Thus some gay leaders are thrilled by the way companies like American Airlines, Subaru and Miller Brewing have aggressively courted their community. But left-wing activists charge that they're being exploited and co-opted. "We're a movement, not a market," has become the battle cry of the other side, and the fight may be the bloodiest battleground within the gay rights movement today.

At the heart of that controversy stands Coors Brewing Co., one of the most hated corporations in gay America since the 1970s. Once synonymous with right-wing causes, it was accused of spying on its workers and discriminating against a variety of minorities, including gays, blacks and Latinos. The most infamous charge was that the brewery forced employees to take polygraph tests about their sexual orientation.

Labor unions organized a boycott in 1974, and California gay rights pioneers Harvey Milk and Morris Knight called on gays to join the boycott, which has raged for more than 20 years.

Coors spokesman David Taylor says the company aggressively worked to change both policies and image in the late '70s and early '80s, when Coors began expanding and developing a national marketing strategy. The company added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy in the '80s and offered domestic partnership benefits in 1995. "They have become one of the most gay-friendly companies in the country," HRC spokesman David Smith said Wednesday.

The emergence of gays in the Coors family is widely believed to have helped moderate its views. Dallas Coors, grandson of company founder Adolph Coors, was a co-founder of HRC, though he did not work for his family's brewing company or the foundation. The real breakthrough came with the next generation, in the person of Scott Coors, son of Bill Coors, who retired as chairman of the brewery earlier this year and remains chairman of the holding company. Scott Coors has been openly gay in the Denver community for years, with no public resistance from the family. He serves as Coors' director of product damage prevention, and is active in the gay employee group.

Coors has also been battling Miller and Anheuser-Busch for the lucrative gay beer market. Cheney's job was to rebuild gay acceptance and gradually increase market share in Coors' target markets. That task took her all over the country, but Coors has arguably made its most ambitious pitch for gay support in its backyard, in Denver (Coors' brewery and headquarters in Golden sit on the outskirts of the metropolitan area).

During Cheney's tenure, the company pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into local and state gay groups, from Equality Colorado to the Colorado AIDS Project. It has contributed $54,000 to Denver Pridefest over the past three years, currently the "presenting sponsor," meaning its bottle-cap logo appears on every related sign, banner and T-shirt strewn about the region for months.

"She opened a lot of doors at Coors for us," says Mike Smith, executive director of the gay community center that organizes Denver's Pridefest. He said a three-year agreement she negotiated will "substantially increase" its support and make it the largest corporate contributor to the organization. (Full disclosure: I sit on the Pridefest steering committee, but was uninvolved in the negotiations.)

Coors spokesman Taylor says the company has contributed about $500,000 to gay organizations over the past decade, most generously in Denver, Atlanta, Miami and Boston.

But the stigma lives on. Coors has been rebuffed by the gay community in markets such as San Francisco, according to sources familiar with the company's marketing plan. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation faced an avalanche of abuse within the gay community when it accepted a $110,000 donation -- under Cheney's tenure -- in 1998. The L.A. Coors Boycott Committee threatened to award them a "Coors Whore Award."

The conflict erupted even more bitterly this February, when the Denver HRC chapter hit Cheney up for a $5,000 donation from Coors as a corporate sponsor for its annual fundraising dinner. Cheney quickly came through with the approval, but the problems surfaced on the receiving end. HRC's national chapter got wind of the donation in February, and called the locals to inform them the money must be returned. An acrimonious struggle erupted, with the national office lined up against Coors and the local chapter.

The national office won. HRC was already under attack within the gay community for its association with the gay Millennium March, and couldn't afford any more controversial moves, explained Joe Barrows, who negotiated on behalf of the locals.

Cheney's friends say she was infuriated by the response, and particularly angry at HRC executive director Elizabeth Birch. HRC agreed to reexamine the issue this spring, and on July 7, Birch flew to Colorado for a private meeting with Coors. Barrows and David Smith said the parties have moved closer to reaching an understanding, but are not ready to make an announcement yet. One member of the board of governors predicted Coors will eventually make a large corporate donation to HRC, which will be embraced in a high-profile press conference, applauding Coors as a leading company in acceptance of gays in its workforce.

But HRC was hardly the toughest opponent Cheney has faced. The crux of her job has been cracking open markets antagonistic to a Coors-gay alliance on both sides. Coors targets specific markets and then sends in a team of specialists in key niches -- such as blacks, Hispanics and gays -- to do outreach to those communities.

Cheney would then fly out to the market to win over both distributors and gays, explained one source who was familiar with her work. She would frequently find herself in a small town in the South, for instance, trying to convince a local good-ol'-boy distributor how great it would be to set up promotions at the local gay bar and spend some time hanging out with the gay managers and bartenders there. The next morning she might spend with a hostile gay organization, trying to convince them to accept what many still perceived as blood money.

Frequently, the distributors -- many franchise operations independent of Coors -- would try to brush Cheney off, saying they'd already tried, and the gay market was resistant to Coors. "Mary's trick is to say, 'Well I think times have changed,' and then kind of hold their hand to reintroduce themselves," her colleague said. "And then she goes into the community and starts identifying groups where Coors money can have an impact."

Much of Cheney's work involved outreach to various gay subcultures, from drag queens to cowboys on the gay rodeo circuit. She spent a great deal of time trying to learn about the leather phenomenon, because it has a tight national network of aficionados who maintain close links through the Internet as well as annual events like the International Mr. Leather competition.

Cheney spent months researching the leather phenomenon, attending events some would find distasteful and carting home stacks of books from the library and bookstores. "My partner wants me to get rid of all these books," a friend quoted her as saying. "I'm so tired of looking at hairy men in leather!"

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