Nothing less than full equality

HOW MANY of you have seen Milk? I think that the most important message from Milk, and the thing that I most want you to understand after seeing that film and hold close to your heart is that I was that hot. I was that cute for about eight weeks in the mid-1970s. I see many of you are young and hot, and I want you to enjoy it while it lasts, because it doesn't last long.

I remember when I was a little bitty homosexual back in Arizona, and I hitchhiked to San Francisco, and I saw the old queens there, with their flat asses and their bellies and their jowls and their wrinkles and their dyed hair. And I thought, "Oh, that doesn't look like much fun."

But you know, that was part of the big lie. That's the big lie they're still telling you, and that they still tell our children--that when you grow up, and you're old and queer, you're going to be alone, and you're going to be pathetic and useless and have no family and no friends.

Well, I'm 54, and this has been the best year of my life.

I guess you would say that I joined the movement in 1967, when I was 13. The movement I joined then as a kid was the movement to end the war in Vietnam. My family had settled in Arizona, my mom and dad both taught at Arizona State University, and we were very active in the antiwar movement.

Then, Cesar Chavez came to the grape fields of Arizona, and we joined that movement and saw little difference. It took a while for news of the women's movement to filter into the hinterlands, but when we got the word, we joined that movement and didn't really see much of a difference.

And then--I remember so clearly--in 1971, I was in my high school library and was pretending to be sick so I wouldn't have to go to P.E., and there was a Life magazine. It was the "Year in Review" issue, and they had a large section--about eight pages, I think--about a new movement called gay liberation. So I'm sitting in the library, and I remember turning the page and seeing the word "homosexual." And I quickly shut the magazine, and I stole it. I took it home, and I hid it under the mattress like it was porno.

And on those days when I was getting beaten up and called a faggot, I would go home and I would pull that out, and I would see the pictures of these guys with long hair in the street, with their fists in the air, marching and confronting the police in New York City and in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

And I knew that if I could just get through high school, there was a place to go. So when I got out of high school, I went out to the freeway, and I stuck out my thumb, and I hitchhiked to San Francisco.

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IT WAS a different time then, for sure--it was very romantic. Meeting all the young people who emerged in this movement today, I wish there was some way I could take them back to that time when it was all brand new. I think that was the most exciting part of it--you didn't have to be educated or political or even all that smart to know that we were being allowed to participate in something that really was brand new.

In those days, if you were walking down Market Street and saw a gay man or a lesbian with a button or a t-shirt or something, you'd make eye contact and smile and say "Hi!" and you'd know you had something in common with that person. You'd fled there from Michigan or Arkansas or Idaho or someplace, to the two blocks in the whole world where you could hold hands with your lover and walk down the street and feel free.

I met Harvey Milk there. I was a street kid. I did what I had to do to survive, and it wasn't that grim--it was actually a very exciting time. Harvey had a little camera store just down the street from my apartment, and he told me, "You have to go back to school. You're smart, you need to get an education."

So I enrolled in San Francisco City College in the film department. I wanted to make movies, and I'd go in and buy supplies from Harvey. One day, I learned that he was going to put together a Super-8 film festival. It's now called the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, but it started in the back room of Harvey Milk's camera store with Super-8 films.

I made one, and Harvey wanted to see it, so I showed it to him. And he took me aside where nobody could hear, and he said, "Cleve, you have no talent at all, change your major." Thanks Harvey! And he said, "You should change it to political science, because if you do that, after I get elected, you can come and work at my office, because I know you have the attention span of a lima bean, and I know you're not going to be able to sit in class, but you can come and get credit working in my office."

I said, "Harvey, you've run three times, and you haven't come close to winning." But he said "I'm going to win," and I said, "That's good, because I don't do losing."

He did win, and he kept his promise, and so I went to work as a student intern the week that he took office. It was really exciting--I was 22 and working on a whole host of issues. Mostly neighborhood issues--getting a stop sign put in at a dangerous intersection, working to get funding for seniors' programs. And also gay rights, which was still such a brand new and volatile idea.

I remember well opening the mail with Anna Kronenberg and Dick Pabich in the morning, and sorting out the death threats and putting them in the threat file. And the ones that were the most scary, we'd show to the police--even though we suspected they'd sent it.

I really loved Harvey, and I think that comes through in the film. Harvey was the most empathetic person I've ever met. He was older than most of us, and I think it's also important to remember that he was a Jew, born in 1930. So when he was coming of age and his political beliefs were forming and his sexual orientation was forming, it was during the darkest years of the Holocaust.

I think that Harvey always carried that memory with him. Though he was very funny and joyous, there was always an undercurrent of sadness with him. I think that was because of his awareness of this history, and how very bad things could get and how very quickly it could happen.

He was a great mentor for kids, gay and straight, boys and girls. My mom and dad are still alive and very close, and they're very good people. But when I first came out, I scared them to death. My father was a clinical psychologist, and at that time, he bought into all that Freudian bullshit, so he blamed himself for what he perceived to be this illness that he had inflicted on his only son.

So it was tough that first year for him. My mom and dad are there for me always, and they're getting a little frail, but they still show up at the rallies and the marches. But at that time, I needed a dad, and Harvey was the most appropriate sort of gay father figure for me.

I loved him very much. He was also the first one to see something of value in me and to say that I had a contribution to make. And it wasn't just me that he did that for.

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ON NOVEMBER 27, 1978, I had left a file in my apartment on Castro Street. I went into City Hall, and Harvey said, "I need that file, go back and get it." I said, "Okay," and I went back to Castro Street to retrieve the file.

I was walking back down the street, and there was a restaurant on that block called The Bakery Café, which was very popular--and the union that I now work for, HERE, was trying to organize it. There was a picket line out in front--the guy who owned it was a real pig. So I joined the picket line. I was walking around, and the bus stopped and a woman leaned out the window and screamed at me, "Cleve, the mayor's been shot!"

So I got a taxi and went down to City Hall, and I went in the back door, on the other side from the mayor's chambers and the supervisors' chambers. I was looking for Harvey. I had a key to the back hallway that connects the supervisors' chambers to their individual offices.

I remember coming around the corner and seeing Harvey's feet sticking out in the hall. I knew it was him, because he only had one pair of dress shoes--these old beat-up wingtips that he bought at a thrift store, that had holes in them. I remember coming around the corner and looking in. I had never seen a dead person before. I've seen many since, but I had never seen what bullets do.

It seemed to me at that moment that everything was over. I had lost a man who loved me and believed in me. We had lost our leader. This movement was just in its infancy. I kept saying to myself, "It's over, it's over, it's all over." As the afternoon went on, and they took the body out, and they found a tape he'd left for us to play--because it's true that he predicted his death--I just kept saying to myself, "It's over, it's over, it's over. We lost everything."

That evening, people by the thousands and hundreds of thousands began to walk to Castro and Market Streets. They were gay and lesbian and straight, young and old, and Black and white, and by the time the sun set, we filled the street for block after block after block--thousands of people, carrying candles and walking in absolute silence down Market Street to City Hall.

I remember walking down that river of candlelight on Market Street and knowing that it wasn't over--it was just beginning.

Dan White went on trial. Somehow in San Francisco, they managed to come up with a jury that was all straight and all white. And on May 21, 1979, the verdict came out--he wasn't found guilty of murder.

People again left their homes and schools and places of business, and gathered on Castro Street. But that night, we weren't carrying candles--we were carrying torches and clubs. And we didn't walk silently down Market Street. We ran down Market Street, screaming bloody murder, and we stormed City Hall.

The police assembled on Polk Street, gladiator style, marching with their shields and beating their clubs against the shields and grunting. We scattered and ran in panic through the Civic Center Plaza as they fired tear gas canisters in.

Then one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in my life happened. A group of us realized that people were going to get trampled, and we started shouting, "Slow down, slow down." Then some really big lesbians came up with us, and started chanting, "Slow down, slow down."

We all started chanting, "Slow down, slow down; don't run, don't run." Other people in the crowd began to hear this chant, and they got what we were trying to do. The chanting went on: "Slow down, don't run! Turn around, fight back! Turn around, fight back!"

And that crowd, which had been panicking and running, slowed down, turned around and threw themselves against the lines of the police, and drove them back four blocks and burned every police car they left behind.

I'm not a violent man. I don't want violence, and I'm grateful that no one was killed that night. But I'm also grateful that we had the courage and the sense of history that night. We knew that this was a turning point. It was a transformational moment for the city.

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I WAS then summoned before the grand jury. I don't know how many of you know about those grand juries--it's an interesting institution in our democratic society where you could be summoned before it, held indefinitely, questioned in secret without counsel. When I went in, they said, "This is secret, you can't tell anybody what you're doing, and you have to answer these questions, and we can lock your ass up until you answer the questions. We have these photos of these people, and we want them identified."

So I found these old commie lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild. They said there's something in the law where you're allowed to leave the grand jury chambers to consult with counsel privately before responding.

So I took a big yellow legal pad and some pens, and I went in and sat down. They began: "What is your name?" I said, "Could you repeat the question?" Then: "I respectfully request permission to consult with counsel before responding." So I went outside, and I had a cigarette and coffee. Then I went back in and said: "Cleve Jones."

"What is your address?" "Could you repeat the question?" "I respectfully request permission to consult with counsel before responding." Went outside, had a cigarette and a cup of coffee. "At 593A Castro St."

I won't go through the whole thing. But finally, toward the end of their patience, the prosecutor said, "You know, we can lock you up forever, and you have to answer the questions." I said, "I am a community activist, I will answer your questions truthfully, and it's my intention to publish the questions that you've asked me, and the answers that I've given." They asked "Are you going to cooperate or not?" And I said, "Could you repeat the question?"

Finally, they said, "We want you to describe in detail how you got from Castro Street to City Hall on the night of May 21, 1979." Went outside, had a cigarette, came back in and said, "On foot." I was dismissed.

A few days later, there was the gay pride march, and there were hundreds of thousands of people there. I'd been getting a lot of death threats, so I had the biggest, meanest dykes I could find all around me. And as we're marching down the street, all of a sudden, this guy comes off the sidewalk, with greasy hair and a weird polyester gray suit. He ran right up to me, and said "You're Cleve Jones, you're Cleve Jones." I said, "Yes." And he said, "I was on the grand jury, you were fabulous!"

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A FEW weeks later, the Speaker of the California Assembly called and said, "I need to hire somebody; would you like to have a job as a consultant to the Assembly health committee." I got hired as the first openly gay legislative consultant to the California legislature; this despite the fact that I had no education whatsoever.

I was assigned to the health committee, so my job was to look at all of the legislation going before the health committee, and then work with the Democratic members to communicate the wishes of the Democratic leadership on all these bills. I didn't know anything about any of it, so I subscribed to every publication I could think of that dealt with public health issues, and one of them was the catchily titled Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

And it was there--in June 1981, I think--that I read those first two paragraphs about clusters of homosexual men suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia.

I knew immediately that this was bad and met shortly afterward with Dr. Marcus Conant from UCSF, and he took me to the clinic where I met the first person I watched die of AIDS--his name was Simon Guzman.

I'll never forget it, because he was in an isolation ward, and we had to wear spacesuits to go in and out. He was alone, and on the table next to him, there were photographs of him with his family. He was a beautiful young man before he got sick. There was a photo of him with his nieces on the beach and his beautiful smooth brown skin, and his beautiful dark brown eyes, his great, flashing smile. And I looked at the photo, and I looked at him and this horrible way of dying.

It's hard to convey. I see many of you know what I'm talking about, but for the younger people, there's just no way to communicate to you what it was like. By 1985, most of everybody I knew was dead or dying. You would see people dying in the street.

I could walk with you down Castro Street and tell you a story about every apartment building on those blocks--this is where Harry died; this is where Bill died; this is where they found George's body six weeks after he passed away because no one bothered to check on him; this is where Harold starved to death because he didn't have the strength to go out and find food, and no one was caring for him; this is where Billy was evicted when his landlord found out.

It was a nightmare, and it went on for 10 years. I recently spoke with the woman who sewed the AIDS quilt--I got all the credit and she did all the work--and she said, "You know, we cried every day for 10 years." When she said that, I thought it was hyperbole. And then, I cast my mind back to that time, and it's true--we cried every day, for 10 years, before treatment finally became available.

For me, it was that experience that set the stage for this new determination, especially around the issue of marriage equality. You know, I'm old school, and when I joined the gay liberation movement, if you'd suggested to me that in the year 2009, I would be campaigning for the right to get married and join the army...We were about smashing the patriarchy and ending war forever.

But I think this new determination around marriage equality comes out of that experience. How dare you not acknowledge our relationships? How dare you say that we're not a family, after what we have endured, after the people we've cared for, after the thousands of people we've watched die? I lost my partner--how dare you?

Whenever I see new young people in the movement, I think, "Thank god you're here." Because there was a time when we didn't know if you would be there, because it was just so overwhelmingly awful. Why would people come to the cities, why would people join this community, why would people become part of this movement when it was all death and dying and disease?

So we fought, and we struggled, and we survived. AIDS is not over, and it breaks my heart that another generation now is facing it. But at least there's treatment. At least there's some response--we have a way of dealing with it. The medications I take to keep me alive would, if I didn't have health insurance, cost $2,300 a month. So one of the things I beg of you is that you support the president on health care reform--that you do whatever you can to support President Obama and push for health care reform. Our community knows what it's like to not have access to health care and to these medications.

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I WANT to talk now about this march.

Last November, after the election, I began getting a lot of e-mails, especially from young people--and then even more after the film came out. I still have 3,000 unanswered e-mails in my inbox, but so many young people were writing and saying, "We want a march on Washington." And I replied, " I don't think it's such a good idea."

I didn't encourage it, partly because I looked at the idea of a march through the lens of previous marches, which were incredibly awful to put together--a long process of horrendous public meetings where people threw chairs at each other, and did their best to determine who was the "most oppressed," and had all these discussions about the whales and the redwood trees.

And I'm there--I'm down with the program. I'm a lefty, okay? I get it, but could we just talk about gay people for once, and our rights, and not have this whole laundry list of other issues?

Then there was Robin Tyler, and she's a great producer, but these things were turning into entertainments. That's one of the things that troubled me a lot about the last march in particular, and I felt alienated by it. It's great that celebrities and entertainers support us, but when they show up at these marches, suddenly, it's an Entertainment Weekly story, instead of a New York Times story. It's the arts page instead of the political section.

I had all these reasons why I didn't want to do the march--including that the previous marches had cost tons of money that often went missing. So I said, 'No, I don't want a march."

Then Join the Impact did that first round of national demonstrations, and I saw the power of this new technology to link us together and to activate people, and thought, "This is really interesting, I wonder if it will last." I remember some of the young people started using the phrase "Stonewall 2.0," and I thought, "Maybe, but maybe not." Because I'm old enough that I've seen these little spasms and outbursts, where every nine or 10 years, something outrageous happens, like a young man in Wyoming gets strung up on a fence and murdered, and then suddenly, there's young people out in the street, but it dissipates and vanishes, and it goes away and nothing happens.

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SO I was skeptical. All winter long, I kept saying, "No, no need to march."

Probably the biggest reason I said that was that I believed in Barack Obama. I chose, as did Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the film Milk, to leave California in the last days before the election--we went up to Nevada to campaign for Obama, and we were working precincts in Reno to try to help win the state, which we did win.

Then I came home to California, and I listened to the voicemails that came in while I was gone. There were the robo-calls, and they said, "Please listen to an important message from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama." And there was Barack Obama's voice saying, "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman."

The election results came in, and we started to celebrate, and then the news came from California, and it was devastating. I couldn't believe it. Then Inauguration Day comes, and who's there to give the benediction? Rick fucking Warren.

Then, at the end of February, Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave an interview to a gay newspaper in San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi has actually been a friend to me--she helped me with the quilt; she held the first fundraiser for the quilt in her home; she was the one who went to the National Park Service when they wouldn't let me display the quilt and convinced them that I would fluff it every 20 minutes so that the grass wouldn't die under it.

I think Nancy genuinely believes in equality for gay people, but she gave an interview to a gay newspaper in San Francisco, in her district, which has probably the largest concentration of gay and gay-friendly people in the world, and she said that repealing the Defense of Marriage Act was not a priority.

Then I called up Barney Frank, who was on our side before he was outed, and said "Barney, would you be willing to expand the ENDA bill to include housing and public accommodations?" And he said, "No, it won't pass."

When people like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and all the LGBT people who work in the Obama administration tell us, "It's not happening, we have to wait," I think what they're telling us is that they don't have the votes in Congress.

But I think that now is the time. I think we have a historic opportunity where a door has opened to us. And frankly, we're at the point where if you don't get that, then pay attention--you need to read more. The country has changed. We're at that point--we're ready to win, we're ready for equality.

I'm very pleased that so many people have been inspired by what happened in California in 1978, when we defeated the Briggs Initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from working in public schools.

That's the only time we have won a statewide battle. And we won that without all the black-tie affairs, without the tens of millions of dollars. We won because ordinary gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people knocked on door after door after door, saying, "I'm your neighbor. I live down the street from you, don't vote for this, it will hurt me."

We came out, and we fought like hell, and we won--30 years ago, against the same assholes with the same arguments. We won because we built coalitions. We reached out to Latino communities, we reached out to the African American community, to Asian-American communities. We did the hard work to win the labor movement and the Democratic Party and the socialists and the libertarians and anybody else we could find.

So, yes, that's inspiring. But we have to remember that this isn't about me, it's not about any one of you. It's not about anything but strategy. The question is: What does victory look like, what is the dream, and how do we get there?

Don't look back to 1978--look back to 1963 and 1964. The civil rights movement had been growing, slowly and steadily, confronting incredible brutality--the firehoses, the dogs, Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery. People lost their lives, and white America became aware, finally, of the barbaric nature of segregation. The country began to turn.

And at that point, it became clear to Dr. King and the other heroes of the time that the Southern states would never, ever willingly extend equal protection under the law to African American citizens. it was then that they set their sights on Washington, D.C., and went to President Kennedy, and after his death, President Johnson, and they succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says clearly that it's the law of the land that there can be no discrimination on the basis of race in employment, in housing, in public accommodations and in all areas governed by civil law.

Did this end racism? No, of course not. That is a fight we must all continue for generations to come. But it set the groundwork. It stated clearly that this is the law of the land, and every struggle since has been grounded in the reality that discrimination based on race was made illegal in the United States of America.

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THAT'S WHERE we need to look for strategy.

I just came from a fundraiser for Equality Illinois, and I love the work that they're doing. In California, we're gearing up to try to repeal Prop 8, and there's a huge debate within the community about whether we do it in 2010 or 2012--but we've got the Courage Campaign, and we've got Equality California. All across this country, there are thousands upon thousands of good people, dedicated people, pursuing what I believe to be a failed strategy.

I am sick and tired of fighting state by state, county by county, city by city, for fractions of equality--for impermanent victories that can be done away with by a popular vote of 50 percent-plus-one, and we're returned to second-class citizenship again.

And also, let's get real: Our brothers and sisters in Massachusetts; our brothers and sisters in Iowa and Vermont; you in Illinois if you get this bill through your legislature; our brothers and sisters in New York if the New York state Senate can ever find the keys to the chamber and figure out which party they belong to; even if the California Supreme court had overturned Prop 8--we would still be second class citizens.

Because the most important and significant rights granted to heterosexuals through marriage are determined not by the states, but by the federal government. This isn't my opinion; it's a fact.

I'm not criticizing any individuals or groups that followed this strategy. It was their only choice. In the 1970s, there were little isolated places--college towns like Ann Arbor and Madison--where we could win the right to keep our apartment if they discovered that we were queer. There were cities like San Francisco and Boston, where we got enough power, finally, to get citywide protection against discrimination in housing and employment. We've made great steps.

But the time has come now to state clearly what the dream is. And it's also time to recognize that this strategy we've been pursuing seems almost designed to separate us from each other--because if you're just working on your state or on your city, you're not linking up. What about all of those people in all of those states and all of those cities where there's no chance in hell that legislatures are going to pass this kind of law?

So this is why I'm supporting the march and doing everything I can to build it. Now is the time to shift the strategy of our movement. This isn't to abandon local work, because we have to respond to every attack, and we have to fight back. But we have to do so in a national context, with one unifying demand.

We don't have a laundry list for this march, we're marching for one demand, and one demand only: It's called the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We are a people protected in all places governed by civil law in all 50 states, period. That's what we're fighting for.

I believe we're equal. If you believe we're equal, it's time to act like it. A free and equal people do not settle for compromises. We do not accept timelines where we can't get that this year, but maybe if we fight for five years, we can get marriage in 20 years, and on and on. No--now is the time.

When I travel, which is all the time, I go to different cities and all these different communities, and I meet all my brothers and sisters: gay men, lesbian women, transgender people, bisexual people. We're equal--but some of us don't believe it. Some of us are pretty deeply invested in our victimhood. Some of us are really afraid of winning, I think.

What I see is that we're equal. We're equal in our ability to form and sustain loving relationships. We're equal in our ability to parent and foster parent and adopt. We're equal in our ability to defend our country. We're equal in our ability to build strong neighborhoods and healthy communities.

If you believe it, then act that way. That's what we're trying to say with this march.

Transcription by Matt Korn and Michael Schwartz.