Salt Lake City » An activist who worked alongside slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk on Sunday announced plans for an Oct. 11 march on Washington to demand Congress act to establish equal rights for the lesbian, gay and transgender community.

Cleve Jones said the march will coincide with National Coming Out Day and kick off a grass-roots campaign for equality in each of the nation's 435 congressional districts and launch a new chapter in the gay rights movement.

Jones, 54, made the announcement Sunday during a rally at the annual Utah Pride Festival.

The event's grand marshal, Jones stirred up a crowd of thousands just blocks from the Salt Lake City headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was part of the coalition of conservative groups that worked to pass Proposition 8 in California last fall.

Mormons were among the campaign's most vigorous volunteers and financial contributors, but Jones said he has had thousands of e-mails from Latter-day Saints who offered apologies and said they were uncomfortable or ashamed by the faith's participation in a political effort to strip people of their rights.

"It's unfortunate that a church and a people who experienced persecution in the past could not come to some accommodation that would allow them to maintain their faith without so vociferously seeking to deny other people their rights," Jones said. "I also think it was a terrible miscalculation on their part in terms of alienating their own people."

Gay marriage is legal in six states. A handful of others allow civil unions for same-sex couples and about 40 states either bar the recognition of same-sex marriage or have explicitly defined marriage -- through legislation or constitutional amendments -- as being between a man and a woman.

Last month, the California Supreme Court upheld Prop. 8, preserving the Nov. 4 decision of voters to overturn an earlier court ruling that legalized gay marriage. The court's decision did not invalidate the roughly 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place last year.

A protege of Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay elected official who was shot and killed by a fellow member of the Board of Supervisors in 1978, Jones has spent most of his adult life working for gay rights and speaks nationwide about HIV/AID prevention. In the mid-80s he founded the NAMES Project, the AIDS memorial quilt that recognizes the more than 80,000 Americans who have died from HIV/AIDS.

In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Jones said a confluence of events -- a new president, the success of the movie "Milk" and Prop. 8 -- make this the right time to intensify the fight for equality.

"The election of (Barack) Obama showed us change is possible. The film 'Milk' reminded us of our history and of what we can accomplish. Proposition 8 shows us that everything that we have can be taken away in a blink of an eye," said Jones, who lives in Palm Springs, Calif. "All of this working together has opened this new chapter. I intend to make the most of it."