Cleve Jones quotes:

To all my friends in Los Angeles: the Sultan of Brunei, owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel, has signed legislation calling for gay people to be stoned to death.

Even in my town, even in San Francisco, thousands of gay men were arrested usually using entrapment techniques every single year for sexual behavior between consenting adults. That continued well into the 1970s until it was finally decriminalized in 1976, I believe.

Marches work, rallies work, civil disobedience works, direct action works, voting works, writing letters works, speaking to churches and schools works, rioting works.

Most of the young people I know are working so hard, 60 or 70 hours a week. They have no time for recreation or love affairs; it's just work and struggle. I want them to endure, and find that strength and be able to continue.

Dealing with Hollywood and commercial entertainment, you always have to worry that the political message is going to be skewed or obscured.

I am not proud to be gay any more than I am proud to be right handed or to breathe oxygen.

If you tell me I can't understand you because of my color or you can't understand me because of your sexual orientation or she can't understand us because of her faith, well, if you can't have empathy how will you ever have solidarity?

A whole lot of the way identity politics has gone seems to me to deny empathy.

This is a terrible time to be young, I think. It's really hard.

The sense of urgency has almost completely vanished.

A movement that seeks to advance only its own members is going to accomplish little

Since the industrial revolution, cities, and especially the inner cities, were the places for the newly arrived. Voluntary immigrants seeking economic betterment, refugees, the bohemians, the artists - all of those people were crammed into densely populated neighborhoods and tenements. And as people climbed up the economic ladder they moved out, which really accelerated with the "white flight" phenomenon in the '60s and '70s.

What people haven't quite grasped yet is that the rich are transforming cities all across the world.

The whole function of cities has been transformed.

If I had to say what my one greatest achievement is, it's that I lasted, and I'm still happy. I hope that comes through.

We spend countless hours talking about people's feelings and issues that aren't going to change anything.

I don't even want to go to the Pride marches anymore. The politics have been removed almost entirely. They're just huge corporate showcases.

The joy with which we denigrate each others' efforts, I hate that.

The subset of our population that has not benefited from the advancement of medication is black and brown people.

I think that a big part of the energy that was going into fighting AIDS was reduced when we saw that more of the new infections were among our black and brown young people. That's a sad truth to have to claim, but I believe it's true.

The majority of new infections in America are among young gay and bisexual men of color, and the full resources that could be brought to bear simply are not.

Everybody will always find some way of diminishing your work, but it's all a lie!

People who say that violence doesn't accomplish anything have not read history. I don't celebrate that reality, but there you have it.

I get to interact with a bunch of young people that are up against despair constantly.

When I was saving pills to kill myself, I thought there was no hope. I thought my life was over because I was a homosexual.

Most people do not have access to medication.

I recently heard young people talking about collective bargaining agreements - I hadn't heard young people use that phrase in forever!

There was no way to have a decent life and to be gay. So I was terrified that I was going to be caught, and I had already experienced quite a bit of bullying. And, you know, I just thought that only misery lay ahead, and that if I - when I got caught that would be the solution. I wish I could say that was a thing of the past. But, you know, it's not.

Even today every year we lose an awful lot of young people, teenagers, who take their own lives because they're - they are gay or transgender.

I was bullied pretty badly especially in middle school. High school was not as bad as middle school, but I was not a macho kid at all. And the kids saw me as different from a very, very early age.

The reality is that the "gayborhoods" are going away. It's because of many factors, including the internet and increased acceptance, but mostly it's the cost of housing.

When you lose the gayborhoods, you lose the political power that comes when you're concentrated in precincts, and you also lose the cultural vitality.

If you're gonna build units for the rich, you're gonna build units for the poor.

There are places in America that have not just protected middle-class neighborhoods but reduced homelessness. Even places like Houston have been able to reduce homelessness among veterans. It's a pretty shameful situation.

Hello! The world is a mess!

I don't have any hobbies! I don't golf, I can't imagine what I would do if I retired other than get fat.

People's lives can be transformed by the movement.

I saw great hope in the Sanders campaign - a flawed candidate, not perfect, but pretty damn close. Millions of young people were inspired by him.

The penalties for homosexual conduct were - would vary from state to state, but they were - it was a felony in most states punishable with prison terms of varying lengths.