After another star turn in a Hollywood production about San Francisco's LGBT community, the bullhorn once used by the late gay Supervisor Harvey Milk is back on display at the GLBT History Museum in the city's gay Castro district.
It had been removed for two weeks so it could be used during filming of When We Rise, the forthcoming ABC-miniseries about the city's LGBT community that is partially inspired by the soon-to-be released memoir of the same title by gay rights activist Cleve Jones, who created the AIDS quilt and is currently working with labor union Unite HERE.
Jones, who helped elect Milk in 1977 as the city's first openly gay official, went on to serve as an intern in his City Hall office. Milk gave him the red and gray Japanese-made Model MV-85-C bullhorn, officially known as a Fanon Transistorized Megaphone, shortly after his election.
In 2008 the bullhorn was used during filming of Milk , the Oscar-winning biopic about the iconic gay leader. Both Sean Penn, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Milk, and Emile Hirsch, who played a young Jones, can be seen speaking through it in the Gus Van Sant-directed film.
In the seven-episode TV series, set to air in 2017, Austin P. McKenzie plays a young Jones while Guy Pearce portrays him as an adult. It remains to be seen if the scenes with the bullhorn, featured prominently in posters for this year's Frameline LGBT International Film Festival, will make the final cut of the show.
"It all still works," Jones said of the bullhorn, which is now dented and scratched in various places and includes the initials "HM" etched onto it.
While more attention has been paid to Milk's use of the bullhorn, and later Jones' utilizing it during various protests and demonstrations in the 1980s and 1990s, the device has a history that predates their ownership of it. Union organizer Allan Baird initially deployed it beginning in January 1974 during the beer truck drivers' boycott of Coors Brewing Company.
"The union gave me the bullhorn," recalled Baird, at the time employed by Teamsters Local 888, which was fighting for a better contract for the beer truck drivers it represented. "I requested it because I couldn't keep yelling in front of the businesses we picketed. We were in front of stores, restaurants, anyone who sold Coors beer."
Baird, 84, spoke to the Bay Area Reporter while seated at a table inside Eureka Cafe on Castro Street, in the heart of the neighborhood he has called home his entire life. Over his shoulder, on the wall, hung a black and white photo of himself, described as "Teamster 'Allan Baird,'" along with Milk at a Coors beer boycott in 1976 that was taken by Dan Nicoletta.
"It has a lot of history in it. I can't tell you all the things that happened with this bullhorn," said Baird.
It was Milk who suggested to Baird that he seek the LGBT community's support of the beer boycott.
"Before the strike, Coors was in the Castro bars. Harvey told me gays drink Coors too," recalled Baird, who years ago retired as president of Teamsters Local 921.
Milk introduced him to the late Bob Ross, the founding publisher of the B.A.R. who was close friends with Milk and had him write political columns for the weekly gay paper.
Baird recalled he stopped by the paper's offices one day to speak with Ross about taking out an ad to inform B.A.R. readers about the protest against Coors, the lone beer company refusing to sign a new contract with the union.
"Bob said that advertising is expensive and asked how I was going to pay. I said I would pay out of my own pocket," recalled Baird. "I asked him how much, and Bob said, 'Do you got a $5 bill on you?' I said I did and that was all he charged me."
The LGBT community soon became one of the strongest backers of the Coors boycott, and gay bars throughout town refused to serve it. Protests against the company became so ubiquitous that complaints about Baird and his use of the bullhorn started to pour in to City Hall.
"The city said quit it with the bullhorn, you are hurting people's business," he said. "Coors even took me to federal court and the judge said your bullhorn is no more. The union then told me not to use it."
Instead, at the suggestion of a friend, Baird bought nearly a dozen children's tape-recorders and had the protesting beer truck drivers play the union song "Solidarity Forever" on a loop.
"They would play it all day long in front of the stores. It got to the point where they said we want the bullhorn back, we are sick of hearing that song," said Baird.
Bullhorn put to good use
After the union ended its boycott of Coors in 1976, and he no longer needed the bullhorn, Baird decided he should pass it on rather than pack it up and have it go unused.
"I thought who I am going to give it to? Who better than Harvey?" said Baird. "Harvey put it to good use and then Cleve put it to good use."
Sometime after the creation of the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, a public elementary school in the Castro renamed for Milk in 1996, Jones donated the bullhorn to it for inclusion in a display case about its namesake. There it had remained, largely forgotten outside of the school community, until 2008.
Due to the media attention the bullhorn attracted for being a part of the Milk movie, Jones opted not to return it to the school and instead brought it home with him to Palm Springs, where he was living at the time. Eventually he struck a deal with the LGBT museum and loaned it the bullhorn indefinitely.
Last Friday, July 8, Jones met up with Baird at the cafe and the two then walked over to the museum to return the bullhorn. It is displayed in a glass case above an old "Harvey Milk for Supervisor" T-shirt and next to a specially lighted case that houses the suit Milk wore the day he was assassinated inside City Hall in November 1978.
"I am really happy it is there, it is accessible, and people can see it," said Jones, who once again is a Castro resident.
After handing over the bullhorn, the two men then walked over to P.O. Plus on Castro Street to have a description and short history of the bullhorn notarized. It will be kept in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society, which operates the museum.
"I want people to know this history. My job today with the union is directly connected to what Allan, Harvey, Howard Wallace, and others did with the Coors boycott, when an alliance of the gay community with the Teamsters was as unlikely as one could imagine" said Jones, referring to the first openly gay Teamster truck driver. (Wallace died in 2012.) "My union today is negotiating on behalf of LGBT hotel workers in the Deep South where there are no protections for people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. And we are winning those protections in our contracts."
As for Coors, the LGBT community continued to avoid the company's products for decades due to its anti-gay business policies and the Coors family's donations to anti-gay groups. In 2007 the company merged with the Miller Brewing Company and is now considered an ideal place for LGBT people to work. (As part of its $100 billion-plus merger with SAB-Miller, Anheuser-Busch InBev last fall agreed to sell Sab-Miller's stake in MillerCoors to Molson Coors for $12 billion, as the Canada-based company had already owned a minority stake in MillerCoors.)
But the actions of Chairman Pete Coors and his family's Castle Rock Foundation continue to draw scrutiny. Many LGBT people still refuse to drink Coors beer.
"It is still not sold here in the Castro gay bars to this day," noted Baird, who has been with his wife, Helen, another lifetime resident of the neighborhood, for 60 years and helped raise her son from a different relationship in the Castro.
The GLBT History Museum is located at 4127 18th Street. Admission costs $5 for the general public, $3 for California students with ID.