Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (7 page)

I did the math while we waited. We only knew for sure we’d have a couple hundred marchers between the Lesbian Avengers and dykes from the ACT UP Women’s Network that Maxine had invited to join the Dyke March party. We were also entangled with a West Coast group that had emerged after we’d already announced the march and done a lot of work on our own. When they said they had a similar idea, I agreed we should work together instead of throwing competing marches. It was a fiasco from the start. They skipped half the conference calls with us and the ACT UP women, and when we were forced to make decisions without them, they bitched it was all an East Coast plot. Still, I was glad when they finally turned up with their portable sound system, the only real responsibility they had.

At first the marchers came one by one, then in droves. By 7
P.M
., on April 24, 1993, Dupont Circle was filled to bursting, spilling over like a dyke Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Young ones, old ones. Suburban dykes in their khakis, city dykes in their boots, softball dykes with the little rat tails in the back of their short-cut hair, shaved Sinéad heads like mine, the big hair of die-hard femmes in dresses, butches dressed to the nines. People who knew about the march before they got to D.C. brought their own banners and signs. The rest dragged each other. I was supposed to be in charge, but how can you manage a hurricane? A tsunami of twenty thousand dykes? You don’t. You just try to get out in front. The Avengers gathered the fire-eaters and drummers together and with the banner pushed our way to the head of the crowd. When that huge entity started moving, what a roar.

The only glitch, if you can call it that, was when we got in front of the White House, the Left Coast girls and the sound system were nowhere to be found. Later, I heard, they were pissed at all the attention the Avengers were getting and decided not to share. At any rate, I bellowed the few words I had to say into a bullhorn. Probably no one understood, though it didn’t much matter because all those dykes knew where we were (in front of the White House), and how many we were (enough to fill the streets of the entire city), and that together we were Dyke America taking over the capital.

After I got done shouting, a dozen of us Avengers stood on the plastic crates we’d toted from New York. The crowd around us grew quiet. It was getting dark by then. You could hear voices shouting in the background, others yelling, “I can’t see. What are they doing?” We dipped our torches into lighter fluid, lit them, and raised the flames in the air. Then, silhouetted against the familiar glowing white form, we brought them slowly toward our faces, which were lit up, too. Exhaling, as the heat approached our lips, fire entered our mouths and disappeared. The crowds hollered and screamed. And we did it again, while Marlene Colburn tried to get a chant going, “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”

That moment, of dykes eating fire in front of the White House, endured as the image of the Avengers. Photographers sent out their photos. The Ministry of Propaganda shot off their press releases. Journalists from major venues beat down our doors for interviews, marveling at the turnout, at the drama and life compared to the same old, same old of the official March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights and Liberation with all the groups lined up and orderly. All the speeches predictably moving.

The message of the Dyke March was in our bodies. All twenty thousand of them there together in front of the White House, lit up with flame. We were disorderly, raucous, happy to be behind our own lesbian banner for a change. I can almost hear a couple of dyke readers murmuring as they turn the pages, “What’s the big deal? I don’t need anybody’s validation.” But if you don’t think it makes a difference, it’s because you don’t know. Maybe you’re dulled a little by seeing one or two lesbian faces on TV, in your local politics. One among thousands. Well, imagine what it’s like to suddenly be the majority. Not even the one in ten on the street or whatever it is. But the 100 percent. I suppose that would be my Lesbian Dream if I could describe it now. To be big enough to count. To take up space in the great brain of the country, for even ten minutes a day. To be free.

At the official march the next day, I walked in a daze, a little off to the side, feeling too shy for the Avenger capes and shields and line dancing, though I have to say we looked good. Everybody along the route cheered us. The sun was out. Girls took off their shirts and slathered on sunscreen. And the Avengers danced and danced. All the way to the mall’s vast expanse of green.

We climbed back in our vans with the sense that anything was possible. Twenty thousand dykes in the street today, a million tomorrow.

9.

And why not? Why not be hopeful for a change? I’d sit in that dusty room and positively beam as Marlene read the latest excited letter from some teenage dyke in the heartland who was thrilled to know there was someone somewhere as disgruntled as she was. New chapters sprang up everywhere from San Francisco to Minneapolis and New Orleans. Some were already planning more Dyke Marches to coincide with local Gay Pride marches in June. The motto for New York’s was Lesbians Lust for Power. I was one of the organizers again, and two artist members, Martha Burgess and Kathleen McKenzie, volunteered to build an enormous bed to push down the street. Somebody else was stitching together a giant vulva costume. And Amy—Amy Parker!—who usually looked like a bespectacled Velma from Scooby-Doo, agreed to wear it. The march was going to be absolutely amazing, even better than D.C. We’d knock their socks off. Flood the streets. I can’t describe the exuberance, the sense that the whole thing was more than an incipient lesbian movement; it was a kind of Dyke Awakening. With lesbians everywhere rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and shouting with joy.

It was buoyed, for once, by a mainstream media tired of all the fire and brimstone and hate. In June, as cities across the United States began to celebrate gay pride,
Newsweek
would even run a cover story on lesbians, highlighting the Avengers and our success in D.C. Three million copies containing our fire-eating lesbian faces turned up on newsstands, in people’s mailboxes, pushing back against the Christian Right with our provocative cry, “Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit!”

Lesbians were suddenly, and briefly, chic.

There was something intoxicating about seeing our faces there, blurry as they were, even if I knew other dykes were going through hell. Like skinny, sick Dee DeBerry who came back from D.C. to find her home in ashes. Her neighbors in the Tampa trailer park had threatened to burn the place down if she didn’t shut her mouth about AIDS and gay rights, and when they did it, Dee was left with nothing much but the clothes on her back, a dwindling T-cell count, a hostile insurance investigator, and the Avengers hot line number. When we decided to help, I felt like we really did have capes hanging from our shoulders.

Tampa was already on our radar screen. It was almost as bad as Colorado or Oregon, with violence rising after the city’s own antigay campaign. In a shooting case, the trial judge had just accepted a “gay panic” defense, arguing a straight guy was justified in blowing away the fag who happened to flirt with him. That’s what you get for unwanted advances. Imagine if dykes used the same rationale, killing every annoying guy who hit on us. We’d have filled whole graveyards, depopulated cities.

We set up a committee and started making plans with Tampa dykes to fly down in June. I wanted to go. I wanted to do everything back then, but my budget didn’t stretch much beyond lentils and rice and rent. I remember talking about it to Phyllis on the way down to Baltimore for a commitment ceremony of two Avengers. I was gussied up for the occasion in clothes that actually had color. I’d borrowed fuchsia cutoffs and put on this tiara kind of thing with cloth roses, smeared my lips with pink.

Phyllis Lutsky was a curly-headed, cab-driving New Yorker who seemed very placid and calm until she got behind the wheel of a car. “We’re holding fund-raisers,” she encouraged me, swerving into traffic. “Look into it. Anybody can go that wants.” I made indifferent sounds. I wasn’t sure I’d work up the nerve. I mooched with the best of them, hinted around, “borrowed,” but almost never asked outright.

It was a moot point after Baltimore.

We parked on the street of a typical suburb. The house was a one-story thing, with a yard front and back, driveway on the side, if I remember right. You imagined paperboys riding their bikes at dawn, and men driving off to work at 8:30
A.M
. in suits and ties. Not in high finance, but something that you didn’t have to dirty your hands with, like accounting or insurance, though maybe they were plumbers made good. Who knew? I hadn’t seen that kind of neighborhood in a long time.

The wedding crowd was a peculiar mix of New York Avengers and Baltimore folks, including aging straight relatives who had been persuaded to come. Lisa and Cyn, the happy couple, had gotten cute matching tattoos in addition to swappable rings. After the ceremony, we ate cake and finger sandwiches and goofed around. I tried to avoid that Avenger who had come to my performance and harassed me the whole time about alternative medicines, and my failures in positive thinking, all while I was stuck there on the treadmill. In Baltimore, she and her friends started tossing around this tennis ball, all worked up like kids on a sugar high. Laughing when it smacked people.

After they hit me the second time, I took it and stuffed it down my shorts. Which was a big mistake. There in front of the other Avengers, in front of the aging relatives and Baltimore straights, they pushed me to the ground, drug my pants down, and stuck their hands in fumbling around until they grabbed the ball. It seemed to go on forever. Me on the ground with my pants half down while these fumbling, laughing girls restrained me, howling with that combustible energy and anger that the Avengers uncovered. That could explode at any moment. Against themselves. Other activists. Against me. Whom nobody helped. While old ladies watched.

When I finally got to my feet and pulled my shorts up, I saw the looks on their faces. Or imagined them. “Those brutes,” the old ladies were thinking. “Those dykes.” And because I always do, I kept on laughing, pretended like it was nothing. Getting thrown down to the ground, my pants yanked down in public. Yeah, I was so tough. Drank more punch. Ate more cake. Swallowed it whole. It sat in my stomach for a week. On the way back to the city, I was adamant about Tampa. I wasn’t going. I was sick of the Avengers. “Why? What happened?” Phyllis asked.

“You didn’t see?”

When I got home, I wiped off the lipstick, threw away the flowers I’d worn in my hair, called the other chair of the New York City Dyke March committee to tell her she was on her own, and quit the Avengers for the first time. I didn’t send a letter or anything, just didn’t go. I got a hammer and ripped down the caduceus, cutting myself a little on the razor wire, boxed up the tampons and amulets, and started tracing the streets again. Walked until I was sick. Until the season started changing and heat radiated up off the sidewalks stinking again of beer and piss and rotting garbage, and melting tar clung to my shoes like shit. Sometimes I’d pause at the river, drop on a bench, and stare at the Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side. Sometimes I’d stop by Kathryn’s. It was cooler in her basement than in our third floor.

A postal worker shot up a post office. Somebody else shot up a McDonald’s. And I’d eye the cars that parked along Tompkins Square Park and wonder what it would be like to take a baseball bat and smash their windows, what it would be like to take a blade and slice spirals into my legs, instead of getting a tattoo like everybody else. Yeah, I’d take a blade and make neat cuts and the blood would curl down my legs.

All that because my pants got yanked down at a wedding party.

I blame it on the eyes. The eyes and thin, pinched lips of those older pin-curled ladies who stared at my vulnerable body while the hands of “those brutes, those dykes” groped around in my pink shorts. They were echoes of my mother who tried to shame me with monthly letters riddled with bible verses and feverish adoration of her delightful Christian friends whose lovely Christian daughters landed terrific, good-paying jobs and then delightful god-fearing husbands. “I pray for you every day,” she wrote. But she was mute about my sister Kim nursing a struggling marriage. Vikki with a divorce and her own address changes moving from Kentucky to Florida to Texas where she wasn’t quite the girl God wanted her to be. And even though my mother had told me a million times what a mistake it had been for her to get married, “and have you girls,” she kept enclosing wedding announcements, births, and deaths neatly torn from the
Louisville Courier-Journal.

I’d forgotten about them. They are brittle yellow scraps that fall from old letters as I retrace my steps. Little messages of yearning and fury on her part, inspiring in me—what else can you call it?—but a sudden, total grief.

When I was too tired to walk, too tired almost to climb the stairs, I’d visit tar beach with our two new roommates. Rennes was moving to London with his boyfriends and Sinatra CDs. Boy Kelly, a skinny young ACT UP fag, was taking his old room facing the Korean deli. Cindra, a fire-eating Lesbian Avenger, claimed the office room in front. We swapped clothes, cutoff jeans, sleeveless flannel shirts, necklaces and bracelets made out of leather strips and bits of thread. None of us had regular jobs, and we’d sometimes spend whole days on the roof, roasting in our underwear while Amy was at her air-conditioned office at the ad agency. At night she’d prop an icepack on her head with two or three fans going and edit the Avenger handbook,
A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution.
Sarah Schulman had whipped out the bulk of the text, handing Amy a brown paper bag stuffed with handwritten notes.

“I’m quitting, too, after this,” Amy said. “Seriously. I want to have a life.” She’d learned banjo and was cooking up a bluegrass band.

Still, on Tuesdays, she and Cindra would go off to the Center for the Avenger meeting, and I’d turn on the television and scribble in my notebook, watching the Mets bobble balls or cars explode, until I heard them come up the stairs. Boy Kelly was hardly ever around, busy with the needle exchange or his ten million pals from Brown that would stop him in the street if he ventured out of doors. A couple of times his friend John came over to the house with a bushel of pills, and if he could hold it down, sipped a cocktail as he attached himself to the IV that was supposed to keep him from going blind before he died of AIDS. I liked John a lot. He was a flaming queen, with the quick wit, high-pitched voice, and all the mannerisms people make fun of. He’d learned to sneer right back.