Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (28 page)

But that led almost to a new kind of grief. And a kind of fury. Our history had disappeared. First, Natalie Barney. Then the Avengers. Now, we were even filtered out of the Web, and nobody seemed to notice or care.

The train to Toulouse was late, and the weather was awful. More or less reflecting our mood. Imagine it: trying to work up a smile after all that and find some way to celebrate dykes in a world blessed by Rick Warren. Where the Avengers fighting so long for lesbian visibility had been made invisible themselves. Lesbians were back where they were twenty years before. More like amphibians than citizens. Sitting like frogs in a vast vat of water as the temp slid up to boiling. Sedated with their potlucks and sports associations and conferences and Web sites. Tech advances that shared information at the speed of light but didn’t always have ripples in the real world.

We couldn’t do it. Laugh.

In fact, we sucked all the air out of the room when we took our place on the panel of activists, which included Madrid’s Toxic Lesbians, and Harriet and Marie representing La Barbe, even if it wasn’t a dyke thing. With our dueling accents in French, Ana and I went at the audience with sharp sticks. Tried to wake them up. We incited desire, showing video snippets of Avengers taking over Fifth Avenue to protest the murders of Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, the vast Dyke March in D.C. in ’93, and fire-eaters in front of the White House. We even showed Avengers giving schoolchildren balloons that said, “Ask about lesbian lives.”

But we also pissed them off, declaring how insignificant we were. How hated, actually, when push came to shove. Let’s admit it: if
lesbian
was a dirty word, what were lesbians in the flesh? We announced the dirty secret that it wasn’t just bigots to blame. It was dykes hiding in corners. And taking it. Refusing to claim a place in society.

I suppose we could have put a different spin on it. Made a joyful call to action. The conference was kind of cool. The organizers were committed to lesbians. But celebrating the power of laughter seemed almost obscene when anger was as taboo as pedophilia. When we’d abdicated the street. Neither seen nor heard. Not demonstrating. Not running around half-naked with bliss. No public platform even for satire. Not like Rabelais poking fun at clerics, or Mel Brooks forcing Torquemada and Hitler to sing and dance.

The response was mixed. Love for the images of activist dykes. Anger at our declaration that lesbians could disappear and nobody would notice we’d gone. One woman said lesbians weren’t that invisible in her city; they’d actually held one whole demo not long ago. Another woman seemed to come out against activism altogether: “Shouldn’t we stop and think about our goals first?”

I was accused of being evangelical about street activism. “It’s not the only way,” she said. I didn’t disagree, but my point was that direct action was a tool. Everybody should know how to use it. Especially dykes who rarely have lobbyists or representatives or cultural power. Like the poor of the world, all we have are our loud, annoying voices. Our bodies that take up room in the street. Every time the Avengers pulled off an action, we weren’t just making lesbians visible or trying to change society. We were changing lesbians. Creating a new kind of dyke who saw public space as hers, who could step out into the street and make noise, be herself, feel at home in the world. In some ways, we were the last utopian group of the millennium, aiming not only for justice, but pure freedom.

It was the whole point of the first Avenger manifesto. We could be as camp as we wanted, as ridiculous, as angry, as serene. You could get from the lesbian feminists of the seventies to all the equality-focused projects without groups like the Avengers, but probably not to a dancing dyke like Ellen. Or a wise-cracking Wanda Sykes. Forget
The L Word.

By chance, the director Rose Troche was at the conference, too, and we went to see her presentation the next morning. I had flashbacks to the East Village circa 1994. She’d been a friend of Anne d’Adesky and had been to a couple of parties in the loft at Avenue B that were full of fashionable queers drinking jewel-colored martinis. She talked about her recently defunct TV show
The L Word
featuring Pam Grier, whom Carrie Moyer had made an Avenger icon, and her film
Go Fish.
Before she was done, Rose managed to inspire finger-pointing, threats, and a near fistfight, at least in the back of the room where we were. The women were arguing about whether
The L Word
was a sellout or not. Is something better than nothing? Would you really sleep with Shane? Was
Go Fish
truly an embarrassment with its scruffy butch dykes? Don’t those
L Word
bitches ever work?

It was my birthday, again. After watching Rose, Ana and I played hooky and went to a restaurant in the market in Place Victor Hugo, eating the best cassoulet in France, and gulping the local wine like we’d been parched for a month. We’d been there our first year in France on a trip to the southwest that included Carcassonne where the heretical Cathars had a stronghold before they were targeted by the Inquisition. I got obsessed with them, that whole wide-eyed desert-dwelling puritanical strain. Thousands were burned at the stake by the equally fanatical Church that liked nothing better than freeing people of their disgusting flesh.

Maybe the attraction was that I could have been either. The heretic or the inquisitor, inflamed by rage, by hate, by a vast consuming love.

34.

It was still under my skin when we got back home to Paris—how we could just disappear and nobody would notice we’d gone. One year for Christmas, I gave Ana a book called
The Commissar Vanishes,
about doctored photos in the USSR. One sequence showed a photograph of Stalin with three other leaders of the Russian Revolution. One by one, they were airbrushed, cropped, and clipped out of the picture until only Stalin remained, so it seemed like he alone was responsible for the revolution. That was us, on the cutting room floor. The Lesbian Avengers. What an embarrassment we were to everybody. So brash. So lesbian. So un-American, rooted in the East Village art scene where people got up to all sorts of embarrassing things with chocolate, and dyke artists weren’t ashamed to portray raunchy sex, or even two girls duking it out in a bad relationship. I couldn’t believe we were ever featured in
Newsweek.
Yeah, the Avengers were gone, and who cared? Our goal now—a mature equality, cultivating our grandmothers’ gardens.

Even if it had its practical side, I wasn’t content, wanted room for somebody to cry out in the queer wilderness, “
LESBIANS! DYKES! GAY WOMEN
! . . . We’re wasting our lives being careful. Imagine what your life could be. Aren’t you ready to make it happen?” Why had we dumped that utopian road? That powerful call to reimagine our lives?

I was too tired to start over, but I couldn’t stand how small they’d made us. I hate constraint. Always had, scratchy little tights. Social boxes that appear as soon as the world takes note of you. I wanted to take up space. On my next trip back to New York, I scanned a bunch of stuff and added it to the tiny Avengers site I’d posted for the conference. I wrote a little article. Then two. Then I enlisted Carolina Kroon for some of her photos. Look. There’s proof. We existed. It’s my world, too. My own goal: to be a splinter under society’s fingernail, create an annoyance for the forces of invisibility. While I was still in New York, Amy Parker invited me to give a talk on activism up at Harvard, where she’d become an administrator for the women, gender, and sexuality department. The stock market had crashed by then, and some of the students were organizing demos around the mass firings at Harvard but couldn’t come up with much except walking around in circles with signs. Even though some of them had studied queer activism. In actual classrooms.

I thought about activism in the United States, and how it hadn’t begun or ended with MLK. There were abolitionists, and union organizers, and the Boston Tea Partiers who would soon be hijacked, and the group from my own neighborhood, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and went up there and showed the documentary and fielded questions. And generally felt like I should be in the Natural History Museum. Afterwards, an archivist up there asked me for my papers, and it was like proof I really was a fossil, a street activist in the age of the Internet. With a gap growing between my generation and theirs, so vast that a couple of Avengers I talked to actually sounded a little embarrassed at having shouted in the street. Though they were glad I had started documenting the Avengers. Of course, that was important. For the sake of lesbian history.

No one else, though, seemed to feel it was as urgent as I did. Maybe because their voices weren’t as faint as mine, they didn’t feel as invisible. Or maybe they remembered how it ended and were afraid somebody would find out that lesbian activists weren’t always pretty. As if we were supposed to be immune to the usual activist infighting, the American curse of race. Not part of that enormous evolving story. My friend Martha Burgess reminded me that the Avengers fought about a lot more than that. Like when those girls came and tried to get us to take on the case of Aileen Wuornos, the death-row dyke who killed all those men in Florida. The problem was the girls weren’t steady Avengers and seemed to pack the room with their friends. Martha turned up for the first time during this mess, and after opening her mouth to speak in favor of doing something for Wuornos was accused of being one of the people there just to swing the vote. She almost didn’t come back. She was still pissed, telling me about it, though at least nobody did a Stalin and put an icepick in their rival’s head. We just wanted to.

For a while now, people have also been rolling their eyes a little at the goal of visibility. Like the idea is passé. They’d expected it to do tricks. Roll over and beg. Save avalanche victims with a tub of rum. And all it did was lie there. I always thought about visibility as a jumping-off place, a precondition for having a voice. Because if you aren’t visible in the culture, or in politics, or even on the streets, how can you demand anything or participate like a grown-up in the ongoing narrative of your country? We could disappear, and who’d know we’d gone?

In Paris, I remembered visibility could be even more basic: the simple desire to see a face like yours, hear your name pronounced. I really was thrilled to see the American dyke rocker Beth Ditto on TV, her body on the cover of that fashion magazine. After Obama got elected in the fall of ’08, it seemed like every person of African descent in Paris walked just a little straighter. Some actually grinned from ear to ear, carrying newspapers with his face on it. Whatever I thought of him as a politician, he gave people hope, stiffened their spines. Visibility isn’t change itself, but a kind of wedge others can follow. Though we don’t know toward what. “The door itself / makes no promises. / It is only a door,” says Adrienne Rich.

We went back to New York in the spring of 2010. Six months later, I made a trip to Louisville. My mother still lived there, as well as my father, his second wife, and my sister Kim’s family. Vikki came in from Colorado with her husband and kid. It was the first time in thirteen years. On the plane I noticed all these guys with racing forms. The “reunion” coincided with the Breeders’ Cup at Churchill Downs, and I spent the next few days imagining a baby-popping competition.

Things had changed, kind of. An out gay guy, Jim Gray, had just been elected mayor of Lexington, Kentucky. One teenager I met, lured into the ROTC by promises of rock-climbing trips, passed a semester or two driving her colonel crazy, defending gays in the military and women’s rights. Though across town, another young girl spent several weeks circulating a petition to preserve the ill-fated Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy of the military, and she wasn’t even in the ROTC yet. She wore bits and pieces of her brother’s uniform, and the two did drills when they were bored. That was my niece, and everybody said she’s exactly like me.

Then there was my mother. When my cousin Donna picked me up at the airport, she told me she’d been lecturing my mother to be more accepting, or failing that, to bite her tongue. “I don’t know how I’d feel if one of my kids had made that choice, but you still have to love them and welcome them into your house. And their companions, too. Even if you don’t agree with their lifestyles.” Donna meant it kindly, but all I wanted to do was turn around and head back to my home planet, which dared rotate around the sun, like Galileo’s Earth, without anybody’s approval.

Still, whatever she said to my mother worked. Mom didn’t exactly ask after Ana, even if we’d been connected at the hip for eighteen—eighteen!—years, but she did button her lip, and because I did, too, we passed our visit together in a relative truce. It was what I was there for, to visit parents who were aging at an accelerated rate. To show my face. Which was the literal truth, especially for my mother, who can’t stand the rest of me, particularly the rebellious brain packed with a lesbian
life.
Very little
style
involved. We looked at photos. She showed me her art. She’d taken classes at U of L and begun painting again years before. She’d drawn and done watercolors as a young woman, stopped when her new husband made fun of her. I tried to encourage her. We should have had this in common. But I heard after I left that she had resumed her diatribes against her no-good, sinful daughter.

The visit with my father was equally calm. I’d decided to let go of the grotesqueries of the past and was rewarded with a martini. Three, actually.

After a couple of nights in a hotel, and all I could gorge at the Dairy Queen, I went to stay with Adrienne. She was a girl from grade school who tracked me down at
The Gully
and wasn’t at all put off by reconnecting with a big dyke. She had one for a sister-in-law, in fact. And she and her husband had actually gotten together when they both agreed some gay-baiting guy at their church was an idiot. Her husband, who teaches social studies at a high school for at-risk kids, told me the girls there were incredibly open, going around arm in arm, declaring they were lesbians, partly to provoke, partly to experiment, without knowing entirely what it meant. Queerish boys, though, were more reticent. When one kid from a troubled family came out as bi, his family was awful. A couple days later he disappeared from school and hadn’t been heard from since. Maybe they sent him somewhere else. Maybe he got the crap beat out of him and was in the hospital. Or was dead.