Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (16 page)

I was nervous myself when we had the very first meeting of the coalition. I smiled and smiled as I played hostess and opened the door, asking people to remove their shoes to save the floor, and would they like a drink? A snack? There was beer in the fridge. Food on the counter. Most of the black women were bigger than me and made me feel like a dwarf. The Latina dykes were louder, chattered, came in gaggles. Way in the back of my mind was getting called honkey in high school, and that time on the train when the young black men surrounded me and my shaved head. Or later, when I was living in Harlem and had just bought these amazingly shiny caramel-colored boots, and these two black Latino kids on a stoop called out, “Look at those shoes.” “I can’t. They’re blinding.” And when I turned to roll my eyes at them, the girl nudged the boy, calling out, “He likes you.” “No, she does,” he said. I never wore those shoes again.

Yeah, I was aware of my whiteness. Probably why I grinned like an idiot.

But it goes the other way, too, that fear of what difference will bring. Adriana later told me that Melanie and I were the first white girls she’d ever really sat down and talked to. She grew up in Queens, and while her schools were more or less integrated, students’ social lives weren’t. She’d been nervous about getting to know us and was surprised at just how like regular people the two
blanquitas
were. Shee-it. I punched her in the arm when she confessed. And we both laughed. It
is
a big deal to work with people who are different from you. And if you’re white or of a higher class, no matter what race you are, you’ll probably mess up. Maybe get yelled at. But there are worse things. Like keeping your dignity safe at home, while the world goes to hell.

I can’t remember what the rest of the Avengers were doing. The November election was over. And in Idaho, the LACROP strategy had helped defeat the proposition. They were back home in New York, toting a remarkable string of testimonials from the folks of rural Idaho about how great LACROP was to work with, how inspiring, how much everybody had learned. Maybe they were researching other places to go, other targets. Or they were raising money. Or were sitting at home burned out and staring at the walls. Even without their competition, we couldn’t get the group behind us. Maybe because the radio project seemed so much more vague than a referendum. Come fight racism. Fight homophobia.

Maybe that was when the bisexuals came to the group and took up weeks and weeks demanding we include bi issues and call ourselves the Les-BI-an Avengers, because apparently a group focused exclusively on lesbian issues had no right to exist. And they accused us of bi-phobia or something, even if we actually had a bunch of bi members. And nobody cared as long as they were okay working on lesbian issues. You knew what the deal was, joining the
Lesbian
Avengers. Or we were already wandering through the minefield of discussions about race. The only thing that’s certain is that in New York nobody was planning actions. Pretty soon, even we wouldn’t be doing that.

A day or two before everything exploded with the coalition, there was an uncomfortable meeting at the apartment as we tried to finalize a flyer. It was just the heads of the three groups. I was in the back bedroom at the computer, making each change as fast as I could in English and Spanish. It went on for hours, with Patricia and Carmen asserting their control by making suggestions on every line, which then had to be revised by Ana, who brought them back to me in the bedroom. Kim and Keisha agreed with everything. At midnight or so, I announced I had to go to bed if I was going to be able to get up early the next morning and get the thing Xeroxed and distributed to the groups that were flyering later in the day. “C’mon. The flyer’s fine. And I’m totally exhausted. No more revisions, please.”

Kim and Keisha were thrilled to agree and get out of there. Carmen and Patricia muttered, then shrugged, so I thought it wasn’t that big a deal. We were friends, right? And all I was thinking about was crawling into bed so I could crawl out of it again way too soon, make Xeroxes, and hand them out to people who were my enemies at school board meetings but there on the street might even smile at me curiously, or ask a question. Force me to speak in Spanish. While I grinned and grinned like the Good American I still was.

And even afterwards, I exchanged a perfectly polite fax with Carmen about changes to the flyer that had been suggested by the people handing them out on the street. And she didn’t give me a hard time or anything. But at the meeting a few days later, Carmen exploded, accusing Ana and the Avengers of trying to control the coalition by holding the meetings in her apartment and facilitating them herself, then demanded a meeting in neutral territory to rebuild the coalition’s decision-making structure from the ground up.

At the time, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Kim and Keisha got on the phone with Ana and Cathy Chang, the dyke from Las Buenas Amigas, who said not to worry, it was all about the relationship between Carmen and Ana, and it would blow over. So we set up a meeting at the Sunshine Diner. The neutral parties, Cathy Chang, and Kim and Keisha, recommended that Ana stay at home, so she wouldn’t be the lightning rod. But “Where’s Ana?” was the first thing Carmen said when she walked into the room and just saw me, Melanie, and Yancey representing the Avengers. Kim and Keisha had brought a few older members of African Ancestral, and maybe there were a few other Buenas Amigas, too.

In practically an act of repudiation, a furious Carmen read a detailed indictment of the racist plot for Avenger supremacy. We were guilty of censorship (when I refused to accept more comments?), secret meetings (Ana coming into the bedroom to bring me revisions?), control of the meeting place (a large, free apartment with stereo and bathroom?), forgetting or confusing names with bigoted intent (definitely me). While Patricia smirked next to her, egging her on, Melanie and I shrank in our seats from Carmen’s lifetime of anger, all this talk of racism that seemed directed at us since there were so few white girls among the dozen or so Avengers who regularly participated in the coalition, unless Yancey and Ana and all the other Avengers of color were counted as white, especially Ana, who was too much of an egghead to be a Latina, too horribly direct, too pale.

After Carmen was done, Cathy said that while she appreciated her feelings, she didn’t necessarily interpret things in the same way and said we should all cool down. Kim and Keisha didn’t say much at all, because their mouths were hanging open in shock. When it was all over, Candice Boyce, one of the older African Ancestral Lesbians, saw my gray face and went out of her way to pat me on the shoulder and say not to worry, it would be okay. Which was really nice of her, even if it wasn’t true. Because Carmen and Patricia ignored Cathy Chang and all the other members of Las Buenas Amigas, went home, and prepared a letter as heads of their board and officially denounced the Avengers as racist, itemizing our sins, which they’d knitted up in a damning scarf like a couple of Madames Defarge. Carmen even gave a couple of damning interviews to gay rags.

It was tough coming up with a report to the Avengers. We couldn’t tell the truth without getting personal, and Ana didn’t want to attack Carmen. “Why not?” I asked. “The bitch’s lost her fucking mind.”

“She’s hurting.”

“She’s a nut, and her girlfriend is the devil.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. Besides, that would let the Avengers off the hook. We do have a problem with race.”

So we went to the center and delivered some sanitized version of the whole thing, only to have the room fall totally silent until some white girl pointed her finger at Ana and said, “You’ve offended people of color. How could you? That’s horrible. You’re racist.” Maxine broke out with a kind of cackle in the corner, which could have meant anything but was interpreted by the room as approval, giving license for the rest of the Avengers to join in with snickers or nod in agreement. “That’s horrible. You’re racist.” And Melanie went all ashen. And Ana sat down with the room spinning around her in humiliation.

Now, students visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives and dig up Carmen’s damning letter and our mealy-mouthed response, which seems to give her credence. And when they write about the end of the Avengers, they quote all these fragments of truth, half-truths, and lies. Some written out of hate, some out of kindness and shame.

Afterwards, some of the older members from Las Buenas Amigas tried to get Ana to sit down at the table with them so they could apologize for the two ill-mannered pups who didn’t last much longer in the group. Still, Carmen and Patricia got their last shots in, purging a few members like Adriana who were perceived as being too cozy with the Avengers, especially white ones. What a cesspool.

If I hold a grudge against someone, though, it’s Patricia. Provoking Carmen, sneering in the corner. When I see her out, I still want to spit in her face and pull her hair, though maybe she’s not as bad as I think. Maybe it was the alchemy between her and Carmen that made her so malevolent. But who cares, really? It’s been two decades. Awww, let it go.

21.

Are flies smarter than bees? It’s a relevant question. Trap a bunch of flies in a clear glass bottle with its base to a bright shining window and watch what happens. The flies will find the opening after a couple of minutes of banging around randomly. Do the same with bees, the industrious little things will be stuck forever, always heading toward the window’s light where the escape should be, wondering why they’ve been betrayed. Maeterlinck finds the beauty in it, and an almost mystical sign of the bees’ intelligence:

They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too logical action. To them glass is a supernatural mystery they never have met with in nature; they have had no experience of this suddenly impenetrable atmosphere; and, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear.

I’m not sure he’s wrong, but the bees end up dead, after all, if you leave them in the bottle with the wrong end facing the light. They’ll die of hope, persistence, and their idée fixe that because light once meant an exit from a hive, it would always get them out. They’re not quitters, those bees. No sirree. They pursued. They’re rationalists. Like the French. Like Ana, who believed, at the time, that every problem had its solution. And that there was still some way to work with the Avengers. I guess we all believed it. She and I, Melanie, Yance, along with Gail, and Lidia who’d also been there from the start. We’d invested too much to cut and run, allow the group to get further and further from the city. Nothing to do with the larger questions facing us. So we plunged back in, throwing ourselves against the glass again.

To start over, we had to face facts. The group had gotten younger and whiter, with a whiteness more freshly scrubbed, less and less diverse (where were the cab drivers and teachers?), though there were also some young dykes of color appearing. We were back to questions Barbara Smith raised. Was the Avengers a white group or not? Were we racist? If, in the days of slavery, it only took a few drops of African blood to define a person as black, how many lesbians of color did it take to define a group as mixed? One? Ten? Thirty? To be legitimate, did you have to reflect the demographics of the entire city? Was America a “white” nation?

In meetings, one or two young black women said the Avengers should set percentages. But that would mean recruiting women specifically for their race. Hey, you’re black. Wanna come to an Avenger meeting and integrate our asses? Marlene Colburn tugged down her baseball cap over her black face and disagreed, said plainly that the Avengers was the most mixed lesbian group she’d ever been in, in New York, and she’d been in plenty. It couldn’t happen quite like that. Once again, nobody talked about differences of culture. Or how power should be factored in. Ana’s role, and Marlene’s. By then Chanelle Mathews, another black woman, was hugely important to LACROP. Gail Dottin was a fixture at almost every demo. And what about members, like Valarie Walker, an aspiring stand-up comic, who helped shape the tone of the meetings? Or Lidia Medina who did the banners, mild-mannered Valerie Kamaya who did a lot of shitwork? Did they count or not?

And was the solution necessarily just about the membership, something tough to control in an open group, rather than our actions? We actually had a good history when it came to race. We’d spent almost a year supporting the Rainbow Curriculum. Had been among the few to call attention to the deaths of Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock. The ex–Radio Mega working group had the intuition that a city-focused project evolving from the radio actions would solve a lot of problems, though we felt we had to talk things out, too.

I don’t know why we thought we could pull it off. Solve the problems of race and class, when Americans have been stymied by them for centuries, were burning up with them. The Klan was resurging, all those skinheads. The Pat Buchanans of the world were setting us against each other. But I guess you have to try. Sitting around that wooden table, prodded by nails, Ana started to think it was time to round up the Avengers of color and brainstorm about constructive ways to change the Avengers.

Ana really sweated it. She’d never wanted to be in a racially segregated group. One that would exclude her own girlfriend. But there didn’t seem any other way to get people to talk freely. I told her I didn’t mind, and I didn’t. Who needed more meetings, anyway? Ana got Chanelle on board, and they decided to throw a party at Marlene’s out in Brooklyn.

I offered to make enchiladas, help do the invites. There had been so much talk of race and percentages we did cards with green cows, asking mysteriously, “Is it skim milk?” Or 6%, 4%, 2%, or 1%? When March 6 rolled around, I sent Ana off with enchiladas, pots of rice, and enormous bags of chips and jars of salsa. And waited back at the ranch. For hours and hours. I even watched the news, Governor Pataki blabbing about something, then a piece on a federal decision to let idiots carry concealed guns and a spot on Greg Louganis coming out as having HIV.