Cleve Jones, the man who once stood beside Harvey Milk and later created the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt, is filled with history. It spills out of his pores in a consistent stream of nourishing calm and unrivaled assumption. His voice clear, his palms steady … Jones lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic strengthened by his background in politics. He helped educate the masses speaking from what he knows best—his heart, his experiences, his legacy, and his unbridled heroism.
In 2011, 30 years following the start of the epidemic that took out almost his entire neighborhood in the Castro district of San Francisco, Jones remembers where he's been and where the LGBT movement is going.
Windy City Times: Many people might not know that you conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt while attending Harvey Milk's candlelight vigil service in San Francisco following his assassination. How exactly did the two pieces of your life fit together?
Cleve Jones: Well, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated on Nov. 27, 1978 and every year since on Nov. 27, folks have gathered and walked with candles to remember Harvey and George. In 1985, I was one of the organizers of the commemoration and in the days leading up to Nov. 27, a headline appeared in the San Francisco daily newspaper—The Chronicle—that 1,000 people had already died of AIDS in our neighborhood. That number would soon grow to about 1,500 per year in our little tiny neighborhood, which was only six or eight blocks. So, I was really devastated by that figure and … can I ask how old you are?
WCT: I am 27.
CJ: Yeah, see your generation just has no clue at how horrible it was. So, I was just devastated by that figure. I remember standing at the corner of Castro and Market and looking at that headline and understanding that of those thousands who had gone, almost every one of them lived and died within just a few blocks of where I was standing and there was no evidence. The neighborhood looks much the same today—beautiful restored Victorians, cafes, restaurants, etc. There is just really no hint of the incredible loss that we've experienced here. So, that added to what was already an ongoing theme of discussion for me and my friends. Our inability to communicate to the rest of the world what was really happening was very present.
So we marched as we always do, but in the hours before the march Nov. 27, 1985, my friends and I had stacks of poster board and magic markers and I had Harvey's old bullhorn and I talked to the crowd. I asked them to write down the names of their friends and lovers who had died of this disease—AIDS. At first people were ashamed to do it!
WCT: What were those next moments like?
CJ: The stigma associated with the disease was so overwhelming that people were just putting down initials or first names only. Gradually people began to write down the first and last names of their friends, lovers and roommates who had died of AIDS. It was painful, being so young [ and experiencing such loss ] .
We marched as we always do down to City Hall and then made everybody walk a couple more blocks to the old federal building at the United Nations Plaza. We had extension ladders and climbed the front of the building and taped the names of our dead friends to the wall. When I got off my ladder and looked around at this weird patchwork, I thought, "This looks like some kind of peculiar quilt." When I said the word 'quilt," I thought of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and it seemed to me to be one of those middle-America, traditional-values symbols. I believe in traditional family values as I understand them [ laughs ] . Love, loyalty, respect … I got it right then. A quilt.
WCT: How was this idea perceived at first by others?
CJ: Everybody said it was the stupidest thing they ever heard of. For a year and a half I thought about it while everybody told me it was the dumbest thing they had ever heard of—too expensive, too morbid, too this, too that—story of my life [ laughs ] .
You know, when I talk to young people about the quilt, I want them to know that there was no support for the idea at all in the beginning. None of the national organizations thought it was a good idea. None of the rich people thought it was a good idea. They thought it was just crazy. During this year-and-a-half before I started it, my tests came back and I learned that I was also infected and my best friend died. His name was Marvin Feldman. In the middle of all that mess, I was attacked by fag-bashers who beat me up very badly and stabbed me.
By 1986, my heart was just filled with hate, fear and despair. I am so grateful that the quilt did happen because it rescued me from that hate, fear and despair and turned it all into love, courage and hope. It reconnected me with all the good people out there, gay and straight alike, who understood the epidemic.
WCT: The very first AIDS Memorial Quilt panel was constructed by you for your best friend, Marvin Feldman, in 1987.
CJ: Yes, my friend Joseph Durant and I made the first, I think, 40 panels. I made the first one for Marvin. Joseph made one for a man named Ed Mock. Those were the first two quilt panels.
WCT: You co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation in 1983. At that time, did you imagine a cure would have been found by 2011?
CJ: Yes, I started it with Dr. Marcus Conant and Bob Ross and others. I don't think I thought in those terms. I think at the beginning we believed we could stop it. I still think we could've stopped it if everyone had responded but they didn't. I'm very glad I didn't know at the time how long it would go on for. I am not sure I would've had the strength to continue with it if I had known that the following generations would have to suffer so terribly.
Back then, you didn't even have the luxury of thinking it all through. It was just like living in a war. When you are living in a war, your lifetime becomes very much a day-to-day and even an hour-by-hour experience. In those days I don't think any of us, certainly anyone I knew, thought or planned more than a couple weeks ahead. There was no way of knowing how long we would live or what would happen to our circles of friends. It was so overwhelming and all-consuming and it was really fought hour-by-hour and day-to-day.
WCT: Not to compare the two circumstances because they are obviously extremely different in nature, but we are in the middle of a civil-rights movement in the LGBT community where laws are changing and legislation is being repealed depending on the state and day at-hand. Sometimes it feels like we're living hour-by-hour with DOMA, DADT, etc. It can be very overwhelming. What advice do you have for this new generation of gay advocates?
CJ: I think it's very important that young people in general, but especially queer youth, know the history of our community and our movement. One can acquire that knowledge relatively easily through many sources. There is a wonderful new documentary that just came out called We Were Here about my neighborhood, the Castro, and our experience with the epidemic.
I think it's very important for your generation to understand that you don't know. You need to start from there—you don't know. I'm speaking generally, it's quite possible that you yourself know [ laughs ] … but as a generation, you have been denied this information, history and knowledge. It happened at the institutional level that this information was not taught to you in schools. Also, the transmission of information among generation of gay men to the next was so profoundly disrupted by the epidemic. So, what your generation needs to know is that half of the men of my generation were killed and the government did nothing. There was a time when we cried every day for 10 years. I, myself, lived with the knowledge that I had the virus for a full 10 years before treatment was available. So, for a full decade I wondered how many days I had left. It affected everything about our movement and our community.
WCT: The lesbian population really had a huge role during the early epidemic years. This is something not really spoken about in our semi-apathetic community nowadays. Can you tell us about their importance during this time?
CJ: People think of AIDS as the "gay men's disease," but there is very little information and discussion out there about the role lesbians played in fighting the epidemic. When I came out, women were separate from men. There was a very strong movement at the time called lesbian separatism and there was great hostility and very little interaction between men and women. The epidemic changed that forever. Women emerged first in the more traditional roles of caregiver but then very quickly took over the leadership of one organization after another as men got sick and died. Lesbian women in particular played a very powerful role in fighting back against the epidemic. It changed us in every way.
WCT: AIDS outed many people in the early days. Can you explain more about this for us?
CJ: I think it's important for people to understand that this movement was very, very young and it was very radical. We were a liberation movement and we used that vocabulary. Most of us had previously been involved in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War or the early feminist movement and civil-rights movement. We had been fighting for social justice for other people. But then, following the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and the spread of the gay liberation across campuses, there was this very early, very tiny, very radical movement. Just as it was gaining a little bit of traction—just the tiniest bit of visibility and political power—we got hit with AIDS. That changed everything.
One of the things that it changed, for example, was that most people in those days did not come out of the closet. If you wanted any type of professional success, you did not come out. Those of us who were out and revealed our sexual orientation to our families, friends and to the public, were immediately cast out of even the most comfortable middle-class existence. Before the epidemic, the movement was led by radicals, street people and people like me who came from middle-class backgrounds but we gave that up because we understood clearly that to come out of the closet meant to give that up. There were no queer business leaders or media figures, let alone politicians when we started this so, one of the things that happened was that the epidemic outed people in huge numbers. It suddenly became impossible to live in the closet. It might be that you stayed in the closet your whole life, sang in the choir at church and convinced your parents that you were just a bachelor, but then suddenly you get these purple spots on your face. Then what are you going to do? Keep lying while you wait to die? People were outed by caring for their partners. Some people finally just said, "Fuck it, I am not going to lie. The love of my life is dying. I've been with my partner for 20 years and I am not going to lie." So, the epidemic outed a lot of us and forced us to do things we had never done before.
WCT: How has leadership changed in the LGBT community since the beginning of the movement?
CJ: When Harvey ran for election that last campaign in 1977, my recollection is that the total budget for his campaign was $30,000. Just a few years after that, LGBT communities nationwide were routinely raising and spending millions of dollars because we had to provide education, services and the rest of it. So then that changed the leadership of the movement. It gave rise to the emergence of the gay bureaucracy. I'm not using the word 'bureaucrat' in a negative sense. Bureaucrats have a function. The leadership of the movement changed. It had come from the radicals, poets, revolutionaries, artists, and drag queens on the street into the social service providing network and required tens of millions of dollars and experience that we didn't have.
The leadership shifted to the donors and administrators and these people are by definition cautious and conservative. Rich people and rich donors who were never present in the early days of the movement. The really wealthy folks out there that underwrite so many of our organizations tend to be conservative because they're rich. The fundraisers—who go out and beg those rich people for money—tend to be conservative and cautious. The administrators who are responsible for keeping the grant money coming in, providing the social services and meeting payroll every two weeks are also by nature more conservative and cautious than the wild-eyed radical dreamers who started the movement. So, there was a profound change in the type of leadership that we have and that goes back to the epidemic.
I'll tell you another thing that started with the epidemic—the fight for marriage equality. Now, I make a joke where I say, "I joined the gay liberation front in 1972 and if you told me that in the year 2011, I'd be campaigning for the right to join the army and get married, I'd start dating women!" That was not what we were about. We were a part of a broader radical movement that we hoped would dismantle the patriarchy and end war forever. But, I think this focus on marriage equality has its roots in the pandemic. There were all of these couples who fought so hard and lost their fight, but after 20 years of grief, heartbreak, loss, and solidarity just said, "What do you mean this isn't a marriage? Fuck you. Fuck you. This is a marriage and if you think otherwise, you are wrong and I am going to fight you. I want the benefits and I want the acknowledgement. This is a marriage. This is a family. This is a community." I would suggest that the whole notion of a queer community was really a theory until AIDS. With AIDS it showed us just how strong we were.
Cleve Jones travels extensively sharing his experiences, including the AIDS epidemic, NAMES Quilt, and other LGBT topics affecting our community past, present and future. Jones authored Stitching a Revolution in 2001 and served as historical consultant on Gus Van Sant's feature film, Milk, profiling the life and untimely death of LGBT political activist Harvey Milk. He co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and currently lives in Palm Springs, Calif.
