Jordan Parshall first got involved in political activism in his early teens growing up in Minnesota.

In 2012, a proposed constitutional amendment would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman in the state. Parshall, who had realized he was gay, felt compelled to volunteer for the ‘vote no’ campaign, which ultimately prevailed.

“I wanted what my parents had. My parents were happily married,” said Parshall, who now works for Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago and as an organizer for the baristas’ union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1220. “I wanted to get married, and when I was growing up I couldn’t do that. And so that kind of activated the spark for me.”

Parshall’s foray into political activism exposed him to unions, he said; neither of his parents belonged to one. When he moved to Chicago and started working for Intelligentsia, Parshall helped lead the charge to organize his co-workers. Intelligentsia baristas in Chicago voted to unionize last summer and secured their first union contract in December, which included paid meal breaks, raises and additional vacation.

“If you grew up queer somewhere that it’s not accepted, you have to learn to stick up for yourself,” Parshall said. “That’s true for a lot of my queer co-workers. There’s just more of a willingness to speak up for yourself and defend yourself, and you know, advocate for changes if you’re working under unfair conditions.”

The last two years have seen a wave of union filings emerge from Chicago’s coffeehouses and university halls, from its cannabis dispensaries to the steps of its vaunted museums. As of the end of last year, union filings in the Chicago area were up more than 17% over the prior year. Nationally, union campaigns have taken root at retail giants including Starbucks, REI, Apple and Trader Joe’s, as well as among graduate students at top U.S. universities and cultural workers at museums.

Many of the new faces on picket lines and sitting across bargaining tables are relatively young, and many of them are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

“People who are in the queer community are very comfortable in organizing spaces,” said Tat Scott, 28, who works as an internship coordinator at the School of the Art Institute, where staff unionized in January 2022.

“We’re used to advocating for ourselves, advocating for each other — in this case for our colleagues,” said Scott, who is bisexual and a member of the bargaining committee for school staff, which is in negotiations with school management over their first union contract.

“Queer people have always fought for liberation,” said Hunter Augustyniak, a barista and shift lead at Metropolis Coffee Co., where staff voted to unionize this spring.

“We have always fought for each other and making sure that each other is safe,” they said, referencing mutual aid efforts during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the face of governmental neglect, as well as more recent community efforts to curb the spread of Mpox.

Augustyniak, 23, said coffeehouses in particular, which are brewing a significant amount of union activity nationwide, are known to be “very queer spaces to work.” Augustyniak said their job at Metropolis is their first at which they have felt comfortable telling co-workers they are transgender.

Chicago’s union coffeehouses now include cafes run by Intelligentsia Coffee and Colectivo Coffee, where baristas are represented by the IBEW, and La Colombe, where staff are unionized with the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Last year, close to 14% of new union filings in the Chicago area came out of Starbucks cafes. The Starbucks union drive is “one of the queerest union campaigns I’ve ever seen,” said Jerame Davis, executive director of Pride at Work, a national AFL-CIO constituency group for LGBTQ+ workers.

Starbucks has long presented itself as a progressive and pro-LGBTQ company, which some baristas said is what attracted them to work for the coffee giant in the first place.

“I wanted to work for a company where I felt like I was safe,” said Shep Searl, who is nonbinary and has worked for Starbucks for close to seven years. Searl, who is on medical leave for chronic illness, usually works at a cafe in Edgewater that was among the first Starbucks in Chicago to unionize last spring.

In the beginning of their Starbucks career, Searl said, the company mostly lived up to its reputation of being a supportive employer for queer people.

Searl said their store manager looked out for queer baristas — he would stand up for employees when they were misgendered by customers, for instance, and was supportive when Searl changed their name.

That changed, Searl said, after baristas at the cafe filed for a union election early last year.

In the months between the store’s union filing and their election in May, Searl said Starbucks managers engaged in a campaign to discourage baristas from voting yes to form a union. (Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Trull said company leaders regularly visit stores in the lead-up to union elections “to help ensure compliance with the complex patchwork of U.S. labor law and to share factual information, including voting logistics with partners.”)

Starbucks offers a range of gender affirming health care options — such as coverage for gender confirmation surgeries and hormone replacement therapy — to employees who work an average of at least 20 hours a week for six months, according to the company.

Searl says their manager told them that if they unionized, they might lose access to those benefits as well as tuition reimbursement they used to attend Arizona State University for free, another Starbucks benefit.

“‘If you go with the union, they might not be able to protect you like we do. So if you choose the union, you know, you might lose your school. You might lose the potential to get your top surgery,” Searl said, recounting their conversation. “And I remember that being one of the kind of repeated threats that was held over my head as well as the heads of a lot of the other trans people in our union.”

“It was one of the first tools that was used, and it was so shocking to me because my manager had always been a very strong ally,” they said.

Messages sent to Searl’s manager were returned by Starbucks, which denies it has ever taken away or threatened to take away trans health benefits from union baristas.

“All partners enrolled in Starbucks health benefits have access to industry-leading gender-affirming care benefits regardless of organizing activity or representation status,” Trull said, adding that company policies “strictly prohibit any retaliatory or threatening behavior directed toward partners who are interested in a union,” including the making of threats or promises.

Over the course of the national union campaign, Starbucks has been found in violation of a range of labor laws by administrative law judges for the National Labor Relations Board. In Chicago, a decision last month found the company had illegally threatened baristas with the loss of benefits at two city stores, though neither is the store where Searl works.

Starbucks has appealed that decision, Trull said. A complaint issued by local labor board officials in New York alleges a manager at an Ithaca cafe threatened the loss of transgender health benefits if workers unionized; Starbucks also denies that allegation, which awaits a decision from a labor board judge, Trull said.

Staff members at Howard Brown Health, a federally qualified health center that specializes in serving LGBTQ patients throughout Chicago, unionized last August. Workers there walked off the job amid layoffs at the health center in January, and have alleged the layoffs were illegal in a filing with the NLRB, which remains under investigation. Howard Brown maintains that the workforce reduction of about 16% did not violate labor law, said associate communications director Wren O’Kelley.

Howard Brown workers raised concerns about what they described as understaffing and high turnover at the organization that affects patient care.

Olivia Prager, who works with patients with HIV and AIDS at Howard Brown, said that since unionizing, staff have gained the ability to push back against changes they disagree with at work. “In the past, we just had no protection,” said Prager, who is a member of the staff bargaining committee.

Bridget Gordon, a diabetes care coordinator at Howard Brown’s Uptown clinic, said she is concerned about threats to facilities that offer gender-affirming care. In Chicago, Lurie Children’s Hospital increased security and moved a transgender youth support group to virtual meetings after being targeted online last year. Gordon said she believes clinics that offer gender-affirming care will soon need security infrastructure to a similar extent as abortion clinics.

“Staff at Howard Brown has been sounding the alarm over that for a while, and so far it’s fallen on deaf ears,” said Gordon, 40, who is also a member of the staff bargaining committee.

O’Kelley said there was “very much a robust effort” to address security concerns related to such threats, pointing to actions the clinic has taken such as taking down the photographs of providers of gender-affirming care from its website, as well as more stringent security in place at clinics that offer such services, especially those that serve minors.

O’Kelley acknowledged that restructuring at the organization in the aftermath of layoffs may have led to temporary reductions in services but said the organization has since “come back strong.” Howard Brown is scheduling more appointments than it was last fall, O’Kelley said.

“We have done a lot to make sure that we’re not losing patients from our care, that people aren’t losing access, and that in the care that we’re offering, that we’re doing a better job of it,” she said.

Gordon, who is transgender, said she first wanted to work at Howard Brown because she believed the clinic saves lives. She still believes deeply in its stated mission, she said. It’s because of that belief that she got involved in organizing, she said, “because somewhere along the line the people who are making the decisions stopped caring.”

Davis, of Pride at Work, said queer people watching anti-LGBTQ bills wind their way through legislatures in states such as Texas and Florida understand that their legal protections can be taken away “at the drop of the hat.”

Labor unions have not always prioritized LGBTQ-specific issues, such as access to gender-affirming health care, Davis said. He said he has heard stories of LGBTQ issues being traded away during bargaining because they weren’t considered high priority. Some unions with significant numbers of socially conservative members may feel they need to make compromises to appease their membership, Davis said, who may want the union to focus only on “bread and butter” issues: wages, benefits and working conditions.

But the landscape is shifting, Davis said — Pride at Work is getting more inquiries about contract language related to issues such as health care, discrimination and bathroom access as unions tackle those issues, some of them for the first time.

And though unions have not always prioritized LGBTQ issues, the gay labor movement stretches back decades, said Gerry Scoppettuolo, an instructor of labor and U.S. history at Cambridge College in Boston.

Scoppettuolo pointed to the alliance formed by the gay and labor communities in the Bay Area during the 1970s when the Teamsters were on strike against Coors beer distributors. Gay bars in San Francisco boycotted Coors, and unions pledged to include gay and lesbian protections in their contracts, Scoppettuolo said.

“That unity between the Teamsters union and the gay community signified the beginning of a movement, and it just grew from there,” Scoppettuolo said.

Queer labor organizers today might see unionizing, and ultimately a union contract, as a way to lock in legal protections for themselves, Davis said. “Queer people see that proposition very clearly,” he said.

That proposition resonates at Berlin, a mainstay of nightlife in the Northalsted district of Chicago that has long been a magnet for alternative queer communities in the city, where staff voted to unionize in April.

In addition to concerns about wages, sick time and working conditions, club employees pointed to safety concerns in the face of rising anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans and anti-drag legislation, rhetoric and violence.

“A lot of the big things that we are fighting for for our union are safety measures,” said Leo Sampson, who works as a social media manager for Berlin and also performs drag at the club. Workers are seeking changes related to training and equipment for security as well as proper staffing levels, he said.

Chelle Crotinger, a member of the club’s security staff, said that to them, unionizing is about creating a legacy at Berlin at a time when homophobia and transphobia are “being enshrined into law.”

“To be able to create governmental protections and spaces and legacies that extend beyond us is one of the most important things that I think we can be doing right now,” Crotinger said.