Why I'm supporting Marni von Wilpert for Congress

Harvey Milk – the trailblazing gay progressive San Francisco supervisor – opened all his speeches the same way. "My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you."

I worked for Harvey and was inspired by him. After he was assassinated, I created the AIDS Memorial Quilt — and I've spent fifty years organizing for LGBTQ equality and justice for hotel workers. Now, I’m fighting for the healthcare Trump is ripping away from working Americans.

I’m borrowing Harvey’s line because what’s at stake now needs all of us stepping up. So here it is:

I'm Cleve Jones. And I'm here to recruit you — for Marni von Wilpert for Congress.

I called Palm Springs home for years. This desert has been a refuge for so many of us — a place to be who we are and find our people. Now that Palm Springs is part of California's 48th Congressional District, this community will help decide one of America's key Congressional battlegrounds. And Marni von Wilpert must be our nominee if we want to take back Congress from Trump.

I came of age in San Francisco watching a generation disappear because cowardly politicians were afraid to say the word AIDS out loud. We learned fast how to recognize who was really with us — who showed up when it was hard. After fifty years, that instinct is what’s brought 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. As a labor attorney in the Obama administration, she wrote rules protecting workers. As a prosecutor, she took on chemical polluter Monsanto and drug companies — and won. As a San Diego City Councilwoman, she passed abortion protections and is hauling ICE into court.

And Marni is one of us – part of the LGBTQ community. She has never once treated our rights as negotiable or secondary — and never will. Marni is family.

Right now, we are going backwards on rights I never thought I'd see questioned again. Marriage equality back at the Supreme Court. Trans kids hunted by state legislatures. But what’s being dismantled in Washington is also the very infrastructure of survival for millions of people, including us.

Medicaid: gutted. NIH: defunded. Global AIDS programs: gone. I have watched this administration make decisions with the same callous indifference I saw in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

Marni will fight back. She will restore the Affordable Care Act tax credits Trump ripped away, push for a public option, and let Medicare negotiate drug prices across the board. She will protect Social Security from Trump's cuts and take on Big Pharma the same way she took on the opioid companies.

She will fight for working people, too — and that matters to me. Marni was a labor lawyer in Obama’s administration. She knows how the deck is stacked against everyday people, and she will stand with unions and immigrant workers. She will fight to raise wages and hold corporations rigging the economy accountable.

Working people stood with the LGBTQ community when it counted. I marched with Harvey and the Teamsters to boycott Coors Beer, because the family running that brewery was notoriously far-right, anti-union and anti-gay. That coalition built this movement – and it’s what can take our country back from Trump today. Marni knows it because she’s lived it.

I have spent my life watching what happens when governments decide some people's health, some people's dignity, some people’s labor — are somebody else's problem. I also know what’s possible when we stand together and fight back.

So, I’ll say it once more. I'm Cleve Jones, and I'm here to recruit you. For our community. For our country. For Marni von Wilpert for Congress.

Cleve Jones is an LGBTQ+ rights activist, labor organizer, and founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. He worked alongside Harvey Milk in San Francisco before Milk's assassination in 1978.

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