And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    The Ferris-wheel gondola rocked gently as it stopped with Cleve Jones at the apex, staring down on the 200,000 milling in front of the majestic City Hall rotunda. This was the gay community Cleve loved. Tens of thousands, together, showing their power. Marches and loud, angry speeches, an occasional upraised fist and drama, such drama. This was what being gay in San Francisco meant to Cleve Jones.
    “This is my private party.” He grinned. “Just me and a few thousand of my closest friends.”
    From the time he was a fourteen-year-old sophomore at Scottsdale High School, Cleve Jones knew that this is where he wanted to be, at gay rights marches in San Francisco. He had suffered through adolescent years in which he was the class sissy and the locker room punching bag. But, as soon as he could, he had hitchhiked to San Francisco and marched in the 1973 gay parade. For the rest of his life, he would know that he had arrived at the right place at the right time.
    San Francisco in the 1970s represented one of those occasions when the forces of social change collide with a series of dramatic events to produce moments that are later called historic. From the day Cleve walked into Harvey Milk’s camera shop to volunteer for campaign work, his life was woven into that history and drama. Political strategists like Bill Kraus recalled the 1970s in terms of votes cast and elections won; Cleve Jones, the romantic, framed the era as a grand story, the movement of a dream through time.
    Cleve remembered 1978, when he had walked in the front of the parade dressed all in white, holding the upraised hand of a lesbian, who was also dressed in white, in front of a banner that showed a rainbow arch fashioned from barbed wire. Death-camp motifs had been de rigueur that year because a state senator from Orange County, John Briggs, was campaigning statewide for a ballot measure that would ban gays from teaching in California public schools. The initiative brought an international spotlight both to California, where the anti-gay campaigns started by Anita Bryant in 1977 were culminating, and to the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade, where gays made a defiant show of strength. They had come to the parade 375,000 strong, with Harvey Milk defying death threats to ride the long route in an open convertible before mounting the stage to give his “hope speech,” prodding the crowd to create the best future by coming out and announcing their homosexuality.
    Such public witnessing had always been a central article of faith of the gay liberation movement, Cleve Jones knew. This, after all, would be the only way their political cause could get anywhere because homosexuality was a fundamentally invisible trait. The fact that gays could hide their sexuality presented the gay movement with its greatest weakness and its most profound potential strength. Invisible, gays would always be kicked around, the reasoning went, because they would never assert their power. On that day in 1978, never had the power been so palpable. Months later, when California voters rejected the Briggs Initiative by a ratio of two to one, it appeared to be a wonderful year.
    However, three weeks after the election, Supervisor Dan White, San Francisco’s only anti-gay politician, had taken his Smith and Wesson revolver to City Hall and shot down Harvey Milk and the liberal mayor, George Moscone. Cleve had helped organize a candlelight march to City Hall that night for Harvey and George. Six months later, when a jury decided that Dan White should go to jail for only six years for killing the two men, Cleve had organized another march to City Hall—the one that turned into a riot, a vivid affirmation that this generation of gay people weren’t a bunch of sissies to be kicked around without a fight. This White Night Riot left dozens of policemen injured and the front of City Hall ravaged; gay leaders across the country grimaced at the televised coverage of police