The New Yorker:

When Ron Woods came out at Chrysler, he realized he would have to fight for his safety in an industry where being gay can prompt violence on the factory floor, or ruin your career.

By James B. Stewart

Trenton Engine is one of the largest machine-tool factories in the world—a three-square-block complex south of Detroit that employs thirty-five hundred workers and builds the engines for most Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Eagle products. The Trenton assembly line operates twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, and life there, dominated by the United Auto Workers, is rigidly hierarchical—based on union job classification and seniority. The U.A.W. leadership has historically embraced social change, notably during the civil-rights struggles of the sixties, but the rank and file have traditionally been socially conservative, suspicious, even hostile, toward blacks, war protesters, women—anyone thought of as different—and that conflict has often been played out on the factory floor.

Though memories of the harsh recession of the early eighties remain vivid, the years since have been boom times for Chrysler and its hundred and twenty-six thousand employees. After Ron Woods reported for work there as an electrician, in 1987, he was often able to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day. During one stint in 1989, Woods worked eighty-three days straight. That year, he earned fifty-five thousand dollars, at $14.82 an hour. The job enabled him to replace his aging Renault Alliance with a new Chrysler New Yorker and, in 1990, to make a down payment on a house.

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