When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

Donald and I threw a big party to celebrate New Year’s Eve in his big house on 25th Street. It was the party of the night and all our friends were there and Bobbi Campbell arrived in his new silver lamé persona as a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

  “Hi, doll, you look fabulous, I’m Sister Florence Nightmare, RN.”

  Donald put a Gloria Gaynor record on and we danced and sang, “I will survive.”

  Nineteen eighty-two was over and I drank the champagne and danced and wondered how many of us would be alive next year.

  The world was still largely unaware of the misery to come, but we in the Castro neighborhood were growing more frightened every day. There was great division, wild speculation, dreadful rumors, and more and more stories of friends and neighbors suddenly stricken with diseases we’d never heard of before.

  The Democratic National Convention was held in San Francisco in July 1984. Gay and lesbian activists within the Democratic Party had made some progress in getting the party leaders to support the community, but not nearly enough. My friends Paul Boneberg and Mary Dunlap led the efforts to build a march on the Democratic Convention, and tens of thousands marched down Market Street from Castro to demand inclusion of gay and lesbian rights in the party’s platform as well as language calling for federal support of AIDS research and services.

  As the march approached the intersection of Market and Valencia Street, I was thrilled to see the black eagle on red flags of the United Farm Workers waiting to join us. Cesar Chavez, one of my great heroes, marched in the front line.

  We rallied in front of the Moscone Convention Center as Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro were nominated as the Democratic standard bearers. Outside, Bobbi Campbell addressed the protesters. A few weeks later he died.

  In November, Ronald Reagan crushed the Democratic ticket and was reelected in a landslide.

  By 1985, almost everyone I knew was dead or dying or caring for someone who was dying. The familiar faces of the neighborhood began to disappear. People I’d known for years would say hi to me on the street and I would not recognize them because they were so skinny and gaunt and grey. I’d stammer and struggle to find something comforting to say.

  I moved into a studio apartment on 18th Street between Sanchez and Church. Most nights I’d drink until the bars closed, stumble home, and pass out on the futon on the floor. I had nightmares every night and in the morning as I showered I examined every inch of my body in search of that first blue-grey spot.

  One morning I awoke to a searing pain in the back of my neck that rapidly spread up and over my scalp. At the hospital they told me I had shingles, and I thought of the angry scar on Bobbi’s forehead. The pain was agonizing and I dulled it with vodka and weed for weeks until it began to subside. A nurse told me coldly that I probably had AIDS.

  I grew more miserable and afraid every day. The community I loved was dying. The movement to which I had devoted my life was fractured and seemed powerless against the new enemy. I knew how to organize against right-wing Republicans and fundamentalist religious fanatics. I knew how to fight back against police brutality. I could gather a march or run a picket line. But this was so different and so much worse. It was the worst thing that could have happened.

  I knew I was getting sick, and it became increasingly difficult for me to go to work. In December I bought a one-way ticket to Maui, where my friends Donald Montwell and Jim Maness were now living. They had worked for years in the comedy club Valencia Rose, founded by Hank Wilson and Ron Lanza. Hank had introduced us and we shared the same radical politics. Donald and Jim took me in and I got a job in a tourist shop in Lahaina. I wanted to stop drinking, but Donald and Jim were heavy drinkers and there was always booze and pot and cocaine around. Some days I’d stay sober until after midnight then run through the cane fields to get to Hamburger Mary’s, the island’s only gay bar, before closing.

  I rented a little studio for myself on Luakini Street and started attending AA meetings. I quit drinking and smoking. I began to feel better and stronger. I saved money.

  On the other side of the world, Rock Hudson was in Paris seeking access to an experimental drug that was being tested on people with AIDS. The story broke and unleashed a media frenzy as the world learned that the great sex symbol and movie star was dying of AIDS. Newspapers and magazines proclaimed that “Now, anyone can get it.” I was disgusted and angry. Researchers found that the virus was present in tears. I decided it was time to stop crying alone on the beach. It was time to go home and fight.

  I landed back in San Francisco in November 1985 with my meager savings and no place to live. On the corner of Market and Castro I ran into Jim Foster. We’d never been particularly friendly since he backed Rick Stokes in the race against Harvey Milk, but he approached me and gently asked what I was doing. When I explained my situation he handed me a key and told me I could stay in his guest room until I got my shit together. I had said many cruel things about him over the years and was touched by his forgiveness and generosity.

  It was November, a difficult month for many San Franciscans for whom the tragedies of November 1978 were still a vivid memory: the tangled piles of bodies in Jonestown and the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in City Hall. As the seventh anniversary of the murders approached I began to write a speech for the annual candlelight memorial march.

  One windy afternoon my friend Joseph Durant and I were stapling flyers to Castro Street telephone poles to remind people of the upcoming memorial march. We stopped for a slice of pizza at Marcello’s and leaned against the newspaper racks outside as we ate and said hi to friends getting off the bus. Joseph pointed to the stack of San Francisco Chronicles and we read the headline: “ONE THOUSAND DEAD.” AIDS had already killed one thousand San Franciscans. We stood there, on the corner of Market and Castro, knowing that of those first thousand to die, almost all of them had lived and died within a half mile of where we stood. The number was staggering, and Joseph and I started listing aloud the names of everyone we could think of who had already died.

  We looked up and down Castro Street, saw the “painted lady” Victorian buildings, heard the laughter and music from the bars, smelled the coffee and the fog, and thought of all the beautiful young men who had died so hideously and so young and so near. And there was no evidence. The fog poured down from Twin Peaks as always. The buses still ran more or less on time. People went to work in the morning and came home at night. We were standing at the epicenter of a monstrous tragedy and it was almost completely invisible to the outside world.

  “If I had a bulldozer I’d knock down these pretty buildings,” I said to Joseph. He looked at me blankly with tears in his eyes. “Maybe if this was a meadow with a thousand corpses rotting in the sun people might get it, might understand.”

  Joseph nodded, “Yes, if we could line the bodies up, people would understand and they would have to respond.”

  Two months earlier, President Reagan had finally mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time. But he had not acted. There was no response.

  On November 27, Joseph and I met up at the corner of Market and Castro to wait for people to arrive for the annual Milk/Moscone march. I had Harvey’s old bullhorn and Joseph brought stacks of poster board and Magic Markers. We had a plan. As the marchers assembled I spoke to them through the bullhorn. “We’re going to remember Harvey and George tonight, but we’ve lost a lot more than them now. How many of you know someone who has been killed by AIDS?”

  Almost everyone in the growing crowd raised their hands. “My lover died this morning,” someone cried out.

  “Both my roommates are dead,” called out another.

  “Write their names,” I said, “Write their names.” People took the squares of cardboard and began to write the names of their friends, lovers, neighbors, and coworkers who had already died. Some hesitated, the power of the stigma associated with the new disease was so great. But soon hundreds of names had been inscribed on the posters and the large crowd began to
walk slowly and silently down Market Street towards the Civic Center and City Hall.

  At City Hall I addressed the many thousands who had marched and recited the names of as many of my dead friends that I could recall, starting with Bobbi Campbell and Frank Cook. And then I said:

  Let’s talk about tomorrow, America. This is what we want:

  We want to live, without fear of violence, without need for deceit.

  We want decent jobs, free from discrimination.

  We want homes to live in.

  We want our families.

  We want to be healthy, and cared for if ill or dying.

  We want to live.

  That is all we want, America, are we so different from you?

  And now our numbers have been diminished and many here among us tonight are already condemned to an early and painful death. But we are pledged—to the memory of those who have fallen and those who will follow—to see this struggle through to the end.

  And if the day should come when only one of us here tonight still stands—one person with a voice, a heart, and two strong arms—then even on that sad day our fight will continue.

  We are the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco. For two decades we have been on the forefront of an international struggle to liberate homosexual people from intolerable persecution, part of a movement that has profoundly transformed the lives of millions of gay men and lesbian women throughout the world.

  Tonight we remember Harvey Milk and George Moscone.

  Tonight we renew our pledge to Harvey’s dream: a dream of a time and a place where lesbians and gay men of every age, race, and background would stand together, taking our rightful place among the ranks of decent people everywhere who seek a world of peace and justice and freedom.

  We are those people.

  We send this message and we send our love to all people with AIDS everywhere—gay and straight, black and white—and to all our gay brothers and sisters who remain isolated and powerless. And most especially, we send this message and our love to all the small children who are, even now, growing up gay in a land of sorrow and fear.

  We send this message to America: We are the lesbians and gay men of San Francisco and though we are again surrounded by uncertainty and death, we are survivors. We shall survive again and we shall be among the strongest and most gentle people on this earth.

  The crowd then moved slowly east, away from City Hall through Civic Center Plaza to the old Federal Building facing United Nations Plaza. We had some ladders there and people climbed up the grey stone façade of the Federal Building with rolls of tape and the posters bearing the names of our dead. We taped the names to the wall. A light rain began and thousands stood there silently in the drizzle, reading the names upon the wall.

  I wandered through the crowd and heard what the people were whispering to each other as they pointed out the names. “I went to school with him.” “We grew up together.” “I didn’t know he was sick.” “When did he die?” “I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

  I got to the edge of the crowd and looked back over their heads at the patchwork of names that now covered the wall. It looked like a quilt.

  CHAPTER 25

  Needle and Thread

  THAT’S A DUMB IDEA, NO ONE’S GONNA DO THAT!” DENNIS PERON TOOK a deep hit on the fat joint that was being passed around his kitchen table on 17th Street and shook his head. “It’s too complicated, and what’s the point? And besides, nobody knows how to sew anymore.”

  Brownie Mary exhaled a small cloud of smoke. “I can sew.” She’d already been arrested a couple times for her famous marijuana brownies but she still baked them and distributed them for free to the AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital. She and Peron, one of the most famous pot dealers in town, had both noticed that the weed calmed nausea and improved the appetite of patients who were very sick and dealing with the side effects of the harsh medications.

  That was the reaction from pretty much everyone whenever I brought up my idea for a giant quilt bearing the names of people lost to AIDS. It was “too complicated.” For over a year everyone told me it was the stupidest idea they’d ever heard of.

  Brownie Mary was working with the Shanti Project now, a support group for people dying from AIDS and other terminal conditions.

  Ruth Brinker lived a few blocks away. One of her neighbors was ill and too weak to shop for groceries or prepare meals. Ruth decided to help him and began to organize volunteers to shop and cook for the man, but some of the volunteers went on vacation and he died alone. Ruth was horrified and began cooking in earnest and was providing free nutritious meals to a growing list of desperately ill and often abandoned patients. Her one-woman operation soon grew into a giant meal delivery service for AIDS patients.

  Almost everyone was involved one way or another. Some signed up with the “buddy” programs to visit the homebound and accompany patients to their medical appointments. Others worked to find housing, provide medical referrals, or offer legal advice or counseling.

  I called up Bob Stemple one morning. We had remained friends since that first night he picked me up on Polk Street and gave me food and money. He was working for the City Clinic now on the new HIV antibody test program. I’d volunteered for a study and knew that my blood had been tested for HIV. It was time to get the results.

  Bob met me at the Village Deli Café. Keith Rice wasn’t working that day and I was relieved, not wanting a witness if the news was bad. We ordered tuna on rye. Bob sipped his iced tea and asked me, “What do you think?”

  I said, “I think I’ve got it.”

  “You’re right.”

  I didn’t realize how much hope I had harbored until I felt it drain away. Of course I was infected—how could I not be when so many of my friends and lovers had already died? Bob smiled gently and reached out to take my hand. I didn’t cry. Not there, not yet.

  Dr. Conant saw me a few days later. “How much time do I have left?” I asked him.

  He laughed, “Don’t be melodramatic, you’re not even sick yet.” But I knew it was a death sentence. I was 31 years old.

  I couldn’t find a job in San Francisco but learned of an opening in Sacramento lobbying for social justice issues. The Quakers hired me to work for the Friends Committee on Legislation and I moved back to Sacramento. I found a little apartment downtown, just a few blocks from the capitol. I’d made several friends there when I was working for the Speaker a few years earlier and was happy to be able to reconnect and spend time with them, especially Ron Gray and his boyfriend Val Fernandez, who were both so handsome and fun. They were also raising a little boy named Justin who was now 5 years old. Gay couples with children were still rare and I was more than a bit in love with their little family. I loved babysitting.

  I went public with my HIV status on national television during an interview by Mike Wallace for a 60 Minutes segment that aired shortly after I moved back to Sacramento. The local newspaper ran a short article about me, and the death threats began with early morning telephone calls. At six a.m. the phone would ring and the voice on the other end would say, “You’re dead, faggot.” It was annoying; I’m not a morning person.

  I asked my friends what I should do. “Should I call the police? Should I get a gun?”

  “Girl, you’re a Quaker, what the fuck are you gonna do with a gun? And the police? Please, girlfriend, you know they don’t give a shit about you.”

  One day I worked late in our little office a few blocks away. Republican governor George Deukmejian was pushing to privatize the state’s prisons, seeing incarceration as a growth industry. The so-called War on Drugs had done nothing to reduce drug use, but it sure did fill up the prisons. The Quakers, with their historic concern for criminal justice issues, were trying in vain to slow the march towards prisons for profit. It was a new issue for me and I spent extra hours every day researching the governor’s prison construction budget and analyzing the disproportionate impact of incarceration on minority communities, e
specially African Americans.

  One hot muggy night I walked home from the capitol and arrived drenched in sweat. I took off my cheap suit and turned on the air conditioner as I changed into shorts and a T-shirt. It would take some time to cool off the apartment, so I set out to the little market around the corner for ice cream.

  Two guys were on the sidewalk coming towards me, young white guys with shaved heads and tats, and as they passed one of them snarled, “There’s too many fucking queers in this town.”

  That puzzled me but I resisted the urge to respond with, “Really, where? I’ve been looking everywhere.”

  I thought they were gone but I heard a noise and started to turn around when one of them struck me hard in the back, near my right shoulder. The force of the blow knocked me to the pavement and one of them kicked at my legs. I saw a knife glitter and felt a sharp sting under my chin. They laughed and ran away.

  When I tried to stand up I felt the pain where the first blow had landed. With my left hand I reached up to touch my back by the right shoulder blade and found a deep hole punched there. I was also bleeding from the neck where my chin bone had taken the jab meant to slit my throat. My white T-shirt was red now but I managed to crawl the half block back to my apartment complex before passing out in front of the mailboxes. Fortunately one of my neighbors found me there and called an ambulance before I bled to death. The blade had missed my carotid artery by a fraction of an inch.

  I regained consciousness in the ambulance and was very confused to look up into the eyes of a beautiful young Latino man in an EMT uniform. He had cut off my shirt and was attaching monitors to my chest and sticking an IV in my arm. He was bent over me, close to my face, and I could smell his soapy clean neck and saw a streak of my blood across his jaw. “Be careful,” I muttered, “I’ve got AIDS.”

  “Shh… we probably all do,” he responded and gently clasped my hand.

  Hours later, on a gurney from the operating room, I could hear my friends’ anxious voices as they waited in the corridor. I closed my eyes and waited until they were leaning over me, then opened my eyes and whispered, “Don’t just stand there. Call the fucking Chronicle.” That got a good laugh. Someone called Randy Shilts and it was on the front page the next day.