If you ask Richie Kahwagi and Will Nutland what makes The Love Tank, the sexual health organization they co-founded, different from other organizations with the same mission they’ll put it simply. “We get out there and we do shit,” Nutland says..
That DIY ethos is part of what drove the pair to create Prepster, a PrEP education organization, in 2015, which would evolve into The Love Tank three years later. Now the UK-based organization produces sexual health guides, community-based live events, and educational programs—all created by the same communities that they served. “We're a lived experience organization,” Nutland says, “so we only work with the people in the communities that we are in and are from.”
In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke to Nutland and Kahwagi about The Love Tank’s mission, the pushback their messaging has received, and what’s on the horizon.
What makes The Love Tank unique as a community interest company built for underserved communities?
Richie Kahwagi: we started off with—and we still have—a very punk, grassroots approach, and I think that's what sets us apart from other organizations. We're not afraid to disrupt. We're not afraid to show all body types—not just muscley, cis white men, and we're not afraid of using words, like, “fucking,” you know?
Will Nutland: we get out there and we do shit. We see a hole in the market, and we— there's all gonna be a whole load of euphemisms about filling holes now—we see a hole and we fill it. If we see a block in the road, instead of sitting there, working out how we remove the block, we work out how we can drive around that block in the road.
What does that kind of work look like in practice?
WN: more than 10 years ago, when PrEP wasn't available in the UK, we helped people work out how they could buy PrEP online safely and legally. That included us doing secret shopping of those websites and getting all of the PrEP pills tested. And then we started helping people to set up PrEP lending libraries if they were running out. At the same time we try to influence public health policy so that those medicines can be available legally and freely.
Now we're doing the same kind of thing around gender affirming healthcare—helping folks who are trans, who want to use hormones, to understand how they can DIY those hormones, and do it safely.
RK: We go into kink spaces, we go into cruising areas, we go into clubs and venues, we go to leather bars, we go to dark rooms, we go to festivals, and all of all the events we do are free.
Working that way—punk, grassroots, whatever you want to call it—it must have created some controversy.
WN: None of us have gone to jail. I mean, we're careful about what we do. We always seek legal advice. At the very early days when we set up Prepster, I got death threats.
RK: There was a whole page on Facebook
WN: They harassed us and threatened to come to our events. There were people who felt like us promoting PrEP was telling people to throw away condoms, which was ironically not what we were doing.
And public health is a big part of your work as well, right?
RK: One of the radical things that we did during the covid outbreak is when everybody was telling us not to have sex, we knew people were having sex. We knew people were meeting up. We knew they were cruising. We made the little guide on how to have sex safely—using masks and not necessarily kissing, fucking outside, using glory holes. We have a real life approach to things.
WN: In 2022, we got 10% of the UK’s available vaccine stock on-site at UK Black Pride in London to make sure that queer people of color were getting vaccine shots; because so much of the vaccine narrative so far had had been filled up with cis, white gay men of a certain age who had the ability to get in the front of line at some of those vaccination events. We took almost 300 vaccine vials into UK Black Pride, and worked with a worked with a clinical team to provide vaccine.
What’s next for The Love Tank?
WN: the next big thing that will be coming out really soon is, we're working with an organization called Prostate Cancer UK to do a little back pocket guide to prostate pleasure and health. Rather than do something that's just on prostate cancer, we want to do something that was holistically about prostate—What is the prostate? Who has one? How can you pleasure your own prostate? The second part is on prostate health, which includes a section on prostate cancer. It’s framing harm reduction and community care in in that sense. And, of course, we're continue doing more of our work on sex, drugs, and care for all.