20 years ago, Ralph Lauren launched the Pink Pony Initiative, a global philanthropic program dedicated towards the fight against cancer. Launched at the fashion show for Ralph Lauren’s Spring 2001 collection, the campaign’s mission is to reduce disparities in cancer care, fight for a cure, and help ensure that quality treatment is accessible to everyone.
To commemorate this year’s anniversary, Ralph Lauren is also launching a new campaign titled “More Conversations, More Love,” which the company says in a statement will highlight a “diverse and influential cast of cancer survivors, thrivers, and supporters” who will each share their own personal stories about dealing with cancer to promote “healing, hope, survivorship, and how love is a universal language.”
Among those featured in the campaign is Ericka Hart, a Black, queer, non-binary femme activist and sexuality educator. The New York-based activist is no stranger to sharing her story: After being diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer at the age of 28, Hart posed topless for Paper magazine, bearing her double mastectomy scars. The shoot sent a message that Black LGBTQ+ people with cancer would no longer be erased and would be centered in conversations about cancer awareness.
Over Zoom, Hart spoke with them. about the importance of health care for Black LGBTQ+ people, her role in Ralph Lauren’s campaign, and undoing the morbidity that surrounds cancer.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do as an activist and educator?
I am a sexuality educator, and I've been teaching sex ed for the past 11 years. I am Black, queer, a non-binary femme, and I'm a breast cancer survivor. My work sits at the intersection of race and gender. I talk about telling truths about race and racism in particular in this country. But anti-Blackness globally and the colonized institution of gender and telling the truth around how gender works — that is the crux of the work that I do.
Have you ever been personally touched by someone who has experienced cancer? What was that experience like for you?
When I was 13, my mom passed from cancer — that was pretty horrific. Me and my mom were very, very close. And it was my second interaction with death, period. Before that, I hadn't really engaged with death in any sort of tumultuous way. My great-grandmother died when I was 9 or so and that was hard. But it was much harder for the adults in my life than it was for me. My great-grandma and I were close, but we weren't as close as my mom and I were. I was also kept away in a lot of ways from the experiences that my mom went through, not because they weren't telling me, but just because I was young and didn't really understand. I knew my mom got chemo. I knew she had a lumpectomy. But the memories of her actually going through all of those processes, the emotions, and her facial expressions, I don't really have a recollection of that.
When I was 28, I was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer: breast cancer in the right and the left breast. I had a double mastectomy, and almost two years after surgeries, I was finished with treatment and I have been in remission ever since.
What makes this campaign meaningful to you?
It's meaningful to me because I want to constantly be interjecting myself in campaigns around cancer, especially as a Black, queer, and non-binary person, because I want folks who identify with a similar background to see me and also check their breasts. Go get second opinions from doctors. See the people that they've known who are living with breast cancer or who are living with any other type of chronic illness that has nothing to do with cancer. I feel like there's a lot of parallels in this country in navigating medical institutions and insurance companies that we can all come together with familiarity in.
How do you think it will show inclusivity toward the LGBTQ+ community?
[It’s about] being mindful of language and not just naming every breast cancer survivor as someone who is a cisgender woman. That's something that we will see constantly in the month of October, where everyone is just assumed to be cis and a woman. This campaign will not do that.
One of the central messages of Pink Pony is love as a force for healing. Can you talk a little bit about how love is a universal and healing language for you?
Love is a healing language for me not in a “love heals all” sort of thing, but more as a tool. I know that I can stay connected to the Earth and who I know myself to be through love, using it as a tool and tapping into it. That's how I use love. I love every process, everything that's going on. What the process reveals to me, I love that. I might not like it right when it's happening, but I do love that I'm going through it, that there's an opportunity to go through this, an opportunity to connect and an opportunity to now tap into a community that I never knew.
I feel like there's a lot of morbidity and sorrow that surrounds cancer. A lot of that could be seen as ableist, as if when you have cancer your life now sucks. I believe that we have to really undo that notion. I believe love can come into play there. How do you learn to live with a chronic illness if you've never had one before? And how amazing it is that your life, you get to open your eyes to see that the world is really not situated for disabled people? How can you begin to use whatever sort of information that you have to shift that reality? That's how I think about it.
Stigma plays a large role when it comes to LGBTQ+ healthcare, which can be a worry when you already have cancer. Have you ever experienced any stigma as a Black queer nonbinary person within the healthcare system?
[It’s] more like racism. I feel like “stigma” is too soft. I had six sessions of this particular type of chemotherapy and my insurance company denied the last one, so I had to literally fight my insurance company to stay alive. And insurance companies know your demographics. They know your background. They know your age. They know everything about you. To claim that that wasn't intentional, to deny me the treatment that I needed, I would be foolish to think that. And it's still ongoing. Once you go into remission, it doesn't mean that you are now done going to get scans or seeing doctors or doing any sort of exam — whether it's a self-exam or a physical exam with a doctor, you still have to do all those things.
Insurance companies constantly create intentional barriers for me to get health care, and I know this to be true for so many other Black people in this country. That's also with the privilege of having insurance, because insurance is so expensive that it's hard to even get the care that you need because you can't afford it.
Do you think that this campaign helps reduce the stigma and racism that LGBTQ+ people face within the healthcare system in some way?
I believe that talking about it helps. It’s important for people within medical institutions to be talking about this more often. The labor is left on folks who are chronically ill or disabled — which, wow, way to put that stressor for us to educate rather than you folks actually just shifting it. My hope is that with us constantly illuminating this issue, it actually gets their attention.
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