Cleve Jones – When We Rise

We are thrilled to announce our second What We Do Now event featuring the amazing Cleve Jones in conversation with David Talbot to discuss activism and dissent In Trump’s America.

Cleve Jones’ career as an activist began in San Francisco in 1970s. He co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which memorializes over 85,000 Americans who have died from AIDS. He lives in San Francisco and works as a labor activist.

His new book, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement provided inspiration for the ABC television mini-series of the same name.

Born in 1954, Cleve Jones was among the last generation of gay Americans who grew up wondering if there were others out there like himself. There were. Like thousands of other young people, Jones, nearly penniless, was drawn in the early 1970s to San Francisco, a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual freedom.

Jones found community–in the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the city’s bathhouses and gay bars like The Stud, and in the burgeoning gay district, the Castro, where a New York transplant named Harvey Milk set up a camera shop, began shouting through his bullhorn, and soon became the nation’s most outspoken gay elected official.

With Milk’s encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in “the movement.” When Milk was killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentor’s progressive mantle–only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again. By turns tender and uproarious, When We Rise is Jones’ account of his remarkable life. When We Rise is not only the story of a hero to the LQBTQ community, but the vibrantly voice memoir of a full and transformative American life.