Uncovering

The first time I tried to write this memoir, I wrote it as fiction. Covering over. Disguising. Smoothing some of the ragged edges where I was afraid to tell the truth about what happened. I thought hiding would be easier.

But really, this book is about those things that happened, the illicit, the blameworthy, and the fragile. When I walked into my first Queer Nation/Los Angeles meeting at 16, which is where the story begins, I was caught between the habit of hiding, and the desire to be seen. The queers in that meeting had an explanation of my internal tension that made sense to me. We learn to hide as a form of protection. But hiding leads to a kind of violence of isolation. Community, activism, and art were interventions in isolation.

Over the next few years, this newfound chosen family of outlaws taught me that stealth was something different than hiding. We demanded of ourselves that we become conscious of our shrouding and that we make decisions about where, when, and why to show our truths. Which is mostly when we find each other. Or when we are protecting each other. Or now, when we grieve each other in private and in public.

Most of the people I came to love in ACT UP and Queer Nation were artists. From the very beginning of our relationships, most of them knew I would outlive them, and they made me promise to use my art to tell our stories. I couldn’t cover them up.

Cory Roberts-Auli was a beloved friend, artistic collaborator, sometimes a lover, and a comrade in ACT UP and Queer Nation in Los Angeles in the 1990s. My relationship with him is one of the central threads in my memoir.

In early conversations with my editors at Duke University Press, I sent them a photo of a wall installation by Cory from his series Power in America. His painting medium was most often blood, drawn from his subjects or from himself. Blood from people who were HIV seropositive. He’d mix the blood with thinner, paint it onto the body from which it had been extracted, then press the bloody body against cloth or a blank wall.

In Power in America, he used his own blood and his own body, pressed twice against a white wall, creating two life-sized figures facing each other. On the right side, a man’s body is reaching toward a woman’s body on the left side of the piece, whose arms are stretched behind her. She appears to be in motion, falling backward. He can’t quite reach her, but they are in contact, their feet braced against each other’s feet. Both of their mouths are open. Maybe they’re yelling. Maybe they’re surprised.

When Cory made this installation, he was asking questions about queer embodiments and symbols of exposure, risk, betrayal, devotion, and secrets. What is almost-but-not-quite hidden. The same questions I am still obsessed with.

After he made the piece, he told me it was about us. And then he gave it to me. Less than a year later, he died. I’m not giving away a surprise plot point of the memoir by telling you that he dies. Most of the people in my memoir die.

Queer codes of conduct were about telling the hard stories, my mentors-turned-friends-and-collaborators told me. The hard truths about how we loved each other and how we watched each other die.

Also, as hard as I tried that first time to write us as a fiction, I couldn’t invent anything as fabulous and ferocious as we actually were.

Sometimes art is a portal to what scares us. Maybe this is what my memoir is about: What scares us may also save us.

While designing this cover, my editors and I imagined people seeing the art, and then we realized we needed to be worried about something other than humans: The algorithms and censors in social media don’t like naked bodies. But would they recognize bloody ones?

It turns out, blood is another form of queer stealth. The censors have yet to recognize Cory’s naked body as a naked body. Hidden in plain sight.

Algorithms, we should not be surprised, do not understand symbolism. And they don’t understand the relationship between the signifier and the signified. The erect penis and the breasts aren’t legible. Algorithms don’t scan for the representational. They scan for the “real.” Ironically, these bodies are more “real,” more made of the corporeal stuff of actual bodies than realistic paintings or photographs which the censorial algorithms can (and do) identify.

The legibility of our bodies was part of Cory’s project. The legibility of our bodies is now part of my project. I inherited this obsession from him.

Who is a cover for? Is a book cover a code-switching form of queer stealth? Power in America is a familiar code for queers who lived through the plague years that are centered in my story. And for readers who weren’t there? Maybe a cover—maybe this cover—is the enactment of multiple definitions of cover, simultaneously protecting and acting as a connection to the present tense of queer precarity.

I’m incredibly lucky to be published by Duke University Press, which is known for gorgeous and edgy covers that reflect the scholarship, aesthetics, and input of their writers. When talking through publicity plans with the marketing team, we realized that my memoir’s release date is perilously close to the next national presidential election. Our attention will be largely focused on the dilemmas of democracy, fascism, the relationship between global militarism and domestic police brutality, and the desperate fight to codify bodily agency and autonomy. But the truth is, we have always made art under, in spite of, and in response to, these conditions. Maybe all art exists under the weight of perilousness.

About the author

Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art is her first book.