Keiko Lane, 50, a Los Angeles–based therapist and author, was only a high schooler when she got involved with the AIDS and LGBTQ activist groups ACT UP LA and Queer Nation in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

There, she met older queer people who became her mentors, protectors and “chosen family”—among them men living with AIDS with whom she became incredibly close, only to witness their deaths in the years ahead. Lane left LA for college but has for decades carried the memories of those turbulent years of protest, performance art, parties and self-discovery.

Now, she has captured them in Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism and Art (Duke University Press), a deeply poetic and moving memoir of a queer political immersion at an early age. The book, whose release date is September 17, begins:

“We want to imagine that there might be a time after. We want to remember a time before. There is no before. Even when we can call up some narrative of our lives before, there is no feeling that, in its recollection, is not refelt and reimagined through the anticipatory veil of what we have seen, what lives in our bodies and in the hollow echo of our stilted breath. We remember the first hospital, the first hospice, the first dying, the first death, the first memorial bonfire. We want to imagine that there will be a time after. But there won’t be. Having lived through (though maybe not survived), there is no future in which this did not happen.”

Lane talked with POZ about her book.

Cover of “Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism and Art”Courtesy of Keiko Lane

Congrats on your book! Are you happy with it?

I am. It’s very surreal to see it finally start to enter the world. So much has changed since it went into final production, including the deaths of Mary Lucey and Nancy MacNeil [a lesbian activist couple who were especially close with Lane, who memorialized them for POZ]. I was about to go to press when I decided that I had to put their deaths into the end of the book. The book ended with their loss instead of being in conversation with them.

You’re a longtime therapist with a strong focus on HIV and AIDS and LGBTQ issues. Did your early activism lead you to that career?

I’m sure it did. In LA, there was so much organizational overlap between Queer Nation and ACT UP, but people took different tracks—some were really good at policy, or art and graphics, or community mobilization. But I actually was more interested in the care work [of being in those groups] and the slowness of intimacy. There was so much franticness to working on policy and a sense of urgency, but it wasn’t my comfort zone. It took me a long time to figure that out.

Was there a moment when you connected the kind of care work you learned to do in those groups to the idea of a career path?

I don’t know if there was one clear moment. I backed into it sideways. Before I went to grad school to become a psychotherapist, I went to massage school. I was thinking a lot about how our bodies have been shaped by what we live through. I went to the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I was introduced to a program director coming out of a lifetime of activism, including antiwar activism. The work he was doing was about the experience of the body in the social world. They were running healing centers for survivors of political torture. And there was resonance between that experience and the experiences in ACT UP.

Such as?

The pervasiveness of loss, the feeling of losing almost everything and then, when you don’t die yourself, having to figure out what happens next. And also really thinking—this may be too in the weeds clinically, but I have a lot of critiques of trauma theory because it comes from a very white and privileged place and holds the idea that trauma can have a discrete beginning and end and that we can heal because the thing that harmed us is over.

When did you get the idea for this memoir, and how did you go about writing it? You note a few times in the book that some of your activist peers urged you to “write our story.”

I was always writing about it, but my first literary training was in poetry, not prose. I tried to write this as fiction about 15 years ago, but it didn’t work for me. I had no experience as a fiction writer, and I felt like I didn’t quite know what I was doing. And I was fictionalizing it to not have to deal with myself, but then I also felt like I wasn’t doing justice to these incredible people whom I’d loved, and still love. To fictionalize them felt like it was doing a disservice.

But it still took me a long time to figure out how to write this as a memoir. [The performance artist] Ron Athey [who was a key figure in the LA scene] was giving a lecture about 10 years ago, and I was there. As part of a slide show, he showed one of the covers of [the zine] Infected Faggot Perspectives, which Cory [Roberts-Auli, an artist who died of AIDS in 1996] and I produced after Wayne [Karr] died in 1995. I asked Ron, “Are you writing about Cory? Someone should.” He said, “It’s your turn—you do it.”

So when I started, I thought I was writing a long-form essay about Cory’s art practice and resisted for a year or two the idea that I was telling a bigger story that I was a significant character in. I was grappling with how to bring myself into the story and center my voice in a way that felt ethical and made it clear that I was remembering from my own subjectivity and not trying to write biographies about them.

Keiko Lane and her artist friend Cory Roberts-Auli (1991)Sonia Slutsky

Did you work from some sort of outline?

I didn’t have one for a long time. I started with the questions I was obsessed with, that I couldn’t let go of—that first section about how we remember things. I started writing scenes, moments that I hadn’t been able to forget. And as I started writing the moments with Cory, Steven kept showing up, and Mary and Nancy, and Jeff and Pete, and after a while, I thought, This is all of us—this is our little queer family. At that point, I got more strategic about including the moments that connected us all. Then, a draft or two in, once I felt like I had the feeling of all of us, I went back and started making a political timeline—of what we were fighting policywise when this or that particular personal thing happened.

The years in question are the late 1980s and early ’90s.

I’d started doing coalition-building work with ACT UP. In LA in the late 1980s, if you wanted to mobilize the left fast for a demonstration, you called ACT UP, you called the Student Coalition, a young person’s activist group that initially formed around apartheid, and you called CISPES, which was The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. I’d started going to ACT UP demonstrations in 1989, and meetings of ACT UP and Queer Nation in early 1991, when I was 16. 

What was proximity to so much illness, death, grief and loss like at that age? Did you ever think, This is too much, I just want to be a normal teen?

From the age of 12 or 13, I’d already been involved in activism — working in community with refugees and asylum seekers, at demonstrations against police brutality in LA and at demonstrations at the South African Consulate in LA against apartheid, so that was already my normal.

So when I was in ACT UP and Queer Nation, I was heartbroken and traumatized a lot, but I also couldn’t imagine walking away from the sense of community those groups gave me as a young person. And because I was one of the youngest in the group, if not the youngest, I was incredibly loved and taken care of. People were very protective of me.

How do you think the experience shaped you?

It’s both an easy and complicated answer. The easy answer is that I was absolutely traumatized—I think we all were. But there’s often a fantasy that if something has been traumatic, that if we could go back, we wouldn’t do it again. But if I had to go back, I wouldn’t walk away from it just to avoid loss.

You write in the book about your mother, who is Okinawan, being born in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. Do you think that family history shaped you in any way?

I grew up knowing about that as a story in my family that was told in a pretty matter-of-fact way. Understanding the emotional toll of it was something I came to much later. 

You talk in the memoir about going with your older peers to Club Fuck!, which was an industrial multigendered queer club and performance space. 

It wasn’t a central part of my life, but it overlapped with people from ACT UP and Queer Nation, so it would be someplace we’d end up. Ron performed there, and he and Cory were good friends, so I could just walk in [despite my age] with Cory. I was a really good and rule-abiding young person in many ways. I didn’t drink or do recreational drugs. I was always one of the designated drivers. I was growing up in Echo Park and going to the public high school in Silver Lake. But as for Club Fuck!, there was a DJ and stages for go-go dancers. There was high sexuality and eroticism all over, but in my experience, it wasn’t like standing in the middle of a sex club. It had an energy of and enactment of sexual performance, a safe and outrageous space for queer outlaws.

A lot of the people in your inner circle were people of color, like yourself. What percentage of ACT UP-LA was people of color?

I’m not the political historian on the group, like the people working on the ACT UP-LA Oral History Project. I have no idea what the percentages were like overall at different points in time. Among my close circle of friends, family and comrades, I remember the percentage being about half or more than half. There was a lot of whiteness in the room, but the People of Color Caucus was extremely loud. The people I was closest to weren’t the white people on the problematic side but rather the folks of color and the white people coming out of antiracist organizing.

There’s the sense that you had a sexual relationship with Cory. Were you in love with him?

That is correct. We loved each other. I wouldn’t frame it as some sort of heteronormative model. 

Were you fearful of getting HIV from him?

The groups were such hubs of frank information about risk and safety. We did so much training of communities about those things. So when we were intimate in ways where there could be viral risk, yes, there was protection. 

Did you feel no fear about the risk of getting HIV?

The virus wasn’t as big a fear for me as the fear of losing people and hence grasping at the kind of intimacies that were available to us. 

Eventually, Cory goes away to be with his boyfriend. What was that like? Did that separation make it easier for you when he finally passed?

Yes, probably, because he was happy. He was so excited about this boyfriend. The story gets framed as me being so much younger than him and blah blah blah, but he was only 26, still so young himself. And by the time he died, I was in college in Oregon a lot of the time. I’ve lived with the question of whether I really showed up for him in those last six months. 

Did people in the groups ever ask you what you were doing there? Or were you ever self-conscious about being HIV negative while in the company of so many people with AIDS?

I was most self-conscious when faced with the decision of leaving to go away to college. I could leave. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people had critiques or questions about me, and I would’ve understood. But also, by the time I started going to ACT UP meetings, I had a solid group of people I’d been going to Queer Nation with whom I was very close to. So that was another buffer.

Were you the only one that young in both groups?

I think so, but I could be wrong. We had to be careful about when and how I got arrested because I was a minor. We decided early on that I was not going to cross state lines. But some of the guys in the group were only three or four years older than me, which doesn’t feel like much now but was a huge difference then.

The kind of surprise protests and civil disobedience that ACT UP and Queer Nation pulled off aren’t as feasible now as they were then. There is so much more digital surveillance now to make such actions far harder to pull off. And the capacity for bad actors to be shamed into doing the right thing has really diminished. Do you think ACT UP tactics still work?

I think they do. I want to think they do. Watching what happened [the pushback from the powers that be and from law enforcement] with BLM [Black Lives Matter] and Standing Rock, yes, feels more violent today. Certainly, the LAPD were not a picnic [in the ACT UP days], but I don’t remember being afraid for my life at demos, even though sometimes people got seriously hurt.

At one point in the book, you write, “I worry about my tendency toward nostalgia and sentimentality.” What do you mean?

I was worried that I would simplify the story and the people in it. I grappled with that through multiple drafts. Could I allow myself and everyone I loved to be as complicated as we actually were? In my first drafts, Cory and Steven were too perfect. I wanted readers to love them as much as I loved them.

Why was it important for you to tell this story?

I wanted to show how I was shaped by it and also how those of us who are left have continued to be with each other. There was hardly a time when Mary and Nancy and I were together in the last 10 years when we didn’t talk about Cory or the others, feeling our way back there.

The question that organizes my life is “How did we end up who we are?” And when I ask that question about myself, those years are so core for me. I’ve always felt responsible for remembering because [most of them] are no longer here.

When I was teaching graduate psychotherapy, I’d always use some early AIDS writing. Most of the people in the class were queer, because it was billed as a queer psychotherapy class, but nobody knew anyone who’d died [of AIDS] or who was seropositive. I started getting afraid of lost stories and lost history. I wanted to see if I could translate what we lived through then to what I am now.