Cleve Jones's Former Roommate

When I read gay activist Cleve Jones's riveting memoir,When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, I was surprised to learn that he and historian Eric Garber were roommates in San Francisco at one time.

In 1982, at New York's Hunter College, I attended Garber's slide lecture on the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I later interviewed him for the New York Native, the now-defunct gay weekly newspaper.

Garber's research inspired me to do further reading on the gays and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance like the artist/poet/novelist Richard Bruce Nugent, who I wrote about for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life.

Note: See my 1983 New York City News interview with Eric Garber that I posted on this blog on April 20, 2013.

Gay Activist Cleve Jones's Memoir

I'm looking forward to reading (and reviewing?) When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, the San Francisco gay rights activist and founder of the AIDS quilt project. (I'm rarely on Facebook, so the last time I checked, he and I were still Facebook friends.)

 I learned about the book after hearing him being interviewed on public radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I  heard him again today on another public radio show, Here and Now.