Robert Haaland has been chased through the streets of San Diego, and he's worked to keep struggling renters off the streets of San Francisco. He's fought literal fires as a volunteer firefighter, and metaphorical ones as a labor organizer. In his 23 years in San Francisco, Haaland has fought tirelessly for tenants' rights, workers' rights, transgender rights, and economic justice for all. He's currently working for the Service Employees International Union, Local 1021 and he's been chosen as one of the community grand marshals for this year's LGBT Pride Parade.
Haaland, 43, often experienced discrimination during his 13 years as a lesbian, and later as a transgender man. It's not surprising, then, that he's devoted his life to serving what he calls "this instinctive, almost knee-jerk 'look out for the little guy' thing. When there are powerful injustices, I want to level the playing field."
Even as a child, Haaland knew that San Francisco – the land of diversity and tolerance – was where he belonged.
"I grew up in a meat-packing town," said Haaland of his childhood in Austin, Minnesota. "The second gay man that I ever heard of was Harvey Milk, who was on TV in the mid-1970s in the [San Francisco] gay parade. And I was like, I want to go there. That's the place I want to go."
Believing that all of California was a haven for "fruits and nuts, as my grandparents told me," Haaland first moved to politically conservative San Diego, where he watched MPs arresting gay and lesbian Navy personnel in bars, and was occasionally harassed or even chased through the streets.
"I went to the first gay parade in San Diego and there were more protesters than there were marchers," Haaland recalled. In the early 1980s, he decided to move north to San Francisco, a city with its own set of issues.
"It was just a whole different world back then," said Haaland. "The Castro ... felt a lot more packed. But it was also the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, which was a weird time. It was transitioning out of being this sex party atmosphere to 'What the hell's going on?' I remember there were articles, they called it the 'gay disease.'"
Later, Haaland experienced a different kind of discrimination when he came out as a transgender man.
"When I first came out as transgender, I was totally terrified I wasn't going to get a job," Haaland said. "The problem is, on your resume it says another name and has another gender history, so there are all these complications you have to deal with. And once you come out during an interview, it becomes this whole other thing besides just the job. You have to have this whole other conversation."
Even with a law degree, Haaland did have trouble finding work. He spent a year unemployed, and said he would have been homeless if not for the financial support of a kind roommate.
"There's such a high unemployment rate in the transgender community that something's going on," he said. "Whether people want to say it's discrimination or not, I don't know. But you don't get unemployment rates over 50 percent without something going on. ... And that's the major problem for the transgender community: we're underemployed and underpaid, typically don't have healthcare, and if we do have healthcare it's shitty healthcare that doesn't actually provide the benefits that we need as transgender people."
Wanting to address these issues, among others, Haaland ran for San Francisco supervisor in 2004, losing the election in District 5 to Ross Mirkarimi.
"At the end of the day, why shouldn't we have representation on the Board of Supervisors?" Haaland asked. "The first few transgender candidates, I'm sorry to say, were not taken as seriously as they should have been."
That may change next year. Last month, Cecilia Chung, a longtime transgender activist who is HIV-positive, announced she's running for supervisor in District 11, where Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval will be termed out of office.
"The discrimination that I usually encounter is not 'I hate you, you're a transsexual.' It's more like, 'Why should you have power? Who let you in the room?' Who we usually think of as leaders are the tall, dark, handsome guys. We don't think of scrappy little transgender guys who are 5 foot 4. But that doesn't mean we don't occasionally win," Haaland said, smiling.
Haaland has certainly seen his share of victories. Several years ago he successfully sued the San Francisco Police Department over police harassment based on gender identity. Currently, he is on the executive board of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. He also is a commissioner on the powerful Board of Appeals.
As co-chair of Pride at Work, organized labor's LGBT group, Haaland is working to attract the younger generation to activism.
"Last year, I went to this Pride at Work convention and looked around the room and there were maybe one or two people under 30 there, which is a real problem," Haaland explained. "I went to my local [chapter] and got some money to do some election work last fall, and we focused on recruiting young queers to do the work, to get involved, to build up our organization. It was enormously successful. Suddenly, the membership of our organization blossomed with young queer people, which before was mostly people 35 and above. And I would say now that there are actually more members that are under 30 than there are over 30."
Haaland has also spent much of his time battling for tenants' rights, and has seen the effect of gentrification on the queer community.
"I remember in the mid-1990s, I was working at the Tenants' Union," Haaland said. "It's right in the Mission, and a lot of lesbians lived in the Mission. And there was this long line of people who were waiting for tenants' rights counseling. And I looked at the line and I recognized so many dykes that I knew in line, and it was like that all the time. The Mission was the hotbed of gentrification, and they were all getting evicted and moving to the East Bay, or not being able to afford an apartment.
"I think that there's this myth that the LGBT community's all rich, and it's not," Haaland added. "There are stats that show that, not just in the transgender community, but in general, gay men and lesbians are economically challenged. Many are living in poverty. People with AIDS are living in poverty. ... There's still discrimination based on gender identity and sexual identity."
However, Haaland chooses to focus on the positive changes in the city, many of which he�s helped to bring about.
"One of the more exciting things I worked on this year was universal healthcare legislation that we passed locally to provide healthcare for low-income people," said Haaland, referring to Supervisor Tom Ammiano's groundbreaking ordinance passed last year by the Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom. "If I live the rest of my life and that's the only thing I worked on, I'd be proud. Those are the kind of things that I like seeing change. And here we are in San Francisco, and we're making those changes."
Haaland is proud of the work he's done in San Francisco, and philosophical about the battles that haven't been won.
"We do our best," he said. "Some struggles you win, some you don't. ... Doing these little incremental changes like the [transgender] economic development initiative, helping people get jobs, are really profound acts that I feel very fortunate to be part of, and grateful that I'm in a city where things like this can happen."
He added, "Even with all the bullshit that goes on with coming out as a queer person, I am so profoundly grateful that I'm here and I'm alive and I get to be who I am. I feel really fortunate to be doing this, really happy. I like my life; it's a good one. And I love the people in this city."