Well into the 1990s, the energetic, septuagenarian gay organizer Morris Kight vehemently opposed any suggestion that the Coors beer boycott, first launched in the late 1950s by unionized brewery workers and later taken up by Chicano, Black, and LGBT activists, was over. For nearly four decades, Kight and other activists had joined in a coalition to oppose the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company, alleging anti-unionism and employment discrimination against people of color, gay men, and lesbians. The boycott also targeted the Coors family’s deep-pocketed support for right-wing, conservative politics.
In 1997, Kight and fellow boycott supporters worried that the Coors Brewing Company was successfully buying off gay and lesbian organizations in an effort to end the boycott. Since the late 1980s, the company’s marketing and community relations teams had sought to mollify many of its critics through philanthropic support. Between 1988 and 1990 alone, Coors and its distributors donated to almost twenty AIDS walks, benefit concerts, or organizations.
Coors supplemented these outreach efforts with public gestures towards equality and significant changes to its employment practices. In 1992, the company helped fight a proposed amendment to the Colorado state constitution that prohibited any locality from recognizing gay men and lesbians as members of a protected class. And in the summer of 1995, Coors announced that its Board of Directors had voted to provide employees’ same-sex partners with insurance and other spousal benefits.
Yet many on the gay and lesbian left saw the company’s efforts as disingenuous distractions. Kight and fellow boycott committee members focused especially on exposing how wealthy business owners like the Coors family influenced both conservative politics and everyday forms of oppression against gay men and lesbians. “Follow the money,” they insisted.
To them, the real problem was not the Coors company, but the Coors family, and its new venture, an openly conservative spinoff of the Adolph Coors Foundation (ACF) called the Castle Rock Foundation. Created in 1993 with a $36.6 million bequest from the ACF, Castle Rock sought to promote free enterprise, “ensure a limited role for government,” promote “personal responsibility,” and “uphold traditional Judeo-Christian values.” Coors family members sat on Castle Rock’s Board of Trustees.
Because of this, the revived boycott committee urged fellow gay men and lesbians to join—or stay faithful to—a boycott effort that had made the Coors name synonymous with right wing politics. Yet some younger, white gay activists aligned themselves with wealthy, moderate gay rights organizations and a more centrist Democratic Party. They welcomed Coors’s new corporate social responsibility—even though company profits were also funding Castle Rock.