In Blood Loss: A Love Story of Aids, Activism, and Arts (Duke University Press, 2024), Keiko Lane weaves her personal narrative into the broader fabric of 1990s Los Angeles, a time marked by the AIDS epidemic, the Rodney King riots, and the Gulf War, among others. Her memoir moves beyond the surface of historical events, instead focusing on the emotional and relational toll of these periods on queer activist communities.
The process of remembering and naming is twofold: it is an inherently personal endeavor, yet it also demands that we look beyond ourselves, beyond the confines of our bodies and the time we inhabit. This duality becomes starkly evident in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and in Sudan and Congo, the relentless bombings in Lebanon, and the clear-as-day lynchings of Black people—Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams at the hands of the state, Javion Magee found hanging from a tree—which each reinforce how memory and naming are more than acts of personal recollection. They are acts of collective witnessing and defiance against erasure, against a colonial system that requires a specific type of white memory to function.
Naming, in this way, can be tricky. Lane’s entry point into the personal through community reframes memory as strictly an individual experience. In other words, the act of remembering transcends the individual, becoming a form of resistance that links past to present and personal to collective, ensuring that the voices of the oppressed resonate beyond the moment of atrocity, demanding justice across time and space.
In our conversation via email, we talked about how memory, archival processes, and affective history shape Lane’s storytelling. Through the lens of her relationships—with those who lived and those who have passed—Lane shows that love, loss, and survival are inherently intertwined, particularly within queer anticolonial movements, and the importance of community in times of crisis.
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The Rumpus: This memoir situates your personal experiences into the broader context of the AIDS epidemic in 1990s Los Angeles, the Rodney King riots, and the Gulf War. Can you tell me a bit about what the research process was like? In what ways did the relationships you explore, or your memory of them, complicate the archival process?
Keiko Lane: I was clear from the beginning of writing Blood Loss that my project wasn’t a political history but an affective remembrance. The observable, political, and material world does matter and provides shape to our internal and relational experiences, but I’ve been more interested and invested in exploring how we internalized what happened. And when multiple people remember things differently, the questions aren’t about who is right and who is wrong but what the threads of experience are that lead us to foreground certain memories and background others. What are the associations that we make that bind us to particular stories, that make those stories resonate for us as reflections of our internal experience?
There were times when I was trying to remember where or when something happened—for example a clinic defense action in the winter, where I remembered the action and that it was important to me because it was the first time I had really connected with writer Steven Corbin, a central figure in the memoir, but I couldn’t remember where we were. I posted to Facebook and tagged a bunch of friends from ACT UP to ask who remembered the action and where we were. Everyone remembered it differently, and so I let everyone have their say. That helped me let go of some of my panic about getting the historical record correct. What mattered in that scene is what I remembered feeling: why we were there and who was there.
Certainly, there are places where the historical record matters—like keeping track of which politicians supported bills that were designed to criminalize us or blocked funding for healthcare. Some things are easily researchable, such as the precise date of the verdict that acquitted the police officers who beat Rodney King, which led to the multiday rebellion. The deadline for the first Gulf War. For other events, my curiosity was about affective and relational memory rather than political memory.
Rumpus: How has your relationships to archives, to the archival process, changed over time?
Lane: I am suspicious of the institutionalization of knowledge because voices like mine, and like those of my loved ones and comrades in ACT UP and Queer Nation, have historically been excluded from the formal record. When I started the book, my fantasy was that I would be able to have my memories verified through research and conversations. But so much of queer culture and activist culture isn’t archived in formal settings. And even formalized oral histories, like the ACT UP/Los Angeles Oral History Project, are just now starting to gather our testimonies, and so I was asking friends what they remembered, and often their stories conflicted. I had to learn to trust my own memory of the feeling and experience of events.
There’s a section toward the end of the book where I’m writing about a gallery show of photography and ephemera documenting a club called Fuck! that had community overlap with ACT UP and Queer Nation. A friend noticed that in a photo of the club, artist Cory Roberts-Auli, who was a beloved of mine and whose life and death is at the center of the memoir, was in the photo but designated as “unnamed person.” It made me think about how the dead can be so easily missed, not intentionally but because when a community loses so many people all at once, as we did in the AIDS activist community in the 1990s, there are fewer people left to do the work of remembering and naming.
Through the years of writing this book, I’ve expanded what I understand to constitute an archive. And really, everything is an archive if we question and listen closely enough.
Rumpus: On the very first page of the book, you write: “Having lived through (though maybe not survived), there is no future in which this did not happen.” This quote speaks to the ways time and memory complicate the body. Can you talk a little bit about ways chronology impacted your storytelling? Did linearity present more of a guide map or an expectation?
Lane: The fantasy of linearity is that if we can organize the stories of our lives into a neat, linear narrative, we will understand how and why things happen. But that isn’t how memory works. We look back and try to recreate what happened, and we are influenced by the experiences and feelings that follow an event. We are always living in the aftermath. Our bodies are also shaped by what has happened. When we recall and remember, as a whole, embodied experience, it is through the lens of what has already happened. Understanding that helped me to let go of chronology as the organizing principle of storytelling. There is a fairly chronological progression that is always grounded by or in relation to a present-tense voice that reflects on the aftermath.
Rumpus: The way you talk about organizing spaces as malleable, always-shifting groups of community reminds me of Octavia Butler’s research on slime molds and how they queer structure, slipping in and out of certain relationships, certain identities. How did you discern the threads you wanted to follow when everything was constantly changing?
Lane: I had to remind myself regularly that I was writing my experience of a few of the relationships that had been central to my life. None of our relationships exist in isolation, and so people enter and exit the story just as they enter and exit moments of our lives. In a sense, my process of writing was also a process of being curious about how and why different people showed up in different moments of the text. And my relationships with these friends and loved ones on the page gave me space to ask questions that we hadn’t had time to sit with, or articulate together, years ago. Some of the questions, like the ones with Cory or Steven, who are dead, had to live just in me. And some of the questions about how we live now, how we metabolize the traumas and the intimacy of the ACT UP years, I got to ask of people who were still alive and still my loved ones—like Jeff Schuerholz and Nancy MacNeil, who has since died. Kind of like building a community, or building any kind of intimacy, the writing was a process of following the questions rather than the conclusions.
Rumpus: Can you tell me a bit more about your choice of structure for the book?
Lane: I wasn’t sure when I started what the structure would be. I wasn’t even sure when I started that I was writing a book. I thought I was writing an essay, and then people kept showing up in my memory and talking and demanding to be included. I knew there was a present tense of the book. Once I gave in to the idea that I was writing a memoir, I knew that the hook wasn’t about the trauma unfolding, but the way we make meaning of it. There wasn’t a way to have a narrator me experience it as it was happening as though I didn’t already know what would happen and what I remembered and felt wasn’t already shaped in response. The big reveal isn’t that Cory dies, or Steven, or the violences we experienced. The movement of the book, I came to realize, was really a journey of trying to understand how I had been shaped by those years, and how my relationships with those of us who are still here, still alive, have all been shaped.
Rumpus: You explore multiple different, intimate relationships. What roles do failure and accountability play in your love story? And looking at Blood Loss as a whole, do you see it more as one love story or many?
Lane: Maybe all love stories exist in the context of, or in relation to, the stories around them. Maybe none of them can be isolated. If the task is to save each other, we were all bound to fail. But the trying was the love story, dyadic and collective.
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Author photograph by Brian Joseph
