Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (27 page)

It seemed timely. Still does. How it grapples with identity. The ’08 presidential election was under way in the United States. And Hillary Clinton, the first serious female candidate for the Democratic spot, got treated about as well as Ségolène in France.
South Park
writers hid nuclear weapons in Clinton’s cartoon vagina, and men howled their disgust at Clinton’s shrieking harpy, schoolmarmy voice, those fat, childbearing, repulsive hips. But then I noticed plenty of dykes in the chorus even if they had hips, too. And were furious and shrill and aging fast.

Not that she was perfectly clean. Every now and then, one of Clinton’s people would float a trial balloon mentioning offensively how well-spoken Obama was or something. But then even Obama’s guys indulged in a little immigrant bashing, briefly trying to demonize Clinton’s South Asian contributors as economic bogeymen, dumping American workers for Indian techies.

And when Sarah Palin got picked as John McCain’s VP, NOW actually issued a press release to say they didn’t support women candidates just because they were women. Because they’re apparently the National Organization for Only Those Women Who Agree with All Our Policies. And queers went after queers. Democratic activists yanking Republican fags out of the closet, inciting homophobia that they hoped would blow back against the antigay McCain. At the same time, their candidate in chief, Barack Obama, was campaigning with some of the same gay-hating preachers who supported Bush and promised to dump way more money than the Texan oilman into faith-based programs. Obama would also flip-flop on primary promises and voted for bills broadening the powers of Homeland Security. Which I still hated, even if no one else did.

I got pissed, then even more depressed. Went through a bad patch. My last ties to the United States were frayed and fragile as my new roots in France. My whole way of life was a waste. Should be ended somehow. Killed. Reborn, maybe. Rewritten at least. It’s not enough to resist what is.

I thought about Rimbaud who wrote all that luminous poetry and got shot and drank and fucked and made scandals, then fell ostentatiously silent. Camus also went mum on the issue when he got tired of arguing that the French shouldn’t shoot all the Arab Algerians or keep them in thrall, and that the Arabs shouldn’t force all the French Algerians to flee to a country they’d probably never seen. He advocated for a third way, but nobody listened. Finally, he put down his pen. And that was a message, too. I wanted to do the same, fall silent, women attacking women, queers attacking queers, people of color attacking immigrants. But to do that, and have it mean anything, you have to already have a booming voice. People have to know you exist. And what was I? The girl getting thrown out of the Monoprix. Who never made a dent in anything.

I didn’t really belong anywhere, but in the street, deserted football fields, creeks. I wondered if it were a mistake to kill
The Gully,
that whole world I’d made where identity was complex, interwoven with everything, and resistance could mean just opening your mouth. It was the only place my life made sense, though we got it wrong sometimes. Like when we sneered at Bush’s “cabinet of color.” Even if Powell or Rice were window dressing, what windows they looked out of, preparing the way for Obama. Sarko had done the same thing. Packing his administration with brainy, beautiful, big-mouthed women of color like Rachida Dati, Rama Yade. He even dipped into the Left, recruiting Fadela Amara, a feminist activist from the projects.

But it was too late. I’d put
The Gully
to bed, shredded my books. Allied myself with Gerardo in Cuba with his ellipses and shrugs. I walked obsessively. At night I’d crawl into bed beside Ana and feel the curve of her back under my hand and the heat coming off it, but the sensation would stop at about my wrist. Before, it would have gone all the way past my elbow, and shoulder, clear to the pumping muscle of my heart.

In January, we’d taken the train to the empty forest of Fontainebleau and hiked around the trails using a map we printed out from the Internet. When we were good and lost, we caught a glimpse of a wild boar running through the trees. But all that beauty had nothing to do with me.

In the spring of ’08, I was sitting on the couch and saw a bug jump up on my ankle. Then found one in the bed. We’d gotten fleas,
les puces.
We fumigated the whole place, washed every scrap of cloth but were so disgusted we gave notice. And after a couple more weeks, we fled.

33.

By June, after a stint in New York, we’d installed ourselves in two unfurnished rooms in a seventeenth-century building on rue Visconti, a long gray street in Saint-Germain des Près. At the rue de Seine end, there were a couple of cheesy galleries with sculptures that were supposed to be from Benin but arrived one by one in shopping bags carried by shady skinny men. At the other end was a convent. And across from it, Balzac’s failed printing concern that cheered me up a little. I wasn’t the only writer that sucked at making money.

Tourists clogged most of the cafés nearby, taking discreet pictures of Karl Lagerfeld at the Café de Flore, or posing like Sartre and de Beauvoir in Les Deux Magots, though without the cigarettes, because the smoking ban had just gone into effect. Which meant when Ana and I discovered a cheap café, we could finally sit inside. In the laundromat up rue de Seine, the Spanish and Americans and provincial French would mistake me for an employee and try to give me orders. I’d be nice to them anyway and use every language I knew to explain how the machines worked. “No, that’s a washer.” And I’d warn them not to leave clothes alone in the dryer because they’d magically disappear.

We’d take refuge in the movie houses and bookstores. They stayed open later than some of the cafés in case you had a sudden urge for the latest Fred Vargas mystery or a reprint of Marx’s essay on the French Civil War. Or a translation of Willa Cather. Or a novel by Marie NDiaye. They were all so carefully designed. I’d pick them up just to admire how they fit in my hand. Ready to open my heart to some writer’s world. I felt like we belonged, Ana and I. Or should have in a neighborhood that once welcomed Janet Flanner, Colette, and Sylvia Beach. Gertrude Stein had lived not too far away, and she actually got a plaque on her house, though it didn’t mention Alice.

And in our own apartment, we had this airshaft-patio sort of thing that had an open brick wall in back. Just behind that was a private park where
über
Sapphist Natalie Clifford Barney had her Temple of Friendship, throwing literary soirées and outrageous parties. A couple of trees were visible over the top of the wall. I remember a peeling sycamore with fat gray leaves and once or twice considered borrowing a ladder from somebody and peeking over. Instead, I’d stare at the bricks and imagine what it was like. Colette running around the neighborhood half-naked with bliss. What would it feel like to be so utterly unself-conscious? I wanted to snog Ana on a street corner. Throw wild parties that scandalized the bourgeoisie that hadn’t improved any.

There was that guy on a fancy motorcycle barreling down the sidewalk. When he almost ran over Ana, and we chased him down, he insulted us first as women, then dykes, then foreigners. And the crowd snickered when we called him a misogynist, turned away when we called him a homophobe, and ran back into the cafés to get their smelling salts when we called him a racist xenophobic dickhead who was the shame of France. I missed lesbians. We had our friends, of course, but hardly ever saw dykes on the metro or in the street. At the time, the only two with a national profile were an anonymous couple suing the state for the right to adopt or inseminate. I got teary the night we saw the dyke rocker Beth Ditto do a cheesy music program on TV. She’d gotten chic all of a sudden, and her curvy naked body was on the cover of a fashion magazine.

We created a group, Goudou Explosive (Explosive Dykes), just to march in Pride. I spent two days sewing and painting a red and gold banner fit for a king, bought a bunch of toy trumpets at a novelty shop, and the whole dirty dozen of us from five different countries made a hell of a lot of honking, squealing noise, and every girl in the crowd cheered, demanding our Goudou Explosive stickers and pamphlets, and joining in for several blocks. Marching, the goudou were reminded why they were explosive. One homo on the sideline made snide comments about how well we blew our trumpets and what we could do with them later on. Young straight boys kept dodging in between us as we marched, making equally clichéd suggestions. A fag marshal lectured us about preparing for the moment of silence as if we were infants, while ignoring the big loud float full of men ahead of us. Meanwhile, the two white guys announcing the participants refused to acknowledge we existed until we took a couple of menacing steps toward them, blowing our horns.

Ana and I capped off Pride weekend by attending a neighborhood talk about Barney’s Temple of Friendship. But instead of juicy details about crazy liaisons and wild dyke parties, the guy giving the lecture focused on the original, boring owner and dismissed Barney as some rich American dame who gave literary soirées for important straight men. He only hinted at her being a dyke with the coy, “Remy de Gourmont called her the Amazon. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to why.” So at the end, when he was taking questions, the explosive Ana Simo stood up and asked why he was so reluctant to pronounce the word
lesbian,
and why he ignored Barney’s importance in her own right as a literary pioneer and dyke icon. Then the crowd started murmuring, some in favor, some outraged that she’d brought up those dirty lezzies. “What does that have to do with anything?” Though if Barney had been a guy, you can bet the speaker would have mentioned he’d conquered Colette, not to mention Liane de Pougy, the famous courtesan.

Our Internet wasn’t working yet, so I went to one of the municipal offices to use their free WiFi and file a story about all this. That’s when I discovered that the city of Paris with its gay mayor was blocking every Web page with the words
lesbian,
gay,
or
goudou.
You’d get this message declaring it pornographic. All my own articles were censored, my blog apparently obscene. Even the
New York Times
’ coverage of the Paris Pride march was ostensibly a threat to public morals and the delicate sensibilities of children. Where were the outraged queers? I wondered. I called up the mayor’s office, but they didn’t call me back until I’d already written a furious article. Their main point was that Mayor Bertrand Delanoë couldn’t be homophobic. “He’s gay, you know.” “So what?” I said. They unblocked my site, but that was it. The antigay filter stayed.

The fall was cold and gray. We put plastic on the windows, wore the sweaters I knitted obsessively after 9/11. Ana was plotting a new book. I was trying to rediscover my essence, writing for myself, shooting video, changing the equation of the fight. I left messages in the street on little stickers that remained for weeks.
Quand la Beauté défait son corsage, ce n’est pas pour nous.
When Beauty unbuttons her shirt, it is not for us.
I was planting my own flag in the city. I exist, I said. Or will.

In the spring we went south to Toulouse. La Barbe had been invited to a lesbian conference, and Harriet and Marie suggested they ask me and Ana to do something on the Lesbian Avengers. The theme was Lesbians and the Weapon of Laughter
,
and I suspect the organizers in Toulouse expected us to be light and funny, the superheroish dykes from New York. We agreed to do it, but neither of us felt like dykes in France had anything to laugh about. U.S. queers surely didn’t. The same day Obama got elected, same-sex marriage got banned in California with the passage of Prop 8. A black man could finally be president, but queers couldn’t even file joint taxes. Obama hadn’t evolved very far yet on LGBT rights. In fact, he rubbed salt in the wound by inviting Rick Warren to bless his inauguration, even if the reverend had helped roll back AIDS programs in Africa, fueled antigay campaigns in Nigeria and Uganda, unleashed mobs with machetes.

Still, crowds of queers demonstrated after the Prop 8 fiasco. And the press as usual started heralding a new movement, Stonewall 2.0, which would be mobilized by e-mails and tweets, not phone trees. But it fizzled pretty quickly because it wasn’t rooted in anything. Our national organizations had stuck to their de-gayed approach: putting nice hets front and center, talking about generic rights, reinforcing the idea we were a bunch of pervs too disgusting to show ourselves. We forgot that we didn’t need their permission to knock on doors, stand on street corners. That it paid off to court the poor, and people of color.

It was a case for the Avengers. But the Avengers were dead. Not just dead, but obliterated. After the election, I Googled them, and there almost nothing online except an article of Sara Pursley’s in
The Nation
about organizing in Idaho. It should be required reading for every queer activist. The Wikipedia entry was worse than none. There was nothing anywhere about the dozens of chapters worldwide. All those actions. The tens of thousands of dykes who marched behind Lesbian Avenger banners in D.C., New York, and San Francisco. A few cities had Dyke March Web sites, but they rarely mentioned their origins, as if they were ashamed of them. Sometimes I was. All that ugliness at the end. In the beginning, so much hope, and for what?

Getting ready for the conference, I e-mailed Su Friedrich, and she sent me a DVD of
Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too.
It was only the second time I’d seen it. I felt a little nervous just slipping it into my laptop. My god, what a Pandora’s box. What a relic. We’d gone from the War on Culture to the War on Terror. From my work at
The Gully,
I knew dykes were still in the street, but in Guatemala City or South African townships, not New York. It was ancient history. Almost indecent to watch. But then I started seeing these familiar faces. The Irish dyke Sheila Quinn and cabbie Phyllis Lutsky. The filmmaker Su Friedrich. Ana was there in the Plaza Hotel talking to the camera about the Colorado boycott as a security guard tried to haul her away. My young, bald self ate fire. I’d forgotten how much fun it was, how brave we were. How much we accomplished going on the offensive, reimagining dykes. “Look at them,” I said, when Ana came home from the library. “Just look.” We reunited the statue of Alice with Gertrude. We danced in the snow. Twenty thousand dykes marched in D.C. There was such joy on their faces.