Although this is a memoir of Cleve Jones it reads more like a history of LGBT+ rights. Something that I was very ignorant of before I read this. Cleve Jones went through nearly every moment of the gay rights movement. When he was a teen and early adult it was illegal to be gay. He was a huge supporter and even worked along side Harvey Milk. He was there when Gilbert Baker debuted, what today has become a symbol of LGBT rights, the rainbow flag. He not only survived the AIDS epidemic while many of his friends did not, but he was an advocate for AIDS awareness throughout that period of history. I see a lot of comments today dismissing pride. Asking what exactly the LGBT+ community has to be proud of. Heterosexuals don't celebrate their pride, so why does the LGBT+ community have parades and months celebrating theirs? I think for people in my generation the real struggles that these men and women went through to get where we are today have been swept under the rug. This book really brought to life those struggles. It was not long ago at all that men and women were being oppressed because of their sexuality and we have every reason to still be celebrating pride!

A bit hard to rate this one. The first almost half of the book has Cleave as a young gay man, traveling Europe, working odd jobs, doing lots of drugs and having a lot of sex and falling in love several times. During the reading, I admit, that part didn't captivate me. But I only understood why it was important after I read the second half of the book.

The second half starts is about when Cleave, as a twenty-something gay activist, becomes more involved in day to day activism in San Francisco, becoming an intern to Harvey Milk shortly before Harvey is shot and killed for his views. This changes things, and the anger and frustration of the community spills over into riots, sometimes violent, and even more furious and daunting work by community activists and organizers. Then starts a mysterious "gay cancer" - the beginning of the spread of AIDS - and I was riveted and broken hearted, reading without slowing to wipe my tears. The absolute terror, of suddenly being sick, of all of your friends dying in their twenties and thirties, of how polarized the media and the politicians made it and how for many years, no research was conducted, because it was deemed a "gay" problem and who cares if thousands are dying if they aren't straight and white. It was brutal to read.

I understood then why Cleave spent the first half of the book sharing his teens and early twenties as a young gay man - after AIDS, no one ever got to be that carefree again. His twenty year old self suddenly seemed to be in a gay utopia - you could meet up at the bathhouses and the clubs, you could love people in any way you want, and within your own community, you were safe. Yes, they were often struggling to make ends meet and afford heating, but the gay community meant home. And then the epidemic started, with whispers and weird bruises and immune systems shutting down, and the community was condemned by this sickness. People were terrified, they watched friends die and got sick themselves and years of activism by the gay community didn't seem to make the government fucking do something about it. Cleave is one of the very, very few people who got to live out his life for decades more, managing his HIV diagnosis because he was in a drug trial that happened to work. The trauma he had to live through? Unimaginable. I have no idea how you carry that with you throughout every day.

I had heard of the AIDS quilt at some point growing up - I hadn't seen it - and it was really interesting to hear how the concept of the quilt came to him, and how determined he was to see it come to life. At some point, the project is handed off to others, but at that point it was massive, commemorating many hundreds of men and women lost but not forgotten.

It's an impressive life story, but more importantly, it is our history.

Jones tells the tale of his life in the Queer rights movement over decades with heart and humor. It's a love story of the community he found and the ways he and others worked for positive change in large and small ways.

Especially now when the world is so bleak and we have Trump rolling back progress and setting the stage for such loss and destruction, this is a book for all to read. I imagine as Jones wrote it he was never imagining how swiftly backwards human rights would be moving in the US. But it is a great gift to us to read it now.

We will rise.

[July 24, 2023] Cleve Jones writes beautifully about a life well-lived. His life and the movement are both fueled by joy, laughter, and loving relationships. I'm so glad that our queer elders share their stories for us to read and connect with decades later.

Major themes/topics: (1) queer joy, love, and community as an enduring source of strength; (2) the debates within the queer community on major issues like coming out, queer identity, the divisions between gay men and lesbians, and approaches to resistance; (3) organizing methods; (4) AIDS, grief, and loss; and (5) uncertainty and hope.

QUEER JOY, LOVE, & COMMUNITY
After a childhood and teendom of isolation, violent bullying, and parental rejection, Cleve found real joy in the queer community of Phoenix and San Francisco in the 1970s. He has had several long-term relationships in his life, including at least two queer-platonic relationships. His community was an enduring source of love and strength for him, even (or especially) during the darkest periods of his life.

Relationships
41: [Scott and I] knew we were brothers for life from the moment we met.

78: My most intimate and long-lasting relationships have not usually been sexual. Or maybe they began as sexual but soon became something else. I loved Scott the moment I laid eyes on him and I know he loved me back, just as strongly and just as immediately.

103: [Marvin] was so funny and so clever with his dance moves and impersonations that I soon shut up and just enjoyed his charisma and cuteness. I knew immediately that I would love him for the rest of my life.

106-107: I felt Scott’s love for me so strongly. It was the same love I felt from Marvin, something wonderful that I could trust and count on forever.

Community
31-32: Grandma [Marion] had traveled across the continent to take her firstborn grandchild to dinner and to deliver a clear message: “You are my grandson and I love you unequivocally and always will, no matter what.” She would live a very long life and all who knew her were happy for that.

46-47: In my early [homeless] years in San Francisco I was so often helped by the queens and transsexuals—they sheltered me, fed me, clothed me, and taught me how to stay alive and out of jail. They were among the very first to imagine a gay community, they took the greatest risks, and they were fierce and uncompromising.

111: My friends and I took classes during the day, worked evening and night shifts, and drank and danced all night. Everybody had a project: a film, a dance concert, a drag show, a gallery opening, a photography exhibit, poetry reading, or political action. […] It was not required to be actually good at anything, but everyone was expected to pitch in, to contribute something to the new culture we were creating.

240: We had some pretty fancy dinners that winter in 1996 and did our best to keep each other laughing. Every now and then someone would speak wistfully of past holidays spent with some long-dead lover, and Larry or another neighbor, Marvin Greer, would look up and say, “Girl, don’t go there.”

He repeatedly notes the ways in which queer elders take on mentoring and caretaker roles for young queer people, especially in the 1970s when many kicked out by their families. It’s heartwarming to see the spirit of care and love passed down generationally through the movement and queer community.

17: Jim [Briggs] taught me how to speak like a queen. He loved gay jargon, was the first person to call me Mary, and demonstrated that the word “please” has at least two syllables.

29/31: Bob [Stemple] had been in New York during the Stonewall riots and I was eager to hear his stories of the already fabled altercation. […] I was still kind of scared [of moving in with two guys I didn’t know, even though I was homeless] and I asked Bob if he would be willing to meet these guys and check them out for me. […] He was always good for advice and had some really cool stories. He was a good cook and generous, slipping twenty or forty bucks into my pocket when I left. Bob met the guys [for me] and said it was okay. Fortunately, he was right.

63: Henry [in Vancouver] was hilarious, with great stories of gay life in the Army during World War II. […] “I wish I had traveled when I was young,” he said. “They tell you to go to school and get a job and have a family and work your whole life and then travel and see the world when you’re old and fat and retired. That’s stupid. Do it while you’re young and can really make the most of it. Send me postcards.” I promised I would.

I loved the focus Cleve placed on art and journalism as lifelines for queer people. He repeatedly lists queer authors, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, radio stations, and public speakers as ways queer people found one another and broke down the barriers of silence and isolation (see 10, 13, 18, 22, 81, etc.).

QUEER COMMUNITY DEBATES
Some recurring themes in the intracommunity debates included…

(1) “Coming out” vs. "don’t ask, don’t tell": Should everyone come out? What about the risks? Is silence the same as hiding?

(2) Defining queer identity: Are we just like heterosexuals, except for what we do in bed, or are we fundamentally different? If we are a community, how do we define ourselves?

(3) The division between lesbians and gay men

(4) Approaches to resistance: Violence/property destruction vs. non-violence/civil disobedience? Work from inside institutions to change them, or work from the outside? Approaching your opposition with rage, or with compassion/patience?

“Coming Out” vs. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
Harvey Milk’s “Everyone must come out!” speech/initiative was revolutionary for the history of the gay movement. By coming out en masse, Americans were forced to contend with the reality that many of the people in their lives, including loved ones, were queer. It de-escalated some of the hate and bigotry quickly.

At the same time, people suffered real, serious consequences on an individual level from coming out, including impacts to their livelihoods, emotional health, and physical safety (150). “Gay bashers” were common in that era. Gay youth who came out of the closet in the 1960s-70s were met with violence and rejection (see Cleve’s experience, 16-17), including being kicked out of the home.

There are still consequences for coming out today, especially in rural parts of the United States (and elsewhere around the world). Is their coming out politically necessary, or is it just self-destructive? I certainly don’t think it’s safe, in a lot of cases.

Are we approaching an era where we are close to the 1970s Western European attitude towards homosexuality, or are we past that? From Cleve’s account, the 1970s Western European perspective seemed to be essentially, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (as also in [b:Giovanni’s Room]).

68: “In France, we respect individual privacy, we do not feel obliged to share the intimate details of our romantic and sexual lives with the general public. […] There is no need for such self-revelations; we live as we wish, but with discretion.” […] When I asked him if his parents knew he was gay, he just laughed. “Why would I tell them such a thing?”

74: “Yes, of course I am what you call ‘gay’,” [Daniel, a French soldier] would say. “I am attracted to men, I want to make love with men, be friends with men, fuck with men, but I like women and I want a family, too. This label that you propose I must declare for myself comes with some limitations, I think. I will never announce to my family that I am gay. These issues are more important in your country because you Americans are so repressed and sexually primitive, we don’t think so much about them here.”

I didn’t accept that and told him so. “I think that you do think about these issues. You just won’t talk about them. And harm results from that silence. You know it.”

Cleve’s argument here feels similar to [a:Audre Lorde|18486|Audre Lorde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1613651890p2/18486.jpg]'s “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” which I agree with. By giving words to a thing, you can act upon it. Your whole internal life changes for the better.

Defining Queer Identity
Cleve makes the point that the question of “Are we just like heterosexuals, except for what we do in bed, or are we fundamentally different?” is still at the heart of many of the internal debates in the queer community today (52). Harvey Milk’s opinion was “We’re not like heterosexuals, and shouldn’t try to be” (157).

Having a queer enclave in San Francisco allowed the people there to define the culture of the queer community. On Castro Street, it was the gay men’s community. In the Mission District, it was the lesbian community.

36: In those days if you were young and gay and walking around San Francisco […] You didn’t have to be political or educated or even all that smart to understand that you, that we, were part of something brand new, something that had never been seen before. And a big part of that, maybe the most important part, was that word: we.

133: Eric [Garber] was part of a small group of people who were discovering the lost history of gay people. Later, their efforts would lead to the creation of history projects, museums, and libraries.

247: Before AIDS, the notion of an LGBT community was just that: a notion. But AIDS proved us. AIDS forced people, many of us, out of the closet. […] Many parents learned their sons were gay at the same moment they learned that he had AIDS.

Lesbians vs. Gay Men
The general tenor of the relationship between lesbians and gay men in the 1970s seems to have been one of strained allyship. And yet, Cleve also mentions lesbians stepping up to act as hospice care nurses during the AIDS crisis (247). (It’s unclear from Cleve’s accounting what the issue was, and it seems like all the animosity was coming from the lesbian side; therefore, I’m almost certain it was sexism that the gay men adamantly refused to see. There were lesbian feminists writing cogently in that era on gender and sexuality and race and their intersections – hell, Audre Lorde was writing in this era.)

Approaches to Resistance
When reading memoirs/essays from organizers, activists, and social justice advocates, similar themes emerge. One I come back to again and again is the debate on methods: Violent tactics vs. civil disobedience; advocating for change from outside major institutions vs. working for "the man"; approaching your opposition from a place of rage vs. approaching your opposition from a place of compassion and patience. Cleve touches on this issue throughout his memoir (37, 171-175, 158, 168, 216).

During the AIDS crisis, New Yorker Larry Kramer led the rage/violent end of the organizing movement with ACT UP. Cleve led one aspect of the non-violent/compassion end of the organizing movement with the NAMES Project Quilt. “I liked what ACT UP was doing—the combination of smart science with direct action and civil disobedience—but I also found them to be just a bit [exclusionary ...] I kept thinking about my grandmothers and how much they loved me and how there needed to be a place in this movement for them and people like them who cared about their gay kids but weren’t going to don bomber jackets and storm Wall Street or the FDA” (220). In my opinion, I think the right answer is “Por que no los dos?” You need both anger and compassion, both direct action and art, to support a sustained, effective movement. There are many, many ways to be effective, and we need all of them. You see this too in [b:And the Band Played On] in all the different avenues queer people and their allies were working on AIDS.

ORGANIZING METHODS
Because Cleve has spent his life in "the movement," as he calls it (the gay liberation movement and its sister movements in labor), his memoir also reads as a sort of organizing manual. It has so many useful organizing strategies in it. To wit:

- Collaboration with labor movements and unions (88, 101, 127-129, 137, 152, 161, 251-253, 263)

- Consciousness-raising discussion groups and action planning groups (48)

- Pairing activism with joy/celebrations, to fuel the movement’s energy (101, 104)

- Playing the long game by picking your battlefields for specific fights, organizing ahead of time, doing groundwork to create activism infrastructure that can react quickly to big news (135, 141)

- Do smaller practice-runs for big events (marches, walk-ins) to test the infrastructure you've designed for the purpose (178, 274)

- Build a neighborhood enclave that is a safe space for people to retreat to but also a hub for organizing in times of crisis (137)

- Organize your own self-protection groups when the cops won’t do it and vigilantes are a danger to you (see the Butterfly Brigade, like the BPP’s patrols, at 138)

- Telephone tree for quick mobilization (138)

- When violence is a risk for large, mobilized crowds, march the crowd fast and far so they tire and don't want to get violent and, if they do get violent, it's not in their own neighborhood (141)

- During marches, have march monitors facilitate the flow of marches/protests and stand between protesters and cops to deescalate/prevent violence (141-142, 177); have volunteers move thru the crowd to collect contact information for future organizing (144)

- Directly request funding for organizing and campaigns from small businesses with queer owners, staff, or queer-aligned interests, because it's necessary to compete against the rich conservative opposition (150)

- Do not cooperate with grand jury investigations; “loose lips sink ships” approach (179-181)

- Sometimes you need awful news to incite real action and change. Examples: Harvey's assassination --> national march (182); CA Prop 8 --> gay marriage thru Obergefell v. Hodges (266, 272, 283)

- Supportive employers who allow activists to take time off to do important work to support the movement and the community (201)

- Mutual aid approaches: cooperative housing for the homeless (30), Shanti project (210-211)

- Use demonstrations to shame the government for their inaction on critical issues, especially through art (plays, the quilt), non-violent protests (e.g., “leave my body on the steps of the FDA”), and journalism (216, 219, 223, 262)

A factor that is unique to the gay liberation movement that cannot be replicated in other movements is the fact that gay people are everywhere, born to any family (51, 189, 191). It fueled a meteoric rise in success of the movement as people came out. It meant that there were stealth queer people in positions of power already who could help the movement from the inside (e.g., journalism, charitable foundations, government); the same approach can’t be replicated with colorism and other axes of oppression for obvious reasons.

AIDS, GRIEF, & LOSS
The last third of the book contains the grief of the Harvey Milk assassination and AIDS. AIDS irrevocably changed the shape of the gay liberation movement and the lives of everyone in the queer community at the time. Based on how Cleve covers it, it seems like it's still probably hard for Cleve to process even now. Can't blame him at all.

Hank finished off his beer and waved to the bartender for another. "What if it's an epidemic?" That word rose up and hung over us like a tendril of smoke in a closed room. "If it is an epidemic, then what happens to all this?" Hank pointed to the street. "Everything we've gained has come out of this neighborhood and the others we have built across the country. We lose our political power. We lose our culture, our safety."

I lit a cigarette and nodded. "Right now, thousands of gay boys are moving here every year to be part of this." Outside it was dark and the sidewalks were crowded with young men of all races. The DJ turned up the music and the dance floor filled with boys. "The religious nuts are going to have a field day."

Hank shook his head. "They may lock us all up."

I stubbed out my Marlboro. "They may not need to; we may just all die."

Cleve covers AIDS in several brief chapters (2-3 pages each) which span multiple years, and he captures a sense of the horror and grief:

232: Many of those who had been there to help us with the first display [of the NAMES Quilt] were dead now. Their shoes were filled by another wave of volunteers. Then they died. That’s how we lived then. Our friends died; we made new friends; then they died. We found new friends yet again; then watched as they died. It went on and on and on.

234: We lost over a thousand people a year, just in San Francisco, every year for over a decade. Within the ranks of the activists and throughout much of the community, people were bitter, exhausted by a decade of misery and death.

I started reading [b:And the Band Played On] once I finished When We Rise to get the history of AIDS.

UNCERTAINTY & HOPE
Cleve Jones’ and [a: Rebecca Solnit|15811|Rebecca Solnit|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1535567225p2/15811.jpg]’s writing are sisters. They work hard to maintain hope for the future through the worst times, because it's the only way things can change.

157: “You’re going to have many lovers, Cleve. You’re going to meet so many beautiful men and fall in love so many times. It won’t be until the end of your life, when you look back, that you will know who were your greatest lovers and dearest friends.”

286: "It is easy to be overwhelmed by the challenges that face us. It is easy to be cynical. It is easy to despair. [...] The movement saved my life. [...] The movement gave [my life] purpose and connected me to other people who also sought love and purpose in their lives. The movement gave me hope and it is that hope which sustains me now--hope that we might yet save our planet and learn to share it in peace; the hope for justice and equality; hope for the children that will follow us; hope that someday soon, we may rise."

Thanks, Cleve, for a beautiful read.

--

[June 29, 2023]

Jones's story is a moving and important one, as he recounts the days of gay liberation, living with AIDS, through the Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In addition to his accounts of working with Harvey Milk, the most interesting parts to me were about the invention of the rainbow flag and his own conception of the AIDS quilt. Important reading.

When We Rise by Cleve Jones. A poignant and provocative memoir of an activist that rose above the fear, hate, and mendacity of a society cultured by the prejudices of religion, conservative, and "moral authorities." As a queer man, he survived all the bullying, Christian prosecution, homophobic law forces, Anita Bryants, Harvey Milk’s assassination, Dan Whites, hate crimes, Republican anti-gay regimes, AIDS, Proposition 8, and the "ballot box [that] is used to strip us of our most basic rights." Highly recommended for its call for empathy and humanity.

 

“The movement gave me hope and it is that hope which sustains me now- hope that we might yet save our planet and learn to share it in peace; hope for justice and equality; hope for the children that will follow us; hope that someday soon, WE MAY RISE” (286).