Once upon a time a community decided that it wasn't going to purchase a certain brand of beer any longer because it was clear that the brewers were blatantly participating in the oppression and suffocation of that community.
The company suffered great losses.
Ten years later, that same community found itself in the midst of an overwhelming health crisis in which tens of thousands died — directly due to governmental neglect induced by the very same hatred those brewers and their kind espoused. Then came the company's glossy, Hollywood p.r. campaign.
Recently an Out Week reporter ordered a beer at the Village gay bar Julius' and was promptly served a Coors. God's Love We Deliver, AmFar, the Gay Rodeo, Lambda Awards of Philadelphia and Northern Lights are among a handful of AIDS and/or gay and lesbian organizations which have of late had Coors sponsor fundraising events or have accepted direct contributions from the company. The national gay news magazine, The Advocate, has recently begun accepting advertising from Coors, as have Long Island's Equal Times and Wilde Side and Los Angeles' Frontiers. Equal Times has decided, as it recently stated, that the Coors boycott is over. So has God's Love We Deliver's Buddy Noro.
Since when do a few people in the community suddenly decide what's right fqr the entire community? How can anyone say the Coors boycott is over simply because he or she has decided to take money from the company, accepting Coors' claims about how the company is now different? And why do those individuals taking the money consistently tell us that Coors has changed while there is overwhelming evidence pointing in the other direction?
A recent OutWeek investigation (issue 2, July 3, 1989) of the Coors Foundations' 1987–88 tax return reveals a $100,000 donation to the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing "think tank"; $150,000 to the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, led by Reagan advisor Paul Weyrich; $80,000 to the Christian Broadcasting Network University, run by televangelist Pat Robertson; $25,000 to the Rocky Mountain Billy Graham Crusade; $20,000 to Morality in Media and $50,000 to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.
"That's only the beginning," says Chip Berlet, who studies the far-right as a researcher for Political Research Associates in Cambridge. "Much of [the Coors] family money goes to neo-nazi groups funneled through front organizations. They still have a reactionary, even white supremacist view of America. Every beer bought is like buying a gun for these people."
And for every charity dollar accepted from Coors, 100 dollars goes toward killing us. Don't believe the hype. Keep the boycott alive...
— Editorial, OutWeek Magazine No. 5, July 24, 1989, p. 4.
