My favorite hours this past weekend was at a fundraiser and birthday celebration in San Francisco to honor a legendary LGBTQ+ activist and beloved community elder. 🎉
The venue was the Hibernia, a historic bank repurposed into an event space. Cleve Jones took the stage after the crowd sang happy birthday to him. He’s 70 now.
He gave a short speech from the perspective of someone with a lifetime of activism and a connection to the earliest days of the movement, when Harvey Milk (who had a photography shop on Castro Street) ran repeatedly for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors and helped transform a marginalized community into a politically empowered constituency, making history as the first out person elected to public office in the United States.
Cleve met Harvey Milk after running away from home as a teenager. Cleve had hitchhiked his way from Phoenix to San Francisco because he’d read an article about something called “Gay Liberation” that was happening there and in other major cities. And it was either flee to San Francisco or end his life as he planned to do with hoarded pills because he didn’t see there was much point to it.
After the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone on a dark day in 1978, Cleve and the Mayor’s daughter led an evening candlelight march from the Castro neighborhood to City Hall with tens of thousands following quietly on Market Street, stunned and grieving.
Cleve also lived the trauma of the AIDS crisis, as an eyewitness to the devastation in one of the epidemic’s worst-hit epicenters and as a person with a diagnosis at a time when this meant almost certain death — especially in the face of a hostile government fueled by religious political extremism. The slogans of this era were “silence=death” and “action=life.”
Cleve cofounded the AIDS Memorial Quilt, humanity’s largest community art project with over 50,000 panels in stewardship. The last time the quilt was displayed in its entirety was in 1996 and it covered the entire National Mall in D.C. I was there to see it and march with over a million others.
In his speech, Cleve summarized his history at a much higher level than the context I share above. He gave credit to the movement for saving his life and reminded the crowd of the dangerous threat to LGBTQ+ lives at this moment in USA history.
“The Beast is at the door,” he said. And requested everyone be ready to fight if called upon, like our lives depend on it.
Because it may. Again.
This community and allies, by simply existing, act as one of the bulwarks for democracy and freedom. And as frequent targets, tend to be frontline warriors holding the line — a shield against hate and extremism.
Judging from the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction, the attendees stood strong and ready for whatever may come and represented a multigenerational and multicultural unity of purpose. There was no need for anyone to declare “we’re not going back.” That part’s a given. 💪🏻
The speech segued into a long procession of folks in drag, dancing and singing their way through the crowd to the stage while the loudspeakers blared Sister Sledge’s “We are Family.” 🎶
Because, as Cleve put it, “I’ve learned over many decades that we can’t get anything accomplished without drag queens!”
Other acts and entertainers followed. And, of course, dancing. 🪩🕺
It’s rejuvenating, inspiring, and fun whenever I’m immersed in queer spaces like this. 🌈❤️
