Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (9 page)

When night fell, Ana burst into tears, but a middle-aged black woman told her not to worry. “The girls are just silly. They won’t hurt you. You’ll be out soon.” Not like her. She was doing twenty-five-to-life for killing a man, though her girlfriend still visited her.

Two or three times, guards fetched her in the middle of the night and marched her to a brightly lit office where she was interrogated by a military officer who laid his big pistol on the desk while he fingered through her teenaged diaries and demanded to know who was queer. “Tell me about Gerardo, Nancy, José Mario. That Rimbaud you write so much about.” Ana herself had a boyfriend and had never really considered the others. Suddenly, a lot made sense, the cryptic comments, and giggles. She kept mum, or defended them.

Then it was back to the cells, and more mind games. A guard would wake her up and force her to march through the serpentine halls of the old Spanish fort. He kept behind her and ordered her not to turn around. Sometimes he’d pause for no reason, then resume. She waited to be put against the wall and shot.

I couldn’t listen properly. I remember looking at the curve of her arm, the flesh of her rounded belly, and muscular shoulders. I held her hand. It seemed like a story we’d have read in a women’s studies class back in Kentucky, the classic Third World woman’s nightmare that poet Carolyn Forché described. Ana’s voice seemed more and more distant. She told me the big purges happened a year later. She’d been arrested early because of her mother. Things had been okay as long as Ana was alone in Havana with her grandmother. But when her mother came from Cienfuegos, the battles resumed about what girls could and couldn’t do, especially with young men. Gerardo used to walk her home sometimes, and two dyke neighbors spread the rumor she was pregnant with his black baby. She was also too close to the flamboyant José Mario. And in fury, anger, and shame, Ana’s mother went everywhere complaining about her unruly underage daughter, her degenerate friends.

State security, already eying
El Puente,
had been thrilled to help.

They dumped Ana in a mental hospital after what seemed like weeks of getting grilled. When she told the shrink she was a political prisoner, they diagnosed her as paranoid and gave her electroshocks until she couldn’t shape the letters of her name. By the time they let her out, months later, she’d decided to flee from her parents’ house and sleep with a girl as soon as possible. If she was going to be accused of things, they might as well be true.

I’ve thought a lot about this since 9/11, and the War on Terror. How we never learn. Homophobes conceive a lesbian activist. A son kills his father at a Theban crossroads.

Ana only told me because she had to. That was her life, and we were getting serious. She asked me not to spread it around, but even then I was a blabbermouth. I told Amy as soon as I got home. I think I actually made notes, too, trying to create some distance, kill it with the filter of history. It was cool and horrible at once, like a train wreck. I was twenty-seven, an ignorant American who couldn’t have found Cuba on a map. I wished above all I could have swooped in and saved her, that teenage girl. But all I could do was wipe away a few stray tears.

I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to you.

I met her mother shortly after she told me. Ana swung by the Avenue B loft with her and her grandmother in her little red Hyundai. I remember standing there with my shaved head. Behind me the shabby building with a mural of palm trees on the front and music blaring from the open door. When she got out of the car and saw me, Faustina’s square jaw tightened like a vise. She managed a hello, but boy how it cost her.

We drove to Veniero’s on Eleventh Street and sat outside where there was room for her grandmother’s wheelchair. Ana and María Luisa, her grandmother, ordered Tartuffo, that two-flavored ball of ice cream. I got a slice of almond cake. Faustina ordered a baba rum. She and I exchanged a few remarks while Ana and her grandmother joked and laughed. Ana squeezed her half to death but didn’t touch Faustina, who still seemed frozen at the shame of a dyke daughter. Still enraged that Ana had escaped, but she hadn’t. After all those years she had fought her own husband whenever she wanted to leave the house by herself, when she wanted to work.

She only bit her tongue, I figured, because Ana had gotten them out of a hungry Cuba soon after the “Special Period.” I pretended I didn’t know anything. Spoke politely in Spanish, made those meaningless sounds that appear to be conversation. I’d had practice after all. That’s what families are for.

11.

Now and then we’d go back to the Catskills where we’d bake in the sun and read Whitman, or drive to a town forty-five minutes away to see a movie, preferably with car chases and exploding things. Ana helped me get my driver’s permit, and back in the city I crashed into a sedan near Canal Street, and an angry Asian guy in a blue suit charged out and screamed for a while but didn’t call the cops or demand insurance. We’d been heading to the Dyke TV office in Chinatown where Ana ran the news department and tried to keep the empty take-out cartons from overrunning the desks.

She’d helped start that too, roping in videomaker Mary Patierno and stage director Linda Chapman, so the Avengers wouldn’t have to depend on mainstream media. It had grown into a real weekly show, with art and culture, and other segments featuring important dyke skills like how to change a bicycle tire. Pretty soon Dyke TV played all over the country on public access stations. I’d leave her at the office and walk back home past the fruit and vegetable markets. In the evening, the streets stank of fish when the ice got dumped in the gutter and the big metal trays were hosed down. Musty spicy smells came from the open doors of Chinese apothecaries.

Trailing after Ana, it was inevitable that I’d return to that room upstairs at the center with the folding metal chairs, and heat, and occasional buzzing fly. I entered tentatively, found a seat off to the side, afraid I’d have to explain where I’d been. But so many people had been on vacation, nobody noticed one more missing dyke. I stared around the room and was greeted by smiles, only relaxing when the meeting started and she wasn’t there, the one who yanked down my pants in Baltimore. “The Lesbian Avengers is a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility.” It sounded different after a year, now that I knew what the words meant.

For several Tuesdays, I didn’t do anything but sit in that dusty room and watch. There wasn’t much going on, a picnic here, a picket there against Clinton’s idiotic Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell compromise about military queers. Almost every week new chapters were announced: Atlanta, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Tampa. Colorado dykes were the first Avengers to be arrested, chaining themselves to the fence of the governor’s mansion during a protest against antigay Amendment 2. They got busted again gate-crashing a party of Focus on the Family, a big backer of the antigay legislation. We thought it was cool, but there in Colorado activists were getting slammed. The boycott was working, and the queers losing money were as quick to hate them as straights.

Ana threw a party when Su Friedrich and videomaker Janet Baus had finished editing the Avenger video,
Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too.
She persuaded her mother to make enormous pots of black beans and rice, and everybody brought beer. I didn’t eat anything, even though Ana swore the beans were meatless, or almost. I’d been a vegetarian for almost a decade. Ethical reasons, if you have to know. Screw health. I hung out in the kitchen and bummed cigarettes from the Avengers blowing smoke up the airshaft and annoying the neighbors. When they turned on the TV and slipped in the fat VHS cassette, I said a quick good-bye to Ana and went back to Avenue B. I couldn’t bear to see my own face on the screen, wondering what it would betray as I talked about those twenty thousand in front of the White House. About growing up dyke in Kentucky. I’d done an interview with Su and Janet after the D.C. March. It had been shot there at Ana’s in front of a brick fireplace with a quilt hanging on it. I was still nearly bald from my performance. Still so high on what we were accomplishing. And feeling whole for the first time ever.

One Tuesday in August, Sarah Schulman swung by a meeting. She almost never came anymore, spending a lot of time out of town on book tours where she still pitched the Avengers. She grabbed a spot at the top of the agenda and talked for a few minutes about the communities that were absolutely swamped with antigay legislation. Many had no idea how to fight back. She’d concluded that the Avengers should share skills. Offer our organizing services to whoever wanted them. Maybe do a kind of Freedom Ride to call attention to the latest wave of hate coming our way. She left immediately afterwards, and we rolled our eyes a little bit at her abruptness but decided it was a good idea. The Christian Right sent forth their minions. Why not us?

One of the first requests for help came from Lewiston, Maine, where a local gay rights ordinance was under attack. When the moderator asked for volunteers, two of my fire-eating friends, Sara Pursley and Michelle Kelley, put up their hands, along with a newbie, Chanelle Mathews. By September 1, they were already in Lewiston, ready to work with local queers, and Equal Protection Lewiston, the struggling organization that was running the show. The Freedom Ride would end there after a tour through New England doing actions in cities where there were Avenger chapters, like Boston and Albany. We started to fax around press releases. We got tons of enthusiastic responses.

We also got a letter from an African American lesbian in Albany practically forbidding us to use the name “Freedom Ride” unless we focused on questions of race. It was more than a letter. It was an injunction, a campaign. The author circulated her demands as widely as possible before we even had a chance to respond. Her heavy-handed tactics led our most experienced activists to wonder if it was as much about territoriality and homophobia as it was about race. She was a big deal in Albany, famous, actually, and we hadn’t paid her our respects. But the youngest took it at face value. If she said something was racist, it had to be. It was Barbara Smith, for fuck’s sake. The grand dame of black feminism, co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and the Combahee River Collective. She was an icon, almost as much of a saint as Audre Lorde. We couldn’t admit the possibility that a lifetime of fury at racism could possibly miss its target, that we ourselves didn’t always aim true.

We agreed on changes to the press release, still keeping the name, but acknowledging our debt to the earlier Freedom Ride. Younger Avengers organized a teach-in. Smith was informed. Nevertheless, when she published the article “Blacks and Gays: Healing the Great Divide,” Smith renewed her attacks on the Lesbian Avengers, essentially characterizing us as a white, insensitive, racist group. The proof was that we refused to relinquish the name after a lesbian of color had ordered us to.

Like half the group, I was still ready to concede. When bits of the article were read aloud, I’d felt a wave of shame rise up from my knees and go straight to my eyes. I looked around the room and everybody
was
white, including Marlene and Valarie, Gail, Maura, Andrea—all bleached by contagion. And Ana and Lidia and all the other Latinas also became not just white but Anglo. And Maxine became young and Christian, and a blank slate. And all the other little quirks of language, or age, or origin that I had perceived until that moment were erased by the indelible power of that word,
white.

But then Sarah Schulman and Maxine Woolf said it was a ridiculous idea, thinking anybody could plant a flag in that word
Freedom.
Ana with her accent agreed. Marlene Colburn, too, shook her head, adjusted the baseball cap over her own black face, and said sadly, “That’s Barbara.” We kept the name. Our elders had spoken, two Jewish dykes, a Latina, and an African American woman, who were not ashamed to admire MLK, who admired Gandhi. Some were actually acquainted with Smith. But you could see it on some of the faces, especially us younger ones of all colors, that we in fact accepted the charge, the Avengers
was
a white group and by definition racist. We didn’t look at each other the same way after that.

In October, the Avengers rented a van or two and draped them with banners calling for Lesbian Freedom, and a group set out for Boston. It was okay at first. They got lots of friendly honks on the way up, and a warm welcome before they got down to the serious business of eating fire and pamphleteering outside the public library. But when the Avengers arrived at the Boston OutWrite conference to screen our video,
Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too,
we found Barbara Smith had set the place ablaze, distributing her damning article to all the professional queers and arbiters of the LGBT community, who attacked us under her banner, accused us of “appropriating” the name, of getting black dykes in trouble with their communities, as if “white” dykes were responsible for inspiring black homophobia.

When Gail asked, with her dark face betraying her Panamanian–West Indies roots, “What about me? I’m an Avenger. Don’t I count?” The answer was pretty much a resounding, nope. Afterwards, she, who had been so proud to be an Avenger, became horribly anguished at having to defend the “white” group she belonged to.

At the next meeting, Anne d’Adesky, who was herself a French-Haitian-American dyke, tried to give it a good spin: “It’s just as well to air things out, confront the ‘divide-and-conquer’ techniques of the Christian Right.”

Except we didn’t really confront anything: not the real problem of racism in the queer community, not the homophobia in the assumptions dykes would dirty up the name “Freedom Ride,” not the hubris of activists. Or even how denouncing us as “white” actually erased Avengers of color along with the differences between, for instance, a Catholic Irish immigrant, a Jewish New Yorker, and a white Southern Baptist dyke from Kentucky. Instead, we became terrified accountants looking only at skin. How many African Americans are in the room today? How many Asians?