Amazing HIV+ Gay Men: Cleve Jones

In 1985, Cleve Jones grabbed Milk’s old bullhorn and instructed the crowd to write down the names of all of their loved ones who had succumbed to AIDS. They went to the old federal building at the United Nations Plaza and taped their poster art to the front of the building.

It happened by accident. As they did every year on the anniversary of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone on November 27, 1978, legions of San Franciscans marched in solidarity to City Hall. In the hours before the 1985 march, however, something out of the ordinary occurred. Cleve Jones had an idea. He grabbed Milk’s old bullhorn and instructed the crowd to take a piece of poster board and a magic marker and write down the names of all of their loved ones who had succumbed to AIDS. Instead of marching to City Hall and stopping with their candles that night per usual, they went a few blocks further — to the old federal building at the United Nations Plaza — and taped their poster art to the front of the building. When Jones took a solid step back, he noticed something: The decorated wall looked an awful lot like a quilt. The rest, as they say, is history.

“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,” Jones said in a 2011 interview for Windy City Times. “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.”

He said later in the same interview that the early LGBT movement was very radical, since many of the participants were also antiwar activists, feminists, and civil rights fighters.

“We were a liberation movement and we used that vocabulary,” he said. “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. ”

And that changed everything.

“For example, most people in those days did not come out of the closet,” he recalled. “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.”

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