Beginning in 1986, Flash documented their involvement with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) demonstrations and also employed cross-color film processing to reverse the printed photograph’s colors—further illuminating how one person’s blue-sky can be another’s fire-red horizon. Said Flash of the series, now known as the “Cross Colour” works, “By flipping the colors, I flipped the narrative.”

“Queerness, in Flash’s multiverse, is bathed in color, imbued with love, an embrace: infinitely generous and open. It is a queerness that is not restricted to gender representations or sexual identities, but stretches voluptuously across ages, races, places,” said Renée Mussai of Flash’s work in the essay Eyes That Commit II—Doing Their Work, the introduction to Believable: The Portraits of Lola Flash (2023, The New Press).