This content is adapted from a 10/29/26 Weekly Email.
October is LGBTQ+ History Month so I wanted to once again spotlight some important queer labor leaders. I’ve done writeups in the past on queer activists like Bayard Rustin, Dr Marie Equi, Harvey Milk, and Pauline Newman - if interested, you can find those on our blog. One interesting thing I’ve noticed while compiling information about more modern activists is that it is shockingly difficult to find detailed information about certain parts of their lives. Despite improved technology and record-keeping, there are some people like Nancy Wohlforth or Cleve Jones that have very limited information available about them online, and a variety of life experiences that make creating a unified timeline quite difficult.
Cleve Jones (1954-present): Cleve was born in Indiana in 1954 and moved to Arizona as a teen. He knew he was gay from a young age but felt incredibly isolated by his community in both states - he didn’t know any fellow gay people and wasn’t aware of broader queer culture until he read an article about the Gay Liberation Movement in Life Magazine in 1971. He attended ASU for less than a year but felt alienated from his peers - he came out to his parents and dropped out, choosing instead to move to San Francisco in 1973. At some point he befriended Harvey Milk but was not directly involved with Milk’s work until 1977. After several years hitch-hiking in Europe and the Middle East, Cleve moved back to San Francisco and was encouraged by Harvey to return to college. He studied political science (and based on interviews, an early version of queer studies) at San Francisco State University while interning at Milk’s campaign office (and later Milk’s City Hall office). He also developed organizing experience while campaigning against Proposition 6, an initiative which would have barred gay people from working in California schools, and the San Francisco gay community’s Coors Beer Boycott, a localized version of a nationwide effort by gay, black, women, and latino organizations to push back against discriminatory hiring and employment practices at the Coors Beer company.
After Harvey Milk’s assasination in 1978, Cleve moved to Sacramento and became involved in state politics. He worked in the offices of state assemblyman Art Agnos starting in 1981 and experienced considerable blowback for being one of (if not the first) openly gay California legislative staffers. Besides taking considerable flack from the public and fellow staffers, Cleve was hospitalized in 1986 after being jumped by 2 men, called a slur, and stabbed in the back. During this period Cleve also started one of the first organizations to study the still-new AIDS disease, the Kaposi's Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation (later renamed the San Francisco Aids Foundation). He also came up with an idea for recognizing the human impact of AIDS deaths after hearing in 1985 that more than 1,000 men had died from AIDS in San Francisco alone. At a memorial for Harvey Milk that November he called on people in the crowd to write down the names of those they had lost - the crowd later stuck papers with these names to the buildings in San Fran’s UN Plaza. Upon seeing the massive representation of human loss laid out in a patchwork pattern, Cleve was inspired to make a tapestry representing all those who had been lost, and worked with artist Gert McMullin to develop a massive quilt. This project became the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a-now 54-ton mass of 55,000 fabric panels that bear the names of over 110,000 people who have died from AIDS. If laid out, the quilt would cover 30 acres, or over 22 football fields. As of 2020, this project was the largest “folk art” piece ever created.
Cleve has continued gay advocacy efforts throughout his life but got more involved with labor organizing in the early 2000s. Besides believing in coalition-building and the importance of labor rights to the queer community, a 2017 interview indicated that he believed the biggest threat to queer communities in the modern era is gentrification and displacement - there, he bemoaned how the San Francisco community he found in the 1970s couldn’t exist today due to housing prices and lack of organizing. He started working with UNITE-HERE (a US/Canada restaurant, hotel, textile, and travel industry union with 300k members) in 2005 and ran a few campaigns, including “Sleep with the Right People,” which pushed people to stay only in hotel chains that treated their workers fairly. He also pushed for UNITE-HERE contracts to include anti-discrimination language and policies that exceeded state or federal requirements, giving queer employees protections even in states which did not have anti-discrimination ordinances or LGBTQ+ protections. I’m not sure if he’s still involved with UNITE-HERE but I believe Cleve is still involved in organizing and politics to this day - as recently as April of this year I found examples of editorials he had written discussing the importance of public health efforts and organizing actions.
Nancy Wohlforth (1945-2024): Based on context clues, I believe Nancy was born in Wisconsin to a labor-friendly family - in interviews, she notes her father’s participation in Wisconsin’s AFSCME when she was young. As a highschooler she participated in the “Freedom Simmer” event to register Black Americans to vote in the rural South. This was a particularly dangerous time for voter registration efforts - prior voter registration efforts had led to beatings, arrests, and even the occasional murder of activists. 1964 was no different - during the registration drive over 1,000 volunteers were arrested, 37 churches assisting registration efforts were bombed or burned, and at least 4 civil rights workers and 3 Mississippi residents were killed (but actual numbers are unknown due to underreporting and it being unclear if people who disappeared were murdered or fled the state). Nancy thankfully survived this and went on to study at Columbia University where she participated in the 1968 Columbia protests, which opposed both the universities’ involvement in the Vietnam War and the planned construction of a segregated student gym near the campus. She later graduated with a Masters in American History.
I had difficulty determining what Nancy was doing for the next decade (I found a few references to her work organizing rent strikes over terrible housing conditions in California) but I believe she was openly identifying as a lesbian by 1978/1979. Around that time she joined the OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union) Local 3 and started a sub-committee (“A Growing Concern”) which focused on issues specific to women and queer people in the workplace. She also helped found the Lesbian and Gay Labor Alliance (LGLA), a separate group which was one of the first national efforts to support queer people in the workplace. In 1983 Nancy became the Vice President and Senior Business rep of Local 3 and represented a wide range of professions across the Bay Area, including, but not limited to, dolphin trainers, elephant caretakers, art museum custodial staff, homeless shelter and detox center employees, and faculty at San Francisco schools. She built a lot of relationships in and around the community while working on queer labor issues - besides pushing for higher pay and better benefits for all workers, she argued for labor contracts that had domestic partner benefits and non-discrimination language for queer workers, and urged the California Supreme Court to strike down gay marriage restrictions. In 1994 she represented both LGLA and OPEIU at a queer labor rights conference in New York. This conference led to the merging of separate queer labor organizations, including LGLA, into PRIDE at Work (PAW) - this group was embraced as a subgroup of the AFL-CIO in 1997, only 3 years later.
In 2003 Nancy became the first openly-gay member of the OPEIU International Board when she was elected as Secretary - she may also have been the first openly-gay elected official of any international labor organization. She was then elected to serve on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council in 2005, one of approximately 50 AFL-CIO officers representing 15 million AFL-CIO members. She retired from both groups in 2010 but continued to do advocacy and political organizing work up until her death in 2024.
Besides obvious advocacy for the queer community, Nancy understood the importance of intersectionality and coalition-building. In conversations with union and government officials about state and national equality legislation, Nancy constantly advocated for trans-inclusion, even when proponents believed that would reduce the chance of certain legislation passing. Nancy gave a speech about hate crimes at the 1999 AFL-CIO convention which pushed for coalitions to fight back against hate and disparate treatment. I think her closing lines reflect the close-knit nature of civil rights and labor rights - she ended with the following words which I think remain powerful to this day.
“From the murders of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming to the brutal murder of James Byrd, an African American in Texas, to the burnings of synagogues in Sacramento, to the shooting up of a Jewish day care in Los Angeles, to the shooting of a postal worker–Joseph Ilteo–because he was Filipino, hate crimes are on the rise….We must educate in our communities and in our unions, that all these hate crimes are linked and the targets of those groups that perpetuate the ideology of hate are always the same: People of Color, Jewish People, and lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people…We must mobilize masses of people in the streets, into the state legislatures and into all our municipal government bodies. Our message must be loud and clear: No More Hate In Our Country and that an injury to one is an injury to all!”