When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, Jones Cleve

The partial inspiration for the ABC television mini-series

You could read Cleve Joness book because you should know about the struggle for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights from one of its key participants--maybe heroes--but really, you should read it for pleasure and joy.--Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

Born in 1954, Cleve Jones was among the last generation of gay Americans who grew up wondering if there were others out there like himself. There were. Like thousands of other young people, Jones, nearly penniless, was drawn in the early 1970s to San Francisco, a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual freedom.

Jones found community--in the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the citys bathhouses and gay bars like The Stud, and in the burgeoning gay district, the Castro, where a New York transplant named Harvey Milk set up a camera shop, began shouting through his bullhorn, and soon became the nations most outspoken gay elected official. With Milks encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in the movement. When Milk was killed by an assassins bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentors progressive mantle--only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again.

By turns tender and uproarious, When We Rise is Jones account of his remarkable life. He chronicles the heartbreak of losing countless friends to AIDS, which very nearly killed him, too; his co-founding of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation during the terrifying early years of the epidemic; his conception of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest community art project in history; the bewitching story of 1970s San Francisco and the magnetic spell it cast for thousands of young gay people and other misfits; and the harrowing, sexy, and sometimes hilarious stories of Cleves passionate relationships with friends and lovers during an era defined by both unprecedented freedom and and violence alike.