Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (29 page)

I was back in Louisville just a couple of months later, not as a daughter but to talk about the Lesbian Avengers. Another classmate, Leigh, had invited me to do something for Women’s History Month at the university where she taught philosophy. So much had happened in the world, it seemed more like a decade had passed since I’d been there. Though I wasn’t sure they’d noticed. Did students at an out-of-the-way college know the Arab world had busted out in what was getting called a glorious spring? That the triumph of nonviolent organizing was getting called a “revolution by Internet” (despite the crowds in the street day after day, despite the years of activism)? Kids had occupied Wall Street. Or tried to. Direct action was relevant after all. Like the traditional media that amplified all the action on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. Like making yourself visible to get support from the whole fucking world. It was already clear they’d need it. Trying to remake entire nations. Egypt and Tunisia stood a better chance, anyway, than Iraq, where change had been artificially imposed.

I chatted with the burly, bearded tech guy and discovered that he used to hang out in my neighborhood because his dad was a musician at the Toy Tiger Lounge, which I’d been told was a den of iniquity. And after we laughed about that, he said, “You’re awright. I didn’t know what to expect, but you’re awright.” Which is high praise in that part of the world, where they’re freaked out as much by New York as the lesbian thing.

When it was finally time, I gave my spiel and showed the movie. Afterwards, a couple of young lesbians in the audience talked about how a gay student was beaten up in a school bathroom recently while a whole gang of kids looked on. Cops refused to classify it as a hate crime. Then a dyke activist from Louisville gave me a CD of Yer Girlfriend, a lesbian band she’d played in during the early nineties, about the time I went to New York. Somebody else asked about the lesbian lifestyle, and I gave a lecture on the lesbian oatmeal I ate and lesbian jeans I put on, because I hadn’t barbequed any infants in decades.

The next day, the aging, twanging mother of a lesbian shop owner actually recommended a gay-friendly church. And at a party, a young black lesbian said she’d finally worked up the nerve to come out but was totally deflated when her father said it was no big deal. Ditto for when she announced she wanted to be a drag king. “Well, we better go buy you some clothes,” was the response. At a dyke bar, she didn’t know anybody, but her dad spotted a friend and her partner: “Look, there’s so-and-so.” She said the worst of it in Louisville was the racial segregation among queers. Her closest friend was a young white fag, and they got hassled a little whenever they went together to bars and clubs. “What are you hanging with him for?” “Why are you with her?” The two shared a house with his white boyfriend, who was from rural Kentucky. He told me he came out with no problem, though his father was still struggling with it. Online, he’d found other young queers from the same region, and they had a little network. Some of them had even begun moving back home. He was considering it himself and planned to enlist the help of progressive nuns to get something going in the area if he did return.

We stared at each other in mutual awe. They thought it was cool I was living in New York and had been a Lesbian Avenger and had made it as far as Paris. I was impressed that they were still at home. In Kentucky. Smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. I could never have imagined their lives. I could never have imagined my own. After all, I was going to be a medical missionary. A doctor, pouring out the balm of Gilead. Instead, there I was outside the city. Blowing a toy trumpet, staring at crumbling walls.

Notes and Acknowledgments

Readers should be aware that this is not an exhaustive history, especially of the New York Lesbian Avengers. Far more people contributed than are mentioned here. For the sake of the book, I had to make cuts, not additions. On the other hand, what I did include is as accurate as possible, though in a few instances (for example, when I was informed that I once had three roommates instead of two) I decided to let the original description stand. Our lives are shaped as much by the stories we cobble together with our memories as they are by the actual details.

Partly for this reason, I made a conscious decision to use full names only for people who are public figures, at least in a limited sense. It can be unsettling to see your name pop up on Google or in a book, especially if you don’t remember things quite the same way. The only two pseudonyms in
Eating Fire
are Faustina and Kathryn.

In general, this book owes a great deal to ideas explored in
The Gully
online magazine and New York’s
Gay City News,
but my biggest thanks go to those joyful troublemakers and unapologetically big-mouthed dykes the Lesbian Avengers. This book is for you.

Born to be bald.

Giggling in the center of my first girl gang.

Athletic at twelve, artsy at twenty-one.

So that’s Gloria Steinem. March for Women’s Lives, my first demo, 1989.
P
HOTOGRAPH BY
K
ELLY
C
OGSWELL.

The club card that launched it all. Text by Sarah Schulman.
F
ROM THE
L
ESBIAN
A
VENGER
C
OLLECTION,
L
ESBIAN
H
ERSTORY
A
RCHIVES.

Who knew dykes were superheroes!?
D
ESIGNS BY
C
ARRIE
M
OYER.

Yeah, I helped write this, with Activism 101 on the back of the manifesto. We handed out thousands of these at the D.C. march to spark a worldwide lesbian movement.
D
ESIGN BY
C
ARRIE
M
OYER.