Blood Loss: A Love Story of Aids, Activism, and Art

By: Keiko Lane

Keiko Lane tells the story of her queer and AIDS activism with the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP, showing how in addition to being public advocates, each group was a queer chosen family that took care of each other in sickness and health.

In 1991, sixteen-year-old activist Keiko Lane joined the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP. Their members protested legislation aimed at dismantling rights for LGBTQ people, people living with HIV, and immigrants while fighting for needle-exchange programs, reproductive justice, safer-sex education, hospice funding, and the right to die with dignity. At the same time, the activists were a queer chosen family of friends and lovers who took care of one another in sickness and in health. Sometimes they helped each other die. By the time Lane turned twenty-two, most had died of AIDS. In her evocative memoir, Lane weaves together love stories and afterlives of queer resistance and survival against the landscape of the Rodney King Rebellion, the movement for queer rights, and the censorship of queer artists and sexualities. Lane interrogates the social construction of power against and in queer communities of color and the recovery of sexual agency in the midst and aftermath of violence. Luminous and powerfully moving, Blood Loss explores survival after those we love have died.