LGBTQ icon to receive Harvey Milk Lifetime Achievement Award May 19 in San Diego
Cleve Jones is over it. Jones is also at the center of it, the pinnacle of it. In some ways, leader of at least three movements – labor, as well as civil and human rights – Jones is also on the edges of it.
“It” is fractiousness within the resistance to trumpism and the specter of a return to progressives’ favorite pastime: division. And, like a shepherd’s faithful herding hound, try as he might, he’s nipping at our heals around the edges of the herds of left-leaning, equality-minded folks warning that the wolves in the fields are watching, waiting for us to divide ourselves and come in for the kill.
“The Democrats won their insurgency in 2016,” Jones told San Diego LGBT Weekly in a recent phone interview in advance of what would be the first of at least two flights for Jones to San Diego from San Francisco in as many weeks. “Then, of course they lost the election.”
Jones, who was a close confidant of slain civil rights leader Harvey Milk, was in San Diego on May Day for a major labor march with UniteHere, the international labor union.
He’ll be here again for the ninth annual Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast during which he will be honored with a lifetime achievement award. The event, attended by about 1,000 people each year and hosted by The San Diego LGBT Community Center, will be held at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel this year, Friday, May 19, 7:30-9 a.m.
Also being honored at California’s largest and the world’s first Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast, is United Church of Christ Bishop Yvette Flunder, who will receive the Champion of Equality Award for her trailblazing work making equal rights for LGBTQ people real in religious and civil spaces in her native Bay Area, and far beyond.
Not unlike Bishop Flunder, whose ethos of “radical inclusion” puts her at the heated rim of a volcano of change in religious circles, Cleve Jones has always pushed against the comfort zones of liberal politics in his own communities.
“Look, the Republicans lost their insurgency,” he continued. “But they won the election.”
Jones points out that despite all signs that pointed to division and infighting and the “shit-show” that was supposed to be – and really, that was – the Republican primary season, followed by the bizarre, frequently cringeworthy Republican National Convention; in the end (with the help of the Russians and former FBI Director James Comey, of course), they took the election.
“It shouldn’t have even been close,” lamented Jones. “I doubt we have any clue, what we’re really up against now though. We who live in the blue state have to find empathy for working-class people living in the red states. There is a lot of squawking going on everywhere on our side.”
Instead of “squawking,” says Jones, with threats to marriage equality, so hard-fought and only recently won, made disquietingly real with an arguably stolen Supreme Court seat now in the hands of a justice handpicked by a far right think tank, indivisibility is what’s needed in the liberal, progressive and LGBTQ-rights movements.
“We need more than ever to find common ground,” said the 45-year veteran of civil rights marches, protests and many victories – not to mention creator of the Names Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt.
“We need new ideas now more than ever,” Jones continued. “We need to build alliances. Gay people are just like people everywhere. There are gay teamsters. I know teamsters in places like Indiana who want to be part of the fight for LGBTQ equality. But they want liberals in Los Angeles, and Boston and San Diego and San Francisco to know they exist.”
More understanding, more interaction and more outreach from the coasts into the center of the country by LGBTQ people and our allies must happen, says Jones.
Jones’ new memoir, When We Rise: MyLife in the Movement, documents his unrivaled marches at the forefronts and at the intersections of labor, civil rights and human rights movements across several decades.
“That’s what we have to do if you want to have a resistance that’s effective,” he said.
According to Jones, if Hillary Clinton and progressives in general had not taken working-class, formerly reliable blue states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania for granted, Florida wouldn’t have mattered so much.
“The election of 2016 was a disaster,” Jones said. “The only way we stand a chance to resist what we’ve inherited from our mistakes by taking them for granted is to now stand united, totally united.”
Jones is over it in terms of hearing snide remarks from so-called progressives with so-called “free-market” philosophies that leave out the needs of working people.
“I’ve walked with teamsters for decades and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single overtly homophobic expression. I don’t ever want to see a single anti-labor sentiment from someone in our movement.”
That’s the kind of division on the left, says Cleve Jones, which is exactly what the likes of Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and the entirety of their minions – anti-equality troops, who would as soon take away marriage equality as they would put LGBTQ people in concentration camps “for our own protection,” are waiting for.
Learn more about Cleve Jones’ new book at clevejones.com
Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast
Friday, May 19, 7:30-9 a.m.
San Diego Bayfront Hilton
Now in its ninth year, the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast began as the vision of Nicole Murray Ramirez, Robert Gleason, The San Diego LGBT Community Center and an amazing coalition of civic and business leaders. The event brings together more than 1,000 diverse San Diegans, business, labor, non-profits, educators, Democrats, Republicans, decline-to-states, all communities, all ages – in fact, all San Diegans who support equality and justice – to celebrate the memory of this influential civil rights activist. Information about the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast is available online at events.thecentersd.org/HMDB or facebook.com/Harvey.Milk.Diversity.Breakfast/
