarity forever/ Solidarity forever.”
Baird made his way down his steps, slowly, until he came to sit before the crowd, his eyes red and raw. He wore a redandwhite pin on his blue windbreaker. “I DON’T DRINK COORS,” it read. One after another, organizations presented him with proclamations and plaques. He spoke for a few minutes, using colorful language to describe Coors, while thanking the most important people in his life and those who fought alongside him during the boycott.
At one point, Jones went up and handed Baird the bullhorn so he might see it up close once more. Baird stared out at all the faces before him. The crowd cheered. He hadn’t been forgotten.