num_pages: 291
description: The partial inspiration for the forthcoming ABC television mini-series from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black executive producer Gus Van Sant and starring Guy Pearce Mary-Louise Parker Carrie Preston and Rachel Griffiths.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 community--in 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 mantle--only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again.By turns tender and uproarious--and written entirely in his own words--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 possibility and prejudice 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--an activist whose work continues today.
language: English
title: When We Rise: My Life in the Movement
publisher: Hachette Books