Contemporary Authors

• Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 2000
• When We Rise: My Life in the Movement Hachette Books (New York, NY), 2016

1. When we rise : my life in the movement LCCN 2017286157 Type of material Book Personal name Jones, Cleve, author. Main title When we rise : my life in the movement / Cleve Jones. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Hachette Books, 2016. ©2016 Description x, 291 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780316315432 (hardcover) 0316315435 (hardcover) (ebook) CALL NUMBER HQ75.8.J66 A3 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Stitching a revolution : the making of an activist LCCN 99052721 Type of material Book Personal name Jones, Cleve. Main title Stitching a revolution : the making of an activist / Cleve Jones, with Jeff Dawson. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, c2000. Description 285 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0062516418 (cloth) 0062516426 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER RC607.A26 J6573 2000 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• People - http://people.com/human-interest/when-we-rise-cleve-jones-lgbtq-activist-quilt/

  When We Rise Inspiration Cleve Jones' Journey from Suicidal Teen to World-Famous LGBTQ Activist
  BY PATRICK GOMEZ•@PATRICKGOMEZLA

  POSTED ON MARCH 1, 2017 AT 3:16PM EDT

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  At 15 years old, Cleve Jones was planning his suicide.

  “I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want to be bullied and abused by the other kids,” he says in the current issue of PEOPLE of growing up as a closeted gay teen in Phoenix. “I thought my life was over before it even started.”

  Jones began hoarding pills to use for an overdose until he discovered the nascent gay liberation movement that began in the late 1960s.

  “When I read about it in Life magazine, I flushed the pills down the toilet,” says Jones, now 62. “It’s not hyperbole to say the movement saved my life.”

  Now his story, which includes being mentored by Harvey Milk (the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California), is coming to television in the new ABC miniseries When We Rise. Jones later went on to conceptualize the NAME Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt, the iconic arts project launched in 1987 to celebrate the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes.

  MICHAEL BRY/ABC
  “Without the movement, I either would have killed myself as a teenager or died of AIDS or been beaten to death,” says Jones, whose memoir of the same name was an inspiration for the miniseries. “But I didn’t just survive because of the movement. It gave my life meaning.”

  Influenced by the civil rights and women’s movements, Jones spent his high school years protesting the Vietnam War. At 17, he moved to San Francisco and got involved in the fight for LGBTQ rights.

  At that time, “homosexuality was illegal and considered an illness. People were subjected to barbaric attempts to ‘cure’ them,” says Jones, who waited until he was 18 to come out to his parents because he feared they’d commit him.

  His father “did not react well” to the news, but Milk — who was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 — became a surrogate father to Jones.

  When he was assassinated in 1978, “it was devastating,” Jones says of finding Milk shot. “I remember sitting in his office while they bundled up his body and thinking, ‘It’s all over.’ ”

  For more from Jones — including what exactly inspired him to create the quilt — pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday

  Tragically, death would become a fixture in Jones’s life as AIDS — or, as he calls it, “the plague” — grew into an epidemic.

  “I lost almost all of my closest friends,” says the activist, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985 but has responded well to medication in the decades since.

  The same year of his diagnosis, he was inspired to create the famous quilt.

  “Everyone told me it wouldn’t work,” he says. “But it ended up being the largest community-arts project in the world and touched the hearts of tens of millions of people across the planet.”

  Back then he never dreamed there would be nationwide marriage equality in his lifetime, “but now I’m determined to defend it. In this critical time in our nation’s history, I’m determined to defend all of the gains we’ve achieved and extend them, not just for my own community but for all of us,” says Jones, who now works with the hotel and restaurant employees’ union UNITE HERE.

  “People say, ‘Thank you for your sacrifice.’ But I don’t view it that way,” he continues. “Making a tangible difference in people’s lives gives me immense joy.”

  When We Rise continues Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/11/29/503724044/lgbtq-activist-cleve-jones-im-well-aware-how-fragile-life-is

  LGBTQ Activist Cleve Jones: 'I'm Well Aware How Fragile Life Is'

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  November 29, 20163:09 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
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  Cleve Jones speaks outside the Supreme Court in June 2013.
  Hachette Books
  Longtime activist Cleve Jones has dedicated his life to working with members of the LGBTQ community, but growing up he felt like the only gay person in the world. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he felt so isolated as a teenager that he considered suicide. Then he read about the gay liberation movement in Life magazine and his outlook changed.

  "This magazine, in a matter of minutes, revealed to me that there were other people like me," Jones says. "There were a lot of us. We were organizing. ... There was a community, and there were places we could live safely. And one of those places was called San Francisco."

  'Gotta Give 'Em Hope': The Legacy Of Harvey Milk
  U.S.
  'Gotta Give 'Em Hope': The Legacy Of Harvey Milk
  Jones moved to San Francisco when he was in his early 20s. There, he found a mentor in Harvey Milk, one of the country's first openly gay elected officials. He marched alongside Milk for gay rights, and when Milk was assassinated in 1978, Jones decided to dedicate his life to the cause. "Meeting Harvey, seeing his death, it fixed my course," he says.

  After the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and started the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

  Jones describes his life and his involvement in the gay rights movement in his new memoir, When We Rise. He says it's a story of hardship, but also one of triumph. "I have these memories of great struggle and great pain and great loss, but I also in my lifetime have seen extraordinary progress and amazing change."

  Interview Highlights
  On considering suicide as a kid

  When We Rise
  When We Rise
  My Life in the Movement
  by Cleve Jones

  Hardcover, 291 pages purchase

  I felt that my life was over before it even really began because it just seemed then that there was no way to have a decent life and to be gay. So I was terrified that I was going to be caught and I had already experienced quite bit of bullying and I just thought that only misery lay ahead and when I got caught that that would be the solution.

  I wish I could say that was thing of past, but you know it's not. And even today, every year we lose an awful lot of young people, teenagers, who take their own lives because they are gay or transgender.

  On being at the scene of Harvey Milk's City Hall assassination by former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White

  It changed my life forever. ... Dan White had invited him into his office and shot him there. And his feet were sticking out in the hall and I recognized his wingtip shoes — he had second-hand shoes he had bought at a thrift store. Then we couldn't leave. We were stuck there because the police were doing their thing.

  And we played the tape that he had left for us to play, because he predicted his assassination. I used to tease him for it and tell him he wasn't important enough to get shot, so that was pretty eerie and very horrible to be sitting in his office, listening to his voice predicting his death while his body is there in the hallway.

  I knew by the end of the day that that was the single most important moment of my life, and it was the single most important thing that happened to me.

  LGBT Rights Activists Fear Trump Will Undo Protections Created Under Obama
  LAW
  LGBT Rights Activists Fear Trump Will Undo Protections Created Under Obama
  Not Always A 'Thunderbolt': The Evolution Of LGBT Rights Under Obama
  POLITICS
  Not Always A 'Thunderbolt': The Evolution Of LGBT Rights Under Obama
  Stonewall At 40: Gay Rights Hits Middle Age
  OPINION
  Stonewall At 40: Gay Rights Hits Middle Age
  On Milk's importance to the gay rights movement

  [Harvey Milk]'s often described as the first openly gay person to be elected to public office. That is inaccurate, and in my book I make sure to credit the half dozen or so individuals who came before him in various places in the country. But I think Harvey's significance really was that he became our first shared martyr. Word of his assassination spread far and wide, and even though gay people had lost many people to violence, to suicide, to drugs and alcohol, here was this symbolic figure that just struck a chord with people. For those of us in San Francisco, it was fascinating to see this guy who was really just one of your local neighborhood characters assume this worldwide significance.

  On testing positive for HIV

  By the fall of 1985, almost everyone I knew was dead or dying or caring for someone who was dying. I tested positive for HIV the week the test came out, which I'm thinking was 1985. That time is a bit of a blur. ...

  I had been in a study I had volunteered for, so I knew that they had samples of my blood going back all the way to 1977. So I learned that not only did I have HIV, but I learned that I had had it since the winter of '78, '79, so I never expected to survive.

  On where he got the idea for the AIDS Memorial Quilt

  Every year in San Francisco on November 27, we gather at the corner of Castro and Market Street and light our candles to remember Harvey [Milk] and George [Moscone, the late San Francisco mayor who was assassinated with Milk]. That year, as we were getting ready for the annual tribute, the death toll in San Francisco rose to 1,000 and there was a headline in the paper about "1,000 San Franciscans Dead From AIDS." ...

  Pieces Of AIDS Quilt Blanket Nation's Capital
  AROUND THE NATION
  Pieces Of AIDS Quilt Blanket Nation's Capital
  I was just so struck by that number: 1,000. ... So that night of the march, I had Harvey Milk's old bullhorn and I got stacks of poster board and stacks of markers and I asked everybody to write the name of someone they knew who had been killed by the new disease. At first people were ashamed to do it, but finally began writing their first and last names, and we carried these placards with us with our candles to ... the building that housed the Health and Human Services West Coast offices for the federal government for the Reagan administration. ...

  We had hidden ladders in the shrubbery nearby and climbed up the front grey stone façade of this building and taped the names to the wall. After I got off my ladder I walked through the crowd. There were thousands of people. It was gentle rain, no speeches or music, just thousands of people reading these names on this patchwork of placards up on that wall. And I thought to myself, "It looks like some kind of quilt," and when I said the word "quilt" I thought of my great-grandma. ... And it was such a warm and comforting and middle-American traditional-family-values sort of symbol, and I thought, "This is the symbol we should take."

  There are some days when it is so painful that I really can barely function. But I have to, and I do, and I find that I get my strength from my community and my friends.
  Cleve Jones
  On the pain of having lived through AIDS epidemic and Milk's assassination

  It's similar, I think, to being in a war. I think of my friends every day. There are some days when it is so painful that I really can barely function. But I have to, and I do, and I find that I get my strength from my community and my friends. And I'm surrounded by people who went through that time with me, and we support each other and we love each other are grateful for every bit of laughter and joy that comes our way. ...

  Whenever I get to these junctures in my life — and we just had one with this last election — where everything I've been through kind of flashes before my eyes again ... I think, "Well, here we go." But finding Harvey's body, watching all those people die during AIDS — I'm well aware how fragile life is and how short it can be and how important it is to use it fully.

• Daily Beast - http://www.thedailybeast.com/cleve-jones-on-harvey-milk-when-we-rise-and-fighting-for-lgbt-equality-under-trump

  Cleve Jones on Harvey Milk, ‘When We Rise,’ and Fighting for LGBT Equality Under Trump
  TIM TEEMAN
  02.22.17 1:10 AM ET
  94600847
  PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LYNE LUCIEN/THE DAILY BEAST
  Cleve Jones still vividly recalls the moment on Nov. 27, 1978, when he saw his friend and mentor Harvey Milk’s dead body at San Francisco City Hall.
  Jones had heard Mayor George Moscone had been shot, but didn’t know by whom, or much else, as he raced to city supervisor Milk’s office. Police crowded the corridors. The 48-year-old Milk—a pioneering and uncompromising LGBT and civil rights campaigner and now a beloved icon—and Moscone had been assassinated by former board supervisor Dan White.
  That day still has such a nightmare, unreal quality to it for Jones that in his brilliant memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, these moments are conveyed in italics. “It became an ongoing, recurring nightmare for me,” he tells me. “The way I remember it has dream-like quality to it. I had never seen a dead person before, and I do remember quite directly and vividly that when the police officer removed him, his head rolled back.”
  There was blood, bits of bone, brain tissue, and Milk’s head was a “hideous purple.” With Milk’s body lying there in his secondhand wingtip shoes, Jones and others listened to the now-famous tape he made 10 days prior to his death in anticipation of his assassination.
  Milk—his voice sounding tired and reflective, probably after a long day—knew that somebody disturbed or upset by him might try to kill him (White was certainly both). He was high-profile, out, proud, and uncompromising. He beseeched, as he had in so many of his speeches, gay people to come out, which would “do more to end prejudice overnight than anyone could ever imagine… only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”
  Milk also said he wanted the tape to be made public of his debate with John Briggs, whose Briggs Initiative, also known as Proposition 6—ultimately defeated—would have made firing gay teachers, and any public school employees who supported gay rights, mandatory. Milk wanted people to know “what an evil man” Briggs was and for “people to know where the seeds of hate come from,” for people to know “what the future’s gonna bring.”
  As he writes in his memoir, Jones was involved in the “No on 6” campaign, and so many others: Milk helped light his activism fire, which has stayed alight for 40 years.
  There is, for LGBT people generally, and Jones in particular, so much history in the Castro. His memoir is an excellent read: warm, intelligent, sexy, honest, radical, clear-sighted, and both personal and political. It is the basis of ABC’s historic primetime mini-series When We Rise, charting the evolution of the modern LGBT rights movement through a quartet of figures, including Jones (played as an adult by Guy Pearce).
  “I think that anyone who has told a story thousands of times over many decades would understand when I say that after a while one is not certain if one is remembering the occurrence or telling it,” Jones says of recalling Milk’s dead body.
  We are having lunch at Café Flore, a long-enduring restaurant mainstay of the Castro in San Francisco, historic center of the city’s LGBT community, where Jones himself returned to live seven years ago after many years away. He has tufty white hair and is dressed all in black: T-shirt, jeans, and dark glasses.
  It is strange, but also comforting to be back, Jones says; he has even recorded an audio walking tour of the neighborhood for the Detour mobile app. Now there are many tech kids and middle-class straight families living here, Jones says.
  It was in this district that Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, owned his famous shop, Castro Camera, and honed his political identity and campaigning that led to him being elected.
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  It was outside on Market Street, where Milk and later Jones led so many marches to City Hall on LGBT rights issues, Milk then Jones using Milk’s bullhorn. Milk advised Jones to make his speeches shorter and not to read from scraps of paper, as it was distracting.
  Those crowds marched down Market the night of Milk’s death and the night of the “White Night Riots,” which occurred after White received two manslaughter, rather than murder, convictions for the slayings of Milk and Moscone. (White would later kill himself.)
  When We Rise was created and written by Dustin Lance Black, who won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for Milk, the 2008 Harvey Milk biopic that starred Sean Penn in the title role and which was directed by Gus Van Sant.
  Penn won the Best Actor Oscar that night (Jones taught him how to say “Gurrl”), and Black’s acceptance speech was as stirring and powerful as Milk himself would have wished.
  Van Sant, along with Black, Thomas Schlamme, and Dee Rees, direct the eight episodes of When We Rise. Pearce and (as a younger man) Austin P. McKenzie’s portrayals of him are OK, says Jones, but his portrayer in Milk, Emile Hirsch—who spent a lot of time with him, perfecting even the most incidental of his mannerisms—“will always be my first.”
  Jones, 62, and Black are close friends. Jones, unable to write in his Castro apartment, wrote much of the book at Black’s dining room table as Black worked on the mini-series.
  He wrote Milk’s death scene having woken one night from a dream, which had a slow-motion quality to it, and so that is how he wrote it. He says he cannot read it aloud.
  “After all these years it’s still…” Jones’s voice falters. “It had to be in there, not just because I saw Harvey Milk’s dead body, but this is a book about survival and endurance. I thought my life was over when I was 15 years old, when I realized I was gay. I was going to kill myself. The shame and fear were so overwhelming I started saving pills. Mom had had gall bladder surgery, dad had had spinal surgery, and the house was full of barbiturates and pain pills and narcotics. I was pilfering them. I thought my life was over before it had even begun.”
  What saved the young Jones was reading an article about gay liberation in Life magazine. “I found that thing, a bolt of lightning. I realized I was not alone. There was a community and movement. There was a town called San Francisco. And I got here and Harvey lifted me up and then he’s gone and it’s over, and people gathered together and it wasn’t over. It was just beginning again. And then AIDS came and all my friends died and I thought, ‘It’s over, we’re going to lose everything,’ and then I was diagnosed as HIV-positive and got sick and almost died, and I thought it was over. But it wasn’t over, and I kept going.
  “There have been so many points in my life when I thought I was done and the movement was done, and I want people to be aware of that right now with Trump. When it seems like it may be over, it’s never over.”
  This span of history, this enduring, never-more-necessary passion and engagement, is the canvas for When We Rise, both in its memoir and TV drama forms.
  “We lost between 1,500 and 2,500 gay men a year over 10 years,” says Jones of the toll of HIV and AIDS in the Castro. “The total death toll in this neighborhood was 25,000—half the gay men of my generation. Half died, half of us survived, and many of those who did survive are still here. That’s a lot of personal tragedy. It’s complicated emotional territory to be back in this neighborhood. I had so many friends here. They died. I had new friends. They died. I carry with me a lot of grief and loss.”
  If one HIV-positive partner, Riccardo, hadn’t committed suicide—a short time before the revolutionary protease inhibitors became available—Jones thinks he would still be with him today.
  His celebrity means Jones is treated “with great kindness” wherever he goes, although he accepts he is, as he has been called, cantankerous. “I have little patience for stupidity. I’m too old for it. I’ve no fucks left to give,” Jones says sharply. The last person to receive a tongue-lashing was a drinker at his favorite bar “who said things would be OK with Trump. I told him he was an idiot.”
  Jones’s own significant legacy was to co-found the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and to conceive the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, on whose colorful and moving panels were stitched loving words in memory of 85,000 people who had died of AIDS. “The quilt” was memorably laid out on the National Mall in Washington in 1987 and 1996.
  There was, however, a painful parting of the ways organizationally with the quilt, but had that split not occurred Jones wonders if Milk the movie would have happened. A depressing, fearful time of his life became galvanizing.
  Later Jones would campaign against the infamous Proposition 8, a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California, and for full marriage equality. Jones—who today works as a community organizer for UNITE HERE!, the hospitality workers’ union—is happy to be still immersed in activism. “It’s the only thing I’m interested in. I really enjoy it. I enjoy the strategizing. I find it fun. I don’t golf. I can’t retire.” He laughs. “I can’t afford to retire, and I would end up doing what I do anyway.”
  ***

  Jones grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and then Phoenix. He was a voracious reader, loved David Bowie, and, before coming to San Francisco, had met other gays through the Quakers. He’d also had an early encounter with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-founders of lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis.
  Jones’s father’s initial response to his coming out was “horrible,” based around what sexual acts his son would perform. “The assumption was that I would go to university like everyone else in the family, but my financial support was conditional on me having ‘therapy’—electro-convulsive treatment and aversion therapy and other barbaric practices.” Jones thankfully rejected those ideas, and he and his father didn’t have a relationship for a long time.
  His mother, a former dancer who taught dance well into her 70s, and he had a much closer relationship. His relationship with his father got close again after Jones was diagnosed HIV-positive and became sick. “Both of them were quite perfect in every way. They went to quilt displays and marches and became activists. There was a rapprochement.”
  How had that happened with his dad? Jones begins to cry.
  “I, umm, hear from young people every week who have come out who are rejected by parents. I always tell them, ‘Do what you need to do to protect your heart. Maybe a bit of distance would be good, but leave the door open.’ I think what happened with my parents, especially my father, was repeated around the country.
  “A lot of gay people were forced out of the closet by AIDS. A lot of families, neighborhoods, and congregations learned for the first time that gay people were part of their lives and they made that discovery while those people were suffering terribly and dying painfully. Some people celebrated that misery, but I think the far greater number were moved and my father I think was one of them. Whatever else had happened, I was his son and he did not want me to die.”
  Jones’s grandmother had once read the riot act to family members at one Thanksgiving dinner, saying if anyone had a problem with Jones being gay they would no longer be welcome in her home. His father challenged a homophobic preacher at church, telling him he had no idea what Jesus Christ was talking about. His next book, Jones says, will be about his father.
  Jones arrived in San Francisco in 1972, aged 17. Young men like him came to the city, which he recalls as perpetually enveloped in fog, “to rock and roll, we’d come to be gay, we’d come to join the revolution.”
  Jones hustled, and slept in grotty hotels with other young gay men with no money. He met future disco superstar Sylvester in a late night café. There was a wonderful-sounding treehouse where guys met for sex and connection. Jones had many adventures, sexual and otherwise, hitch-hiked around Europe: One story about meeting a French soldier on a train is the sexiest seduction scene you will read this year.
  “Yeah, I had a lot of sex, and some of it were pretty perfunctory encounters. But in almost all of them there was that element of potential. One pattern in my life is that some of my greatest friendships began with casual encounters. People have this idea that the baths, for example, were lurid and dark, but I found great camaraderie there.”
  Slowly he became politicized, even if, as he notes, “In the gay community, trying to achieve consensus is like trying to herd cats.” When they filmed Milk, the set decoration was so precise a facsimile of the era, every day Jones was reminded powerfully of what his life had been like. People of all ages watched filming, and thanked him.
  His parents had been involved in the anti-war movement and as a younger man, Jones says, he was interested in revolution rather than the Democratic Party. Knowing Milk changed that, and Jones would later get a job at the state legislature in Sacramento.
  “I was never ever a single issue person. For me, the LGBT movement was part of the bigger movement for peace, social justice and against war, racism, and poverty.”
  The established LGBT rights movement earns his scorn for being too timid in the early stages of fighting for marriage equality.
  Jones also says he is “sick and tired of identity politics. If Harvey were here he’d be sounding the alarm too. Our union doesn’t do this game. We don’t have a gay or black caucus, we are one union. I’m frustrated by progressives and the left with their lists of buzzwords and catchphrases that everyone has to incorporate into everything they write. And lot of what I read today is incomprehensible: It’s so full of vague, mushy terms. At the core it seems to be about denying empathy. I’m sick to death of it.
  “If you believe the capacity of genuine feeling for other human beings is defined or diminished according to skin color, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation then you need to take a good, hard look in the mirror. You are part of the problem.”
  LGBT people are among the groups nervous that President Trump will target them directly. When we met, it was when a widely anticipated anti-gay executive order was expected to be announced. (It ultimately wasn’t that week, but one or more than one of a “religious liberty” law or EO, or the signing of First Amendment Defense Act, are still seen as likely.)
  Jones had worried Trump might win, even as those on social media scorned the idea during the campaign.
  “I travel a lot away from the coasts, and I end up in a lot of airport hotels, where I look like any other white guy sitting at the bar. I’m often in a room full of other old white men, and I heard what they were saying. I’m disturbed that people are focusing still to this day on racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. That is part of what happened, and I’m not diminishing or denying that. But the Democrats need to find way of talking to the white workers who voted for Obama twice and then for Trump. I don’t hear people on the left having that conversation.”
  In Jones’s analysis “there is a lot of anger, uncertainty, and fear: The middle class has never bounced back from the economic collapse. People lost their homes and pensions. In a year when people were yearning for substantive change both parties found themselves under attack by insurgencies. The Republican establishment was swept away by theirs, and won; the Democrats successfully squashed theirs [Bernie Saunders, whom Jones initially supported before moving to support Hillary Clinton], and lost the country.”
  Jones, who had demonstrated for the release of those at San Francisco International Airport in the first weekend’s chaos of Trump’s travel ban, says the new president “terrifies” him.
  “Young people need to understand they’re going to have to fight back against this for the rest of their lives. I don’t see this being undone quickly or easily. The reality is this man and his party not only control all three branches of the federal government, but close to two-thirds of legislatures.”
  Jones is not optimistic about change, believing the Trump administration will do all it can—from voter suppression to redistricting to curtailing freedom of speech, and patrolling people’s opinions online—to maintain its grip on power.
  “This is not me saying, ‘Don’t fight back.’ Just this morning I was invited to another secret Facebook group. But I would say there are no secrets on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else—so plan accordingly.”
  While Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of the arc of moral universe being long and bent toward justice may be correct, says Jones, “within that there can be massive swings of the pendulum.” The racial justice, gender equality, and LGBT movements “are never won permanently. Every victory is impermanent and can be swept away. Everything we have can be swept away in the blink of an eye.”
  When we met, the political chill was so fierce Jones thought When We Rise could itself not be transmitted (one episode has been moved to make way for Trump addressing a joint session of Congress). “I think everything is in doubt. I don’t want to sound crazy, but I think it’s possible to wake up tomorrow morning to no internet, a media shutdown, and tanks in the street. That’s where we’re at. It’s Berlin 1933.”
  Jones is reluctant to speculate about what Milk would have advised LGBT activists to do. “Harvey’s basic message was clear-cut: ‘Come out, be honest.’ Now I think he’d say, use every tactic available to you. Build coalitions. Understand it’s not just you. Be bold. Take risks.”
  Jones’s memoir is honest about Milk, whose iconography can obscure the light and dark shades of a human being.
  “He was not a saint,” says Jones. “For young people, as he becomes increasingly mythologized, it’s important to know he was an ordinary man in most respects. He was our neighbor. He lived down the street from me. He was a terrible businessman, his personal life was often in disarray, he was usually broke. In his lifetime he experienced so many defeats and humiliations and tragedies—the kinds of things all of us have to face in our lives. He was most certainly not a saint, and not a genius.
  “He made many mistakes, but he had a vision and stuck to it. Maybe his greatest strength was his love for this city and its people—he was so genuine. We’re so accustomed to politicians making significant eye contact and telling us they feel our pain, and it’s all bullshit—and with Harvey it was so real.”
  For Jones, “as something of a heterophobic kid—he seemed so much older than me, and now I am much older than he was when he died—it seemed slightly crazy to see how he would walk up to anybody and say, ‘Hi, I’m Harvey Milk and I’m running for office’ and engage them. That was always the strategy, whether it was a rich lady on Nob Hill or a homeless person or a hippie kid or a firefighter. Regardless of skin color and circumstances, he would somehow find the only thing he had in common with them and build on that. Just to watch him do it was amazing. It was very startling and disarming. He used humor and self-deprecation.”
  In the memoir, Jones writes about Milk flirting with him, complimenting him on his tight trousers. Did they ever get it on? Jones laughs. “No, he was flirty with everybody. He was too old for me, I thought…” He laughs again. “… Words that have come back to haunt me now.”
  ***

  At the end of the book, Jones writes that he sleeps alone, but that is not true anymore. “I met a young man in July, and he turned my life upside down in a really wonderful way. We’ve been pretty inseparable since.” Is he in love? “Yes, very much. A mutual friend said we had nothing in common but were a lot alike.”
  Meeting this guy—and Jones demurs on precisely enumerating the age difference—has been life-giving. He recalls going to bed the night before he turned 40, and waking up the next morning feeling 80 years old. “I had been sick for so long, and the early rounds of HIV medication had been so toxic. They did horrible things to my body. I thought I was unlovable, and I spent a very long time thinking this would not happen again. And now it has, and it’s happened with such ease.
  “He is younger than me, but he is very strong emotionally. He’s much better than I am about talking about feelings. He can read me like a book, even before he read mine. The last several months have been really pretty wonderful despite the calamity unfolding around us. He has given me a very compelling reason to stay alive and stay healthy.”
  Jones felt nothing upon finishing the book, and not “much of anything” while watching When We Rise be filmed. “I wasn’t walking around crying, I didn’t cry for years. I didn’t let myself. I just felt flat. And, now that I’ve met this person, I don’t anymore. I’m not a very complicated person. I wanted love and to be loved, and it’s important for me to feel useful.”
  For a long time Jones says he had a horrific feeling of vertigo when falling asleep. His father died, and he still could not cry. A month into his new relationship, Jones realized he was feeling emotions he hadn’t felt for a long time, and was frightened by it.
  He walked to the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, which he had avoided for years.
  His voice cracks. “No one was there. I saw all the inscriptions of all my friends and it just all came out. I sat there and sobbed for an hour or more, walked out to the ocean, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of my pants and stood there and thought, ‘OK, just keep going, at least you’re still able to feel this emotion.’”
  Beyond knowing Milk, the Quilt, and fighting for marriage equality, Jones says his greatest achievement is that “I’m alive and capable of falling in love and feeling joy. I stayed there looking at the ocean and thought, ‘OK, this relationship is not going to work’ but at least dealing with it shows that I have a heart capable of falling in love. We went out for dinner that night and it turned out it could work.” Jones laughs merrily.
  Is Jones’s history with Milk ever a burden? He pauses. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to be ungracious, that would be incredibly selfish of me. I don’t have a choice, and that’s probably a good thing.” Thirty or 40 emails land every day seeking Jones’s advice and inspiration.
  The Castro’s streets may be crowded with strollers, and its roads now populated by Google buses, but San Francisco remains a beautiful city for him. Even with his “battered old body and sad old heart,” Jones still feels “incredibly lucky to be alive.”
  He smiles. “There’s an old Peter Allen song, ‘(I’ve Been) Taught By Experts,’ whose lyrics go: ‘My body is a battlefield. / I’ve got the scars to show. / One for every ‘yes and no’ / Every yes and no.’” He’s in good shape—walking five miles a day—and thinks he looks better than he has in 15 years “and so does my honey. It’s a miracle. Love is absolutely the most important thing: It’s connecting.”
  The idea of marriage seems “a little ridiculous” at Jones’s age. But he says this pummeling a piece of tissue so who knows. In the last six months he cannot remember a time having laughed and cried so much. His HIV levels have been undetectable for 15 years. He takes three pills a day: two anti-retroviral, and one for cholesterol.
  Had Milk lived Jones thinks he would have eventually become mayor, and Jones would have run for Milk’s old seat. He ran for office himself but failed: It had occurred to him that it may have been useful having someone dying of AIDS sitting on the Board of Supervisors.
  Milk’s successor (until December, when he entered the state Senate), Scott Wiener, earns a scowl from Jones, and a “He whose name shall not be mentioned.” The city’s neo-liberalism today angers Jones, signaling an “abandonment of core values and the working class. This is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. This is a terrible failing. There is such a stark delineation between rich and poor here.
  “There are 100,000 millionaires in this town, yet people are sleeping in filth and squalor rights outside our restaurant now. You walk around and see desperately ill people, homeless people. We’re living in a Third World country here. There is such appalling poverty. The tech people drive by in their private buses and Ubers with their tinted windows, and are oblivious to the bodies they’re stepping over on the sidewalk.”
  ***

  Jones is guarded in his praise of ABC’s When We Rise, which is intriguing given his friendship with Black. When I ask what he thought of the first two hours of it he had been shown, Jones pauses and says tightly, “Well, let’s just say one can be truthful without being accurate.”
  Is he happy with it? “I think so. With Emile, we got to spend so much time with each other. I felt such a strong connection with him, and we are still friends. He was just so like me in Milk. I didn’t have that experience with Austin and Guy.”
  He and the other real-life figures in When We Rise are “OK with details of lives being substantially fictionalized as long as the movement narrative is accurate.” He knocks on the wooden partition of our booth. “We hope it is.” What has been jarring to him is seeing Riccardo’s suicide being re-storylined. Jones was attacked in Sacramento in 1985 by neo-Nazis—that too has been altered. Interpersonal conflict between the lead characters that did not happen has been written into the drama.
  Surely he has had conversations with Black about this. “Yes, and they’re always interesting.”
  Jones talks glowingly of the relationship between Black and his British swimmer fiancé Tom Daley (this before reports of Daley’s alleged affair with a hunky male model surfaced). “They’re in love,” he says. “Tom is very sweet, very real, not in the least bit pretentious. I admire him for his discipline and for being a normal bloke.” He recalls texting back and forth with Daley the night that his coming-out video amassed hundreds and thousands of views. “I’m very, very proud of him. I’m not a big fan of celebrity culture, but when somebody like Tom does that he saves lives—and that’s not hyperbole.”
  Generally, Jones doesn’t think celebrity comings out are as important as the coming out stories of ordinary people. “In big sections of the country, that Hollywood message is the least influential,” Jones says. “It’s the man in the church choir—these are the folks that need to be encouraged. It’s just as Harvey said. We won support during that Briggs Initiative fight, it wasn’t due to black tie dinners, media buys, and celebrity endorsements. It was ordinary people going door to door, saying, ‘I’m your neighbor, I’m gay, don’t vote for this, it will hurt me.’ That’s what worked.”
  Jones goes off to the bathroom, and when he comes back makes a call in which he and the speaker at the end of the phone—one of his younger activist friends—plan the outline of a fast protest should Trump announce his anti-gay EO.
  We walk to Harvey’s restaurant at the corner of 18th and Castro. On Oct. 11, 1978, the day of Jones’s 24th birthday, the venue was known as the Elephant Walk. It was also the night Milk and Sally Miller Gearhart were debating Briggs.
  There was no room in the car for Jones to join Milk that night. He and others watched it at the Mission High School on a closed circuit broadcast, then came to Elephant Walk with Jones still in “a bit of a sulk at being abandoned.”
  But then, just as the picture on a wall above one booth shows, Milk showed up having bought Jones a doughnut, in which he had stuck a birthday candle. Also in the picture is Jones’s then-roommate and a guy he was dating.
  “And then Nov. 27 he was shot,” says Jones, looking at the picture of his younger self and Milk. “I would tease him about that assassination message. I told him he wasn’t important enough.”
  He pauses. “I didn’t think he was important enough to be assassinated by the state, but we were always worried about the possibility of just a crazy person, maybe a closeted person, and Dan White really was that person. We knew Dan was troubled, and Harvey tried to reach out to him on more than one occasion.” We look at the happy picture in silence.
  I say farewell to Jones outside the restaurant, and later I listen to Milk’s assassination tape again. In voicing his desire for “the movement” to grow, Milk recalled again a call from a young person in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and how he had been able to offer that caller hope.
  His mission, Milk said, was “not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power. It’s about giving those young people out there in the ‘Altoonas,’ ‘Pennsylvanias,’ hope. You gotta give them hope.”
  It is Milk’s most famous catchphrase, and it is what Cleve Jones is still determined to do.
  When We Rise: My Life in the Movement is published by Hachette; When We Rise premieres on ABC, Monday, Feb. 27 at 9 p.m.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Jones

  Cleve Jones
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Cleve Jones
  Cleve Jones.jpg
  Cleve Jones at the 81st Academy Awards, 2009
  Born October 11, 1954 (age 62)
  West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
  Occupation LGBT rights activist
  Known for NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
  Website clevejones.com
  Cleve Jones (born October 11, 1954) is an American AIDS and LGBT rights activist.[1] He conceived the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt which has become, at 54 tons, the world's largest piece of community folk art as of 2016. In 1983, at the onset of the AIDS pandemic Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation which has grown into one of the largest and most influential People with AIDS advocacy organizations in the United States.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  3 Film, theatre and major parades
  4 See also
  5 References
  6 Bibliography
  7 External links
  Early life[edit]

  Cleve Jones marching at the National Equality March, 2009
  Jones was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona. His father was a psychologist. His mother was a Quaker, a faith she held at least in part to benefit her son in the era of the draft for the Vietnam war. He did not reveal his sexual orientation to his parents until he was 18.[2] His career as an activist began in San Francisco during the turbulent 1970s when, as a newcomer to the city, he was befriended by pioneer gay-rights leader Harvey Milk. Jones worked as a student intern in Milk’s office while studying political science at San Francisco State University.[3][4]

  Career[edit]
  In 1978, Dan White assassinated Harvey Milk, recently elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, along with San Francisco’s Mayor George Moscone, and Jones was one of the first people to see Milk's body after the assassination. Jones went to work in the district office of State Assemblyman Art Agnos.[5]

  In 1983, when AIDS was still a new and largely underestimated threat, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.[6] Jones conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1985 and in 1987 created the first quilt panel in honor of his friend Marvin Feldman.[7] The AIDS Memorial Quilt has grown to become the world’s largest community arts project, memorializing the lives of over 85,000 Americans killed by AIDS.[8]

  Jones ran for a position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the November 3, 1992 election.[9]

  While in San Francisco, Jones took part in a documentary, Echoes of Yourself in the Mirror, about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, speaking during World AIDS Day in 2005. In the documentary he talks about the idea behind the AIDS Memorial Quilt, as well as the activism of San Francisco citizens in the 1970s and '80s to help people affected by AIDS and to figure out what the disease was. The film also looks at the impact HIV/AIDS is having in communities of color, and the young.

  Jones has been working with UNITE HERE, the hotel, restaurant, and garment workers' labor union on homophobia issues.[6] He is a driving force behind the Sleep With The Right People campaign, which aims to convince LGBT tourists to stay only in hotels that respect the rights of their workers.[10] Another part of Jones's work with UNITE HERE is making the labor movement more open to LGBT members.

  In an interview in November 2016 with Terry Gross on NPR radio talk show Fresh Air, Jones described his status as HIV+, and said while he first learned of his status when tests for infection came out the 1980s, he later discovered that he was infected around the winter of 1978 or 1979.[2] In the same interview, Jones also talked about the time when he became seriously ill, and how he responded rapidly to the "cocktail" of drugs[11] that fought the virus, in the earliest trials of it. He described his present health as good.[2] The interview was based on Jones's book, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, and the television program When We Rise, broadcast in February and March 2017 on ABC in the USA.[2][12] A theme of the interview was that activism saved his life, as he was in the early drug trials, part of the group pushing the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) to stop doing double-blind trials as soon as it was clear that the cocktail of drugs saved lives.

  Film, theatre and major parades[edit]
  Jones is portrayed by actor Emile Hirsch in Milk, director Gus Van Sant's 2008 biopic of Harvey Milk.[6]

  Jones is prominently featured in And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts's best-selling 1987 work of non-fiction about the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Jones was also featured in the 1995 documentary film The Castro.

  Jones was one of the Official Grand Marshals of the 2009 NYC LGBT Pride March, produced by Heritage of Pride joining Dustin Lance Black and Anne Kronenberg on June 28, 2009.[13] In August 2009, Jones was an official Grand Marshal of the Vancouver Pride Parade.

  Jones participated as an actor in the Los Angeles premiere of 8, a condensed theatrical re-enactment of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial's closure, on March 3, 2012.

  Jones is portrayed by actors Austin P. McKenzie and Guy Pearce in the 2017 ABC television miniseries When We Rise, directed by Gus Van Sant.

  See also[edit]
  LGBT culture in San Francisco

• IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1197300/

  Cleve Jones
  Biography
  Showing all 4 items
  Jump to: Overview (1) | Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (2)
  Overview (1)
  Date of Birth 10 October 1954, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA
  Mini Bio (1)
  Cleve Jones was born on October 10, 1954 in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He is known for his work on Milk (2008), Looking: The Movie (2016) and When We Rise (2017).
  Trivia (2)
  Initiated the famous AIDS Memorial Quilt Project.
  Jones was instrumental in introducing Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. In fact, Van Sant briefly crashed at Jones' apartment in the Castro in 1990.

  Filmography

  Jump to: Miscellaneous Crew | Writer | Actor | Thanks | Self | Archive footage
  Hide HideMiscellaneous Crew (3 credits)
  2017 When We Rise (TV Mini-Series) (consultant - 7 episodes)
  - Part II (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part VI (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part V (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part IV (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part III (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part VII (2017) ... (consultant)
  - Part I (2017) ... (consultant)
  Show less
  2008/I Milk (historical consultant)
  1989 Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Documentary) (co-founder/executive director: NAMES Project)
  Hide Hide Writer (1 credit)
  2017 When We Rise (TV Mini-Series) (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by - 7 episodes)
  - Part II (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part VI (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part V (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part IV (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part III (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part VII (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  - Part I (2017) ... (inspired in part by the unpublished manuscript by)
  Show less
  Hide Hide Actor (2 credits)
  2012 8 (Video)
  Evan Wolfson
  2008/I Milk
  Don Amador
  Hide Hide Thanks (2 credits)
  2014/II The Last One (Documentary) (special thanks)
  2008/I Milk (thanks)
  Hide Hide Self (16 credits)
  2017 When We Rise: The People Behind the Story (TV Movie documentary)
  Himself - Commentator
  2016 Looking: The Movie (TV Movie)
  Himself
  2016 The Eighties (TV Mini-Series documentary)
  Himself - Gay Community Leader / Creator, AIDS Memorial Quilt
  - The Fight Against AIDS (2016) ... Himself - Gay Community Leader / Creator, AIDS Memorial Quilt
  2015 Passeurs (Documentary)
  Himself
  2013 The '80s: The Decade That Made Us (TV Mini-Series documentary)
  Himself
  - Tear Down These Walls (2013) ... Himself
  2011 Sanjay Gupta, M.D. (TV Series documentary)
  Himself
  2011 Illegal Love (Documentary)
  Himself
  2010 Dirty Hands Caravan (Documentary)
  Himself
  2009 Annul Victory (Documentary)
  Himself
  2009 Milk: Hollywood Comes to San Francisco (Documentary short)
  Himself
  2009 Larry King Live (TV Series)
  Himself
  - Are They the Oscar Favorites (2009) ... Himself
  2003 Milk & Moscone: Assassination at City Hall (TV Movie documentary)
  Himself
  1997 Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco - The Castro (TV Movie documentary)
  Himself
  1995 World AIDS Day Special (TV Movie documentary)
  Himself
  1989 Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Documentary)
  Himself
  1988 48 Hours (TV Series documentary)
  Himself - Activist (segment "Patterns")
  - In AIDS Alley (1988) ... Himself - Activist (segment "Patterns")
  Hide Hide Archive footage (1 credit)
  2011/I We Were Here (Documentary)
  Himself
  Edit
  Personal Details

  Other Works: He acted in Dustin Lance Blacke's play, "8," in an American Contemporary Theatre production in San Francisco, California with Dustin Lance Black, Luke MacFarlane, Holland Taylor, Patricia Wettig, Neil Giuliano, Jonathan Moscone, and John A. Perez in the cast.
  Edit
  Did You Know?

  Trivia: Initiated the famous AIDS Memorial Quilt Project. See more »
  Star Sign: Libra

• Cleve Jones Home Page - http://www.clevejones.com/?q=content%2Fbio

  ABOUT CLEVE
  Cleve Jones is an American human rights activist, author and lecturer. Jones joined the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. He was mentored by pioneer LGBT activist Harvey Milk and worked in Milk’s City Hall office as a student intern until Milk’s assassination in 1978.

  Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation in 1983 and founded The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, one of the world’s largest community arts projects, in 1987. HarperCollins published his first book, “Stitching a Revolution,” in 2000.

  Jones was portrayed by Emile Hirsch in Gus Van Sant’s Oscar-winning film, “MILK,” and was the historical consultant for the production. Jones led the 2009 National March for Equality in Washington, DC and served on the Advisory Board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which challenged California’s Proposition 8 in the US Supreme Court.

  Hachette Book Group published his new memoir, When We Rise, in November 2016. The ABC TV mini-series inspired in part by stories from Cleve’s book was broadcast in February 2017 with a screenplay by Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black.

  Jones lives today in San Francisco, California and works as an organizer for the hospitality workers’ union, UNITE HERE.

  Follow Cleve on social media.

When We Rise: My Life in the Movement
Publishers Weekly. 263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p112.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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When We Rise: My Life in the Movement

Cleve Jones. Hachette, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-0-316-31543-2

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Jones, an activist and grassroots organizer, weaves together his own coming-of-age story and the broader story of the struggle for LGBTQ rights and safety in America. Much of the story is rooted in San Francisco in the 1970s and '80s, and Jones writes powerfully about the rise of Harvey Milk, who became San Francisco's first openly gay elected official in 1977. This is an ode San Francisco during a bygone era when the city was a gay sanctuary and crucible for activism. Jones also details the genesis and execution of the stunningly elegiac Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and how that labor of collective love parlayed a feeling of loss into hope for resilience. Over the course of the book, readers experience Jones's own personal journey from closeted young man contemplating suicide to a noted player in the history of the gay rights movement who was portrayed by Emile Hirsch in the movie Milk in 2008. The books many rose-colored vignettes, coupled with Jones's impressive accomplishments as an activist, serve as an inspiring reminder that one can go from "daydreaming about sex and revolution" to making them reality. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Dec.)

Jones, Cleve. When We Rise: My Life in the Movement
Mary Jennings
Library Journal. 141.16 (Oct. 1, 2016): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Jones, Cleve. When We Rise: My Life in the Movement. Hachette. Nov. 2016. 256p. ISBN 9780316315432. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780316315449. MEMOIR

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In this memoir, notable AIDS and LGBTQ activist Jones (coauthor, Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist) chronicles his journey of activism and involvement in the fight for equality within the LGBTQ community. After recounting the depression he suffered as a child owing to a sense of isolation and feelings of loneliness, Jones (b. 1954) explains how he eventually came out to his family and moved to San Francisco. There, he connected with other gay men and became an advocate. The author describes his close friendship with San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, and how Milk encouraged him to lead campaigns for equal rights. Tragically, Jones expresses the painful loss he experienced after Milk's murder in 1978. Also detailed is the devastation of the AIDS epidemic and Jones's role in founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the creation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. While missing the personal perspective Jones presents, Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution provides an excellent overview of the LGBTQ movement. VERDICT For those interested in understanding the history of the LGBTQ quest for social justice in America, this work will resonate.--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA

When We Rise: Coming of Age in San Francisco, AIDS, and My Life in the Movement
Donna Chavez
Booklist. 113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* When We Rise: Coming of Age in San Francisco, AIDS, and My Life in the Movement. By Cleve Jones. Nov. 2016. 256p. Hachette, $35 (9780316315432); e-book, $13.99 (9780316315449). 306.766.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

LGBTQ activist Jones, the father of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, imbues his enlightening memoir with a powerful sense of history in the making. From his youth in the Arizona desert--an apt metaphor for the sexually confused and isolated young man--to his discovery that he did indeed have a place in the world to his national activism, his story builds to a crescendo of LGBTQ-rights breakthroughs. Though these culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the road was never smooth as Jones and the LGBTQ community took small steps, bigger steps, and missteps based upon their faith that they were entitled to the same rights and freedoms as every other American. En route to this seismic shift in American culture and politics, there were painful setbacks. Jones is unsparing in his account of the 1978 assassination of San Francisco supervisor and LGBTQ activist Harvey Milk and the terrible toll of the catastrophic AIDS epidemic, including discovery of his own HIV infection. Jones' powerful memoir is a primary source for ABC's forthcoming miniseries, also titled When We Rise, starring Guy Pearce as Jones. Sure to be requested. --Donna Chavez

Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist
Whitney Scott
Booklist. 96.15 (Apr. 1, 2000): p1419.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 American Library Association
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Jones, Cleve and Dawson, Jeff. Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist. Apr. 2000. 304p. Harper San Francisco, $26 (0-06-251641-8). DDC: 362.1.

In February 1987, Jones started the quilt memorializing AIDS fatalities with panels for two friends he had lost. Since then, the quilt has traveled the world many times and been displayed in every major American city, memorably including Washington in 1989, when President Bush's helicopter drowned out the quiet reading of the names of panel dedicatees. More important than its itinerary, the quilt constitutes evidence of an epidemic that many embarrassed, confused, or homophobic survivors might wish swept under a carpet. It is an ever-growing witness of the entire community of persons with AIDS, gay and straight. In 1994, Jones retreated to California to die, but he has survived to write this history of the project he began that also documents his involvement in the 1970s gay rights movement and the emergence of the AIDS crisis. The quilt will be in Washington again in April 2000 for the Millennial March for Gay and Lesbian Rights, and this time it will be seen officially by both the president and the vice president.

Our Cloth Monument
Bill Strubbe
Lambda Book Report. 8.9 (Apr. 2000): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
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Stitching a Revolution:

The Making of an Activist By Cleve Jones with Jeff Dawson Harper San Francisco, HB $26.00, 283 pp.

It's a personal accolade that by the second chapter of Stitching a Revolution, I put my day on hold and read the book straight through, an indulgence I haven't permitted myself since Armistead Maupin's Tales of City. In a sense, this memoir is another tale of San Francisco, featuring Cleve Jones (the visionary behind the Names Project), countless activists and volunteers, and the AIDS Quilt itself.

With broad strokes the narrative covers much territory--time and place, as well as the personal and political--pausing now and then to brush in finer details of key events from Jones's childhood in Indiana, the assassination of Harvey Milk, the plague years, Jones's own diagnosis, stitching the first Quilt panel, its debut in Washington in 1987, and subsequent national and international tours.

Seamed with the glories, despair, sadness, and befitting humor, this compelling book--especially for denizens of San Francisco in the '70s and '80s--is penned with a refreshing lack of pomposity. And, to their credit, while not glossing over the often factious differences with those Jones sometimes butted beads with--Diane Feinstein, Larry Kramer, and ACT-UP--Jones and his cowriter, Jeff Dawson, remain generously kind and stay focused on the issues at hand.

While Stitching's first half weaves three inextricably overlapping yarns--Jones's burgeoning activism, the maturation of the gay movement, and the onslaught of AIDS--the second half focuses on the evolution of the Quilt, which now covers 25 football fields and contains over 80,000 names, including instructions for making a panel. One moving square, made by Duane Kearns Puryears for himself, reads:

I was born on December 4, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7, 1987, at 4:45. I was 22 years old. Sometimes, it makes me sad. I made this panel for myself. If you are reading it, I am dead.

The most poignant anecdote from Jones's endless reserve is that of a black woman who had ridden for four days on a Greyhound bus from Kentucky to San Francisco to deliver a panel she'd fashioned for her dead son. "[ldots]And I felt so proud at that moment, that we in San Francisco, who were mainly young and white and gay, had created a symbol that had traveled across America to this old black woman, alone with her grief in the hills of Appalachia, and connected her and her son and their struggle with all of us.[ldots]"

In addition to his brushes with celebrity in the line-of-duty with the likes of Jane Fonda, Gore Vidal, and Liz Taylor (and an inspiring account of meeting Rosa Parks), the book graciously honors the era's often unsung heroes: Dr. Marcus Conant who guided many PWAs through the valley of the shadow of death; Michael Lueders who cared for, in his home, a total stranger with AIDS; Gert McMullin and Michael Smith, who surrendered their lives to the quilt; Jerry and Dolores McCall from Texas who, after their son's death, immersed themselves in gay and AIDS activism.

From his speech at the 1988 showing of the quilt in Washington, Jones distills the tapestry's essence:

Today we have borne in our arms and on our shoulders a new monument to our nation's capital. It is not made of stone or metal and was not raised by engineers. Our monument is sewn of soft fabric and thread and was created in homes across America, wherever friends and families gathered together to remember their loved ones lost to AIDS.

Stitching a Revolution reconnected me with my own history and personal loss, and I indulged myself in another longtime first--a big cry.

BILL STRUBBE'S ARTICLES HAVE APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE, VF, THE ADVOCATE, AND THE BOSTON GLOBE.

Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist
James E. Van Buskirk
Library Journal. 125.4 (Mar. 1, 2000): p112.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Jones, Cleve with Jeff Dawson. Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist. HarperSanFrancisco: HarperCollins. Apr. 2000. c.304p. ISBN 0-06-251641-8. $26. SOC SCI

Jones offers his personal perspective on events surrounding the creation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has helped facilitate grieving and promoted AIDS activism internationally. He candidly recounts his early upbringing in Indiana; his move to San Francisco in 1972, where he was mentored by Harvey Milk; the controversial "White Night" riots; his discovery that he was HIV-positive; and his aborted run for a California Assembly seat. Here he highlights his inspiration on the November night in 1985 when he and friend Joseph Durant had the initial idea for the quilt and the creation of its first panels in early 1987. Through his work, he encountered Rosa Parks, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor, Gus Van Sant, and Presidents Bush and Clinton. And he withstood pressures from inside and outside the ever-growing NAMES Project organization in his efforts to promote the quilt, which now has more than 42,000 panels, has been viewed by more than 12 million people, and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Recommended as a unique, behind-the-scenes look at an important phenomenon.

--James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.

STITCHING A REVOLUTION: The Making of an AIDS Activist
Publishers Weekly. 247.8 (Feb. 21, 2000): p73.
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GLEVE JONES WITH JEFF DAWSON, Harper San Francisco, $26 (304p) ISBN 0-06. 25 1641-8

The AIDS Memorial Quilt-42,016 interlocking panels, each celebrating the life of an individual who has died of AIDS-related causes--is one of the marvels of contemporary political organizing and art. Jones, who conceived of the quilt and formed the Names Project, which curates it, has written a memoir of his life as a gay rights and AIDS activist that attempts to place the meaning of the quilt within both a personal and a social history. Born in 1954 to a pair of liberal Indiana college professors, Jones left home and his less-than-accepting parents at 18, after he came out. Cutting his political teeth working for openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, Jones became a noted community leader after Milk's assassination in 1978. When AIDS hit three years later, Jones, who was working as a legislative aide on health concerns, became involved with local AIDS projects and in 1984 was inspired to begin developing the quilt. Although it is filled with dates and names, Jones's memoir is oddly vague about political or personal specifics. He claims, for example, that Harvey Milk's politics were not based in "any kind of political or economic philosophy" but were just "about individuals"; he also describes his Latino lover's depression about having AIDS as "Aztec fatalism." So although Jones touches on many of the key moments of recent gay and lesbian history, and while his vision for the quilt has been vital in personalizing the AIDS epidemic for many nongay U.S. citizens, his memoir lacks the narrative drive and insight to make it an important social or personal document. Agent, fed Mattes. Author tour. (Apr.)

"When We Rise: My Life in the Movement." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 112+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166630&it=r&asid=8e8a91c9f2e8d541a15f2c05149e93a9. Accessed 11 June 2017. Jennings, Mary. "Jones, Cleve. When We Rise: My Life in the Movement." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464982274&it=r&asid=dcd847aed8859182650ea8b54b5157c5. Accessed 11 June 2017. Chavez, Donna. "When We Rise: Coming of Age in San Francisco, AIDS, and My Life in the Movement." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980737&it=r&asid=e4b81ee4e45d3f73d555880e63ca9c33. Accessed 11 June 2017. Scott, Whitney. "Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2000, p. 1419. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA61934389&it=r&asid=11a4e726531ea480545a57a0c95bd691. Accessed 11 June 2017. Strubbe, Bill. "Our Cloth Monument." Lambda Book Report, Apr. 2000, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA62410299&it=r&asid=84c80eb8486b85765ef4631312760c0e. Accessed 11 June 2017. Van Buskirk, James E. "Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an AIDS Activist." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2000, p. 112. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA61234047&it=r&asid=c9b292c3592d04612f23fb98503b8236. Accessed 11 June 2017. "STITCHING A REVOLUTION: The Making of an AIDS Activist." Publishers Weekly, 21 Feb. 2000, p. 73. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA59649610&it=r&asid=c911539df0285c05ffdc18ba90e8d737. Accessed 11 June 2017.

• Lambda Literary
  http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/12/13/when-we-rise-my-life-in-the-movement-by-cleve-jones/
  Word count: 1081

  ‘When We Rise: My Life in the Movement’ by Cleve Jones
  Review by Walter Holland
  December 13, 2016

  Cleve Jones’ memoir straddles both the demands of an intimate personal portrait of a gay man at the end of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, and an in-depth historical record of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans movement in America. Interspersed in Jones’ story are also key events in American history over the decades, both political and cultural, usually handled by short summary paragraphs, which review historical events over the years, e.g. 1975: the Watergate cover-up, the Weather Underground’s activities, Bowie’s “Fame” and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star for You to See.” These chart a timeline of sorts, milestones, which mark the author’s growth and development as well as that of the country at large.The first half of the book deals with Jones’ early life, his trials and tribulations in Arizona where he grew up, his penniless entry into San Francisco where he partakes in its sexual liberation of the 1970s and is first introduced to its burgeoning gay bohemia. Later he travels abroad and spends time in both Paris and Munich. In Paris he is told by a handsome law student: “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,” a flat out rebuke to the American LGBT movement to come where “coming out of the closet” was imperative to building gay power.

  It is perhaps in the second half of the book–when Jones’ encounters his mentor, Harvey Milk, in San Francisco and begins his true political life as an organizer and activist–that Jones writes at his very best and his most informative.

  Here we get the full gay excitement of the Castro district and the growth of San Francisco as an LGBT mecca:

  Every day brought more gay and lesbian immigrants, fleeing intolerance and violence for San Francisco. The platform shoes and glitter of the 70s gave way to a new look, derisively labeled “Castro clones” by Arthur Evans. The hippie look of long hair and bell-bottoms was gone. The ‘70s disco look of platform shoes and glitter was disappearing. The men of Castro Street now wore work boots, plaid flannel shirts, tight T-shirts revealing broad chests and biceps, and straight-leg Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans . . . As word of what was happening in San Francisco spread, and as the backlash from the right grew more intense across the country, more and more people arrived […]

  Here Jones’ story becomes also more gripping, including the advent of Harvey Milk on the political scene, the events leading up to Milk’s murder by Dan White, the murder itself, the later advent of AIDS, the founding of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, Jones’ own AIDS illness, and his subsequent work in union politics and beyond:

  I float to the door of White’s office and peer in. There is a cop there, on his knees, turning Harvey’s body over. I see his head roll. I see blood, bits of bone, brain tissue. Harvey’s face is a hideous purple. I feel all the air leave my lungs. My brain freezes. I cannot breathe or think or move. He is dead. I have never seen a dead person before.

  [… ] They come from all over the Bay Area: young and old; black and brown and white; gay and straight; immigrant and native-born; men and women and children of all races and backgrounds streaming into Castro Street—Harvey’s street—faces with wet tears, hands clutching candles. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands fill the street and begin the long slow march down Market Street to City Hall, a river of candlelight moving in total silence through the center of the city.

  There is also a fascinating chapter on the making of the film Milk in 2008, directed by gay filmmaker Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black. Jones explores the legend of Harvey Milk versus the reality of the actual man as well as the complicated process of lifting a seminal piece of history and theatricalizing it.

  As Jones alludes to in his lectures or teaching of millennials, every year much of the LGBT history he so assiduously details is being lost to ignorance and apathy. San Francisco itself has become too pricey for the very artists, activist and middle class that made it so richly creative a place. It is to this end that Jones’ book succeeds as a sort of primer to LGBT youth about the history of the movement and those key characters that figured in its advancement. He does a nice job especially of summarizing the recent advances in the past few years with the overturn of Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the famous opinion of Justice Kennedy in Obergefell vs. Hodges that essentially legalized same-sex marriage. He also is successful throughout the book with teething out the intricate political strategies, pro and con arguments and necessary alliances needed to advance the gay rights cause.

  Having had a front row seat to history, Jones gives us an honest appraisal of his feelings and opinions, e.g. he admits to finding Larry Kramer’s ACT-UP organization in New York City “to be just a bit of a clique,” the membership being “overwhelmingly white and male and under 40.” He describes the opposition gay organizations gave to the American Foundation for Equal Rights when it challenged California’s Proposition 8 in federal court; the arguments to take it slow and not confront the system too aggressively.

  All this makes for compelling reading. I was instantly reminded of other gay diarists and memoirists who sought to passionately chart the momentous changes and upheavals both culturally and politically that enveloped their lives. A writer such as Gad Beck during the Nazi era in Germany or more recently Randy Shilts (an acquaintance of Jones’) or David Wojnarowicz during the AIDS years in America. All in all, this is a mandatory read for future scholars of LGBT history and for queer millennials to learn about their heritage.

  When We Rise: My Life in the Movement
  By Cleve Jones
  Hachette Books
  Hardcover, 9780316359528, 304 pp.
  November 2016

• New York Journal of Books
  http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/when-rise
  Word count: 869

  When We Rise: Coming of Age in San Francisco, AIDS, and My Life in the Movement

  Image of When We Rise: My Life in the Movement
  Author(s):
  Cleve Jones
  Release Date:
  November 28, 2016
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Hachette Books
  Pages:
  256
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Lew Whittington
  Last year, journalist Michelangelo Signorile’s It’s Not Over detailed how the right wing and some religious groups were working feverishly with antigay organizations to attack any pro-gay initiatives such as marriage equality, gays serving openly in the military, and even LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections in employment and housing. In the wake of the 2016 election GLBTQ Americans have even more reason to mobilize to protect civil-rights. San Francisco activist Cleve Jones’ memoir When We Rise couldn’t come along at a better time. It is a stirring account of Jones’ “Life in the Movement” that spans 40 years and is otherwise an inspiring rallying cry for social justice and vigilance.

  Jones grew up in the 60s, the rebellious son of liberal professor parents, early on choosing his own resolute and if necessary defiant path academically, emotionally, and sexually. Jones’ activism began while at Arizona State University, where he joined a small gay college group and even arranged for legendary lesbian feminist pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-founders of The Daughters of Bilitis, to speak there.

  Soon enough, Jones became involved in a number of allied political causes on the West Coast, eventually moving to San Francisco. In San Francisco he worked as a hustler and took a number of part time jobs to save money. He became part of the booming community of thousands of gays and lesbians emigrating from their hometowns to live their truth in a liberated environment.

  From the start Jones was a rebel with a cause, aligned with the gay civil-rights pioneer Harry Hay, who challenged the philosophy that only definable difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals was what they did sexually. To gay liberationists it was a matter of immutable sexuality as well as identity, character, community, and even spiritual awareness.

  As part of his education, the 20-year-old Jones also took time out to travel and tramp around Europe, an eternal a student of history and not wanting to miss out on summers of international free love. Jones’ observations about gay life in various countries are candid, witty, and unexpectedly romantic in the travelogue in the center of the book.

  Jones continued to go back to Europe during his 20s and recounts his numerous affairs with men in several countries. Meanwhile, he was also establishing himself in San Francisco as a formidable social justice organizer. He was back in college and was a student intern on Harvey Milk’s election campaigns to win a seat on San Francisco’s newly formed Board of Supervisors. He worked side by side with Milk to organize all over California to defeat the Briggs initiative that would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. And he worked in at City Hall after Milk won the supervisor seat representing the Castro as the first openly gay elected official in California.

  Jones’ account of the Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone murder by Dan White is a gripping inside account and eloquently non-exploitive. It is rather an insider testament to the compassion, fortitude, and community strength of gay and straight San Francisco. Jones’ leadership skills were eventually noticed by the state’s Democrat establishment in Sacramento as one of the state’s first gay community organizers and liaisons.

  In the early 80s, Jones returned to San Francisco when it became one of the first cities to deal with the growing AIDS epidemic. Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and created the AIDS Quilt Memorial Project, which memorialized over 85,000 Americans who have died from AIDS. The quilt became a living memorial to remember those lost to AIDS and bring awareness to the horrific realities of HIV-AIDS and the community of compassion as well as survival strategies in the face of a homophobic culture and the hostile indifference of the Reagan Administration.

  By the late 80s, Jones was diagnosed as HIV-positive and as his T-cell count dropped, starting to present with opportunistic infections symptomatic of AIDS. He became a longtime survivor whose health was restored by the advances in the mid-90s of anti-viral medications.

  His lifelong commitment and vigilance regarding social justice and equality for all minorities is an unbending profile of compassion, courage, and poetic truth. When We Rise is an inspiring manifesto for LGLBTQ solidarity in a perilous time. It is in part also the basis for screenwriter Justin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for his script for Milk) and producer Gus Van Sant’s upcoming ABC mini-series about the gay civil rights movement.

  Lew J. Whittington writes about the arts and gay culture for several publications including Philadelphia Dance Journal, Dance International, CultureVulture, and Huffington Post. His book reviews and author interviews have appeared in The Advocate, EdgeMedia, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/arts/television/review-when-we-rise-review-gay-rights.html
  Word count: 1183

  Review: ‘When We Rise’ Charts the
  History of Gay and Transgender
  Rights
  By JAMES PONIEWOZIK FEB. 26, 2017
  “Identity politics” is one of those labels that say most about the labeler. Used as a
  pejorative (generally by people who already feel safe in their identity), it implies that
  causes like race, gender and sexual­orientation rights should be secondary to
  concerns that — so the argument goes — are more concrete and universal.
  “When We Rise,” ABC’s sweeping four­night history of the gay rights
  movement, is a rebuttal. As a television drama, it often plays like a high­minded,
  dutiful educational video. But at its best moments, it’s also a timely statement that
  identity is not just an abstraction but a matter of family, livelihood, life and death.
  Largely written by Dustin Lance Black, “When We Rise” begins in postStonewall
  San Francisco, tracing a trio of idealists — people who would not take
  “social­justice warrior” as an insult — whose lives intersect on and off over five
  decades. (Mr. Black wrote the screenplay for the film “Milk,” about the San
  Francisco gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, whose work and 1978
  assassination figure in here.)
  Cleve Jones (Austin P. McKenzie as a young man, Guy Pearce as an older adult)
  arrives in the city after coming out at home in Arizona; later, he conceives the Names
  Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt. Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs younger, Mary­Louise
  Parker older) becomes enmeshed in feminist organizing while discovering her own
  7
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  sexuality. After a tour in Vietnam, Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors and Michael K.
  Williams) returns stateside to work in a military anti­racism program, even as he has
  to hide his sexual orientation.
  The fact of this mini­series’ existence is more radical than the form of it. Even
  today, when “Will and Grace” is returning as a nostalgic revival piece, it is something
  for a serious history of sexual and gender politics to take up four nights of ABC
  prime time.
  But aesthetically, “When We Rise” is the kind of sweep­of­history mini­series that
  might have been broadcast 20 years ago. Gus Van Sant (also of “Milk”) directs the
  first night, but the show’s style and structure — a tour of big moments, connected by
  Mr. Pearce’s occasional narration — is strictly conventional. (This does allow for
  continuity among the other parts, directed by Dee Rees, Thomas Schlamme and Mr.
  Black.)
  The series, beginning Monday, breaks down into two halves. The second
  features the bigger stars, but the first is more effective, thanks partly to its theatertrained
  young leads. Ms. Skeggs (“Fun Home”) has a terrific, earnest dynamism,
  while Mr. McKenzie (“Spring Awakening”) makes Cleve at once a young charmer
  and an old soul. (High­powered guest stars appear throughout, among them Rosie
  O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg and Rob Reiner.)
  The early hours of “When We Rise” are impressively specific, both about the gay
  and transgender subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s and the nuts­and­bolts tactics
  of organizing, alliance and local politics. Roma’s community organizing introduces
  her to tensions between mainstream and radical feminists, gay women of color and
  “straight white Wellesley girls,” respectability politics and revolution.
  As Roma partners and raises a daughter with a fellow activist, Diane (Fiona
  Dourif and Rachel Griffiths), the political issues become personal: Does fighting for
  equal rights mean rubber­stamping the traditional construct of marriage? (Her
  polyamorous mentor, played by Carrie Preston, would say no.)
  If “When We Rise” has a thread, it’s coalition­building, getting disparate voices
  7to find a common chord. The out­groups it portrays are hardly monoliths — Ken,
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  who’s African­American, encounters racism among gay white men and homophobia
  among black community leaders. But as Cleve puts it, when anti­gay politicians
  declare “war on all the us­es,” then the us­es discover what makes them a we.
  The series’ latter section grows darker and gets rushed, losing any nuance or
  idiosyncrasy in exposition­heavy dialogue. It’s stronger when it filters history
  through personal stories, as it does in the evolving relationship between Cleve and
  his father (David Hyde Pierce), a psychologist who believes that gays can be “cured”
  with electroshock treatment.
  Ms. Parker, Mr. Pearce and Mr. Williams often seem to be playing different
  people from their younger counterparts, in ways that can’t be entirely explained by
  the characters’ maturing. But Mr. Williams (“The Wire,” “Boardwalk Empire”)
  brings particular vulnerability to the older Ken, who struggles with addiction.
  Night 4 concentrates on the court fight for marriage equality. Curiously,
  Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same­sex marriage in all 50
  states, gets only a postscript, along with a screen card noting that violence against
  L.G.B.T.Q. people and other minorities is increasing.
  Reality supplied its own postscript. “When We Rise” was meant to air four
  consecutive nights, but the last three were pushed back a day by Tuesday’s address
  to Congress by President Donald J. Trump, who promised to defend gay and
  transgender citizens from terrorist violence in his nomination acceptance speech but
  who recently rescinded Obama­era protections that allowed transgender students to
  use the bathroom corresponding with their identity.
  The mini­series itself doesn’t refer to the current administration. It simply
  leaves the viewer with a sense of a long journey rewarded — but one that doesn’t
  always move in a direct line forward.
  When We Rise
  Monday, Wednesday,
  Thursday and Friday on ABC
  A version of this review appears in print on February 27, 2017, on Page C2 of the New York edition with
  the headline: The Unending Struggle for Gay Rights. 7
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  © 2017 The New York Times Company

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