AIDS Quilt founder and renowned LGBTQ activist to speak at University of Evansville

EVANSVILLE – A renowned LGBTQ activist and creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will give a talk at the University of Evansville on Thursday.

Cleve Jones will speak in Eykamp Hall at 7 p.m., with a question-and-answer session to follow. The free event is part of the university’s Constitution Day celebration.

Jones has been pushing for LGBTQ rights since beginning his activism work in San Francisco in the 1970s under the tutelage of Harvey Milk. In 1987, he founded the Names Project and first unveiled the memorial quilt – a massive patchwork containing the names of tens of thousands of people who have died of AIDS over the decades.

Jones, who lives with HIV himself, conceived the idea after his partner, Marvin Feldman, died of the disease in 1986.

According to the National AIDS Memorial, the quilt contains around 50,000 panels and memorializes more than 110,000 loved ones. If you were to unfurl it in its entirety, it would weigh 54 tons.

“I imagined families sharing stories of their loved ones as they cut and sewed the fabric,” Jones wrote in a 2016 Washington Post column. “It could be therapy, I hoped, for a community that was increasingly paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness.”

Jones has received multiple honors throughout his life, including being named as a Champion of Change by President Barack Obama. He’s also been portrayed in multiple films and television series.

Emile Hirsch played him in the 2008 Oscar-winning biopic “Milk,” while Guy Peace took over in the 2017 ABC miniseries “When We Rise,” which was based on Jones’ memoir of the same name about the history of the gay rights movement.

In 2022, he received the Lifetime of Commitment Award during World AIDS Day.

“It's a little alarming, because I've been getting quite a few of these this last month. And I'm thinking, 'Is somebody talking to my doctor?'" he jokingly said that day. “Am I on my way out and this is their last chance to say, ‘hey, good job?’”

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: AIDS Quilt founder Cleve Jones to speak at University of Evansville