In 1991, 16-year-old activist Keiko Lane joined the Los Angeles chapters of Queer Nation and ACT UP. They protested against 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, they 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 22, most of them had died of AIDS.

In her evocative memoir, Lane weaves together the 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.

  • “Keiko Lane’s Blood Loss travels back through the heart of AIDS Activism with fierce love and a dazzling, devotional desire to bring the story back to life. What I found in these pages was history, memory, hope, fight, and a heart beating, not beaten. This book is a brilliant love letter to those we lost and a message for all of us who remember. We must keep telling the stories for those who carry on next.”

    — Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

  • “Keiko Lane is a powerful writer and Blood Loss is especially notable for its perspective of a young Asian American queer woman AIDS activist. Lane describes a significant conflict in herself: between her duty to protest on behalf of others and her deeply ingrained cultural survival tactic of avoiding notice in order to avoid violence. Viscerally evocative on every page, Blood Loss is historically significant as a work of Asian American literature, women’s literature, and queer activist history.”

    — Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

  • “Blood Loss’s contents gush off of the page with aching urgency, begging readers to remember one more person—urging us to hold onto people history has already forgotten. . . . Blood Loss feels like the blanket that Lane used to warm her dying friends. Just as importantly, it also serves as a proud banner in the never-ending battle for equality, tolerance, and respect."

    — Jose Solís, The Body

  • "At its best, the book is a poetic yet often devastating account of the worst of the AIDS epidemic, as well as the profound intimacy Lane experienced during this period."

    — Kirkus Reviews

  • "This is a book about brave and desperate acts of care, the necessity and impossibility of memory, and how time refuses closure. It differs from other AIDS activist memoirs not just in terms of perspective, but through its vulnerability, its openness to the porousness of experience, its drive to articulate the inexpressible."

    — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Truthout