Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (14 page)

We booed and stomped when we heard they ripped down signs that local queers put up. And laughed when Sheila Quinn arrived one Tuesday with a story of how she’d flown out to support the Avengers for a couple of days and joined a meeting of some local lesbian business people who were sitting on the fence about working with them. She’d done her best to convince them to participate. And when Sheila got back to her job at Astraea, a national lesbian foundation, she got a phone call from one of the same dykes who was trying to check on the Avengers. Are they reliable? Are they competent, serious, worth working with? “I believe I was one of those you met,” Sheila told her, in her charming Irish accent. “And yes, we’re all those things.”

LACROP persisted anyway, making alliances with progressive straights in local churches if the national groups had scared off queers. They stuck to the tactics that had worked in Lewiston, canvassing as out queers, reminding people that they had their whole lives at stake.

I talked to Elizabeth Meister not long ago, a thin, long-haired Avenger who said working in Idaho wasn’t at all what she expected as an East Coast activist. Like that time going house to house, or more accurately, farm to farm, she’d knocked on a door that was answered by this big scary burly guy. When she’d choked it out that they were there about Proposition 1, he said, “What kind of person do you think I am?” And she said, “Ummm . . .” And he said, “I’d never support that kind of discriminatory crap.” That was traditional grassroots organizing at its best. Enlightening everybody all around.

LACROP deserved all the credit they got. More, in fact. They worked 24/7. Smoked too much, drank too much. Ate take-out as they organized speak-outs and designed flyers. Maxine, who’d cut her teeth on grassroots organizing, was their mentor. She visited awhile and reminded them to breathe. “Sit down together, eat a meal,” she counseled. Their work was hugely important, and the group back in New York realized it. Ana got Sara to take video for Dyke TV. If they had the time or money, people like Sheila even flew out there for a few days.

At the same time, the radio action group could barely persuade anybody to participate. Only a handful, mostly Latina, would volunteer. We stank at raising money, while funds seemed to be pouring in for LACROP. We started to feel at odds with them, as if the whole thing was a popularity contest in high school, and we’d lost.

We didn’t really understand what was going on. Were newer Avengers afraid of crossing cultural and linguistic lines? Were they just at the meetings to cruise girls? After all, we’d already done the heavy lifting. The Avengers existed. We’d accomplished things. These new dykes had already seen images of Lesbian Avengers eating fire in front of the White House. Out singer k.d. lang got shaved by that model Cindy Crawford on the cover of
Vanity Fair.
Bi comedian Sandra Bernhard played a lesbian on
Roseanne.
We even seemed to have our dyke Toni Morrison in Dorothy Allison, whose
Bastard Out of Carolina
had hit the best-seller lists. Lesbians were goddamn fucking chic, at least briefly. Nothing was urgent. Nobody was desperate. Alone, the name
Lesbian Avengers
gave them a bold identity. They didn’t have to shape their own.

Or maybe their problem was the project. Did they see it as just some marginal, city thing, while LACROP was national, out there fighting the Christian Right with their important, serious manifesto? Was it us? We didn’t think about how to incorporate newbies. The first wave of Avengers had gotten to know each other by doing actions, and at the time we hadn’t had too many in New York. Some of our most experienced activists like Maxine were focused on Idaho. Sarah Schulman was off on another book tour. Anne and Marie were increasingly besieged with ILGO infighting. And Ana wasn’t much of an advocate. She’s too earnest. Never learned the trick of leaning back in her chair, smiling, and pontificating in a persuasive way.

The whole group started to feel unbalanced, off-center, like in action films when you see a stunt guy straddling two speeding cars.

I didn’t want to think about it, skipped meetings, and went to the Greenwich House Pottery for classes. It was very soothing, mucking around in the clay, and I’d daydream a life in which I could set up a little shop somewhere and spend my days throwing bowls that people would beat down the door to buy. How exquisite. Let me shower you with money for this chunk of mud. Bette Midler turned up at a class one day. She was smaller than I imagined. With thin, bleached hair. We were all so cool ignoring her that it started to get weird, too, nobody helping her when she started struggling to get the round wooden bat off the wheel. I finally said something idiotic, “Yeah, that thing can have you in tears.” And she shot back, “I hardly think it’s worth that.” And I slunk away in humiliation.

There was no escaping it. Not at the pottery. Not at the Avengers. The center of operations for the Radio Mega actions was still our apartment, even if we weren’t planning anything as exciting as an invasion. After Ana’s son moved out, Melanie became our new roommate, and I teased her like a younger sister. It felt like a clubhouse, all girls all the time. Especially once we put together the coalition.

18.

Ana prodded Carmen, the Cuban American lawyer, to get Las Buenas Amigas more involved in the Radio Mega campaign. She was one of their co-chairs, and Ana had already pushed her to meet with GLAAD to reiterate the facts of New York life—that Hispanics made up a huge part of the city and that Spanish-language media was a cesspool. Plus antigay Hispanic fundamentalism was beginning to explode. They had to act quickly, recruit more Spanish-speaking volunteers, get Latino spokespeople.

After the action, Ana met with Carmen and pitched the idea of a coalition to dive deeper into the issue. She came home talking about how smart Carmen was, how exciting it was to find somebody so brilliant, who could maybe become a partner in this work, maybe eventually a friend. Carmen had a more mixed response. She wanted to work with Ana but was wary of the Avengers. She sent a fax saying every mixed project she’d worked on had ended up being dominated by white Americans imposing their language and culture. At the same time, she thought it was an important venture, and that it would be good for the girls,
las muchachas,
to work with Ana in particular. She was a great role model for Latina lesbians.

Ana didn’t notice that part, or she might have been reluctant herself. She didn’t want to be anybody’s role model, or mentor, no matter how much she liked them.

By early fall the Avengers had established a formal coalition with Las Buenas Amigas (LBA), and also with another group called African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change (AALUFSC). We’d approached BLUS, Bronx Lesbians United in Sisterhood, but the white woman running the thing told us street activism wasn’t culturally appropriate for her group, which was mostly black and Latina lesbians. “Who does she think started the Avengers?” Ana asked. “Or, for that matter, took to the streets with King?”

We offered our house as a meeting place. It was free and centrally located, with a bathroom right there, a stereo, and flexible hours. It was fun at first, a great big party, even if not many Avengers participated. The LBA dykes were a lot more social than Latina Avengers like Ana, Susana Cook, or Lidia. They had to have music all the time, and beer and food. I got to know Carmen and her girlfriend, Patricia, the two LBA heads. Carmen had close-cropped hair and bright red lipstick. Patricia had long wavy hair, a grad student’s slouch. I’ve never been looked at with such interest and delight. They absolutely cooed when I mumbled something in Spanish, complimented my appearance, my intelligence, my dedication to lesbians. They congratulated Ana on having found such a prize and told me how lucky I was to be with such a saint, an icon. “You’re a million times blessed.” Ana shrank from it a little, but I ate it all up after getting attacked by the Avengers at least once a month.

In those days, being the Good American was my specialty. It had started in college on that trip to Spain when I’d agreed with the locals when they criticized U.S. foreign policy even if I didn’t know what they were talking about. Living in Harlem, I’d eat as many hot peppers as any of the Bengalis and nod promptly when they condemned the Gulf War or American militarism, keeping to myself the dirty secret I had cousins in the service. And when the Irish girls poked fun at their hyphenated colleagues for appropriating an Irish identity when they were clearly American, I laughed as hard as them, desperate to be on the right side of things.

No wonder I kept mum when Carmen stared at Ana with awe, asked me questions about this person she’d only seen in that 1984 documentary by Néstor Almendros,
Mauvaise conduite
(Improper Conduct), about what happened to queers in Castro’s Cuba—the concentration camps, the prisons, the endless harassment while the global Left turned a blind eye, denouncing homosexuality as a bourgeois phenomenon. I didn’t wonder at her motives when she interrogated Ana about why she didn’t do the interview in Spanish. “Because the film was for a French audience, and I spoke French.” And why did she write in English? “Because I live in the United States and I feel freer in it.” Her curiosity extended to Ana’s books and CDs. She and Patricia approvingly pulled out Gloria Estefan and Albita but laughed at Beny Moré and Bola de Nieve. “What are you, an anthropologist? A scholar? A snob?” As if one weren’t a Wall Street lawyer, the other an academic in an ivory tower.

After that first meeting, the LBA dykes brought their own music to the house, and it was nonstop salsa and merengue, their culture dominating the group. They also had a lot of parties themselves, and Ana and I went to a few where there were enormous spreads of food, lots of drinks, and dancing, also party games that involved people scribbling things on Post-its. Ana wasn’t very comfortable. It was even worse for me. All that cuteness. The demands that everyone participate. I spent a lot of time hiding in the bathroom.

Kim and Keisha and the other African American dykes were lucky. Nobody expected them to party with LBA. They were there to work toward the demo. We started painting banners and made a huge radio out of cardboard, with the three monster heads of homophobia, racism, and sexism coming out of it. I was obsessed with chicken wire and papier-mâché at the time and used them at every opportunity. It was a good chance to meet girls from the other groups while we glued bits of paper to the frame, then painted it. I admit that, like with the Avengers in the beginning, it took a while for me to separate out individuals from the smiling, chattering mass.

Melanie did media with Ana and Carmen and Anne d’Adesky, when she wasn’t working the counter at Casa Linga, a restaurant we called cunnilingus for fun. Ana and Carmen in particular exchanged a million faxes. Ana sending short ones, Carmen the lawyer responding with pages and pages of notes. I’d tease Ana sometimes, say her beau had sent another love letter. I recently found some going through Ana’s old folders. They’re like tissue paper now, and the words have faded almost to illegibility. Some are written with a scrawling hand. Others are typed. Some are in Spanish. Others in English, depending on Carmen’s mood and the subject matter. The indistinct words almost seem like a sign to let sleeping dogs lie. What will they howl when they wake? That words like
Cuban
are meaningless? Identity a sham? Hope always burns?

There’s that early fax about Carmen’s reluctance to collaborate with the Avengers, her fear of integrated groups, her hopes Ana will be a role model. Then there’s one about broadcasting regulations and how the FCC worked, the background that would shape our strategy, and tacked on at the end a faux humble invitation to a little party with “cheap” merengue. Later, personal concerns began to dominate. They show not just admiration or interest but flat-out need as she looks for affirmation in the words of this Cuban dyke who was older and more experienced, who was a kind of icon for her.

Though what did they have in common, really? Ana came of age in Cuba, and became an immigrant in France, then the United States, her national identity already formed. Carmen mostly grew up in Anglo America as a mixed-race Hispanic. For her I was white. For Ana, American.

The expectation of sameness was a disaster. Carmen wanted to know what that change in commas meant. Why did you delete the one thing and add another? She analyzed Ana’s tone of voice on the phone. Pleaded with her, accused. Felt rebuked. She reminded me of a lover I had once who would dissect every move I made, every word I spoke in fits of rage and jealousy. I’m sure Carmen would think it presumptuous, racist, even, but I try now to imagine what she felt, faced with Ana. Who didn’t really notice all that, just kept making more and more demands of Las Buenas Amigas without giving Carmen what she needed or expected in return.

Ana will admit it herself. If she was a flawed advocate for the project in front of a bunch of Anglos, she was worse with Carmen, because she’s a rotten Latina. Ana doesn’t open up. Is not particularly effusive. Hates chitchat. It’s why she adopted New York as her home. You can make a call, get right to the point without inquiring politely into what the other person did last night, or is going to do tomorrow, or how she felt about it all.

Carmen took it personally, Ana’s New York abruptness. Perceived it as rejection, which made her more obsessed than ever. Patricia made an appointment with Ana and came over to the house, hinting around at something, but never getting to the point, like a girlfriend who’d discovered an affair and was trying to tell the other woman to back off. She already rubbed us wrong since that moment early on at the Sunshine Diner when the four of us were bonding over coffee, and Carmen told us how difficult things had been for her growing up as a mixed-race dyke, caught between the rock of an America that preferred things in black and white, and the hard place of a gay-hating, racist, macho Cuban community. Thinking of it, she got upset, pushed her cup around the sticky table.