Xfinity LGBT had the pleasure of chatting with activist Cleve Jones about his part in the film and his role in spreading the word on a history that isn’t about the past, but also the present.

Cleve Jones with panels of the Quilt in the 1980s. (Showtime)

Read the full interview here:
http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2014/12/01/cleve-jones-on-aids-quilt-doc-the-last-one-how-the-crisis-is-not-over/

Select Quotes:

On the rise of infection rates among young people: It’s kind of shocking actually. It’s the United States we’re speaking of here, transmission rates are down in most categories and we’re holding steady at about 50,000 new infections a year which in my view is unacceptable. The numbers are driven by an increase of about 135% in the last year to that group of young people. It’s not that difficult to understand why. They don’t have a memory of what my generation went through and people were dropping dead all around us, but also it’s the education campaigns have dwindled. There’s an idea that young people are being fully educated. I meet young people everyday from parts of the country where there’s absolutely no sex education, let alone HIV education.

On the use of PrEP: There is kind of a controversy going on in the community right now around the issue of pre-exposure prophylaxis. Of course the slogan from my generation was that Silence = Death. I think the slogan today needs to be that Treatment = Prevention. The researchers that I’m in touch with, and I still speak with some of them, tell me that a vaccine and a cure are still years away. But we do know that people were successfully treated, people who are HIV+ are being successfully treated are very unlikely to transmit the disease. Now we know that uninfected individuals by taking one pill a day can prevent themselves from being infected. Now there’s a controversy about this.

People are speaking in very harsh terms about young people and criticizing them for being irresponsible. There’s a lot of finger wagging, shaming and blaming going on. I wish it would stop. My message to young people and what I think everybody should be saying to these young people is that we love them. That they are beautiful. That their lives matter. That their lives have value. That the choices they make are important. We’re talking about a population that does not need to be further put down. We’re talking about a group of people who need to be raised up and shown as much as possible the promise that we’ve seen when we look at them.

Read the full interview here:
http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2014/12/01/cleve-jones-on-aids-quilt-doc-the-last-one-how-the-crisis-is-not-over/


The Quilt spreading its message in Washington DC. (Anne Grober/Showtime)


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