If you were part of the New York City club scene in the ’80s or ’90s—which no students reading this were—you would have known Chloe Dzubilo. Or, as poet and blogger Jeremiah Moss said, “If you didn’t know her, you noticed her.” You might have seen her performing at clubs, or milling about the crowd, educating people on HIV. You might have seen her name listed as editor in a magazine you opened, or her face on the cover. But if you were not there, in and at that moment, you likely have never had the opportunity to notice her at all. It seems as though knowledge of Dzubilo is as ingrained in the scene as she was.
Most of what is online about Dzubilo was written post-Feb. 18, 2011, the date of her death. She was 50 years old, and many of the people she had spent the pivotal decades of her life with had died or otherwise moved on. For those who remained, or, at least, for those whose memories remained, her death sparked a need to write. As people go, they take their memories with them. Whole people, places and movements are forgotten. For those who had known Dzubilo, there was a sudden understanding that what they said now would be what was preserved about this icon of the city who could no longer share her own story. People rushed to publish, spilling her life onto blogs and forums. By sifting through this complex web, a sporadic picture of Dzubilo is brought into focus as she was: a deeply, deeply present person.
Dzubilo was born in 1960 in Connecticut, growing up as a champion equestrian. In 1982, she moved, as so many transgender people did, to the East Village in Manhattan, pursuing the boom of culture and kinship that was otherwise inaccessible outside of the city. She started with a job at then-nightclub Studio 54, but quickly took up a position at art magazine “East Village Eye” as their advertising director, right at the explosion of the arts scene. She began dating Bobby Bradley, founder of the Pyramid Club. In 1987, Dzubilo was diagnosed with AIDS as Bradley was killed by it. At this time, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. But Dzubilo kept on living.
Her life took on a different edge in the ’90s, mixing art with activism to an intense degree. She began volunteering with the LGBT Community Center’s Gender Identity Project, performing outreach initiatives to prevent HIV. She went back to the Pyramid Club, writing and acting with theater troupe Blacklips Performance Cult. She was at every workshop, every party, every march. She completed her gender transition, which alienated her from her family in Connecticut. She was part of Transsexual Menace, an activist organization that has made a return in 2025 due to increasing risks posed against transgender rights and safety. She sang and wrote for punk rock band the Transisters, which was credited by fellow musician Kembra Pfahler as “One of the only bands that addressed issues around AIDS and had the courage to sing about their anger.” In 1997, Dzubilo directed the first federal HIV prevention program aimed at transgender sex workers. Her work, both artistic and political, permeated every level of the scene.
In 2001, Dzubilo founded the Equi-Aid Project, providing children affected by HIV or otherwise at-risk with the opportunity to ride horses. As Dzubilo asserted, “It is my belief that horseback riding, under proper guidance, offers these children a deep sense of immediate power, a power that they may have never experienced before.” Her horseback riding years had been under a different name, a different persona, practically a different life. But, ever the equestrian, she bridged the gap between who she had once been and who she was now. She began to reconnect with her family. In 2003, she was appointed to the HIV and Human Service Planning Council of New York, where she was able to advocate for trans HIVers such as herself, chronically overlooked in discussions of the illness. In 2007, she met and married T De Long, a transgender man; this was only possible because both were documented as their birth sexes. If one of them had attempted to legally transition, a shaky and unclear process, their marriage would not have been possible. He encouraged her to draw, something which fulfilled the need to create at a time when she could no longer perform like before; both her health and the art scene had deteriorated.
There is something soberly poetic about the age Dzubilo reached. Far too young, and yet older than many in the NYC art scene could have ever dreamed of. Her contemporary Keith Haring, who was diagnosed with AIDS in the same year as Dzubilo and died three years later, said, “Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough. I mean, I’ve barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years. The progress and evolution is remarkable. I would love to live to be 50 years old. Imagine…hardly seems possible.”
Dzubilo had been a fierce critic of the medical industry’s intolerance for transgender patients, which left many, including her, without proper care and attention. In a 2004 interview for HIV/AIDS magazine POZ, she said, “Trans have a history of dying at home—because of the stigma.” The prejudices of doctors kept many from attempting to pursue the healthcare they knew they would be denied anyway. Over two decades later, it is important to remember her words and to think about the ways in which we are so easily moving backwards. She is just one of many whose lives are so easy to lose.
The city changed as Dzubilo lived in it, and it certainly did not stop changing once she was gone. The organizations, the magazines, the programs, the clubs—some still exist as they were. Others reformatted or digitized, got bought out or shut down. There is no expectation that things must stay as they were; change is exactly what Dzubilo fought for, and much of it is representative of progress in the city and the country as a whole. But when this change is met with a lack of recognition, of documentation, we risk losing the how of how we got here and the why of why it happened. And to be deprived of this knowledge is to be left unequipped with the tools and lessons from decades of struggle for liberation, liberation which slips through our fingers without constant upkeep. To bring Dzubilo’s story to the present is to do the work of archiving, continuously maintaining a history which is actively being buried. One way or another, Dzubilo died at home, in the city where she had spent her life. Dzubilo had once gone with De Long to visit Return to Freedom, a wild horse sanctuary in California founded by one of her high school friends. Her ashes were scattered there, free among the wild.