HELP LILY! Two views of the girl with the dragon tattoo. Left: Billy Ward; right: Tolga Katas
Help Lily fight cancer: support a beloved scenester’s GoFundMe
Li Ly – aka Lily Wong-Cain – is one of the fetish scene’s enduringly colourful characters, known to many of us on both sides of the Atlantic through her early connections to the London scene and Torture Garden, her involvement in the Dallas scene, or her later career as an air hostess who modelled in her free time. But right now, Lily badly needs our help. She has just been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasised to her spine, so friends have set up a GoFundMe campaign to support her with treatment and living costs while she is unable to work. Read more below about Lily and how you can help her!
TESTS SHOTS posted by Lily in May when she announced ‘I think I wanna go red’ – which she then did
If you’ve been around on the UK scene for long enough — writes Tony Mitchell — you might have met Lily Wong-Cain— or ‘Li Ly’ as she’s known on Facebook — when she was a London scenester, model and also the girlfriend of Torture Garden co-founder Allen Pelling.
Lily’s path and mine crossed fairly regularly while she was London-based, and then less frequently but still meaningfully after she moved back to the US, where she became a flight attendant, still modelling on her days off.
So it was a shock to see Lily posting on Facebook in late July that she’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that, she had just learned, had metastasised to her spine.
Her most recent Facebook posts — with their introspective musings and the new images that accompanied them — were hard to take in — conveying concerns understandably different from those of the genial, gregarious, sharp-witted and sometimes impish Lily that I’d known back in the day.
But it also very quickly became clear that she had good and loyal friends who were determined to help her in every way they could. One of these was Tasha Ford — another London scenester and model from earlier times who has stayed in touch after also, like Lily, relocating back to the States.
In a clearly heartfelt message, Tasha said of Lily: “She’s still so young. She still models and is a massage therapist, and until her diagnosis, was airline crew.”
Tasha went on to explain that Lily’s friends had set up a GoFundMe page for her to help with her treatment “as she now can’t work”. So she wondered if I might be able to “put the word out for it” via my Fetishistas network.
To which the answer was, of course, yes.
TASHA FORD with Lily at the Torture Garden Latex show in Dallas that they both walked in
Tasha reminded me (in case I’d forgotten) that Lily had modelled and done published shoots with the great and the good, including work displayed on billboards in London and shoots both in Europe and the USA.
She went on to say: “She’s honestly the sweetest thing. When I was escaping a hurricane that was headed straight for me where I was staying at the time, she took my kitty and myself in, in the middle of the
night. No questions asked, just: come here and the door was open when we arrived.
“I’d like to think we look after our own and am trying to put the word out to as many people as possible who remember Lily.”
The friend who set up the GoFundMe for Lily is Jennie Vee, who’ll be known to some as the bassist in various musical ventures including (from 2017-2025) Eagles of Death Metal.
In her text introducing the GoFundMe campaign, Jennie explains that she met Lily in her first few months with EODM, and that, “like so many people in music and the arts”, she was pulled in by Lily’s warmth the moment they met.
JENNIE VEE (right), who created the GoFundMe campaign, with her pal Lily in happier times
“Lily is one of those rare, beautiful souls who gives and gives,” she continues.
“She’s a flight attendant who has carried her kindness around the world, a massage therapist who has healed so many of us with her hands, and a friend who has shown up with love and light for more people than she could ever count.
“Now Lily is facing the hardest fight of her life … To give herself the best possible chance to heal, she has to step away from her job — and the income she depends on — and pour everything she has into her treatment and recovery.
“That’s where we come in. For years, Lily has been the one holding everyone else up. Now it’s our turn to hold her. When her beloved father was facing his own battle with cancer, Lily put her life on hold to be there for him. Let’s be there for her, right now.
“Every dollar raised will go toward Lily’s living expenses while she is unable to work, along with the medical and care costs of her treatment — so she can rest, fight, and heal without the crushing weight of financial worry stacked on top of everything else.”
So The Fetishistas joins Tasha and Jennie in inviting everyone who might have known Lily personally or just through her work to visit the GoFundMe page and support this fundraiser if you possibly can. Thank you!
The GoFundMe page includes some updates on Lily’s situation, but if you have time, do also read Lily’s personal updates on her Facebook page — see links below.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Billy Ward/Facebook
Jill Rasco/Instagram
Steve Diet Goedde/Instagram
Tolga Katas/Instagram
BELOW: Lily photographed by Steve Diet Goedde in 2003, wearing Torture Garden Latex in London (left), and a Puimond Progressive Corset Design corset in Los Angeles, right
Tags: Community, Fundraising, Models, Personalities
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