Former longtime Teamsters official and staunch LGBTQ ally Allan M. Baird died Tuesday, January 7, friends told the Bay Area Reporter. Mr. Baird was 92 and had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, he told the paper last year.
Tizoc Arenas, a straight ally and trustee at Teamsters Local 223 in Gladstone, Oregon, told the B.A.R. that Mr. Baird passed away late Tuesday night. He had been in hospice care at his longtime home in the Castro.
Mr. Baird is best known for spearheading the Coors Brewing Company boycott with Harvey Milk in the 1970s. He led the famous 1973 boycott of Coors beer because of the company's then-homophobic and anti-union stances. Mr. Baird joined with Milk, then a gay political newcomer and Castro resident who would go on to win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.
Even after Teamsters Local 888's (beer delivery drivers) boycott of Coors ended in 1975, Mr. Baird continued to work with Milk — both successfully against the anti-LGBTQ Briggs initiative, Proposition 6, in 1978 that would have banned queer people and their supporters from teaching in California's public schools, and for LGBTQ equality in the labor movement. For a time when American labor was often a bastion of social conservatism, Mr. Baird's coalition-building did not go unnoticed by the LGBTQ community — especially in the LGBTQ neighborhood he has called home for so long.
(Local 921, which represented newspaper delivery workers, has since been merged with Local 853. Local 888 represented delivery drivers who at the time faced low wages, union-busting, and employment discrimination. Local 2785 now represents food and liquor delivery drivers.)
Cleve Jones, a longtime gay activist who has known Mr. Baird since the 1970s, was with him when he died.
"He had a gentle passing," Jones said. He also expressed thanks to Mr. Baird's longtime caretaker, Jessie Gonzales.
Isak Lindenauer, a gay man and neighbor of Mr. Baird's, was also with him during his final moments, he told the B.A.R.
"I loved him dearly," Lindenauer, who owns a small antique shop, said in a phone interview January 9. "Allan was a very good friend. He was so special a person."
Lindenauer, who founded the Rainbow Honor Walk in the Castro more than a decade ago, said he ran the idea past Mr. Baird when he was considering the project that honors late LGBTQ luminaries.
"I had his encouragement," Lindenauer said.
Overall, Mr. Baird's legacy will be one of advocating for others, Lindenauer said.
"He was very old school — honest, decent, kind, sweet, and strong," he said. "He was a great union leader who championed justice."
Arenas said that Mr. Baird has left a lasting legacy.
"He had an immeasurable mark on our Teamsters union and the labor movement, and his work will live on through all of us," Arenas said. "He was an inspiration to a lot of people."
Jones had organized a rally in 2021 during Pride Month in June to honor Mr. Baird for his work on behalf of the LGBTQ community. Gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro, presented a certificate to Mr. Baird outside his home, as the B.A.R. reported.
Mr. Baird's wife, Helen, died in 2016.
"She was a strong lady," Mr. Baird said outside his home at the rally. "Her and her brother owned a bar — believe it or not — in the Castro district in the 1950s and 1960s at Market and Laguna. She told me about different women entering the bar and didn't know what was going on because they were kissing and hugging. She treated them terrific, and from that point more happened."
Longtime friend Sue Englander, a bisexual woman who is retired from serving as political director of the California Faculty Association chapter at San Francisco State University, praised Mr. Baird's union work.
"He was a model of what a trades unionist should be — activist, vital, and always committed," Englander told the B.A.R.
Long an advocate for equality
The B.A.R. had spoken with Mr. Baird several times over the last year or so. One of his last projects was working to get the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to change its name to better reflect that the union's membership is not solely made up of men. The national organization has so far resisted such efforts.
In an interview in 2023, Mr. Baird attributed his support for equality across the spectrum of race, sex, and sexual orientation from his mother's remarks after he danced with a girl at a picnic.
"She made me what I am," he recalled. "We went to a picnic each year in Santa Rosa. I was there and a lot of the children my age were there, dancing with everyone. I came to my mother and she said, 'You're having a lot of fun.' I said, 'Her eyes are different from mine, they're not as round.' And she said, 'She's an Oriental girl and their eyes are different, but you should respect them. You're not different from anybody else. Always respect women, especially young women.' That stayed in my head."
Mr. Baird said he also remembered Japanese- and German-owned businesses that were harassed on Castro Street during World War II; his family had moved to his current residence on Collingwood Street at that time.
It was during his time serving in the United States Army in Korea that he learned even more about racism, he said during the interview. Assigned to play in the band, due to a paperwork mix up, he was temporarily assigned to a mostly-Black, mostly-Southern unit in an era when the army had only recently been ordered desegregated.
"I was the only white man in that band," Mr. Baird said. "They said, 'We'll show you the letters we get from our parents.' Some were murdered, homes burned down. Nothing but violence. It's horrible."
After being sent home due to illness, Mr. Baird recuperated in Sacramento before returning to the city and getting a job with the San Francisco Chronicle, where he held a union job aiding in newspaper delivery. When he had an issue he contacted the union, which corrected it, and after that he became more and more involved with the local, eventually becoming president and business agent.
Mr. Baird met Milk in the early 1970s when the latter was starting to make a name for himself as the "Mayor of Castro Street," running for supervisor and once for state Assembly.
"I was walking down Castro with my wife and this guy said, 'I want you to meet him,' and I said, 'Who is him?' and he said, 'He's a politician running for office, and I understand you are into politics,'" Mr. Baird recalled. "I said, 'I'm not into it much,' and he said, 'He wants to help the people. He's for everyone, not just the gays. He's for every faith.' And he was right."
Mr. Baird had his first conversation with Milk in Milk's Castro Camera store.
"He talked to me about all the things he wanted to do to make the Castro better and San Francisco better," Mr. Baird said. "He said, 'There's not going to be any discrimination in San Francisco when I get finished.'"
It was the beginning of a cooperative relationship between the straight union man and the gay civil rights icon. Tragically, Milk and then-mayor George Moscone were assassinated in City Hall by disgruntled ex-supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978.
In 1973, Mr. Baird took charge of a union strike against Bay Area beer distributors, including the Coors Brewing Company. Baird reached out to his neighbor, Milk, to build a coalition. Coors also had a 178-question employment application form, as Nancy Wohlforth explained in 2017 on the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' website.
"One question demanded: 'Are you a homosexual?' If you answered 'yes,' that terminated your application," she stated. "Another demanded: 'Are you pro-union?' If you answered 'yes,' that terminated you, too."
The successful boycott ended in the mid-1980s. (In some circles, the Coors boycott has never really ended, and it was only in more recent years that the Molson-Coors Company, as it's now known, began enacting more LGBTQ-friendly policies for workers. It scored 70% on the national Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index for 2025, down from 73% in 2023, according to the report.)
In honoring Mr. Baird in 2021 with a certificate signed by all 11 members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mandelman noted that Mr. Baird "forever changed" the perspective of the labor movement on the matter of LGBTQ acceptance.
A viewing will be held Tuesday, January 21, from 5 to 8 p.m. at Duggan's Funeral Services, 3434 17th Street in San Francisco. The viewing will resume Wednesday, January 22, at 9:30 a.m. at the same location followed by an 11 a.m. life celebration.
Updated, 1/10/25: This article has been updated with comments from Isak Lindenauer.
Updated, 1/13/25: This article has been updated with funeral information.
Updated, 1/14/25: This article has been updated with Mr. Baird dying late Tuesday, January 7.
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