Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay progressive San Francisco director, began every speech the same way. “My name is Harvey Milk. I’m here to recruit you.”
I worked for Harvey and was inspired by him. After he was assassinated, I created an AIDS memorial quilt and spent 50 years organizing for LGBTQ equality and justice for hotel workers. Now I’m fighting for the health care that Trump is taking away from working Americans.
I’m borrowing Harvey’s words because the issues at stake now require all of us to do our part. Here it is:
I’m Cleve Jones. And I’m here to recruit you – for Marni von Wilpert of Parliament.
I called Palm Springs home for many years. For many of us, this desert is a refuge, a place to be ourselves and find companionship. Palm Springs is now part of California’s 48th Congressional District, a community that helps decide one of America’s key battlegrounds for Congress. And if we want to take back Congress from Trump, Marni von Wilpert must be our candidate.
I grew up in San Francisco watching a generation disappear because cowardly politicians were afraid to say the word AIDS out loud. We quickly learned how to recognize who is truly with us – who shows up in difficult times. Fifty years later, that intuition led me to Marni.
Marni served in the Peace Corps in Botswana at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, helping people get treatment when the world had given up on it. As a labor lawyer in the Obama administration, she created rules to protect workers. As a prosecutor, she fought and won against chemical polluters Monsanto and pharmaceutical companies. As a San Diego City Council member, she passed abortion protection legislation and is taking ICE to court.
And Marni is one of us, part of the LGBTQ community. She never treated our rights as negotiable or secondary. And I never will. Marni is family.
Now we are rolling back rights we never thought would be questioned again. Marriage equality is restored at the Supreme Court. Transgender kids being pursued by state legislatures. But what is being dismantled in Washington is also the very basis of existence for millions of people, including us.
Medicaid: Uprooted. NIH: Funding has been terminated. Global AIDS Program: Gone. I have watched this administration make decisions with the same callous indifference that I saw in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Marni will fight back. She would restore the Affordable Care Act tax credits that President Trump stripped away, push for a public option, and give Medicare full negotiation of drug prices. She will protect Social Security from President Trump’s cuts and fight Big Pharma the same way she fought opioid companies.
She will also fight for working people, and that’s important to me. Marni served as a labor lawyer in the Obama administration. She knows what hostile forces are stacked against everyday people and will stand up for unions and immigrant workers. She will fight to raise wages and hold companies accountable for rigging the economy.
Workers stood up for the LGBTQ community when it mattered. I marched with Harvey and the Teamsters to boycott Coors beer. Because the family that owned the brewery was notoriously far-right, anti-union, and anti-gay. That coalition built this movement and can take our country back from Trump today. Marni knows this because she has experienced it.
I’ve seen what happens when governments decide that some people’s health, some people’s dignity, and some people’s labor are other people’s problems. We also know what is possible if we come together and fight back.
So I’ll say it again. I’m Cleve Jones. We’re here to hire you. For our community. For our country. For Marni von Wilpert of Parliament.
Cleve Jones is an LGBTQ+ rights activist, labor organizer, and founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. He worked with Harvey Milk in San Francisco until Milk was assassinated in 1978.
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