Artist, Lola Flash: I remember reading an article in 1981 about this "gay disease" or "gay plague." I said to myself, I'm not going to take a pretty picture until the AIDS crisis is over, until there's a cure.
My name is Lola Flash and I'm an activist and an artist.
I believe it was around '87 that I moved to New York, and within seconds I was in ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, being part of the demonstrations and all those kinds of things. One of the things that was amazing about ACT UP was, no matter what you were best at, you could be helpful to the organization. If you were a scientist, then you were in there talking about the drug trials. If you were a partier, you would be at the clubs with Safer Sex t-shirts on, or we had packets that you would give out, or condoms. I loved that about it because it really empowered all of us, no matter what you were up to, there was something that you could do to help the organization.
This was one of our T-shirts: AIDS is Killing Artists, Now Homophobia is Killing Art. That had to do with all the kind of adverse attention that was happening around stopping funding for queer artwork. With the help of ACT UP visuals, it really made the work have an extra special punch along with the color palette that I created.