December means another year is on the books, 12 months packed with events that may wind up influencing the future in ways we can’t predict. If 2016 felt like an especially eventful year, it also provided good reasons to broaden your understanding of history as a whole. Lucky for you, another fascinating slate of history books has just […]
Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
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 communityin the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the city's 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 nation's most outspoken gay elected official. With Milk's encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in "the movement." When Milk was killed by an assassin's bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentor's progressive mantleonly 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 Cleve's passionate relationships with friends and lovers during an era defined by both unprecedented freedom and and violence alike.
When We Rise is not only the story of a hero to the LQBTQ community, but the vibrantly voice memoir of a full and transformative American life.
Lambda Literary Award Winner
The partial inspiration for the ABC television mini-series!
"You could read Cleve Jones's book because you should know about the struggle for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights from one of its key participantsmaybe heroesbut really, you should read it for pleasure and joy."Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780316315432 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Hachette Books |
Publication date: | 11/29/2016 |
Pages: | 304 |
Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface vii
1 Ghost Ranch 1
2 Gay Liberation Arizona Desert 15
3 Polk Street 24
4 Betty Blender Finds a Tree House 27
5 Struggling for Solidarity 44
6 Going to the Tubs 55
7 On the Road 61
8 Père Lachaise 68
9 On Barer Strasse 79
10 Homesick 93
11 Ten Million Queers 97
12 Back to Scott 106
13 Anita Bryant 109
14 Summer of '77 117
15 Supervisor Harvey Bernard Milk 126
16 Building the Army 136
17 Raise the Sky 148
18 A Victory and a Massacre 155
19 A Long Winter 164
20 White Night 170
21 We March on Washington 179
22 Sacramento 186
23 The Avalanche 196
24 One Thousand Dead 200
25 Needle and Thread 210
26 A Stupid Idea 216
27 We Bring a Quilt 223
28 Ricardo 228
29 Loma Prieta 231
30 Counting the Days 234
31 The President Sees the Quilt 239
32 A New World 247
33 Making Milk 255
34 Proposition 8 260
35 New Life 266
36 Meet in the Middle 271
37 National Equality March 277
38 Equality Across America 279
39 "Something greater than once they were." 283
Acknowledgments 288
What People are Saying About This
"Some people witness history; other actually make it happen. Cleve Jones, by planting himself boldly in the eye of the storm, has succeeded brilliantly at doing both."
"When We Rise is a song to what's best in us, when we join together in a movement that takes us higher. The story Cleve Jones tellsof a bullied boy from the sun-blasted Arizona suburbs, who finds an extended family among the street kids of San Francisco and then within the gay movement that revolutionized the worldis thrilling to read. The path to freedom is littered with the names of fallen loved ones. But through all the sorrows and setbacks, Jones perseveredand the movement for human liberation that he helped lead still rises."
"Cleve Jones is a history buff who has himself become part of history. He has been at the epicenter of the LGBT movement for over 45 years. Now, in When We Rise, Cleve takes us along on his personal journey in the fight for equal rightsa journey filled with humor, sadness, love and ultimately profound change."
"I loved this amazing, inspiring, and sometimes outrageous book. When We Rise is about the building of a movementand the building of Cleve Jones, who came to San Francisco as a teenage adventurer and transformed into an activist whose contributions helped change the course of gay history."