# Cleve Jones Born October 11, 1954 in West Lafayette, Indiana. American LGBTQ-rights and AIDS activist who has been continuously organizing in San Francisco from the mid-1970s to the present — beginning as a youth aide to [[Harvey Milk]], continuing through the [[AIDS Crisis]] as a co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and most enduringly as the **founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt** in 1985. ## Pre-AIDS Organizing Jones moved to San Francisco in 1973, becoming part of the Castro neighborhood's emerging gay political community. He worked as an aide to Supervisor [[Harvey Milk]] in 1977-1978 and was one of the lead organizers of the candlelight march from the Castro to City Hall on the night of Milk's assassination (November 27, 1978). He was also a lead organizer of the second candlelight march — the one that turned into the [[White Night Riots]] — after Dan White's May 1979 manslaughter verdict. ## The AIDS Memorial Quilt Jones conceived of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in November 1985, after a march commemorating the assassinations of Harvey Milk and [[George Moscone]]. Frustrated that the names of the AIDS dead were being lost — and that conventional cemetery burial often was not available because of family rejection — Jones proposed that survivors create panels memorializing each person who had died of AIDS, sewn together into a continuously-growing communal quilt. The Quilt: - **First displayed** on the National Mall during the second National March on Washington in October 1987, with 1,920 panels - **Has grown** to over **50,000 panels** memorializing more than **110,000 individuals** — making it the largest single piece of community folk art in the world - **Has been continuously displayed** in pieces at hundreds of venues over the decades, and in full only a few times (the Mall displays in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992, and 1996) - **Is now housed** by the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, with the full Quilt permanently archived there as of 2020 ## Continuing Activism Jones has remained a continuously visible American LGBTQ-rights and labor organizer — working with UNITE HERE on hospitality-worker organizing in the 2000s and 2010s, advising on the Lance Black-written 2008 *Milk* biopic, and continuing direct-action organizing through the Trump administrations. His 2016 memoir *When We Rise: My Life in the Movement* was adapted into the 2017 ABC miniseries of the same name. ## Place in the Vault Cleve Jones is one of the **bridge figures** spanning every phase of post-1969 American LGBTQ organizing — the Milk political era, the AIDS crisis, the marriage-equality decade, and contemporary anti-trans defensive organizing. His half-century continuous organizing tenure is unusual; few American queer organizers have remained continuously active from the mid-1970s through the present. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Harvey Milk]] - [[AIDS Crisis]]