Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (3 page)

Not everybody was happy about it. Homophobe-in-chief, Mary A. Cummins, worked twice as hard to kill the Rainbow Curriculum. She was a white-haired grandmother and president of the school board in District 24 where we’d taken our balloons, and she worked that white hair for all it was worth. “Look how nice I am, how innocent. How mean the homos are to me.” Her specialty was forging unholy alliances, and she pulled one off with Cardinal John O’Connor, and the evangelical Pat Robertson. But the real coup was dragging in New York’s African American and Latino churches in a kind of rainbow of hate.

Of course, Cummins and her lily-white board had no ulterior motives, like seeing the whole multicultural thing dumped. It was just a fluke a few years later in ’94 when District 24 elected Louisa M. Chan, its first minority school board member, and Ms. Cummins immediately attacked her behind closed doors as a know-nothing chink. Cummins denied the allegations, though in another session packed with press she went on to call Chan “an evil, wicked woman,” declaring, “I’ll say what I like, as long as I’m an American!”

Chan responded, “I’m an American, too.”

That’s what we were saying also, just by taking to the streets. But Republicans didn’t accept it. Played one minority against each other, defining just who a real American was. Sometimes immigrants were. Sometimes not. In his speech to the ’92 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan used the “brave people of Koreatown” to slam the (black) welfare-ridden mobs of the LA riots, setting everybody against the bra-burning feminists, tree-huggers, and of course, homosexuals. It was a Culture War, a holy war, he declared, for the soul of America. Extremist Christians would do anything to save it. Including bombing abortion clinics and dipping into their filthy minds to create videotapes “proving” lesbians and gay men did nothing but have orgies with animals and babies and assorted inanimate objects, snacking on fecal matter between rapes.

In California, antigay activists perfected divide-and-conquer when they defined lesbians and gay men as “a rich class demanding ‘special rights’ at the expense of
true
minorities”—which didn’t seem like a lie because the visible leaders of the movement were almost exclusively white and privileged (and male). In New York City, plenty eagerly swallowed the hook. The mostly black District 29 decided it was better to dump the curriculum, let their kids pay the price, than extend a mere six pages of respect to queers. Thousands of black and Hispanic parents marched on the Board of Ed and flooded every hearing. No way they had anything in common with rich white pervs. No way they were gonna let that Chancellor of Schools Joe Fernandez turn their kids into sodomites. He even wanted to hand out rubbers in high schools. What was the world coming to?

The Avengers who attended the hearings would come back shaken at seeing the whole gamut of human faces so contorted with hate. When we spoke in favor of the curriculum, they screamed at us, stomped, threw chairs, and pumped fists in dyke and faggot faces, even if some of us were black or Latina like them.

I signed up to go but chickened out. I didn’t want to be there when it finally erupted, the mass antigay lynch mob. Everybody knew about the murders of black kids at Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, but queers were getting killed, too. And not just by AIDS. The year 1992 had started with a student in Alabama shooting members of Auburn’s lesbian and gay organization from his dormitory window. In March, a gang of kids—the youngest eight years old—shot a bartender at a Norfolk, Virginia, gay bar just because they wanted to “mess with some gays.” In April, an off-duty cop and his pal attacked a couple of dykes in Methuen, Massachusetts. In May, in the Detroit suburbs, a lesbian couple was shot and killed in their front yard by a neighbor. And these were just the cases that got attention. In New York, queers were regularly murdered and dumped in the Hudson. Transgendered people and drag queens, many of them black and Hispanic, disappeared without a trace. We’d all been harassed. Some of us beaten.

If you’d have gotten out a U.S. map and colored in a bright red dot for every attack, huge crimson smears would have covered places like Oregon, where the Christian Right was in the throes of an antigay campaign. They wanted it set down in the black and white of their constitution that we were child-molesting monsters, not worthy of homes or jobs or even life. Their foot soldiers destroyed the offices of LGBT organizations, beat up queers. In Salem, Oregon, skinheads spent months harassing Brian Mock, a white, gay disabled guy. First they just called him names, then they threw things at the rooming house where he lived. They finally beat him so badly he could barely move and his face was unrecognizable. When his friend, African American lesbian Hattie Mae Cohens, tried to step in and protect him, she became a victim, too. On September 27, 1992, at 3:18 a.m., the four wannabe Nazis tossed a Molotov cocktail at their rooming house, burning them both alive.

“Nigger dyke,” the skinheads jeered, as they watched the building burn, uniting us minorities as objects of hate, whether we wanted it or not.

4.

Not long after the murders in Oregon, the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP) asked the Avengers to join them in a protest march on October 30, the night before the big Halloween parade. I saw it for the first time in ’89. I was on my way to get a falafel after a class at NYU when I got caught up in a shocking mob of drag queens all dressed up as the pope and his cardinals with enormous red hats and robes. There was also a bloody Marie Antoinette and her courtiers with giant wigs and sequins. Huge puppets. Practically fresh off the bus, I’d only seen drag queens at the one gay dive in Lexington where I went to college. They were like my furious sister Vikki, who also had big hair, extravagant blue eye shadow, and sometimes drew her knife-like fingernails down whatever was nearest, my arm, neck, back.

It was dark and there were barriers everywhere, sending me off into a maze of narrow streets that were stuffed with white suburbanites loaded with plastic cups and beer bottles and flasks trying to get a glimpse of the freaks. They wore Batman or Catwoman masks or powdered white faces made up as sadistic Jokers. Others came as themselves, with the acid-washed blue jeans and matching jackets of the bridge and tunnel crowd. I was the hickster ingénue, authentically shabby in my army jacket and holey shoes that the Irish girls made me throw away a year later. “How can you wear these stinking things?”

Music blasted from the floats and the bars, along with laughter, shouts. Glass shattered in the distance. People smashed up against me, sometimes excusing themselves, mostly not. I couldn’t breathe, never made it to Mamoun’s Falafel, just got the hell out of the crush, and descended into the nearest functioning subway station. The train had already been pelted with eggs and whatever else the mobs of teenagers found. There was that plastic string stuff everywhere, and graffiti scrawled on seats and subway maps. All the working people looked warily at the platforms when the train stopped and doors opened. They were still full of kids unleashing chaos, covering the city with garbage, broken bottles, broken egg shells, the tempera of drying yolk, and blood.

I learned that was a typical Halloween, with the blood often belonging to queers.

That was why AVP was holding the antiviolence march, and also warning every queer they could find to skip the Halloween night parade. The year before, there had been even more antigay attacks than usual. The Avengers said “yes” to the march, and a big fat “no” to staying home when things heated up. It would make a mockery of any effort to Take Back the Night, as the protest march was called. Otherwise you’d have to rename it Take Back One Night, or Take Back the Nights That Aren’t Too Troublesome and Don’t Require Very Much Effort.

Remembering the Oregon murders, we decided to build a shrine to Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock at Father Demo Square in the Village and plant ourselves there from the chaos of Halloween Eve through Election Day. Jennifer Monson, a wiry dyke with strawberry blonde hair and a sideways way of talking, suggested we transform the image of their deaths by learning to eat fire. She turned out to be a dancer and choreographer, with a bunch of friends in alternative circuses. A couple of days before the march, Amy and I and some others found ourselves out in Brooklyn with jars of lighter fluid, rags, and a bunch of metal hangers in a room filled with juggling pins, and swords, and stilts. I hadn’t meant to learn. I was mostly tagging along with Amy, who was really into it, and seeing who else would turn up.

There were a dozen or so of us, all about my age or younger. All white, too. When I’d asked Marlene Colburn, this older African American dyke if she was going to learn because she was as tough as anybody and had a lot of flair, she just laughed and said, “Are you kidding?” Another black woman said it was nuts, too, that
her
people had better sense than that, though she was even younger than me. And paid her tuition dancing in a bar.

When we got there, Jennifer Monson introduced us to her friend Jennifer Miller, the director of Circus Amok, the one-ring, gender-bending spectacle of political agitators, jugglers, and tightrope walkers. She showed us all how to wrap a little bit of rag around the end of a hanger (not too big or the flame will be enormous), then dip it in lighter fluid or kerosene (lighter fluid tasted less gross). You tilt your head back so the approaching flame doesn’t burn off your nose or hair and insert it into your mouth as you exhale slightly. Close your lips, it’s extinguished. Make a mistake and inhale—your lungs explode and you die.

It was harder in Jennifer Miller’s case because she was a bearded lady and her face was flammable. But I still balked when it came down to it, even with my short hair and smooth cheeks. If you want to talk about unnatural acts, bringing fire toward your face clearly qualifies. Sticking it in your mouth is downright nuts. But I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the others, so I grabbed a torch, lit it, tilted my head back, and opened my mouth, exhaling in a great gust.

I could eat fire. It was nothing at all.

We practiced until we could do it with aplomb, in unison. We even learned to light the torches from each other’s flaming tongues. We started to pick up each other’s names: Sara, Michelle, Alison were all roommates at a loft on Avenue D. Then there was Cindra, Rachel, Lysander, the Jennifers. It was a bonding experience. We became friends. Some of us, lovers.

It was chilly and dark at Father Demo Square. The streetlights barely shone. You could hear the march coming from blocks away with whistles and chants, the call and response of “Whose streets?” “Our streets!” as we reclaimed the Village, making it safe. Suddenly, the marchers were around us, a nervous, angry crowd with signs, “No on Nine” (the antigay Oregon measure), “Bigots Go Home,” and “Justice for Marsha,” a murdered black drag queen and transactivist the cops were ignoring.

Lysander climbed up on a plastic milk crate in front of our homemade shrine, and we formed lines off to her right and left. She was a deeply religious person who wore an Elmer Fudd cap. Other Avengers handed out candles, and the small crowd lit them as Lysander began to read from her notes. It was as much a homily as an activist’s speech. Her voice shook a little, but the people fell silent as she talked, first about the nearby dyke bashing where a gang of kids attacked two lesbians just for embracing, then about Oregon, where Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock had been burned alive.

“We Lesbian Avengers have built this shrine. It stands for our fear. It stands for our grief. It stands for our rage. And it enshrines our intention to live fully and completely as who we are, wherever we are. We take the fire of action into our hearts. And we take it into our bodies. And we stand, here and now, to make it known that we are here, and here we will stay. Our fear does not consume us. Their fire will not consume us. We take that fire, and we make it our own.”

And Lysander touched the torch to her tongue where the flame stayed lit long enough to light a second torch. And the Avengers to her right and left lit their own. And so, the fire passed down the line from tongue to torch to tongue. On my side, from Rachel to me, then Sara, then Alison, her roommate. And we raised our flames triumphantly into the air, leaned back, and swallowed them down. The crowd cheered, a little uncertainly, at watching a circus trick transformed into a sacrament.

I took a couple of shifts at the shrine encampment. The Village was one of the most gay-friendly places in the city, and also the most dangerous, because the homophobes knew where to find us. And there we were, handing out leaflets with the words
gay
and
lesbian
smack-dab on the front, explaining how violence and murders followed hateful antigay campaigns like sharks follow the scent of blood.

I remember being cold and sitting on scrounged cardboard to keep the damp from rising up from the concrete. An outreach worker to the homeless brought warm blankets that we returned when it was all over. We peed in the coffee shop at the corner. The revelers of Halloween came and went like the fading light. We stood vigil and bled into the gray city. Sometimes, other queers joined us for a while, lighting candles to their friends who were dead from violence or AIDS. The sidewalk was a constellation. People bought us slices of pizza and paper cups of coffee. Somebody brought the news that the Vatican had finally lifted the Inquisition’s edict against Galileo. The world
did
revolve around the sun. More than one romance was born when Avengers huddled together. It became hard to leave after your shift. Part of you wanted to stay there forever, claiming, at the very least, that corner of the city, inserting yourself as a speck in the public eye.

We packed up on Election Day and took stock of things at the next meeting. The liberals’ darling, Bill Clinton, dethroned George Herbert Walker Bush, but queers still got creamed. In Oregon, where Hattie Mae and Brian were murdered, tons of local antigay laws got passed, though the statewide initiative failed. A lot of cities like Tampa dumped pro-gay ordinances. Probably the biggest victory for the Christian Right was in Colorado, where they passed a statewide amendment making it legal to kick us out of our jobs, our apartments, even the hospital.