Is It Possible Not to Die of AIDS?

Joshua Gutterman Tranen speaks with Keiko Lane about her memoir “Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art.”

By Joshua Gutterman TranenOctober 31, 2024

• Gender & Sexuality

• Nonfiction

• Memoir & Essay

I’M NOT A religious or superstitious person, but I believe kismet brought Keiko Lane and me into each other’s lives. When we were first introduced, I was working as an editor at Duke University Press. I’d recently read an essay by Lane in an anthology on contemporary AIDS writing and thought: I wonder if she has a book? A month or so later, a colleague’s friend introduced me to Lane over email. The rest is history.

A psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, Lane is the author of the recently published Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, which, in my last official act as an editor at the press, I had the privilege of offering a contract. Blood Loss details Lane’s involvement with the groups ACT UP and Queer Nation Los Angeles, which she joined as an already experienced teenage anti-war activist in the early 1990s. It also offers an account of AIDS activism from the perspective of a “young, queer, multiracial Okinawan American dyke.” As its title suggests, the memoir is a loving tribute to friends lost to AIDS, and particularly to two queer artists of color: the novelist Steven Corbin and the visual artist Cory Roberts-Auli, who died in 1995 and 1996, respectively.

Since leaving the press, my relationship with Lane has evolved into an ongoing conversation between two writers committed to intergenerational queer exchange and the politics of AIDS historiography. The following exchange offers a glimpse into that world.

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JOSHUA GUTTERMAN TRANEN: Blood Loss is a love story about your relationships with Cory and Steven, both of whom died from AIDS-related complications nearly 30 years ago. Toward the ends of their lives, both men tasked you with the obligation to tell their stories. What set of ethics guided your writing? Is there a tension between telling someone else’s story and your own? 

KEIKO LANE: When Cory and Steven told me to “tell the story,” I heard it as a directive to tell their stories. So much of our activism had been about the importance of amplifying the voices of the intentionally silenced, which included their voices as HIV seropositive queer men of color and my voice as a young, queer, multiracial Okinawan American dyke. We had all had moments where our outsiderness was highlighted, but that didn’t mean we understood how to tell the truth of each other’s experiences. I obsessed over the question for years. Finally, I heard them in my memory saying to tell the stories, and to tell our stories. And that started to shake loose the terror in me about getting it wrong.

I find myself searching for others who are asking questions about how we integrate memory and the world around us, which is both an unconscious process and a deliberate one. Marianne Hirsch’s work on “postmemory,” which explores how our ancestors’ experiences manifest in us, informs my questions about how the experiences of our loved ones are communicated to us, and then metabolized and expressed in us—a process complicated by differences in identity, interpretation, cultural expression, and embodied histories. I’ve also been deeply influenced by Carolyn Forché, whose work on how we understand the poetry of atrocity has given me a way to understand both my experiences in ACT UP and my family lineage of incarceration during World War II. One of the questions she asks is “What is the responsibility of the witness?” Once I could use that frame, of myself as simultaneously a participant in these stories and a witness, I found my way into writing the memoir.

The questions that animated my activism—Whose voices are silenced or amplified? Whose bodies are erased or sacrificed, and in which historical and cultural moments?—also animate my writing. Even when I didn’t want the memoir to be about me, it had to be—at least about me taking responsibility for my own subjectivity and mistakes. And yet, there’s a humility I feel that edges toward paralysis, because my understanding can change over time and [Cory and Steven’s] can’t. They don’t get to update their account of what they believed at the time or how they would reflect on that time in the present. And every time I tell it, the story changes as time and experience continue to shape me. It’s an ethical knot that keeps me up at night.

Throughout Blood Loss, you refer to yourself as a “dyke” and to Cory and Steven as “fags.” What do these terms mean to you in relation to more identitarian forms of LGBTQ+ politics? How did the sexual aspect of your relationships with Cory and Steven inform your thinking about queerness—as when you observe that “dykes and fags sleeping together doesn’t negate queerness; it amplifies it”?

Queerness is a social identity as much as an internal one. Women of color and queer of color theory provided a frame for me to understand what we were living through, and a way to untangle, or maybe further complicate, the relationship between intimacies, bodies, and love. Some of the influencing texts were what we might now think of as “classics”—[the anthology] This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984)—and later, works by people like Amber Hollibaugh, Susan Stryker, Eric Wat, and José Esteban Muñoz. They offered paths toward recognizing that amplifying the erotic (in Audre Lorde’s usage) is an of assertion of queer vitality under conditions that attempt to sterilize, separate, criminalize, and weaponize bodies.

In that context, who was having sex with whom or with what bodies was both a politicized experience and an affective one. Love and play across genders were ways of subverting the dominant narratives. We were never chasing heteronormativity, and we resisted straight-passing privilege. Cross-gender sexuality was also an intervention against certain ideas of separatism. Some people in the queer/AIDS activist worlds of Queer Nation and ACT UP came from social and political experiences in primarily gender-segregated spaces—mostly white, gender-segregated space—while many of us who had come from political organizing in communities of color had always had our primary spaces, and many of our emotional attachments, cross gender lines.

Part of why I focused on my relationships with Steven and Cory is that they both had very conscious analyses of the role of the erotic in art and activism. HIV seropositive folks in general, and especially HIV seropositive queer men of color, were caught in a double bind of hypersexualization and desexualization. Racism inside and outside of the queer community projected hypersexualization onto gay men of color—particularly Black and Latinx men—and this was in constant tension with the equally toxic belief that HIV seropositive people must forfeit their right to sexual expression. In their art practices, Cory and Steven interrogated ways the erotic had been projected onto them or denied to them. They defied those projections by insisting on intimacy, sexuality, and vitality.

Sexual, erotic, and emotional intimacies grew out of the intensity of what we were living through, the relentlessness of loss and the determination to survive, to try to save ourselves and each other, to stay connected to our aliveness. Pleasure is rebellious discourse, which is an inherently queer notion because it subverts assumptions about what sex is for, and what intimacy is for. Part of the drive of intimacies was navigating the connection between desire and death. As though by loving each other we could ward off death. Which is a ridiculously tragic fantasy—and also a deeply romantic one.

For the first generation of AIDS activists, “risk” mostly referred to the risk of HIV transmission through sex or IV drug use. By the time you entered the activist scene in 1991, queers had already developed extensive safe sex protocols, and latex condoms and rubber gloves were the norms. But as your memoir illustrates, it was a fantasy to think of sex as risk’s only domain. Can you say more about how you arrived at a broader conception of risk?

There are a few things that we mean when we talk about risk and HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. We mean virological risk, which was the easier part to address: strategies had been invented by early AIDS activists and allied medical folks, things like safe sex protocols and universal precautions in medical settings. Likewise, ACT UP Los Angeles was an early organizing force for needle exchange programs to protect people who use IV drugs.

But the more overwhelming risks were both bodily and emotional. We experienced violence, mostly from police and sometimes from queer bashers or counterprotesters, and in the panic and urgency of what I now understand to be field medic interventions, we were confronted with moments of needing to stop bleeding and tend to injuries. Though most of us kept a stash of latex gloves with us, it was hard, at least for me, in the traumatic pressure of post-violence moments, to remember to put on gloves. Even when I remembered that I had them, there was something about the experience of enforcing a tactile separation in a moment of emotional precarity that I resisted. The memoir opens with a scene where I’m tending to Cory’s wounds from a beating by the LAPD at a demonstration, and I’m struggling to make myself wear gloves because, emotionally, it feels like a betrayal of intimacy—an unbearable reminder of our different relationships to precarity, illness, and survival.

For me, the biggest risk was the constant anticipation of loss. I lived, and continue to live, in fear of losing the people I love. That is the reverberation of the relentless losses of queer family in the 1990s, and the inherited trauma of my family’s separations and losses during World War II incarceration. Maybe most people—or at least most people from marginalized and precarious communities and families—are faced with the deep ache of risk, knowing that love inevitably pairs with loss.

As you tell it, your first encounter with AIDS performance art—a choreographed and experiential piece mimicking “quarantine”—precipitates your first meetings at Queer Nation and ACT UP and evokes your family’s history of incarceration at Manzanar during World War II. In that sense, the story of your AIDS activism was always already the story of being Okinawan American. Can you say more about that?

The performance that you’re referencing was part of an all-night vigil and performance sequence at Highways Performance Space on World AIDS Day in 1990. It was the moment when I first became aware of the resonance between my embodied-though-not-often-articulated family history and the righteous outrage and panic I felt rippling through ACT UP demonstrations. The performance was not the first time I had encountered ACT UP, but it was the moment I understood it to be a place not only where I belonged politically but also where I felt something like reflection and belonging.

This project took close to a decade to finish because it was almost unbearable to explore the ways I have been shaped by the relentless losses of the ACT UP years, and to understand that my embodiment in the 1990s was also an embodiment of growing up in a family whose own wartime incarceration was not often talked about.

The connections between people whose experiences echo our own has a kind of intimate resonance. That’s what I felt in my ACT UP years—that the unmetabolized experiences of my family history had led me to a kind of political, moral outrage, and vigilance about power, justice, and caring, and those things were alive and driving much of the work in ACT UP, and certainly driving the intimacies I formed with people in ACT UP and Queer Nation. In a sense, I was both a witness and a participant.

The problem with calling the AIDS crisis “history” is that the crisis is ongoing. The best we can do is talk about different periods of response: the initial years of confusion and AIDS service organizations, the development of ACT UP and other direct action groups, the activist fallouts of the early 1990s, the post-cocktail years, and now a new period emerging in the wake of PrEP. But even then, the delineations aren’t neat. The quarantine of Manzanar is echoed in the suggested quarantine of people living with AIDS, both of which are echoed in the incarceration of migrants at the US border. Given these slippages between crises, how has this project shaped your relationship to the “historical”?

The very idea of the “historical” is the most glorious and problematic fantasy. It implies that something is a discrete event with a beginning and an ending. I don’t just mean the fantasy of AIDS as a discrete epidemiological experience that has ended, because of course AIDS is not over. Past and present crash into each other—COVID-19 echoed early confusions about viral transmission, the outrage of medical access and treatment inequity, and the trauma of being separated, which continues as we watch and fight the separation of families at the US border. The slippages are associative.

Just as I was finishing copyedits on Blood Loss and preparing for publication, Mary and Nancy, two beloveds from ACT UP who were part of my chosen family and have a big role in the narrative, died unexpectedly. Nancy and Mary had been together for over 30 years and came to ACT UP as a mixed-serostatus lesbian couple. I wasn’t surprised. I was still devastated, and I’d been living in anticipation of this loss for so many years.

That may be what I mean when, at the end of the memoir, I ask the question “Is it possible not to die of AIDS?” I imagine I may get pushback from people, including long-term seropositive survivors whose immune systems are stable and whose viral loads are undetectable. But I mean something more affective and internal, rather than virological. We are shaped by the experiences we survive. They leave scars. They shape how we move through the world, through our relationships. If we never escape it, and we live with it and within it, then don’t we die under the conditions of it as well?

The fantasy is that if something has an ending, we can recover from it fully, move on, and not continue to be shaped by it. But that isn’t true. Not for our psyches, and not for our bodies. At least not for mine. I’m much more invested in the idea of the aftermath: that everything which follows an event is shaped in relation to that which has already happened. Historical slippages are always and constant. Sometimes, we notice them more than others. Sometimes, the noticing is unbearable. But even the idea of “unbearable” is a lovely fantasy, because it implies that we somehow find an escape. Because we continue anyway. To live with it. In spite of it all.

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Featured image of Keiko Lane by Brian Joseph.