Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (2 page)

Yet there I was in the Gay and Lesbian Center going to a meeting of the
Lesbian
Avengers. It was on some upper floor, and the air got hotter every couple of steps as we crept up the decrepit wooden staircase covered with posters. The funky bathrooms that intentionally mixed the signals for girls and boys were also covered with flyers, photos, postcards, and graffiti, queer history on the hoof. We picked our folding metal chairs, and I tried to look around without meeting anybody’s eyes. I was there mostly because I was still trailing Anne and Marie and didn’t want to miss anything. Chubby, brainy Amy probably would have gone anyway. She’d already been involved in feminist and queer stuff. She helped start a lesbian group in the Performance Studies Program at NYU where we met, and her bookcases were full of women writers from the academic Judith Butler to the dyke mystery guru Barbara Wilson and sci-fier Octavia Butler. Me, I’d dip into her shelves, then pass on, a fish searching for a different hook.

Gradually, the room filled up with women. Some were around my age, twenty-six. Others still in college. Some old enough to have grown kids. But all a little nervous and eager. Nobody foamed at the mouth or anything, though. Nobody brandished a sword or cape or breast. The first meeting of the Lesbian Avengers was actually kind of bureaucratic, the way somebody officially called the meeting to order and the six organizers introduced themselves. I already knew the funny freckled Marie Honan and Anne Maguire with her riotous red hair. The writer, Sarah Schulman, and professor, Maxine Wolfe, had worked with ILGO, so I’d met them, too. Sarah was more blunt than the yearning narrator of
After Dolores.
Long-haired Max was efficient and expansive, the born teacher. There was also an angular androgynous dyke, Anne-christine d’Adesky, who turned out to be a journalist, and a short one with dark hair and bright-red lipstick who spoke so softly you could barely hear her. That was the playwright, Ana Simo.

After them, it was our turn. None of the names stuck at first, but I remember the multitude of accents: Hispanic, British, Irish, East Coast, West Coast, flat Midwestern, my faint Kentucky twang, and even a few homegrown New Yawk drawls. Then Sarah or somebody talked just enough to lay out what the Lesbian Avengers was supposed to be, “a direct-action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility.” And I nodded my head like I understood, though that phrase “direct action” didn’t mean much to me. The closest I’d come to organizing anything was the time back in Louisville when I tried to get the kids in my youth choir to protest the sudden firing of the minister of music. Deb was a kind, energetic woman; I babysat her kid. When I came to her defense, the pastor denounced me in private as a confused little girl, then in public as an agitator, and I’d faded in shame.

“Visibility” didn’t really mean anything either, except in the most basic sense. I’d never thought about how the world changed. Or about the world at all, for that matter. Martin Luther King gave a speech, and that was that. Public schools were desegregated. White teachers were horrible to black kids, and young white girls got their asses grabbed in the hallways by young black guys getting their own back. I’d been to NOW’s March on Washington in ’89 to photograph the marchers for an installation I was doing with some artist friends in Cincinnati, but they had to identify the VIPs in the shots. “Oh my god, you got Gloria Steinem.” “Really?” But this idea of going to the source, aiming to change what people thought, how they saw each other, saw us, was something new to me.

That first Avenger meeting, sweating in that metal chair, I was really just there to be among girls, and to find out if I belonged. I wanted to. Anybody would. I can almost feel the gape-mouthed awe of watching the organizers talk about something called the Rainbow Curriculum, and why they’d decided our first action should be in support of it. I didn’t say much, though plenty of others did. All the dykes there seemed so incredibly smart, creative, beautiful, adventurous, ready to take their place in the world. And there I was with them.

Pretty soon, we broke up into five or six groups and got to work. There was research to do, flyers to design, interviews to place, money to raise, and strategies and ideas to hash out—preferably involving balloons. Successful actions don’t organize themselves.

The other day I was in the Lesbian Herstory Archives out in Brooklyn and saw the sign-up sheet for that first meeting. Something like fifty women attended, and forty-six were brave enough to put their John Hancocks down, along with phone numbers and addresses. Remarkably, most were still in the room two years later when we’d already mobilized twenty thousand lesbians for a ’93 Dyke March in D.C., and sparked sixty other Avenger groups. I’m tempted to read out the names, one by one, and summon them back to me as they were in those days. Ready for anything, fearless, open, generous, and kind. Before the bitter end.

More dykes came every week as the word spread, cramming their bodies into the hot, dusty room, jockeying for spots near the window as flies buzzed around the place and our sweaty legs stuck to the seats. There hadn’t been any action yet, but you could feel it coming, even in the committee reports. The Research girls came with two pages analyzing possible targets until they finally recommended a grade school in Middle Village, Queens, the heart of District 24. They talked a lot, but there wasn’t much discussion afterward. We said, Excellent. Great. Who the hell really cared? Let’s just get moving.

We rapidly approved draft flyers, including an alternative list of ABCs to hand out to parents and kids that featured lots of names I’d never heard of, like Urvashi Vaid, who was running something called the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which I’d never heard of either. Though, why would I, coming from Kentucky, writing poems, crisscrossing the streets of New York? I watched cop shows on TV, and baseball. The Mets lost. They always did. Nobody was inviting me to black-tie fund-raisers. Still don’t.

The Rainbow Curriculum that the Board of Ed had developed used games and songs, from an Irish ballad to the Mexican hat dance, to teach little kids there were lots of different kinds of people in the world, and they should all be respected. We whipped ourselves up with scorn for the homophobic assholes, denouncing the whole project as “gay” because out of its 443 pages a whopping six mentioned queers, including the book
Heather Has Two Mommies.
Which was only on an additional reading list, and for that matter was about as insidious as a glass of milk. We also sneered a little at the dykes who would turn up as regularly as Cassandra to point an irate finger and accuse us of setting back the movement a hundred years by going anywhere near children. “My god, they already think we’re pedophiles,” they’d wail. We tried to keep it civil but didn’t give an inch. Their discomfort, their desire to play it safe, avoid confronting taboos, seemed to confirm the rightness of what we were doing. Maxine Wolfe, the college professor, was the kind, but firm, diplomat. “Maybe this action isn’t for you. Why don’t you check back in afterwards?”

A few walked out and never returned, but most stuck around to see what we did next. They were a little like an audience at an air show, half marveling at our high-flying antics, half hoping we would crash and burn.

It would be dark when we left the center. Most Avengers would head to the nearby Art Bar or somewhere else to get cold beer. Amy and I would head home to the grunge of the East Village and the inferno of the apartment so she could get to work early and I could get to bed. It was like walking through water. The air was still full of heat, and the faint scent of the Hudson lurked underneath the exhaust and pollinating trees. Gradually, I began to sense other forces in the city besides the cracked sidewalks I walked every day, and the figures moving through the streets. Over everything, through it, and all around were the invisible filaments of politics, of bureaucracy, of a decaying decadent culture that looked under and into its beds and was afraid, and made us queers the scapegoats, drafting laws, defunding art, banning books that merely acknowledged our existence. As if they could force us into moral and physical exile.

But we refused to go.

We shaped our renegade lesbian identity action by action, flyer by flyer. A fund-raising poster featured little giggling girls in front of a blackboard. Like a public service announcement, it demanded, “Do you know where your daughters are?” (At the Lesbian Avengers’ back-to-school party!) Carrie Moyer, this bleached blonde artist, did a flyer with a drawing of a superhero dyke flying over the city. She held a balloon reading, “I ♥ lesbians.” And the caption screamed, “
THE LESBIAN AVENGERS ARE COMING TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR BABY DYKES EVERYWHERE
.” It wasn’t meant to reassure. Not with kids on the same page as
LESBIAN
. Not with the dyke in cape and tights jetting down from the sky.

We laughed our heads off, there in the center, but were a little more muted when it was time to go out to Queens and wheat-paste Carrie’s flyer on lampposts and fences. Especially me. I might strip naked and shave myself for art, or wander the streets of the East Village at all hours, but I wasn’t ready to claim either the word or the image. Still, I went, giggling nervously and sweating in the New York dusk. One of us stood lookout, while another swabbed the nearest flat surface with wallpaper paste and the third slapped a poster on before we all scampered away. The newbies among us laughed the loudest, almost hysterical with happiness and fear. The Lesbians are coming. The Lesbians are coming.

3.

On September 9, 1992, the first day of school in New York City, I scrounged a token and took the subway out to Middle Village, Queens, with Amy. Most of the school district was racially mixed, with shops as likely to have Mexican tortillas as Turkish preserves, or cartons of kimchi. Middle Village, though, was a mostly white working-class neighborhood that couldn’t boast much except a cemetery housing Lucky Luciano and Don Carlo Gambino, and the Long Island Expressway.

We were the most interesting thing to happen there in ages. And while we would have made a splash if we’d come in black leather and raising our fists like the Black Panthers or ACT UP, the Lesbian Avenger Concept Committee decided what we really needed was Sousa. Sousa, and lavender balloons reading, “Ask about lesbian lives.” It was ridiculous, absurd, delightful, though I wouldn’t have admitted it then.

Jenny Romaine, an artist Amy knew from Performance Studies, pulled together a brass band, kitting them out in the knee socks and plaid skirts of Catholic school uniforms. She herself carried a big bass drum. Some Avengers wore T-shirts that read, “I was a lesbian child.” I turned one down, saying I couldn’t afford it, but refused even when Ana Simo, that mild-mannered Cuban playwright, offered me a discount. I still cringed at the word
lesbian.

When we were all there, the sixty of us marched down Metropolitan Avenue to the elementary school, P.S. 87, singing at the top of our lungs, “Oh when the dykes, oh when the dykes, oh when the dykes come marching in.” We revised a few other Dixieland standards and proclaimed, “We are family. I’ve got all my sisters with me.” One banner read, “Teach About Lesbian Lives” and another “The Lesbian Avengers.” Somebody clutched an enormous bunch of the balloons, which had created a ruckus at the printer’s, who kept misspelling l-e-s-b-i-a-n. We were met with disbelief, anger, fear, a few approving nods, but mostly the typical New Yorker’s disinterest. Like them, I pretended I was totally cool with it. Hell, I did this kind of thing four or five times a week. No big deal. Like it was no big deal that when we got to the elementary school, the cops came with their thick blue arms and shiny shoes and tried to get us to leave.

At the civil disobedience training session, Maxine Wolfe explained it was perfectly legal to have a picket and hand out flyers. It was a public sidewalk, for crying out loud. And she’d been doing demos since the sixties, first for workers’ rights, then women, then people with AIDS. But who knows what cops will do? Nothing, as it turned out. Maybe it was our unshakeable knowledge of our rights, or how we continued singing, handing out balloons, giving interviews and flyers, while our negotiators negotiated with them. Or maybe they just took one look at this group of relatively innocuous females in knee socks and plaid skirts and thought, “What the heck. It’s New York. Let’s go get donuts.”

More than one kid got their first lesson in the real world when an Avenger handed them a balloon and their red-faced mother grabbed it away. No way is my little Sean or Antonio or Karen gonna be like
that.
As for the Xerox of our alternative alphabet—A for Acceptance, Action, and W. H. Auden; B for James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, and boycotting bigotry—some got tucked into pockets, others pointedly ripped into shreds. Though not in front of me. I stayed with the other picketers tracing that tiny oval on the sidewalk and avoiding confrontation. Maybe I held a sign for a while, feeling goofy and embarrassed, as I always did, at so much emotion being displayed.

The weather was nice, anyway, one of those perfect fall days with dark blue skies and white fluffy clouds that did not send forth lightning bolts or hail or anything at all to kill the lesbians. Nope, nobody died, there in front of the school yard. Neither were kids converted, or perverted, or particularly traumatized except when their angry moms grabbed their shiny balloons and let them float away. We just signaled to the world we existed. We’d been kids ourselves in school. The only thing different about us as adult lesbians was a few additional years. And self-awareness. Which was just beginning on my part.

Funny, I write that like it’s nothing.
Just signaling to the world we existed.
When it was like setting off a bomb. What else could it be? Lesbians plus elementary schoolchildren.

We left en masse when the last student entered the school. In those days, bigots would sometimes haunt queer demos, grab a few stragglers, and beat the crap out of them. So, together, Avengers set off for their day jobs, or classes, or coffee shops. The media dykes went to send more press releases. And I remember at the next meeting, Maxine or Ana or somebody arrived triumphantly waving copies of
Newsday
and other rags that had covered the demo. We’d done it. We’d launched the Lesbian Avengers, and the city had taken note.