When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  I spent most weekends in San Francisco, grateful for the cool fog as Sacramento heated up. Many nights I’d stay at Dennis Peron’s house on 17th Street, where one could find the most potent weed and always the cutest tie-dye boys, while listening to Dennis plot to legalize marijuana. I danced at the Stud or at the Galleria or Trocadero, drank at the Midnight Sun, and cruised the crowded streets when the sun broke through the fog and the boys peeled off their shirts. We’d lie on the grass lawns of Dolores Park or hike up the hill to Buena Vista and walk the paths between the eucalyptus trees.

  A new cable television service began that summer called Cable News Network. In July, the Republican party selected Ronald Reagan as their candidate against Jimmy Carter. Election Day came and Reagan obliterated the peanut farmer from Georgia, and Republicans took control of the US Senate for the first time in twenty-eight years.

  In April, Fidel Castro announced suddenly that anyone who wished to leave Cuba was free to do so. The Mariel Boatlift would last until October, but most of the 124,000 Cubans to flee arrived in Florida in May and June. Into the mix of political and economic refugees, the Castro regime also added criminals and mental health patients. In addition, large numbers of gay, lesbian, and transsexual Cubans seized the opportunity to leave. The community rallied to receive them, secure housing, find jobs, and sponsor language schools for the flood of immigrants. Hundreds would settle in San Francisco.

  Gay Freedom Day 1980 arrived, and I was surprised to see carnival rides and a giant Ferris wheel in San Francisco Civic Center. A new crew of organizers clearly wanted to depoliticize the commemoration of the Stonewall riots as much as possible, which annoyed me. Anne Kronenberg was there; we hadn’t seen each other for a while and rode around on the Ferris wheel, looking down at the plaza that just thirteen months earlier had been filled with smoke and fire and rage. Anne and I just shook our heads. I was uneasy, and found myself listening for the distant sound of Cossack hooves.

  In Sacramento, the shoot-out between Leo McCarthy and Howard Berman ended with an ironic draw. The dapper and ever wily Willie L. Brown Jr. pounced. The ultraliberal, pro-gay black assemblyman from San Francisco made a deal with the Republican caucus and, with a majority of their votes, became Speaker of the California State Assembly.

  One of the prevailing rumors of the time was that the Republicans were alarmed by the “imperial” Speakership of McCarthy and imagined Berman to be even worse. Maybe they even saw Willie Brown, in his Brioni suits and gorgeous hats, as someone they could work with for a while and then replace. If so, they underestimated Brown, who would rule as Speaker for the next fifteen years, one of the most powerful politicians in California history.

  After Brown took over, many of the staffers loyal to McCarthy or Berman were sacked, but I was spared. In a rare meeting with the Speaker-elect, he told me my job was secure for now.

  I walked home from the capitol on Monday, December 8. It was chilly in Sacramento and I poured myself a few shots of bourbon, flopped down on my roommate’s big recliner, and turned on the TV. The sound was off and I had to get up to adjust it on the set as I recognized the building on the screen: it was the Dakota on Central Park West at 72nd Street in Manhattan. Marvin and I had walked past it many times, sometimes on our way to cruise the Rambles area of Central Park.

  No, no, I thought. Not again. Not him.

  I watched the news and drank my bourbon. Sometime later the telephone rang; it was my father. He’d been reaching out more since I started working for the Speaker. I said hello.

  “What’s wrong? You sound upset.”

  “Yeah, I just heard the news, Dad.”

  “What news?”

  “Dad, it’s all over the TV, someone shot John Lennon. He’s dead.”

  There was a pause. “The Beatle? Is that what you’re upset about?” and a short bark of laughter.

  Less than two weeks earlier, we had marched with our candles from Castro Street to City Hall on the 2nd anniversary of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. My memories were strong then and vivid, of the colors painted by Dan White’s bullets across the smooth walls and marble floors of City Hall.

  “I can’t talk now, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hung up.

  President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January of 1981. John Lennon, Blondie, Dolly Parton, and Kool and the Gang topped the charts, while Iran released the fifty-two Americans they had held in captivity for over a year. In Poland, the Solidarity movement was about to topple the communist regime. A brutal civil war raged in El Salvador. On March 1 Bobby Sands began his hunger strike in Long Kesh prison; he would be one of ten members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army to starve to death. In May, Maya Lin’s design for a Vietnam War memorial was selected.

  I was happy with my job and knew that Art Agnos was going to bring me back to San Francisco to work in his district office. Agnos and his staff were known for their strong constituent services. We had a reputation for solving problems and respecting the many diverse communities that made their homes in the 16th Assembly District.

  I’d been dating a handsome experimental filmmaker and musician named Rock Ross who looked a bit like young Burt Reynolds. He lived in an old storefront in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, where we spent most weekends.

  That first Friday of June 1981, I was driving in a borrowed car, heading back to San Francisco, Kim Carnes on the radio singing “Bette Davis Eyes.” I had my own office in Assemblyman Art Agnos’s district office in the State Building on McAllister where the police cruisers had burned just two years earlier.

  I was optimistic. I thought that Agnos would eventually become mayor and that I would soon run for the Board of Supervisors. More gay people were moving to San Francisco every day. In what was now called “The Castro,” we were a majority of the population; increasing precincts in central San Francisco had significant percentages of gay and lesbian households. Anything was possible.

  I spent Sunday in Dolores Park, but with a busy day ahead I got home and to bed before too late. I knew there would be a stack of assignments for me: letters from constituents, requests for meetings with my boss, and the many reports, newsletters, bulletins, and press accounts we looked at every week. There were a few I always made sure to read. One was that clinically grim-sounding Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control, the MMWR.

  When I returned to the office, the June 5, 1981, edition of the MMWR was on my desk. The headline said “Pneumocystis Pneumonia—Los Angeles.” I read and reread the article over and over, then carefully clipped it with scissors, scrawled “just when things were looking up” in the margin, and tacked it to the corkboard over my desk.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Avalanche

  I LEFT ART AGNOS’S DISTRICT OFFICE IN THE OLD STATE BUILDING IN Civic Center and decided to walk the couple miles home to the Castro. Walking past the Twin Peaks bar I heard a sharp rap on the window and turned to see Hank Wilson, grinning his usual broad smile and motioning me to come in.

  “Cleve, have you met Bobbi Campbell?” Bobbi and I nodded at each other. We’d never spoken before but I’d seen him at the Stud, and frequently at the Club Baths at 8th and Howard. I also knew him as part of a circle of guys I sometimes hung out with who were starting to wear nun’s habits with whiteface and adopting hilarious sister names.

  “Hi, how are you?” I asked.

  Bobbi looked anxious and I noticed an odd discolored patch of skin on his forehead. He saw my glance and said, “Shingles. Hurt like a motherfucker but stopped before it affected my eyes. It’s better now.”

  Hank looked at Bobbi with an expression I’d not seen before on the ever-enthusiastic Hank. “I think you should show Cleve.”

  Bobbi looked at the floor and stretched his legs out. I guessed what was coming and felt my stomach clench. I’d been waiting for this moment since I read the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report a few weeks earlier. I’d tried to keep it out of my mind
but in my heart I understood that something mysterious and dangerous and new was here. And now I was going to see it for the first time.

  Bobbi slowly unlaced his sneakers and took off his shoes and socks. It was a bit anticlimactic. Hank and I looked at the bottom of his right foot and saw the small, slightly raised blue-grey spots.

  “At first I thought they were bruises,” Bobbi said. “I’d been on a hike and thought maybe I’d stepped on a rock too hard or had a pebble in my boot.” The spots didn’t look menacing at all.

  “It’s Kaposi’s sarcoma,” Bobbi said matter-of-factly as he relaced his shoes.

  Hank and I exchanged a look. We were rarely at a loss for words, but neither of us knew what to say.

  Bobbi was the 16th person diagnosed with KS in San Francisco and one of the first publicly identified people living with AIDS. He wrote a column called “Gay Cancer Journal” for the Sentinel.

  Dr. Marcus Conant was a dermatologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He’d written to Assemblyman Art Agnos shortly after the MMWR report to ask for help. He took me out to dinner at the Zuni Café on Market Street and leaned forward as he told me what he thought was happening. “We’re seeing more of these cases every week. I think it is something new, a virus we don’t know, even though it may have been around for decades or longer. I think it’s sexually transmitted. It takes down the body’s natural immune system. I think it kills most, maybe everyone who is infected.”

  I took in what he had said and believed it. “Well. Then we’re all going to die,” I said.

  Conant took me up to the University of California Medical Center in Parnassus Heights, the foggy neighborhood about two miles west of Eureka Valley and Castro Street. We were there to visit a patient named Simon Guzman, a young Mexican American man. He was terribly gaunt, and the sight of all the tubes and wires made me take a few deep breaths as I walked towards his bed.

  Then I saw the blue-grey lesions, the same color as the spots on Bobbi’s feet, but large and raised and covering most of his body. I had already heard and believed Dr. Conant’s urgent message. But here was the evidence before us, drawing the life from the once-vigorous body now unmoving but for the little jerks of breath into his wasted lungs.

  Afterward, I called Hank Wilson and we met at Badlands. I got there around 4:00 p.m. and saw that Hank was already on his second beer. He didn’t usually drink much. Outside on 18th Street, the sidewalks began to get busy as the after-work cocktail hour began. Across the street the Pendulum, San Francisco’s only black gay bar, was filling up. I sat next to Hank and ordered a vodka tonic. Hank looked out the window silently as the guys walked by in their tight jeans.

  “I think this could be really bad.” Hank offered an attempt at his usual broad smile but it fell short. “I think we’re in trouble and we may lose everything.”

  I nodded. “I’m scared too.”

  Hank finished off his beer and waved to the bartender for another. “What if it’s an epidemic?”

  That word rose up and hung over us like a tendril of smoke in a closed room.

  “If it is an epidemic, then what happens to all this?” Hank pointed to the street. “Everything we’ve gained has come out of this neighborhood and the others we have built across the country. We lose our political power. We lose our culture, our safety.”

  I lit a cigarette and nodded. “Right now, thousands of gay boys are moving here every year to be part of this.” Outside it was dark and the sidewalks were crowded with young men of all races. The DJ turned up the music and the dance floor filled with boys. “The religious nuts are going to have a field day.”

  Hank shook his head. “They may lock us all up.”

  I stubbed out my Marlboro. “They may not need to; we may just all die.”

  Hank was always the first to laugh at me when I was melodramatic, but he didn’t say anything as we headed for the door.

  Bobbi pushed open the door to Star Pharmacy, calling out, “Hey Jackie, you look great, girl, I was wondering if you would let me put this up in your window? Right here on the corner maybe?”

  Bobbi air-kissed the middle-aged woman with cat’s-eye glasses and a grey/blonde bouffant who managed Star Pharmacy on the northwest corner of Castro and 18th Streets, the heart of the gay neighborhood. Jackie beamed back. “What you got there? Are we having a march? A street fair?”

  Bobbi unrolled the poster he’d made with Polaroid photos of the lesions on his feet and the words “Gay Cancer” printed at the top. Jackie’s smile froze for a moment as she read the poster, but then she reached for Bobbi and hugged him close.

  “Yes, darling, let me get some tape and we’ll put it up right here by the front door.” Within minutes, a dozen or so men had stopped on the sidewalk to read the poster.

  CHAPTER 24

  A Thousand Dead

  I MET FELIX VELARDE-MUÑOZ DANCING AT THE I-BEAM CLUB ON HAIGHT Street during the traditional Tea Dance held every Sunday afternoon. I went alone, mostly just wanting to drink and dance, and found myself out on the large dance floor as the DJ spun the Diana Ross hit “I’m Coming Out.” The floor was soon packed with men, some shirtless, dancing in couples, groups, or alone. The DJ played “Tainted Love” and I saw Felix dancing by himself in a white tank top, khakis, and hiking boots. He had some funny moves and a kind of earnest clomping intensity that made me smile. Soon we were dancing together and then walking down Haight Street and over the hill back to the Castro and his apartment on Eureka Street, between 18th and 19th Streets. Felix was shy to talk at first but passionate about his work as a staff attorney with MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Foundation. We bonded politically and physically.

  Before I met Felix, I had been seeing a guy named Frank Cook, an activist from Long Beach and a founder of the gay Democratic club there. We’d run into each other at Democratic conventions and fundraisers and always found a way to get some time alone. He had a muscular furry body and sometimes visited me where I was living on 25th Street with an actor named Donald Currie. After a while I found out he had a boyfriend back home. We continued to see each other at Democratic Party events and would sometimes share a bed, but I had no illusions about the relationship.

  By the summer of 1982, almost five hundred cases of what was being called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) had been reported to the CDC in two dozen states. But the designation of “gay-related” was already in question as cases of the new disease were identified among hemophiliacs, Haitian immigrant communities in Florida, and users of injectable drugs. Some two hundred people had died.

  In August, a National Lesbian and Gay Leadership Conference met in Dallas and—as a side event—brought together activists from the recently organized Gay Men’s Health Crisis of New York, the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation founded by Dr. Conant, and gay and lesbian leaders from around the country, to meet with officials from the Centers for Disease Control to discuss the new disease. One of the few decisions to come out of the meeting was to drop the term GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) in favor of the more accurate and less prejudicial term acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

  In October we learned of the first confirmed cases among blood transfusion recipients.

  I moved back to San Francisco full time and continued to work for Assemblyman Art Agnos, who encouraged me to spend as much time as needed to assist the KS Foundation. The organization was growing slowly and staffed mostly by volunteers, including my roommate Donald, many of my friends, and some folks I would just drag in from the street, among them a Vietnam War veteran named Ken Jones. Ken and I had first met back in 1979 when we worked with the Gay Freedom Day Committee. He was a few years older and had traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, which impressed me. He and I hit it off and spent hours leafleting the boys on Castro Street.

  Winter came. I drank heavily and went to bed each night dreading the nightmares and cold sweats that became ever more frequent.

  Marv
in and Scott were in New York. Marvin came down with meningitis and was very ill but recovered. I’d never known anyone to get meningitis.

  Felix grew distant. We would still cuddle in his bed for hours, but when I would try to kiss him he would turn his head away. He was getting thin and never wanted to go dancing anymore. I asked about his health one night; he gave me a look that shut me right up.

  Frank stopped showing up at Democratic Party meetings. I wanted to call him but was afraid his boyfriend would answer the phone. I never saw him again.

  One day while registering voters on the corner of Castro and 18th I noticed a cute short boy with dark hair and mustache leaning against the newspaper shack and watching me. He smiled slyly and sauntered over, saying, “I guess I should register to vote, huh?”

  I assured him that it was his civic duty to participate in the democratic process, unless he was prepared to engage in armed struggle against our oppressors. He lifted his head and laughed as I handed him a pen and the form. He filled it out and handed it back. Keith Rice was his name and he lived a block away on 18th Street and Ford. I pointed out that he had failed to enter his telephone number.

  “But it says that’s optional.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “No, actually, for you it’s required.”

  Keith worked at the Village Deli Café, where I would see him several times a week. I thought he was more beautiful every time I saw him. He was nervous about bringing me home because he lived with an older guy for free and didn’t want him to be jealous.

  I could not get enough of his lips, and whenever possible we spent hours making love and slept curled up together on foggy nights. I was falling in love with him.