Sal Rosselli, one of the community grand marshals of this year's LGBT Pride Parade, has for 40 years had an active role in two social justice movements: workplace democracy and LGBT empowerment.
First, as a student reporter and later as a college radical turned college government leader, Rosselli aided the indigent and was active in Democratic Party politics. He was an early organizer in the city's response to the AIDS epidemic and, in recent years has used all that hands-on experience to work within organized labor as it faces friction from within its own ranks.
With a slightly lower profile than many in the city's gay political establishment, Rosselli has, since 1988, served as president of the 140,000-member Service Employees International Union's United Healthcare Workers-West. Rosselli leads one of the few expanding union affiliates.
Last month the San Francisco Labor Council's Political Education Committee honored Rosselli and Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), the first time that two openly gay men were honored on the same night.
Attending parochial schools in Albany, New York from pre-kindergarten to senior year, where he served as class vice president and school newspaper editor, Rosselli was raised in a "very loving, together," and "extreme Catholic" family, attending daily Mass with two younger sisters and his father.
"The cultural expectation as the oldest grandson was that I would enter the priesthood," said Rosselli, 56, who dated women until his mid-20s, his sexuality off the radar.
Enrolling at Catholic Niagara University at 17, he studied biology, but was expelled after two years for successfully organizing students to reject mandatory basic ROTC in 1968.
In 1969, Rosselli lived and worked at Manhattan's Chrystie Street Hospitality House, cooking meals and sheltering the homeless with Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the pacifist conscientious objector and journalist who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Day lived through the 1906 earthquake, and was jailed multiple times for acts of nonviolent resistance – with suffragettes in 1917, after refusing to take shelter during WWII civil defense drills simulating nuclear attacks, and in 1969, protesting with California farm workers.
A poetic symmetry is apparent between Rosselli's union philosophy and Day's conviction advocating personal responsibility and performing works of mercy.
"She had the most profound influence on my social and economic justice work, a most extraordinary woman," he said.
In 1971 he volunteered in an arts and crafts cooperative in Lawrenceville, Indiana, with Volunteers In Service to America, the one-year national domestic service program initiated by President Kennedy that began in the Johnson administration. The program was part of the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act.
Rosselli then sped cross-country on a Triumph motorcycle with his best friend, and ended up broke in Oakland. He started attending City College in San Francisco at age 21, where he served as student council president and was the student representative on the community college's board from 1979-1980. Motivated, he said, by his "great appreciation for free higher education," he ran for an elected seat on the board in 1980 and 1982 (against out lesbian Carole Migden, now a state senator. Both lost).
In 1980, while working nights cleaning TV stations, an SEIU leader asked Rosselli to help with a protracted battle to unionize theater janitors.
"I put medical school on the back burner," he said.
Others in organized labor took notice.
"I could see he had exceptional skills," said Howard Wallace, who in 1974 helped unite Coors beer boycotts by both the Teamsters and gay community, supported rent control with the 1970s Bay Area Gay Liberation, and led the AFL-CIO-affiliated Pride at Work and Lesbian-Gay Labor Alliance.
Wallace is currently vice president of the San Francisco Labor Council.
Rosselli is "effective at reaching out to a broad formation on picket lines – a multinational, multicultural composition," said Wallace. "He fused together a number of friendships, and is very good at speaking one on one with people, getting commitments to do work. He's had that gift a long time. He doesn't try to do anything alone. He's unusual in that respect."
"A tireless worker" with "strong commitment," and "a certain amount of charisma," said Wallace. "People are attracted to him. He's a person of action. He doesn't just sit around. He gets things done."
Rosselli served as president of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club in 1984, which previously supported Rosselli's run for college board.
"As president of Alice he was very dynamic," said Steve Walters, the club's president in 1980. "Under his leadership we had the largest membership before and maybe since. He had an incredible amount of energy and focus."
"He's always been out-front gay," and "able to bridge both communities, gay and straight, by focusing on the issues," said Walters, who called Rosselli credible and "forthright for what he thought was in the best interest of the [LGBT] community. What's wonderful about him is he doesn't bullshit. He really tells it like it is."
During the early years of AIDS, Rosselli led the KS Foundation (now the San Francisco AIDS Foundation), meeting in a second floor Castro Street storefront). During its grass roots development, the foundation depended on the SEIU's resources for printing treatment and safety materials.
With little known information, union members on the frontlines were fearful when the epidemic first surfaced, but later, Wallace noted, "The United Healthcare Workers did a major amount of work in terms of educating people about AIDS – that it's not contagious."
In Rosselli's successful 1988 election bid for the Local 250 presidency, in what he called a "bitter, divisive race," his opponent mailed a "sophisticated targeted gay hit piece," juxtaposing various Bay Area Reporter headlines to publicize his role as a gay rights leader.
But does the McLaren Park-area resident who works out at a 24-Hour Fitness and occasionally attends Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club meetings, attempt to butch up his act when across the bargaining table from gruff, intransigent management?
"I'm just myself," Rosselli said. "I am who I am."
The two biggest events under Rosselli's Local 250 tenure have been his leadership in unifying the north state SEIU Local and the Southland's Local 399 into the biggest healthcare workers' union west of the Mississippi, and SEIU's decision last year to leave the AFL-CIO due to fundamental philosophical differences.
SEIU favors investing in organizing workers in a single industry. The SEIU's course echoes Day's conviction of achieving better standards through direct action, not the elusive anticipation that elected leaders will one day appoint to state and federal labor offices officials who keep corporate America in check and safeguard worker rights.
"The organizing skills of Sal Rosselli are extremely evident," said San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson. "He successfully led the merger of two unions with common employers, and can now bargain together on an industry-wide basis rather than piece by piece."
Rosselli's industry-based strategy, of challenging one big hospital chain, for example, results in better contracts and stronger leverage. With union members in the state's remote corners pounding on elected officials' doors, "They can't escape us, or our voting capacity, and ability to form coalitions," said Wallace.
"Sal had an inspiration that this was possible," said Wallace, contrasting Rosselli's "risky vision," with shrinking unions that lack such vision.
Rosselli is inviting healthcare workers, especially those caring for people living with AIDS, to walk with him in Sunday's Pride Parade.
"I'm personally honored in this, the 25th anniversary of AIDS, to be honoring those who care for people with AIDS," he said.