Nationally-known AIDS and civil rights activist Cleve Jones of San Francisco briefed a room of D.C.-region LGBTQ community leaders gathered in Northern Virginia last Saturday on these earliest days of his initiative to organize a nationwide week of actions in June to focus on “how Americans can work together to build a healthy nation.” The occasion was instigated by the Falls Church News-Press in response to a broad-based outreach by Jones.

Jones’ initiative is being launched just days after the GOP failed to advance benefits of the Affordable Care Act, meaning monthly health care premiums could as much as double for up to 20 million by the end of this year.

Included in the Trump administration and GOP-backed cuts to health care, generally, are provisions to exclude coverage for HIV/AIDS related therapies. “We are on the verge of a capacity to almost eliminate HIV/AIDS through new, inexpensive and easily administered medications, but just as this new opportunity arises, because of cuts to health care, we are now on the verge of plunging into a new AIDS epidemic,” Jones told the group.

Assembled by News-Press owner Nicholas Benton and under the auspices of the Go Gay DC community networking group led by T.J. Flavell, and held at Crystal City’s Freddie’s Beach Bar, the only openly LGBTQ bar in the Northern Virginia region, the audience for Jones’ rallying call, which came through a FaceTime phone call, were Lou Chibbaro, senior writer for the Washington Blade, Flavell who heads a network of over 10,000 names in the region, National Women’s Democratic Club mover David Hoffman, trans activist Ezra Solomon, Benton and others.

Jones spoke for a half-hour on the initiation of his plans. He was a former top aide to the slain San Francisco Supervisor and gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk and the founder of the national AIDS Quilt project. Still active in his 70s, he is also a labor organizer.

Jones said, “Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken with scores of smart, kind and determined friends and colleagues. We are committed to organize a nationwide week of actions, June 1-7, to focus on how Americans can work together to build a healthy nation.

“June is the month with the most mid-term primary elections. All candidates for Congress and other offices must address the crises of affordability and health care, issues that impact the lives of all ordinary Americans.

“As we all enjoy the holidays, please start to think and talk about how you and your communities might participate in these actions and help set a national agenda for the critically important November elections,” he said..

Jones cited the latest advance in AIDS treatment, the Gilead Labs’ pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) Yestugo, a new medication that requires dosing only twice a year, an advancement that could make it inexpensive and easy to administer to millions worldwide.

To date, globally, he noted, it is estimated that 40 million people have died from AIDS, and he is worried that with Trump health care cutbacks, a new explosion of deadly infections may ensue.

“We in the LGBTQ community lived through this and we know how terrible is was, on the one hand, but also how to fight back,” Jones said.

He said the plan will be to involve as many organizations and groups with an interest in general health care as possible for the actions he plans for June. At this early stage, he added, there isn’t even a name yet for the actions that he hopes will take place in as many Congressional districts as possible by next June.

Next June, he added, also marks the 45th anniversary of the week in June 1981 when the first cases of AIDS, which remained qnincurable death sentence for 15 years before the first effective treatments were developed, largely spurred by mass demonstrations of activists at the time, were found.

Jones, Benton and Chibarro all date their LGBTQ activism to the early 1970s, Benton when he co-founded the Berkeley, Calif., chapter of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, a year after the Stonewall Riots triggered the modern LGBTQ movement for equality, Jones when he was recruited by Harvey Milk to help with Milk’s groundbreaking election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Chibbaro when he launched his career as a reporter for the Washington, D.C. LGBTQ newspaper, The Blade, in the first half of the decade of the 1970s.