Image: Brewing a Boycott cover featuring boycott broadside, ca. 1974-1975, printed by the Howard Quinn Co., courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library. Headshot photograph of author Allyson Brantley by Molly Zimmerman. Headshot photograph of Miriam Frank by Desma Holcomb.
DESCRIPTION
Historians Miriam Frank and Allyson Brantley will discuss the long and interwoven history of LGBTQ and labor activism through the lens of Brantley’s new book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Drawing on oral histories and archival collections, including those held by the GLBT Historical Society, Brantley details how activists across the nation, from gay liberationists to Chicano activists and union members, built supportive, vibrant coalitions. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, they molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest, challenging the Coors Brewing Company’s antiunion, discriminatory, anti-LGBTQ practices and conservative political ties. This talk will examine the particular success of the boycott in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and consider its impact in light of contemporary ongoing conversations about consumer power and corporate buyouts.
SPEAKERS
Allyson Brantley (she/her) is assistant professor of history at the University of La Verne. She studies, teaches and writes about social movements and radical coalitions in the late 20th century United States. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2016 and she is a 2020–2021 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader. She currently lives in Los Angeles, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Pacific Historical Review, and the Radical History Review.
Miriam Frank (she/her) began her academic career in Detroit during the 1970s as a professor of women’s studies at Wayne County Community College. Via museum tours and after-work reading circles at union halls, she went on to develop community programs sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities that emphasized the great artistic, literary, and cinematic cultures of Detroit’s historic working-class communities. During the mid-1980s and for the next thirty-five years Dr. Frank taught humanities in New York University’s liberal studies program. In 1995 she began research on Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America (Temple University Press, 2014), a history of collaboration between two vital movements in the twentieth century which was named a Choice outstanding academic title.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
This event will take place online. After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with a link and instructions on how to join.
ADMISSION
$5 | Free for members
Register online here: https://bit.ly/3HAaosj
ASL INTERPRETATION
ASL interpretation provided upon request. Please write at least three days in advance of event to leigh@glbthistory.org.
JOIN THE GLBT HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Become a member of the GLBT Historical Society for free museum and program admission, discounts in the museum shop and other perks: www.glbthistory.org/memberships.
ABOUT THE BOOK
For more information about Brewing a Boycott, see the publisher’s webpage here: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469661032/brewing-a-boycott/.