Activist Shares Personal Experience with AIDS

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Author: Christina LeBlanc

On November 6, Occidental hosted prominent AIDS activist Cleve Jones for a speech on the fear and misunderstanding surrounding the early years of the AIDS epidemic and how AIDS is still present in American society.

Author of Stitching A Revolution and the founder of the AIDS memorial quilt project, Jones came to Occidental as part of the First Tuesday Speaker series. The event was held in Johnson 200 and was co-sponsored by Queer-Straight Alliance and Emmons Health Center.

As a protégé of former gay rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978, Jones was center-stage in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. He spoke of the terror prevalent in San Francisco’s gay district during the time. Jones said that, of the 1000 people who died of AIDS in 1985, most were living “within six blocks of where I was standing” in the Castro district. “It is impossible for me to convey to you what it was like to live on Castro in 1985,” he said.

Jones said the isolated nature of the spread of the disease made it easy for the mass population of the country, along with the government, to push the crisis out of their minds. “If they saw a meadow with 1,000 rotting bodies, maybe they would understand,” he said, in reference to the inaction on the part of the American government during the time.

The stereotyping of AIDS as a gay man’s disease only served to increase inaction, Jones said. He cited a Republican bumper sticker from the 1980s which read “AIDS: It’s killing all the right people,” displaying the animosity felt towards the disease’s victims. “It felt like everyone I knew was vanishing one by one,” Jones said, discussing the ways in which deaths were ignored to avoid the shame associated with AIDS.

When the antibody test was developed in the 1980s to detect the HIV virus within the body, Jones had himself tested from a blood sample he used for a previous medical test in 1979. He met with his doctor a week later over coffee.

“You’re sitting across the table from someone, eating your tuna, drinking your lattes and they’re about to tell you your life is over,” he said. He knew instinctively that he would test positive.

After Jones tested positive, he was full of anger and resentment. “I hated straight people; I hated the straight world,” he said. His anger, as well as his disillusionment at the silent disappearances all around him to “the worst pandemic ever experienced in human history,” gave him the idea for the quilt. The death of his friend Marvin Feldman, however, brought the project into reality.

Jones himself made the first quilt piece for Marvin on a 3″x6″ piece of fabric, the size of a grave. After this, he realized that “there’s enough angry queens with sewing machines” to create the AIDS memorial quilt in respect for the victims of AIDS.

In 1996, the quilt—which Jones had started—was unfurled in Washington, D.C., and covered the entire mall from the Capitol building to the Washington Monument. Since then, the quilt has continued to grow. Quilts have also begun internationally, such as a South African AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Jones said that, while knowledge about the disease has increased significantly, “the epidemic is not over.” He cited the statistic that over one million people in the United States have HIV and most do not know it. In addition, half of the gay African American population in the United States is infected with HIV.

A member of the audience asked him what the youth of today can do. “I don’t think your generation has figured out what you’re going to do,” he said, leaving the future open to the youth’s choice.

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