Cleve Jones
(1954 - living) U.S.A.
Activist
Jones was born in Indiana and moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s.
He is the initiator of the The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and is running for San Francisco city supervisor.
On May 21, 1979 thousand of gay and straight protestors led by Cleve Jones, took to the streets in protest of jury convicted killer Dan White of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Jones conceived the Quilt in 1985. By the time of 1985 march, the number of San Franciscan who had died from Aids-related illness reached the 1,000 mark: Jones asked each of the marchers to write on a placard the names of these lost to Aids.
Levine notes that "At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on the ladders, above the sea of candlelight, taping these placards to the walls of San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked to Jones like a patchwork quilt". Thus the Aids Quilt was born.
The Quilt consists of individual three-by-six-foot panels sewn together by friends, family and loved ones.
 "By the fifth time the entire quilt was unfolded in public, in Washington, D.C., on October 11, 1996, it comprised 45,000 panels. But this time we unfolded it with a sense of hope - hope for effective treatments, for compassionate public policy, for a vaccine.
Also for the first time, the president and first lady of the United States were there. And as I had first imagined in 1985, it covered the National Mall, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument."
Excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001 - et alii
|
