Blood/Loss: Toward a Queer Poetics of Embodied Memory (a Love Story)

How does memory work? What can the art left by dead loved ones teach us about how to live without them? How do we move forward into a future they could not have imagined?

Blood/Loss is a memoir about queer kinships and the experiences of outrage, grief, love, and artistic process in the plague years of the 1990s.

In 1991, when I was 16, I joined the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). In public we protested against legislation aimed at dismantling rights for LGBT people, prisoners, and immigrants; and fighting for needle exchange programs, women’s right to safe abortions, safe sex education, hospice funding, and the right to die with dignity. We were arrested fighting against the criminalization of people living with HIV and the first Gulf War. Privately, we were a queer chosen family who fostered fierce intimacies; made visual, literary, and performance art; rearranged jazz standards for queer duets; and questioned the role of art in revolution and survival. We took care of one another in sickness and in health. And sometimes we helped each other die. By the time I turned 22, most of that chosen family had died of AIDS.

This book weaves together the stories of queer and AIDS activisms against the landscape of the Rodney King Rebellion, the Gulf War, the movement for marriage equality, and the funding fights and censorship battles of the National Endowment for the Arts. The lives and deaths of this chosen family of queers, most of whom are people of color, highlight questions about the social construction of power in medical access, the recovery of sexual agency in the aftermath and ongoingness of violence, and whose survival is valued.

I explore the embodied experiences of queer intimacies in relation to my family history of Japanese American Incarceration during WWII and my childhood as the daughter of a painter and a jazz musician. Making use of literary theory about the poetry, literature, and theater of wartime and collective memory, and neuroscience, psychoanalytic thinking, and somatic processes of memory, attachment, and sex, Blood/Loss explores the questions of who survives and how we survive after those we love have died.

(Instead of a) Preface

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.

Rebellion

Cory called me to his house in the middle of the night during the first week of queer rebellion in response to the governor’s veto of AB-101, the queer housing and employment nondiscrimination act. Cory had been thrown to the ground by riot police, trampled, hogtied, beaten, detained. Released, he was home again, alone, and wanted me. He told me he had been hurt, but still I couldn’t have prepared for the damage. I walked in the door of the darkened house and leaned up to kiss him. He turned his mouth away from me and my lips ricocheted off his jaw and he winced. He had showered but couldn’t bear to put clothing back on his wounded skin. He was standing naked in the dark living room. I turned on the light in the corner of the room to look at him closely. His skin was scraped raw along his arms, jaw, cheekbones, legs, and chest. His lips were swollen and split. His chest, arms, and back were blooming with deep purple bruises...