When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Cleve Jones

  Photo here courtesy the author. Photo here by Sarah K. Burris. Used with permission.

  Jacket design by Alison Forner

  Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-31544-9

  E3-20161026-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Ghost Ranch

  2. Gay Liberation Arizona Desert

  3. Polk Street

  4. Betty Blender Finds a Tree House

  5. Struggling for Solidarity

  6. Going to the Tubs

  7. On the Road

  8. Père Lachaise

  9. On Barer Strasse

  10. Homesick

  11. Ten Million Queers

  12. Back to Scott

  13. Anita Bryant

  14. Summer of ’77

  15. Supervisor Harvey Bernard Milk

  16. Building the Army

  17. Raise the Sky

  18. A Victory and a Massacre

  19. A Long Winter

  20. White Night

  21. We March on Washington

  22. Sacramento

  23. The Avalanche

  24. One Thousand Dead

  25. Needle and Thread

  26. A Stupid Idea

  27. We Bring a Quilt

  28. Ricardo

  29. Loma Prieta

  30. Counting the Days

  31. The President Sees the Quilt

  32. A New World

  33. Making Milk

  34. Proposition 8

  35. New Life

  36. Meet in the Middle

  37. National Equality March

  38. Equality Across America

  39. “Something greater than once they were.”

  Acknowledgments

  Newsletters

  For Elizabeth, John, Frankie, and Sylvia,

  And in memory of Marion Kirk Jones

  Preface

  The movement saved my life.

  I signed up in ’68, when I was 14 years old. Like other young people across the United States, I wanted to do my part to end the war in Vietnam. My family had just moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona and when Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers came to organize the grape pickers, my friends and I knew right away that it was part of the bigger picture and signed up for picket duty and walked in the marches.

  It took a while for word of the women’s movement to reach us in the Arizona desert but when we heard about it we joined that call, too, circulating petitions for the Equal Rights Amendment and speaking out against rape, sexual harassment, and wage inequity.

  It wasn’t until 1971 that I learned that part of the movement was especially for people like me. I read about it in the “Year in Review—1971” issue of Life magazine in my high school library while skipping gym class. Gym wasn’t a safe place for me; I didn’t get beat up much but the threat was always present. I invented a mysterious lung malady to persuade our family physician that I was too ill to attend physical education. Instead, I’d spend the hour in the library reading magazines or pretending to study while trying to remember to cough every few minutes.

  So it was that one afternoon I was idly flipping through the pages of Life magazine when the headlines leapt off the page: “Homosexuals in Revolt!” Several pages of text and photographs of the new gay liberation movement followed, including photos of handsome long-haired young men marching with fists in the air through the streets of Greenwich Village, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. I was thrilled and then amazed when I looked closely at one of the photo captions and read that a small group called Gay Liberation Arizona Desert was holding meetings at Arizona State University, the school where both my parents taught and where I would no doubt enroll after I graduated from high school the following year.

  I am pretty sure that was the exact moment I stopped planning to kill myself.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ghost Ranch

  I WAS BORN INTO THE LAST GENERATION OF HOMOSEXUAL PEOPLE WHO grew up not knowing if there was anyone else on the entire planet who felt the way that we felt. It was simply never spoken of. There were no rainbow flags, no characters on TV, no elected officials, no messages of compassion from religious leaders, no pride parades, no “It Gets Better,” no Glee, no Ellen, no Milk. Certainly no same-sex couples with their kids at the White House Easter egg hunt. Being queer was sick, illegal, and disgusting, and getting caught meant going to prison or a mental institution. Those who were arrested lost everything—careers, families, and often their lives. Special police units hunted us relentlessly in every city and state. There was no good news.

  But there were a lot of words, cruel words, hurled on the playground and often followed by fists. They were calling me those words long before I had a clue what they meant. Then one day when I was about 12, one kid kept calling me a homo.

  Near tears, I yelled back, “What does that even mean?”

  He said, “You’re a homosexual and you’re going to hell.” So I went to my father’s library—he was a professor of clinical psychology—and looked it up. I remember vividly the shame of reading that I was sick, psychologically damaged.

  By 12 years old I knew that I needed a plan. The only plan I could imagine was to hide, never reveal my secret, and, if discovered, commit suicide.

  I graduated from high school, barely, in June 1972 and traveled to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, for a gathering of Quakers called the Inter-Mountain Friends Fellowship. My mother and I had started attending the Phoenix Friends Meeting a few years earlier. Supposedly some of my father’s ancestors had been Quaker, but my artistic but practical mother’s main motivation was avoiding conscription. In the early 1970s all young men were required to register for the draft at 18, and thousands were sent against their will every year to fight, kill, and die in Vietnam. It was my worst nightmare: gym class with guns and rednecks in a jungle. Mom knew that Quakers and members of other “peace churches” like the Mennonites and Jehovah’s Witnesses were being granted conscientious objector status that kept them out of the war. My family was not religious, but we opposed the war. My paternal grandfather, Papa, was even willing to move us all to Canada rather than see me, his first grandchild, sent to war or forced into exile alone.

  As it happened, I loved the Quakers, loved the silence of Meeting for Worship, and loved the principles of simplicity and peace by which they lived. From the Friends I learned the history of nonviolent resistance and civil disobe
dience in the struggles against war and for peace and social justice. In the Meeting I also found some friends and even a boyfriend of sorts for the last two years of high school.

  A few weeks after graduation, I joined some of the Quakers on a VW bus trip. We sang along to Don McLean’s “American Pie” and rode across the desert to New Mexico for a few days’ retreat at Ghost Ranch near Taos. The land there is magnificent, and I spent hours every day hiking the mesas by myself in between various meetings and discussions, mostly about the war and the civil rights movement.

  I met a guy named Mel there. He was older than me, and taught at a college in Logan, Utah. We went on walks together and talked about politics and literature. We shared a love for Hermann Hesse novels and the Moody Blues and talked about books with the excitement that was typical of young people then. One day Mel confessed to me that he was “probably bisexual” and I told him that I “probably” was, too. We exchanged addresses and promised to stay in touch after the conference ended and I returned to my family.

  That summer, our family left Arizona and returned to Michigan, where our parents had grown up. We spent every June, July, and August outside a tiny village called Omena where Mom and Dad had purchased a ramshackle old house on a sand dune overlooking a small inlet on Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan.

  Mel and I wrote back and forth, and he asked me to join him for a trip to California for Pacific Yearly Meeting, the annual gathering of Quakers on the West Coast. The Yearly Meeting would be held in Moraga, California, which I noted on the map was just east of San Francisco. I’d been dreaming about San Francisco all year.

  Somehow I persuaded my parents to let me fly to Denver in the first week of August. Mel met me there, at the old Stapleton Airport, and we drove up to Logan first, then across the deserts and mountains to the green hills of Northern California. We were sleeping together by then, but not talking about it.

  Pacific Yearly Meeting took place on the campus of St. Mary’s College in Moraga. There were all sorts of gatherings and planning sessions and other meetings, and I spent the first day just wandering around, seeing which of my friends were in attendance and checking out the various workshops posted on the communal bulletin board. A small card caught my eye: “Gay and Lesbian Friends will meet on Saturday afternoon,” with a time and room number. My first emotion was fear—fear of taking a step that could not be undone. There were the names of two organizers on the card as well, Gary and Ron. My stomach turned over; I was so frightened and confused I couldn’t sleep at all that night.

  The following afternoon found me pacing around the building where the meeting was to happen. I must have walked around the damn thing four or five times before getting up the nerve to go inside. And then I walked up and down the hallway trying in vain to catch a glimpse inside the room through the tiny door window.

  Eventually I took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and walked through—heart thumping, face flushed.

  Somebody laughed.

  “We wondered if you were going to show up.” More laughter. I looked around the room in amazement. Almost all of my favorite people were there. I cried, and then we all laughed.

  Gary Miller and Ron Bentley, the gay Quaker couple who had organized the meeting, lived on 16th Street in San Francisco and were active in an organization called the Council on Religion and the Homosexual as well as the newly formed Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club. They had invited Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon to speak at the meeting. Del and Phyllis were among the founders of the first national lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, and had just published their groundbreaking book, Lesbian/Woman.

  Del and Phyllis spoke mostly about the role of lesbians within the larger feminist movement but also about their efforts to change the hearts and minds of religious people. They inspired me enormously.

  Gary and Ron were nice but they seemed much older and not very cool, or maybe they were just on their best behavior. I had hair down to the middle of my back and loved rock and roll and smoking pot. I was pretty sure neither of them smoked. But they lived in San Francisco and I immediately accepted their invitation to visit after Yearly Meeting concluded.

  We crossed the Bay Bridge late in the afternoon on a clear day, driving west across the span from Oakland through Treasure Island and into the city. The fog was piled up behind Twin Peaks and beginning to pour down through the hills and valleys and into the densely packed pastel-colored homes dotting the city’s eastern neighborhoods.

  In the distance to the northwest we could see the Ferry Building, Coit Tower and Russian Hill, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Closer in, the skyscrapers of the financial district rose up on our right; on our left were shipyards, piers, warehouses, and a coffee-roasting plant all crowded crowded together south along the Bay’s edge. We rolled down the windows and the cold air smelled of sea and smoke and coffee and fog.

  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  I stayed with Gary and Ron for a few days and tried to explore the city. I found it very confusing. The streets in the eastern half of San Francisco are laid out on two different grids, which meet at an angle at Market Street. Every time I crossed Market I got lost, especially in the fog. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon encouraged me, and I went with Del to address students at Mission High School, my first—terrifying—experience with public speaking.

  There was a club called the Shed on the south side of Market Street between Sanchez and Noe Streets for gay kids who weren’t old enough to get into the bars. Developers tore it down a long time ago. It’s a gym and shops now, but before it was taken down it housed the headquarters of Harvey Milk’s campaign to defeat Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative. That was in 1978, six years after I first danced to James Brown, T. Rex, and Curtis Mayfield records at the Shed. Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” always got all the young dudes out on the dance floor, singing along, “Carry the newwws…”

  After a week I hitched a ride with some Quakers and other antiwar activists back to Phoenix, with a stop in Seal Beach where we attempted to blockade the Naval Weapons Station. As a child of faculty, I could attend Arizona State University for almost nothing. As a mediocre student who had barely graduated from high school, my options for college were extremely limited. I enrolled, but with little enthusiasm.

  I moved into one of the big dorms and struggled through the classes. I couldn’t concentrate. Every cute guy walking by, every headline or TV news broadcast from Vietnam or Alabama distracted me. I’d doze in class, daydreaming about sex and revolution.

  As early as elementary school I had been a poor student. It perplexed and troubled my parents greatly, coming as we do from families that greatly respect education. But my earliest memories are of hating school.

  Before we moved to Phoenix in 1968 we lived on Seneca Drive in Mount Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a clean, safe, and well-kept neighborhood of modest single-family homes, surrounded by other equally pleasant communities. Only white people lived there; the few Negroes (the polite term of the day) we encountered were housekeepers who took the streetcar in from Homewood and the Hill District downtown. Latinos, other than Ricky Ricardo, were almost unknown. Asians were unheard of, existing only in our consciousness as caricatures or cartoons from World War II films.

  There was no crime to speak of in Mount Lebanon, no fences between our neighbors’ yards and the undeveloped wooded areas with creeks and open meadows where we played that surrounded our homes. As soon as we could walk we were free to wander unsupervised, knowing there was no danger. In the winter, we constructed elaborate igloos and toboggan slides and engaged in raucous snowball warfare. In summer, we built forts in the woods and hunted for snakes and salamanders and other lost little critters that we would take to a buxom older woman next door who was known to all the kids in the neighborhood as Aunt Jane. She was always baking cookies for the kids who showed up at her door with battered birds and rabbits, often rescued at the la
st minute from the local cats or half flattened by a car. Miraculously, not one of the mangled animals we took to Aunt Jane ever died. She saved them all, every one, and when they were strong she released them into the wild as we slept. “Oh how cute they looked as they scampered away,” she would say as we sat on her front stoop eating the cookies warm from her oven.

  Divorce was almost unknown at that time and it really did seem as if we were all living in an idyllic, perfect, suburban sort of world. Fathers knew best, and didn’t run off. Nobody we knew used drugs or drank to excess. The only gangs were the packs of little boys in Buster Brown suits or Cub Scout uniforms.

  And yet, there was anxiety: among the adults, who tried to hide it from their kids; and among the kids, who sensed the grownups’ fears and had fears of our own. We rarely locked our doors, but there was fear.

  In class, while the teachers droned on, I would doodle mushroom clouds.

  In our living room Walter Cronkite spoke through our new black-and-white television of Cuba and missiles and Khrushchev. In school we filed silently down to the basement for mandatory air raid drills. We heard our parents after dinner, as we watched The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on the living room floor, talking about the Berlin Wall and, closer to home, Dr. Martin Luther King. My parents were among a few in our neighborhood who vocally supported the civil rights movement. Most offered no opinions; others sneered or got red in the face and shouted.

  I was 8 years old in the fall of 1962, when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over the Cuban missiles. We practiced air raids in the basement at school once a month. One year later, President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. I think it was the first time I saw my father cry. I was 11 in 1965 when the Watts rebellion incinerated large portions of Los Angeles.

  I turned 14 in 1968, when it seemed we were on the verge of revolution. The year began with the Tet offensive, a series of attacks by North Vietnamese forces across South Vietnam, including an assault on the US embassy in Saigon. US military involvement in Vietnam had begun in 1954, the year I was born, when the French Army was defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. By 1968, it was becoming clear that the war, which had raged my entire life, could not be won.