When We Rise My Life In The Movement Cleve Jones by Cleve Jones 9780316315449, 0316315443, E320161026JVPC instant download after payment.

I signed up in ’68, when I was 14 years old. Like other young people across

the United States, I wanted to do my part to end the war in Vietnam. My family

had just moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona and when Cesar Chavez and the

United Farm Workers came to organize the grape pickers, my friends and I knew

right away that it was part of the bigger picture and signed up for picket duty and

walked in the marches.

It took a while for word of the women’s movement to reach us in the Arizona

desert but when we heard about it we joined that call, too, circulating petitions

for the Equal Rights Amendment and speaking out against rape, sexual

harassment, and wage inequity.

It wasn’t until 1971 that I learned that part of the movement was especially

for people like me. I read about it in the “Year in Review—1971” issue of Life

magazine in my high school library while skipping gym class. Gym wasn’t a

safe place for me; I didn’t get beat up much but the threat was always present. I

invented a mysterious lung malady to persuade our family physician that I was

too ill to attend physical education. Instead, I’d spend the hour in the library

reading magazines or pretending to study while trying to remember to cough

every few minutes.

So it was that one afternoon I was idly flipping through the pages of Life

magazine when the headlines leapt off the page: “Homosexuals in Revolt!”

Several pages of text and photographs of the new gay liberation movement

followed, including photos of handsome long-haired young men marching with

fists in the air through the streets of Greenwich Village, Los Angeles, and San

Francisco. I was thrilled and then amazed when I looked closely at one of the

photo captions and read that a small group called Gay Liberation Arizona Desert

was holding meetings at Arizona State University, the school where both my

parents taught and where I would no doubt enroll after I graduated from high

school the following year.

I am pretty