Cleve Jones

Cleve Jones (born October 11, 1954) is an American AIDS and LGBT rights activist. He conceived the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has become, at 54 tons, the world's largest piece of community folk art as of 2020. In 1983 at the onset of the AIDS pandemic, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which has grown into one of the largest and most influential advocacy organizations empowering people with AIDS in the United States.

Early life

Jones was born in West Lafayette, Indiana. He moved with his family to Scottsdale, Arizona, when he was 14 and was a student at Arizona State University for a time. Jones claimed, however, he never really accepted the Phoenix area as his home. During the 1970s, Jones was also involved in the Coors boycott.

Career In 1981, Jones went to work in the district office of State Assemblyman Art Agnos. In 1982, when AIDS was still a new and largely underestimated threat, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, then called the Kaposi's Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, with Marcus Conant, Frank Jacobson, and Richard Keller. They reorganized as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation in 1984.

Jones conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1985 and in 1987 created the first quilt panel in honor of his friend Marvin Feldman. The AIDS Memorial Quilt has grown to become the world's largest community arts project, memorializing the lives of over 85,000 Americans killed by AIDS.

Jones ran for a position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the November 3, 1992 election.

Jones has been working with UNITE HERE, the hotel, restaurant, and garment workers' labor union on homophobia issues. Another part of Jones's work with UNITE HERE is making the labor movement more open to LGBTQ members.

In an interview in November 2016 with Terry Gross on NPR radio talk show Fresh Air, Jones described his status as HIV-positive, and said while he first learned of his status when tests for infection came out in the 1980s, he was likely infected with the virus around the winter of 1978 or 1979, based on blood samples collected from him as part of a study he volunteered for.

In the same interview, Jones also talked about the time when he became seriously ill, and how he responded rapidly to the "cocktail" of drugs that fought the virus, in the earliest trials of it. He described his present health as good. A theme of the interview was that activism saved his life, as he was in the early drug trials, part of the group pushing the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) to stop doing double-blind trials as soon as it was clear that the cocktail of drugs saved lives.

Film, theater and major parades Jones is portrayed by actor Emile Hirsch in Milk, director Gus Van Sant's 2008 biopic of Harvey Milk. In August 2009, Jones was an official Grand Marshal of the Vancouver Pride Parade.

He participated as an actor in the Los Angeles premiere of 8, a condensed theatrical re-enactment of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial's closure, on March 3, 2012. He is portrayed by actors Austin P. McKenzie and Guy Pearce in the 2017 ABC television miniseries When We Rise, directed by Gus Van Sant. He also had a cameo appearance playing himself in Looking: The Movie in 2016. Additionally, Jones is portrayed by actor Augustus Oicle in the 2023 Showtime limited series, Fellow Travelers, in the episode titled "White Nights."