Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (20 page)

This time, though, it was harder to isolate us. Squash the facts. The Internet gave new people access to that rusty old battleground, the media.

I named our zine
The Gully
because water can carve a mark in the landscape drip by drip if it persists long enough. The first tag line was “Digested news, raw opinion, from the queer edge of America,” which I shortened pretty quickly to “Digested news, raw opinion, queer edge.” We ended up a couple of years later with “Queer views on everything,” refusing to fill a tiny niche or restrict ourselves. The world was large. I designed
The Gully
as a major daily, inserting us everywhere. My ambition was in the nav bar itself. Gaymundo. Asia. Americas. Africa. Europe. Race/class. And Art. For a while, the U.S. coverage was submerged in the Americas. I put my country back in its place, at least until Bush came.

I connected the dots. Seeded the “mainstream” channel pages like Africa with tons of queer stories and links from places like
Behind the Mask,
a gay African site. Then I’d stuff the Gaymundo page with stories about free speech or the right to assemble that affected LGBT activists all over the world. I’d use an article on Taiwan, which was having elections after a long dictatorship, to throw Cuban issues into relief. Like how do you forge a democracy with a colonial giant (China) breathing down your neck? How do you build a viable economy when you’re so small? Where did queers fit in to the national picture? Taiwan also had its own racial and ethnic minorities, an indigenous people that were overrun by colonizers that were in turn colonized, like in the Caribbean. It wasn’t just The West guilty of an ugly colonial past.
The Gully
was like the backside of the tapestry where all the threads of human striving were tangled up and knotted together. Returning the world to its unity. Pissing everybody off.

Straight readers subscribing after reading an article on police brutality would flee after seeing the word
gay.
A gay Webmaster in Kentucky refused to list
The Gully
because we used the word
queer.
Didn’t I know it was offensive?! And there was that time I was at a party telling some dyke art dealer about the magazine, and her face got all contorted with disgust, “What do you mean, gay point of view? There’s no such thing!” She stormed off raging that sexual orientation meant nothing beyond who you went to bed with. She was right, in a way. In fact, that was the whole conundrum of identity politics. There was no single gay point of view. Like skin color or gender or any of those arbitrary, sometimes artificial, differences, sexual orientation didn’t make us all the same. But it did affect us. It had to. Being pointed south while everybody else was pointed north. Being a cuckoo in heterosexual nests. Maybe it was even our contribution to society, that difference. Our lives making the radical point—things don’t have to be the way they are.

I also did what I preached and looked to see who was missing. We featured writers of color or interviewed international LGBT activists. I’d put their photos up, or some video, and there’d be an Argentinian transgender woman online for maybe the first time ever. We’d feature Guatemalan dykes holding kiss-ins, and black South African lesbians marching against violence. Straight Taiwanese women were getting their riot on. An Iranian dyke risked her life to express herself in a blog post. No single group could ever plant a flag in that word
freedom.

When St. Paddy’s Day rolled around again, I interviewed Anne Maguire at the Mission Café on Second Avenue. I’d run into her in the street. Pretended everything was back to normal, post-Avengers, and it mostly was. It had been ten years since ILGO had begun the struggle to march in the damn parade. Ten years since we got clobbered with Dinkins. We talked about immigration, how it made some people more conservative, like the Hibernians, who clung to the past. How others embraced the chance to reinvent themselves and became radical forces. Thinking about it now, I realize that’s how the Avengers began. As a kind of radical immigrant project. Anne and Marie from Ireland. Ana from Cuba via France. Anne d’Adesky’s mom was French, her father Haitian. Maxine Wolfe and Sarah Schulman were children and grandchildren of the Jewish Diaspora. Even most of the other American Avengers were far from their homes in Idaho. Alaska. Kentucky. All of us trying to claim a place in our own country. Be
citizens,
though I didn’t grasp the word yet.

For a while the Internet seemed to offer us endless possibilities to participate. But not long after we published “South Africa: Apartheid Military Forced Gay Troops Into Sex-Change Operations,” I turned on my computer and found a scary e-mail from a cabal of Canadian lawyers. They were suing
The Gully
and everyone involved with it for defaming the respected doctor Aubrey Levin, formerly Colonel Levin of South Africa, who’d reportedly performed forced sex changes on queers in the apartheid army. Better a female than a fag. A gay group had published a huge scholarly report on it in which he admitted a hell of a lot of ugly things. Afterwards, articles appeared in big publications like the
Daily Mail & Guardian.
At least until Levin got busy with his lawsuits, and all the South African and British rags pulled their stuff.

The First Amendment gives U.S. journalists more protection, so his lawyers were just blowing smoke at us, hoping we’d get scared and cave, but
The Gully
ended up having the last article standing. It was weird how quickly the story disappeared from the Web. That last chance for justice.

It was the first hint I had of some limits to the Web. Lawyers could force journalists to yank stories even if they believed they were true. Writers could change their minds and delete pages themselves, pretending they’d never said or done that, calling into question the legitimacy of bloggers, who were beginning to be called citizen journalists. We’d even find governments could filter, block, just pull the plug. And not just the ones you’d think.

25.

Much of that was later. At the end of June 2000, we were just waving farewell to Elián, the kid we’d followed as closely as OJ and his bloody glove, Clinton and that damn blue dress. In April, there’d been a big raid to get him out of the relatives’ house and reunited with his dad. Photographers emerged with a snap of an INS storm trooper yanking open a closet to find a man holding a wide-eyed, terrified Elián. Miami Cubans played it up like it was another Waco. And it wasn’t pretty, but it was right. The law held up. Which is nice if you care about things like that, and I was beginning to. I thought I might need it myself someday, believed law was the glue that kept all these fifty states from flying apart.

It wouldn’t be long until it was tested again in the 2000 election. I couldn’t watch the campaign, their smug faces. Clinton’s uptight Ivy League Vice President Albert Gore, who pandered to the most extreme of the Miami Cubans and got photographed in front of stained-glass windows every chance he got. George W. Bush, the silver-spooned, down-home, Ivy League kid of the ex-President who himself had prayed away an addiction to alcohol and would open the door even further than Gore to gay-bashing, women-hating Christian fundamentalists.

Half the people we knew said there was no difference at all between the two corporate sell-outs. Their man was Saint Nader, the Ivy League Independent, consumer advocate, and environmentalist who called on the antiglobalization movement as his own higher power, eight months after the Battle of Seattle nearly paralyzed a big meeting of the WTO.

I’d watched Seattle with mixed feelings. Do you applaud them or kick them in the nuts, these guys who looked so middle-class and white? Who seemed to think it was enough to slap a bandana over their faces and wear T-shirts of that fag-bashing, middle-class bastard Che. Oh, and raise the solitary fist in the air before the baton came down. I’d made the gesture myself in the Avengers. You can see it in the documentary. My hand bunched in the air. If you watch carefully, I give a sideways glance, wondering if I’m ridiculous because I’m borrowing somebody else’s pose. Hadn’t figured out what mine should be, though I was making progress.

I wondered if the Seattle protesters would ever get beyond it. Maybe look around the room and see who wasn’t there. Envision something more radical than their mantra “Local,” which seemed to translate into women from Appalachia to Ecuador trapped weaving baskets and stitching quilts and popping babies, while the world went by and menfolk served as enforcers.

What about girls who wanted to learn computers? What about the urban poor? Or queer homeless kids? What about me? When we wrote about police brutality and race, I’d started to look closer at my own life. I realized I’d overemphasized the whole hickster-farmer’s-granddaughter thing ever since college, when all that stuff about cultivating your mother’s gardens was pushed so hard it made the whole impoverished rural thing seem more authentic than my life growing up on the margins of suburbia, not just praying in football fields but hanging out occasionally at the mall where I’d get followed around by security because I looked too poor. Too alone. My dykeliness showing. Too smart and sullen, they said, for a job at Mickey D’s.

There was the time I was out with my sister Kim and her boyfriend, and the cops put on their big flashing light and pulled us over because the car was a beater, the tape deck blasting Kiss, and the boy’s hair too long. He got frisked by the pigs. We didn’t tell my mother. It was so white trash. Later, it helped me imagine what black kids went through. My humiliation squared. Along with the anger and fear. Education could give you a step up, but not much more, unless you acquired that veneer of entitlement. That gloss.

Nothing was separate, class or race. Gender. Sexual identity. Even place. And when it came to social policy, the Nader campaign pretty much ignored all that. When
The Gully
insisted that all these things were related, you should have seen the screaming all-caps e-mails including, “
NOTHING
is as important as class.” “
NOTHING
is as important as the environment.” “Even to mention such differences is an attack on a more egalitarian, color-blind world.” There was a contest of oppression, and they used every old lefty excuse in the book to silence people of color and women and queers. They hated
The Gully.
Wanted to reach across cyberspace, rip our hearts out. They imagined we were the forces of evil.

I supposed that was progress, having the power to incite such fury with each article we published, declaring that class was intertwined with other issues. I wonder who they thought we were. Probably not these two dykes, one white, one Latina, sitting in the East Village all alone in front of their computers.

When I’d stumble out into the street, I was as insignificant and inoffensive as ever, awkward in the air. I’d go to the Fourteenth Street Y, enter the locker room, and the aging ladies would scream, “A man, a man. This is the women’s locker room.” And I’d shrink and sigh and say, “I know this is the women’s,” and let them mutter among themselves until they figured it out. I’d do laundry at that place on First Avenue and Second Street where you had to fight for a dryer with the little rich kids taking over the neighborhood. They came in and out between errands, trusting nobody would steal their stuff, while the old-timers sat around watching their machines and complaining about their diabetes in raspy voices like my aunts and uncles back home. They were too fat or too skinny. They downed sweet tea and soda pop and smoked. I drank diet Orange Crush and ate Cheetos where Ana couldn’t see me. If I wasn’t careful, I’d smear neon orange from my fingers onto the clothes.

That was my real life, wasn’t it? Off-line. It was the place I felt attacked when George W. Bush seemed to squeak past Gore in the November election, and my lefty pals lit up the bulletin boards with a surge of posts hating on those inbred
HILLBILLY MORONS
from the red states, even if they’d wasted their own votes on Nader or shared real estate with the likes of Cardinal O’Connor or Mary Cummins. Some even mentioned Kentucky. People whose names I recognized, and I thought knew me from the Avengers or ILGO. Who knew where I was from. And for that matter, where bell hooks was from. I wanted to explode. Got enraged again. Seethed. I can call myself a stupid hick if I want to, but not you, you snide fucking fucker. Maybe it’s your arrogance, like Gore’s, that lost you the working class, and what’s left of rural America. I felt more and more alien. Only Ana, maybe, was from a nearby planet.

Meanwhile in Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris was busy using Democratic ballots to wipe her Republican ass. And probably Puerto Rican cab drivers made jokes that Jimmy Carter should be down there instead of wherever, overseeing the election. And the same Cuban Americans who said they wanted Elián to grow up in a glorious democracy held violent demos attacking the recount. Poor George W. Bush retreated to his ranch and suffering greatly from the stress, appeared in photos with enormous swelling boils on his face under big cowboy hats. And Gore with his fleshy red face just smirked and shrugged and let things take their course.

Ana was online 24/7. Only making brief forays to her own gym, where nobody shouted at her to get out of the women’s locker room, but did sometimes ask her as a short brownish woman for fresh towels. I wrote sneering articles but suffered a lot. It felt like our democracy was at stake. The rule of law. That web that had a harsh beauty to it, and was tested but held when Elían was returned to his father. No matter that he was Cuban or his opponents had powerful friends. The law was the law. Even imperfect, it held the promise of justice. It fed us our lines as activists. Offered ways to settle differences, be together.

You could almost see it rip as the Florida election was rushed to the U.S. Supreme Court and they decided it was more important to hand over power on schedule than to respect each American voice.

Nobody remembers now, just how it was. But that was the real moment the country shifted, weakening the ground on which the two towers stood. Making their fall more awful. Paving the way for Bush to ignore international treaties, dash into Iraq after imaginary foes. Everything was set up like dominoes, and the last nudge was the certification of the vote in Congress when not one single senator out of the hundred stood up to protest the widespread fraud and the disenfranchisement of black voters. As Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore was still presiding. He could have acted to slow things down, but he just grinned and shrugged at the protesting Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. “The Chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois, but, hey . . .” Let’s just get this thing over with. As if the consequences of racism didn’t poison us all.