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At 54, Cleve Jones is ready for his comeback
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PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — Cleve Jones is happy. As happy as he has ever been, thank you. He has a labor union job he loves, powerful allies in Hollywood and Washington, guys to date. Best of all, a new generation of gay activists has embraced him as the mentor he once had, the man whose story he helped deliver to the screen in the movie “Milk.”
Call it a cultural confluence, call it a comeback. Now 54 and the closest the gay rights movement has to a living legend, the former protege to a political martyr and creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is busily planning his next act — a march on the nation’s capital that he hopes will usher in the final era in his community’s struggle for acceptance.
“There was a time when I thought I would never be happy again,” Jones says, standing barefoot in the tiki-torched yard of the California desert bungalow where he has lived since 1999 but is rarely home long enough to enjoy. “I feel so connected to the movement again.”
That he feels compelled to comment on his good fortune says a lot about the twists Jones’ own life took after 1978, the year openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated.
Culture watchers will remember that Jones, the 23-year-old City Hall intern portrayed in “Milk,” went on to create the 47,000-panel quilt that humanized the lives lost to AIDS. Less widely known is that during the decade he spent weaving one of the world’s largest folk art projects into the nation’s fabric, Jones was preparing to die himself.
Instead, he became one of the AIDS epidemic’s earliest survivors.
“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have saved money and joined a gym,” laughs Jones, who shows the puckish sense of humor actor Emile Hirsch exhibited as his on-screen alter-ego.
When talk turns to the National Equality March scheduled for the second week of October in Washington, however, Jones turns serious.
His goal is to build an army of activists drawn from each of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. Afterward, participants will be sent home to pressure their representatives and the White House into removing the remaining barriers to gay equality, such as the policy that prevents gays from serving openly in the military.
If successful, Jones’ vision would represent a sea change in the gay rights movement’s strategy of securing victories piecemeal on the local or state level.
“We got locked into this pattern of fighting for fractions of crumbs — ‘Oh please, sir, in this county could we please not be fired for being gay if it’s all right in this county for you to evict us for being gay?’” he says. “It’s been this ping-pong with our basic civil rights….If you are a free and equal people, why would you settle for this?”
Jones agreed to organize the march at the urging of veteran activist David Mixner, who proposed it as a way to lobby President Barack Obama to follow through on his campaign promises.
“When he has a sense of righteousness about a mission, he has a tenacity I have rarely seen,” said Mixner, who has known Jones since the 1970s. “He is not a person who has ever put himself before the mission.”
Many gay leaders quickly dismissed the march idea as a waste of time and money. Jones took to the Internet and the gay political circuit to address the nay-sayers.
During more than 35 years of activism, friends and associates say that Jones has weathered criticism before.
In 1986, when he was trying to amass support for a giant quilt stitched by people who lost loved ones to AIDS, even fellow activists refused to get on board, according to Jones. Many saw the project as a morbid endeavor that would distract them from the serious work of persuading the government to invest in AIDS research.
Jones persisted. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is now recognized as not only a powerful symbol of loss, but a turning point in the public’s perception of the disease.
“I thought who is going to grieve the most when I die? It’s going to be my family — my parents, my little sister and my grandmothers. I wanted a place in this movement for my grandmothers,” he says.
With his health waning, Jones in 1990 relinquished control of the quilt to a nonprofit foundation that eventually moved the 54-ton quilt to Atlanta. He continued to serve as its public face until five years ago, when tensions between him and the foundation’s new leadership bubbled over with his firing and an unsuccessful wrongful termination suit.
In recent years, Jones has worked as a gay community liaison for the national hotel workers union, an outgrowth of his activism.
He credits Milk, the middle-aged camera store owner turned politician, with transforming him from a shy and somewhat aimless young hippie into a committed activist unafraid to use his voice or to be open about his sexuality.
“Harvey was never a shadow to me. He was an inspiration, a light. His biggest gift to me was to not fear straight people,” he said.
Jones’ determination not to let Milk’s legacy fade was key in getting the movie made, said screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his work on the film. Jones served as the movie’s historical adviser.
“Cleve never lost his belief in the power of the grass roots,” Black says. “I remember when I first met him, over those first few years of research and even when shooting ‘Milk’ he would say, ‘What is your generation doing? I can’t imagine how empty it must be not to have a really strong generational purpose.’”
In Jones, Black sees an heir to Milk’s role as an inspirational leader. “Milk” opened last November just before the 30th anniversary of Milk’s assassination and just after California voters passed a ballot measure rescinding the right to wed the state Supreme Court had granted gays five months earlier.
For weeks, young activists protested in major cities across the country.
“I saw this man’s eyes light up in a way I had never seen,” Black says of Jones. “I saw him come to life when the young people started to rise up. I think he recognized in them a purpose he hadn’t seen since his own days with Harvey Milk.”
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Since Gays & Lesbians can’t say “I do”, Clergy says “I won’t”
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July 10, 2009 | Art Cribbs leans forward in his pressed blue shirt and pink tie, wide-eyed and wistful, exclaiming his love of wedding ceremonies while sitting in his office one morning.
“It’s just glorious,” he said. “Every time I do a wedding, I go back to my wife and reconnect. It’s like reliving our own wedding vows.”
But Cribbs, a 59-year-old African-American minister with the United Church of Christ in San Marino, Calif., isn’t attending many weddings lately.
Headed by John Tamilio and Tricia Gilbert of Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Cleveland, the Refuse-to-Sign campaign seeks to make the division between church and state clearer, as it concerns the issue of marriage.
Supporters of the campaign argue that faith leaders have, by default, become agents of the state, signing off on marriage licenses — whether or not they agree with the state’s policy on marriage. By asking clergy to refuse to sign marriage certificates, they hope to make a distinction between the obligation of the state to afford equal rights to all and marriage as a religious sacrament.
In short, the Refuse-to-Sign campaign says, while churches have the right to choose whether to bless same-sex couples, states should not have such a choice, and have a duty to extend marriage certificates to all who seek them.
Clergy aren’t the only ones participating in the campaign. Couples can also join the movement by voluntarily going to a local judge or court clerk for the signing of the marriage license, rather than to a church leader; they look to their congregation strictly to provide a religious ceremony.
Tamilio says the movement is just now gaining ground, with a couple of dozen interfaith leaders already signed up. But he believes that there are thousands out there who are interested in such a campaign, although the specific way clergy participate does vary.
Cribbs, for example, isn’t just refusing to sign marriage certificates. He’s refusing to perform at weddings at all.
As an African-American who grew up in the impoverished Watts area of Los Angeles, famous for the large-scale 1965 race riots, a backlash to the lack of social services in the area and discriminatory behavior by police, Cribbs says he can’t see doing anything else. The discrimination faced by African-Americans in the ’60s is not unlike the challenges homosexuals face today.
“I cannot with good conscience perform weddings for heterosexuals knowing people who are gay and lesbian are being denied that opportunity,” he said.
Molly Holland Avery, founder of the Organization for Cultural Competency, a group dedicated to bringing people of diverse backgrounds together, voluntarily forwent a civil ceremony as part of the campaign, opting solely for a religious one. She says she understands the discrimination same-sex couples are facing today.
“We’re a mixed-race couple,” 67-year-old Avery said, referring to her African-American husband. “Forty years ago, there were several states where we could not be married.”
All Saints Church, an Episcopal church in Pasadena, Calif., is one of a few congregations that has joined the campaign so far, declaring, “We are no longer in the civil marriage business.”
“We are not going to allow the state to make us agents of discrimination,” Susan Russell said, the congregation’s senior associate. (Russell issued this statement from the Episcopal Church’s general convention being held in Anaheim, Calif., this week and next. The convention is set to consider resolutions that would allow same-sex blessings in the church, as well as the appointment of gay bishops, resolutions that many Anglicans disagree with and that have resulted in friction among members.)
The inability of a church’s leadership to unanimously agree on the issue of homosexuality or same-sex marriage has led to troubles for some who have joined the Refuse-to-Sign movement.
Anne Cohen, a minister at First Congregational Church in Glendale, Calif., had at one point spoken out about her refusal to sign and her decision to withhold her services from heterosexual couples. Cohen, however, now says she has promised her congregation that she will no longer talk about her “personal decision.
Still, John Witte Jr. at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University says, a movement that asks clergy to stop signing is likely to gain ground. Witte says prior to the American Revolution, a strict separation of church and state, specifically as it concerns marriage, existed. And he suspects we’re heading full circle.
“I think it’s probably a start to a new trend,” he said. “Clergy are going to get out of this marriage business.”
Canada and Western Europe already operate under a two-step process, not unlike the one advocated by supporters of Refuse-to-Sign. People in these countries are used to looking to churches to experience marriage as a sacrament, and to the state for the signing of the certificate. And Witte says certain denominations of Baptists, Quakers and Catholics chose to remove themselves from the business of marriage long ago.
In fact, Witte says a parallel can be drawn between what is happening today with regard to marriage, and what has happened in the past with regard to adoption. Although the Catholic Church, like other religious organizations, has traditionally acted as an adoption agency, when faced with pressure in states like Massachusetts to allow same-sex couples to adopt, the church has opted to quit the business altogether, rather than continue to deal with the controversy stirred by the state’s mandate.
Of course, unlike in adoption, which is an all or nothing proposition, churches could decide to quit the business of marriage, while still overseeing unions; they would simply extricate themselves from the civil side of marriage, that is, the signing of the certificates.
It’s an idea that organizers think both conservatives and liberals can get behind.
The Refuse-to-Sign movement, despite being made up largely of liberal organizations, is actively making an appeal to conservatives: We want your church to be able to decide for itself on the issue of same-sex marriage, even if, in the end, it chooses not to bless same-sex couples; we just don’t think the state has that choice.
Although conservatives may not like the direction the country is heading, they could be satisfied with the knowledge that they will continue to have the freedom to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, without getting hassled by the state or other religious organizations.
And although the Obama administration has been receiving piss-poor grades from the LGBT community of late, there are enough who are afraid of what might be around the corner — on both sides of the debate — that a movement to seek more autonomy, and separate church and state on the issue of marriage, could very well be appealing. For supporters of gay marriage, it means avoiding the possibility that friends who are homosexual will never achieve marriage status, and for those on the other side of the debate, it means the religious communities they belong to won’t be forced to comply with a state mandate with which they disagree.
Mass. sues feds over definition of marriage
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BOSTON – Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage, sued the U.S. government Wednesday over a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
The federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Massachusetts is the first state to challenge the federal law. Its lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, argues the act “constitutes an overreaching and discriminatory federal law.” It says the approximately 16,000 same-sex couples who have married in Massachusetts since the state began performing gay marriages in 2004 are being unfairly denied federal benefits given to heterosexual couples.
“They are entitled to equal treatment under the laws regardless of whether they are gay or straight,” Coakley said at a news conference.
Besides Massachusetts, five other states — Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Iowa — have legalized gay marriage. Gay marriage opponents in Maine said Wednesday that they had collected enough signatures to put the state’s pending law on the November ballot for a possible override.
The lawsuit focuses on the section of the law that creates a federal definition of marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”
Before the law was passed, Coakley said, the federal government recognized that defining marital status was the “exclusive prerogative of the states.” Now, because of the U.S. law’s definition of marriage, same-sex couples are denied access to benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including federal income tax credits, employment benefits, retirement benefits, health insurance coverage and Social Security payments, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit also argues that the federal law requires the state to violate the constitutional rights of its citizens by treating married heterosexual couples and married same-sex couples differently when determining eligibility for Medicaid benefits and when determining whether the spouse of a veteran can be buried in a Massachusetts veterans’ cemetery.
“In enacting DOMA, Congress overstepped its authority, undermined states’ efforts to recognize marriages between same-sex couples, and codified an animus towards gay and lesbian people,” the lawsuit states.
The defendants named in the suit include the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the federal government.
Brian Camenker, leader of MassResistance, a group opposed to gay marriage, criticized Coakley for challenging the federal law.
“The federal government has a perfectly legal right to define marriage,” he said.
The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriages and opponents worried that other states would be forced to recognize them.
President Barack Obama has pledged to work to repeal the law, although gay rights activists criticized the administration last month after Justice Department lawyers defended it in a court brief. White House aides said they were doing their jobs to support a law that is on the books.
Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, declined comment on the lawsuit itself, saying the department plans to review it. He noted Obama “supports legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act because it prevents (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) couples from being granted equal rights and benefits.”
Supporters of gay marriage predicted that other states where same-sex marriage is legal will also challenge the federal law.
“Every state has the right to determine who it will allow to marry, and the federal government always respects those decisions by states … except in this case,” said Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.
“(Coakley) is going right for that vulnerability in the law,” she said.
This is the second lawsuit filed in Massachusetts challenging the law.
In March, the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders claimed the law discriminates against gay couples and is unconstitutional because it denies them access to federal benefits that other married couples receive, such as health insurance and pensions.
In Maine, the Stand for Marriage Maine coalition said it took only four weeks to gather more than the 55,087 signatures necessary to put gay marriage to a vote.
The Maine law to legalize gay marriage had been scheduled to go into effect Sept. 12. It will be put on hold after the signatures are submitted and certified by the secretary of state’s office. Voters will then decide in November whether the law should stand.
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