Changing Colours.
ioli Tzanetaki in Conversation with Lola Flash

ioLi Tzanetaki: Over the past 30 years, you’ve been working on creating visibility about the legacy of the LGBTQI+ community and communities of colour worldwide. We’re currently very happy to be showing your work SALT at the museum as part of the cycle of exhibitions under the umbrella title What if Women Ruled the World? Today, we will focus on your series of works, Cross Colour (1987-ongoing), which you developed in the 80s and the 90s while living in New York City. From very early on, your art and activism have been profoundly connected. You were living in New York at the time, developing your Cross Colour work while also being very actively working within various organisations, such as ACT UP, working on raising awareness about AIDS.
Can you tell me a few words about Cross Colour?

Lola Flash: I started creating the Cross Colour work when I was in college in the 70s. I studied at the Maryland School of Art in Baltimore. It’s interesting when one reflects on how things develop because I suppose, in some ways, it was due to the lack of money that I developed this method of working. At school, there was always negative paper lying around in the darkrooms that was up for grabs. And so I started thinking about what would happen if I worked with this negative paper. I decided to print my slides on the negative paper, and voilà, I got this crazy colour. Then, I started photographing, knowing that I was going to reverse the colour for the final image. At first, it was just like a mistake, a happy mistake. But then I started thinking if, for instance, I photographed the red, it would be the opposite of red, so green. In the darkroom, I was able to dial in other colours – yellow, magenta, and cyan. I could make black people white and white people black. If I photographed a black cat, which is “bad luck”, it became “good luck”. I started playing around with the filters, and then I realised I could make people green and red and blue and quickly move away from the binary idea of race. Sometimes, even gender is blurred. It became about being a human being. The audience is allowed to forget about biases concerning whether the photograph is a black man or woman or a queer person or whatever their bias might be.

This process made me realise things that I knew subconsciously growing up. For instance, when I was little, I used to love dictionaries, both as objects and because I just loved learning new words. I was aware when I was a kid that black meant bad, dirty, and wrong, but that white meant pure, innocent, and idyllic. I don’t think I talked to my parents about this much, but I know if you’re a black kid growing up, you see how the media presents your community, you see your parents struggle, your friends’ parents struggle, and you kind of assume that something is “wrong” with you. I think it’s the responsibility of the artist to let the world see how we see things or let the world see how we would like to see the world. For instance, in my photograph of Martina Navratilova, she is serving at the US Open and in the background, the crowd, because it’s in cross-colour, is black. The spectators have funny tennis hats on, and their faces are black. My dad used to take me to these tennis tournaments, and this, of course, was way before Serena and Venus were even born. I was very aware that it was mostly just me and my dad at these tournaments, and the other black people that were there were workers; they were the people cleaning up, the people that were the vendors. Early on, Cross Colour was a way for me to create inclusion through my work and to show my audience the way I would like the world to be – an equitable one. I did this work for 20 years. I like to say that last century that was what my work looked like.

As a kid, I was what they called a “tomboy” – I was always doing things that girls weren’t supposed to do. Then, when I went to college, I realised that I was gay. I feel like I was always pushing against the system. My parents, while I was growing up, made it very clear that education was very important. Both of them were teachers. I was conscious that I was pushing against the sort of stereotypes about black people, not wanting to be like that. I think that the work was kind of similar to that; it was very different. Some people say I was queering the vision. And I like this idea. I love the fact that my friends were able to start seeing things in Cross Colour. They’d say, “Lola, I saw a wall”, or “I saw a corner”, or “An outfit that would look really cool in Cross Colour”. And so, I feel that we had this little tribe of people that were really into Cross Colour. It was like our own little secret.

Another thing about Cross Colour that I loved was that sometimes it kind of looks like a collage. In that period, unless you were cutting up your images, it wasn’t really easy to do collage like it is now with Photoshop. There were a lot of ideas I was working on that were very complicated, but I think that because for the most part, I was entranced in the AIDS crisis, I didn’t really have a chance to reflect on the work. I graduated in 1981, the first year someone was diagnosed with AIDS. Most people in the AIDS world know that people were dying before this, but that’s when it was officially announced in The New York Times. And that was like a message that I had to create work that was political. But even in hindsight, for me to be black and queer and female, I didn’t have a choice, really. I felt that I needed to make images that spoke to my identity. For so long, other communities have been photographing my people and showing us the way that they want to show us. Many times, it wasn’t collaborative. I’m thinking about Edward Curtis and how a lot of the work that Curtis did was about how he wanted to see and photograph the Native Americans, not really about the way that they wanted to be presented. Often, he didn’t even include their names. The label just says: Native American woman. I often think about the colonial start of photography. I think about photography as this tool that I use to change a lot of these words and thought patterns. For example, I use the word participant, instead of subject.

My works were always a collaboration. I didn’t make any of my models; my models made me. I never could take pictures of someone who was dying. I think about my friend Ray1 in particular. There’s that picture I have called “4 Ray”. During that period, all people with AIDS had this specific look on their faces, especially in the beginning when they had Kaposi’s,2 so a lot of them had sort of purple spots all over. There’s a picture I did of my friend Charles, where we put brown Band-Aids on him. I knew that if I put the Band-Aid on his dark skin, they would come up dark. And then I dialled in the colour again to make it look purple. So the image would in a way speak to Kaposi’s. I did do some photography at demonstrations. Cross Colour work made so much sense with the demonstration shots, but a lot of the work I did was set up in a studio environment. I don’t consider myself a street photographer; I generally create the scene for the images.

iT: Did you use your friends and community members as models for the photographs you took in your studio? How did you choose who was going to be photographed?

LF: For my whole career, my models/participants have been my friends. Every once in a while, I would stop someone at a bus stop and say, “Hey, I’m doing a series about ‘beauty’” or whatever it might be, “and you’re perfect for it”. But for the most part, it has been friends, like the picture I just talked about, Charles. He died of AIDS. When I photographed him, he was in the closet for being HIV positive. I didn’t know; he didn’t want to tell people. There was so much guilt and stigma around the virus. Another friend of mine, Ray, who is in a couple of my photographs, told us that he was sick, and it felt that two weeks later he had died. I know it wasn’t that quick, but in the very beginning, it was a really quick curve of being diagnosed with AIDS and then dying. My girlfriend at the time was Julie Tolentino,3 who was in the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” poster with me and used to be a bartender at this club called “Quick”, a boys’ club. I took a lot of photographs for their promotional flyers, and Julie would help me pose the guys, who were generally nude. But because it was Cross Colour, it wasn’t as shocking to see a naked body. It was a way to sort of hide their nudity.

After Julie finished up at the club, I would usually go meet her, around 4 am, we would go to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, which is where most of the people with AIDS were, and most of them died there. We would go there to take care of Ray because he had developed dementia, and he would try to climb out of his bed. Since he was too weak, he would have hurt himself. So, from 4 to 8 am, Julie and I would go to the hospital, and then at 8 am, his mom, Patricia Navarro would come and do the 8 am to 12 pm shift. And so we provided 24-hour care for him. We couldn’t afford to pay for the care, so the family and friends pitched in. Julie likes to always say, “Ray is going to think this is so funny. Here we are in our leather club clothes, sitting there just watching him, and he would probably laugh.” But, of course, he didn’t ever come back. There was also joy within all of it, all of that period.

I do believe that my commitment to making images that are political is because of all those people that I lost. It seemed as though all of them were geniuses, like Cookie Mueller. She was an amazing writer. Ray was an amazing person. They were all just amazing. It seemed like the best of us were being taken away. From another friend, Dave White, I learnt a lot about design. He used to work at this club called “Meat” and we would change the look of the club. I’ve never been very spatial, but he showed me how to make spaces look totally different each night. That’s the reason why I committed myself to doing political work, speaking for them, and sharing things that they taught me and shared with me. Because they left us too soon.

When I was photographing people for Cross Colour, I did some nudes; I did some sexy pictures with people embracing. Back then, a lot of people weren’t out. And so I would say, “No one’s going to know who you are because you’re going to be green, blue, or purple”. Especially if they weren’t looking straight on, it was hard to tell who they were. I think, in some ways, it was a way of letting people be a part of showing their identity, but also a way to kind of mask it at the same time. It was just such a hard time. I remember I used to talk to my grandmother. And she would say that she was making biscuits for her friend’s funeral, and I was just like, “Oh, I just went to a funeral”. It seemed so ironic and wrong that my grandmother and I were losing friends at the same time.

I was thinking about how when COVID first surfaced, it was all over the papers from the beginning, while for AIDS, The New York Times didn’t report anything about it until well into the 1980s. I don’t know how many people had died by then. And even then, when they did report it, it was not on the front page, whereas COVID, after the first, maybe a thousand people that died, was on the front of The New York Times. The response in the media was just so overwhelming when I compared it to the reportage of AIDS. It was obvious to me that the system is still broken and that the same marginalised people who died from HIV were the same group of people that were dying from COVID because of a lack of healthcare, because of poor diets, because they were vulnerable, because they couldn’t isolate. And so, I realised, “Wow, the system has not changed one bit”.

iT: Earlier, you mentioned that although a lot of the photographs were taken in your studio, you were also taking photos in some of the demonstrations you were taking part in, which is something more unlikely in terms of how you usually photograph.

LF: So much of it was just this natural thing. I remember that I would go to the demonstrations, and I would either bring my camera or not bring it. If I brought my camera, I would say to myself, “I’m not going to get arrested”, because our goal was generally to get arrested. If I knew I was going to get arrested, I wouldn’t bring my camera. One of the reasons why I did bring my camera was because we had such great posters in the demonstrations. Gran Fury4 created the graphics for them. And we also always had our T-shirts on – the “Silence = Death” T-shirts. Reagan was always the target. I remember there was a Reagan T-shirt with a bullseye on his face; he was fluorescent with red eyes. The graphics around our work were so great for photos, so it made me want to photograph. It’s interesting because a lot of the work I did at the time I didn’t print. I was so ensconced in being an activist and so busy with all the different meetings and commitments that there’s so much of that work just sitting in my bedroom in boxes.

There was one time when we got arrested during a demonstration at City Hall, where we blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. There is a really great video showing this called “Like a Virgin” (1991). There was DIVA-TV,5 which was our in-house film crew, and they were photographing me. I was sitting down, and the cops were asking, “What are you doing?” And I said, “We’re demonstrating because the city is not doing enough around AIDS. And we want to make society aware that people are dying.” And they were like, “What are you doing now?” I said, “Well, I’m sitting here waiting to get arrested”. And right when I said that they pulled me away. It was almost like it was edited, but it was actually what happened. And then, what they would do is put the women in one holding cell and the guys in another holding cell.

When we got arrested, one great thing was that we had lawyers who watched us go in and wrote our numbers down so we knew we wouldn’t get lost in the system. And, of course, as a black person, you want to make sure that someone knows you’re in there. And I suppose that even then, I imagine some of the white gay folks were probably worried too because even though there is still homophobia, it was pretty bad then, in the late 80s and 90s.

When we went to jail, following the City Hall demonstration, what they did to intimidate us was they made the girls go downstairs to this awful-looking basement. There were three women officers, and they had plastic gloves or marigolds. It was more like gardening gloves, like those yellow big, thick ones. They were just standing there, and they said, “Take off your shirt; show us what’s in your bra”. They even asked us to take our pants down. They didn’t touch us, but they were kind of just intimidating us. They knew that we were non-violent, and they knew we didn’t have guns. So, what happened with that was some of the women were really triggered, especially some of the women that had been abused in the past. And so we sued the city, and each woman got $1,000 in our name. At the time, Ray wanted Ray-Bans. He wanted to look like Ray Charles. So, we got him Ray-Bans, but back then, that was expensive for me. I also bought a bunch more films. Some women just needed a holiday. But I think it was kind of the end of the [ACT UP] women’s group because a lot of women wanted to put that money back into ACT UP. I think this to me was the demise of the women’s group because there was just kind of their infighting and stuff like that. I don’t see people talking much about that, but that’s my thoughts on what happened there.

iT: Can you tell me a bit more about ACT UP and your involvement with it?

LF: I moved to New York around ’85 or ’86. I met this wonderful woman in Provincetown called Sharon Neisp, who was in a lot of John Waters’ films. She sadly passed away last fall. Yet, she saw my artwork, and she said, “What are you doing in Atlanta? You should be in New York.” She let me move into her place, which was a studio apartment in the East Village. It was such a pivotal time to be in New York, I don’t even know how I became part of ACT UP. I don’t remember being invited. It just seems like I moved to New York, and I was in ACT UP. Every Monday, we met at the LGBTQ centre, which is still there on West 13th Street. It was a non-hierarchical structure; a different person led at every meeting. We eventually grew out of the space; at the end of my being in ACT UP, we moved to the Cooper Union building. Usually, there was standing room only, and there were chairs in the front for people with AIDS. Keith Haring, yet another person, another genius who died from AIDS, was part of ACT UP for a little bit, and he would donate his artwork for our many fundraisers. To show you what kind of guy he was, I remember one time – he was very thin at this point, and you could tell he was obviously a person with AIDS – he was giving his chair to someone who was even sicker than him. I just thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool, showing that kind of empathy”. He was already kind of famous by then, especially in New York, and it was a very humble gesture to give up his chair.

Another story is about when we invaded one of the TV stations – I forget whether it was ABC or CBS. We went in during the time they were doing the nightly news, and we started hollering, “ACT UP, Fight Back”. I think one person chained themselves to a broadcaster’s chair. Someone from ACT UP worked for one of those TV stations, so they made fake passes. I think back then, they probably just used a photocopier machine and that’s how we gained access. That was the other thing about ACT UP that I loved: since it was non-hierarchical, everyone felt like they were important parts of the group. The scientists met with other scientists at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control). The clubbers passed out condoms and safer sex information. Everyone who had whatever speciality would somehow help; us artists, we did, you know, photography and flyers. And I think that was a brilliant way to understand how organisations can work and how they can be much more inclusive.

There was something called affinity groups – I guess, now, in the Zoom world, you have these “breakout rooms” – and they were like the old-fashioned “breakout rooms”. Each affinity group had a specific focus. I joined one, and that was helping women get to the clinics, specifically Latino women. That was another problem in New York during that time; there were a lot of black women and women of colour who were HIV positive because someone they were sleeping with was backsliding. They were being exposed to AIDS without knowing. It was a huge population that a lot of the press didn’t feel the need to expose. But those women needed to get to these clinics, and they couldn’t because they had childcare issues. There were specific needs for specific parts of the community. And the affinity groups were how we supported different groups within those communities. I would always tell myself, “You’re not going to join another affinity group”, and somehow, I would end up in another affinity group and more meetings.

We would have these think tanks within our affinity groups. And then we would sometimes show up to the demonstrations with huge refrigerator boxes that we’d make them look like buildings. We would put windows on them and we would do different kinds of DIY stuff to talk about housing for people with AIDS. The guys that were part of the Gran Fury – it was mostly guys – they had money, they had generational wealth. Back then, we were just starting to use computers, and those guys had a lot of that equipment already, so they were able to make these really clean-looking posters as opposed to just using a marker and writing. Some of the groups didn’t have that kind of money. So, Gran Fury created a mixture of DIY-looking agitprop and commercial-looking material.

I’ve lived through the civil rights movement; I lived through the Vietnam War, but I was too young to be a part of those movements. ACT UP gave me the chance to put my body, literally, on the street. It was very empowering to create change that can be felt even today. We have done so much – if you think about the drugs that are available and the fact that people are actually living with HIV, instead of dying from HIV. And housing is another thing. I have a friend who lives in a really cool apartment uptown, West Side and 44th Street. Now, when they make new buildings, there has to be a certain amount for people with HIV. There are definitely long-lasting results from the activism that we did. And another great thing about it is that we came together as a queer community. There were also straight advocates. For instance, Deb Levine is a straight woman who has gone on to continue to teach about AIDS/HIV. It really brought all of us together. There wasn’t a separation; we all banded together because our friends were dying at such a rapid rate, and the world seemed not to care. I feel people were lost and scared. Everyone was much less judgemental. It was like, “Here’s another set of hands that can help us; come on in”. I still have a lot of friends from that period, such as my friend Aldo Hernandez, another person who was in it and is still doing the good work. Or Nan Goldin, who wasn’t really in the trenches as much but has been very outspoken. She did lose a lot of friends, like all of us. I saw her speak just the other day, and she was saying that she kind of lost all the people that she’s supposed to grow old with, which is kind of the way I feel. It’s very hard to talk about that period without being overwhelmed with emotion. And I know when my parents passed away, I thought, “Oh, I’m an expert at death. I’ll be fine.” But your parents’ death is a lot different than your friend’s death.

I was still doing work during this time. Even now, when I look at my Cross Colour work, it makes me realise how things haven’t changed that much and how I sort of had my finger on the button last century, pointing to the lack of equality and how it still reigns today. I guess that’s the thing about art; although it’s made in a certain period, a lot of times the message can be lifelong.

iT: Things remain relevant, sometimes even more over the years.
During this period, you were also part of the people who founded Arts+Positive, which was another organisation you were very involved in at the time.

LF: Yeah, some of the work we did is on display now in Chicago. There’s a doctor who acquired the Art+Positive Archives, Dan Burger. He bought the collection from Aldo [Hernandez]. What’s interesting to me is that people used to say that people like Aldo are hoarders. Now, hoarders have become archivists. Thank goodness Aldo was an archivist and kept a lot of the material we had. We had the meetings at his place, in the East Village. A lot of them were based around Senator [Jesse] Helms and all his nonsense – revoking money from the NEA (National Education Association), etc. Arts+Positive was based more on the arts and the homophobia around the arts. Dan put together a book about Arts+Positive, and although he even had notes from when we would sign in at the meeting, it’s a period I can’t remember a lot about. One thing that we did was a photograph where we were spelling out “queer beauty”. And I remember everyone in the group modelled for me, nude, and they made the shapes of each letter. So, two women together, I think it was Julie and another girl whose name I forget, put their bodies together face to face and kind of leaned back to create the letter “Y”. The letter “Q” was made by some of the guys lying on the floor, circled around, and one leg sticking out. And I photographed from above.

iT: Were these also part of the Cross Colour series?

LF: Yeah. I enjoyed being a part of that group, but there’s a lot that I don’t remember. I guess photography helps remind us of some of the things that we were involved in and the friends we knew.

iT: I imagine that in this period when you were constantly moving and acting, there wasn’t any time to sit back and think. I guess a lot of things blur together, or time feels different and passes by differently. It doesn’t sound like you were sleeping a lot.

LF: No, in fact, that’s why I left America. I had gone to London for a couple of months, and when I got there, I met all these great people, and I just called it home. I felt that with the pace I was going, by the time I was 40 or 50, I was going to feel old. And I thought that the pace was just too stressful. It was too much for me. I just felt tired and needed a break. Once there, I did participate in some ACT UP demonstrations, but it wasn’t quite as invigorating, there weren’t quite as many people involved, and due to social healthcare, there wasn’t as much of a need in London.

iT: When did you move to London?

LF: I believe it was November 5th, 1999. I remember there were all these fireworks because it was Guy Fawkes Day. So, in actuality, I probably was in ACT UP for maybe 2 to 3 years. It seems like a lifetime, to be honest with you.

iT: Sometimes time can be compressed in that way.

LF: Yeah. I feel like I owe so much to ACT UP. I learned how to get arrested and how to participate in a demonstration. What’s important for me now is being alive, being a big old black dyke and continuing to create images that go against cultural norms. I’m being honoured on June 5th by Visual AIDS. They have been working tirelessly to help support artists who are living with HIV/AIDS. They have many programs for women of colour. I have volunteered for them for a long time, and so I’m super excited to be nominated by them. It just feels so perfect that this organisation has nominated me because we’re all fighting the same fight.

My work is very honest and true. I was using my miniscule teacher’s salary to buy my film to help make my communities feel beautiful. Recently, I co-curated a show at the LGBTQ centre. It has had a whole new facelift, and it looks beautiful compared to how it used to be when we had our meetings there, in the 90s. It’s still very much a pulse of the community. The show I co-curated was for lesbians over 40, and it was wonderful. Many of the younger folks came up to me and thanked me and hugged me for my life’s work. Those moments are so precious. The whole community, especially the younger ones, are almost like smitten with me; I sometimes even see tears in their eyes.

iT: I’m so happy that you’re receiving this honour, which you totally deserve. Your work has been very important through the years for your community and for all those people who were photographed. What’s really impressive and important in the work that you’ve been doing all these years is that you stuck by what you needed to do and what you believed you should do. You didn’t make any compromises. And that’s why it’s had this kind of impact on your community, and it’s now being seen by a much wider public and recognised.

LF: I love it when we have Pride parades. They were never televised back in the day. In fact, we’d stop at a phone and “drop a dime” and call whoever didn’t come to the parade – it was called a march back then, actually, not a parade. And we would say, “Hey, did you see us on TV yet?” Because there were no mobile phones. We would proudly wave our big banners and wear our political T-shirts. Fast forward to the present, where even the commentators are gay. It’s this whole televised extravaganza now, and it’s just kind of crazy to see this change. Imagine what would have happened if we were on TV when we were demonstrating in the street during the marches – how much quicker legislation and drug trials would have progressed. We orchestrated all our actions without cell phones, and we were still able to gather and do all these different demonstrations.

iT: And giving the chance also to people to be there, be present, but also keeping their anonymity. I wanted to ask you about the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster, which you briefly mentioned earlier. You’re always behind the camera, and for this iconic poster, you ended up being in front of it. You mentioned earlier that you didn’t know what the photograph was going to be about, but how did you actually end up doing it?

LF: That is definitely an iconic image, but we had no idea that that’s what it was going to be about. Gran Fury put out a call at one of the meetings informing us that they were doing a kind of Benetton-inspired photograph campaign. We used to do a lot of “kiss-ins”, which were like demonstrations. Often, these were aimed at different businesses that had been homophobic, and we would just converge on the street, often in front of the establishment and we would just start kissing each other. The crowd would gasp, “Look, she’s kissing a girl, she’s kissing a guy” and so on. This was during a time when people thought that you could contract AIDS from kissing, and our ad addressed this misinformation. I remember that Julie [Tolentino] didn’t really want to do it, but I encouraged her, I begged, “Come on, Julie, let’s just do it”. We were partners then. We went down to a loft in Tribeca, and we were photographed kissing various members of ACT UP. After that photo shoot, we probably went to a demonstration or a meeting or to the hospital to visit a friend or to a funeral. That was an average day of an AIDS activist’s life, back then. My apartment was a place to go back to and change to for the next event. We didn’t even have time to listen to the answering machines. We just kind of kept it moving.

When the advert did come out, I think we were happy that we were chosen as a couple. But I don’t really remember being overly excited about it; it was just kind of like, “Okay, check.” Check it off the list and move on to whatever else we were percolating. The poster ran nationally in many major cities and was on the side of the buses. I remember when I was teaching in the Bronx, I would take my “Silence = Death” pins off. In fact, in certain areas, I would not wear my ACT UP shirts just because, in specific neighbourhoods, it would be problematic to be “openly gay”. One time, I remember waiting for the bus to arrive, and our ad was on the side of the bus! I looked towards the ground and no one seemed to recognise me. I remember once the poster was hanging at the Whitney, the old Whitney, in the window, and I took a group of students there. I think one student recognised me, but most of them didn’t even recognise that it was me. In many places, like Chicago, the poster was tarred. They tarred the two “gay couples”. And I’m gesturing air quotes because all of us were gay. There was a guy and a girl kissing on the poster, but they were both gay, and people read them as straight.

I never imagined that the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster was going to be so iconic. It’s, again, just something we did, and we just moved on. Since the interest in that period has increased, it’s been shown in lots of different places. Many people told me that they had it in their dorm rooms, in their homes. One friend didn’t realise that women could be HIV positive, and after she saw the poster, she went to get tested and found out that she was HIV positive. She holds Julie and me quite dear to her heart because she feels that by getting early detection, she was able to attain meds for HIV. It’s really powerful to think that an ad could save someone’s life. Also, for some other black and brown lesbians who had never really seen lesbians of colour, let alone kissing, it totally affirmed their presence in our communities. So, the ad worked on many levels. I feel that we are a symbol in that picture, it’s much bigger than us! Whenever I do a presentation, I always use it to talk about the misunderstandings around AIDS – that there was so much misinformation during that time frame.

iT: How do you reflect on this period today?

LF: I think for some of us, especially for a lot of guys, there’s a sort of sense of guilt that they are still here, that they weren’t one of the “chosen ones” to be taken. And then there’s that whole phenomenon of a lot of guys going to Florida – they decided that their final resting place was going to be Florida. They knew they didn’t have long, so they thought, “I’m just going to go down to Florida and party”. And then drugs like combination therapy were developed and the “death sentence” was no longer, many of them are still here today.

A lot of times, people that are my age come up after my talks, always very thankful that I did this work, and I realise that for some of us, instead of focusing on our careers, we were demonstrating in the streets. Many of these same people have houses on Fire Island or the Hamptons, and they were watching us from afar. Unlike us, they weren’t spending all their time organising; instead, they were spending their time getting their careers together. And that’s not just in ACT UP or the AIDS activism. Throughout history, many activists have a similar ethos in that we are so busy worrying about the world, yet not really concentrating on individual goals while the others are climbing up the “promotion ladder” at work. I have never been absorbed with monetary items; I have always just barely made ends meet. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have no regrets. A lot of the people who are my age, 65, have found themselves in a situation where they are still working because they didn’t plan for the future. I’m lucky to have this cushion of my photography being acquired. I just feel blessed that I have my health and that my work is out in the world so that it’s able to create a safe space for me and my beloved community.

iT: Thank you so much, Lola. Thanks for being so generous with your time and for everything you shared with me today.