Local hero
Queer Youth Organizing Project

photos by Terrrie Frye at the Left Out Party

The queer-labor alliance Pride at Work, a constituent group of the AFL-CIO, added a youth brigade last year, and it’s been doing some of the most inspired organizing and advocacy in San Francisco. The Queer Youth Organizing Project can marshal dozens of teen and twentysomething activists with a strong sense of both style and social justice for its events and causes.

Founded in March 2007, QYOP has already made a big impact on San Francisco’s political scene, reviving the edgy and indignant struggle for liberation that had all but died out in the aging queer movement. Pride at Work has also been rejuvenated and challenged by QYOP’s youthful enthusiasm.

“It really is building the next generation of leaders in the queer community, and man, are they kick-ass,” says Robert Haaland, a key figure in both Service Employees International Union Local 1021 and Pride at Work. “Pride at Work is now a whole different organization.”

QYOP turned out hundreds of tenants for recent midday City Hall hearings looking at the hardball tactics of CitiApartments managers, an impressive feat that helped city officials and the general public gain a better understanding of the controversial landlord.

“They have a strong focus on tenant issues and have done good work on Prop. 98 and some tenant harassment legislation we’ve been working on,” says Ted Gullickson, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. “They really round out the coalition between tenants and labor. They do awesome work.”

In addition to the energy and numbers QYOP brought to the campaign against the anti–rent control measure Prop. 98, the group joined the No Borders encampment at the Mexican border in support of immigrant rights and turned a protest against the Human Rights Campaign (which angered some local queers for supporting a workplace rights bill that excluded transgenders) into a combination of pointed protest and fun party outside the targeted group’s annual gala dinner.

“It’s probably some of the most interesting community organizing I’ve seen in San Francisco,” Haaland says. “It’s really made a difference in our capacity to do the work.”

As an added bonus in this essentially one-party town, QYOP is reaching young activists using mechanisms outside the traditional Democratic Party structures, an important feature for radicalized young people who are wary of partisan paradigms. And its members perhaps bring an even stronger political perspective than their Party brethren, circulating reading lists of inspiring thinkers to hone their messages.

Haaland says QYOP has reenergized him as an activist and organizer: “They’re teaching me, and it’s grounding me as an activist in a way I haven’t been for a long time.”

Steven T. Jones