Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (10 page)

Which was too bad, because we could have used a real discussion about race and power, but also class and education. Sure, Sarah Schulman could breeze in and get the group to do anything, but there were also certain African American and Latina and Asian voices that had authority, too. But when the merely beige Ana started to speak in her marked Cuban accent, the eyes of newer Avengers seemed to glaze over almost immediately. Nobody listened either to this glowingly white Russian girl who was still struggling in English. Or even noticed that Denise, a young black dyke, rarely opened her mouth. Maybe because she didn’t seem to have a degree from one of the Seven Sisters or was kind of fat.

I wonder now what would have happened if we had responded differently. Allowed Smith to assume the Freedom Ride was hers. That the Avengers were all white and had never mourned Hattie Mae Cohens, or acted on behalf of the Rainbow Curriculum. What would have happened if instead we had asked if African Americans were such misers, freedom in such scarce supply, that they couldn’t spare a little for us, too? In those divide-and-conquer days, would she have responded to a plea for generosity? Or was it inevitable to wait twenty years for an African American president to see Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall as three faces of one struggle for freedom and human rights?

12.

I missed Sara and Michelle, two of my fire eating friends, and took the Greyhound up to Maine, meaning to help out a couple of weeks. But I arrived with a scratchy throat and bloody underwear because I always got my period when I climbed onto a plane or a bus. I only lasted long enough to draft a flyer or proofread something before they sent me home, pale and feverish. Still, I got a good look at the place, and Lewiston was nothing to shout about. Decrepit, urban, gray. A rotting town abandoned by the textile industry and the bluebird of hope. The apartment wasn’t much better, damp and filled with bits of paper, notebooks, empty pizza boxes, neon green buttons, and a handful of depressed dykes who wanted to change the world and ended up stuffing envelopes full of crap that they didn’t even get to put on some asshole’s doorstep and set on fire.

The newbie was Chanelle Mathews, a young black woman who was the epitome of elegant urban cool. She came to the Avengers fresh out of the Army, and at her first meeting when they were calling for Lewiston volunteers she just stuck up her hand and was on her way. Why the hell not? The smiling Mary Lou came from Austin, I think. Sara and Michelle had been part of the New York Avengers from the beginning, fire-eaters like me, and roommates at the loft on Avenue D where we held our legendary fund-raising parties. Michelle was a pastry chef, trained up in Paris. She had glasses and thick, curly black hair, and horse sense galore. Sara taught English as a second language and barely made enough to pay the rent and keep herself in smokes. She was a ringer for the young Leonardo DiCaprio, though far too laconic to climb on the prow of anything and shout.

Sara and I had kept company for a while after my thing with Jennifer. We didn’t do much. Hung out. Messed around. Once, after a hurricane passed over the city, we struggled along the East River promenade in the gusting wind. Waves jumped over the rusting, crumbling handrails and in some places claimed the highway. We leaned into each other as ballast, kissed each other’s salty lips. Another time, we dressed up for a party, her in a blue wig, me in a blonde one and gold-sequined dress that sweet Alison leant me, which I balanced out with a pair of big Doc Martens. I should have played it cool and sophisticated, but instead went around like a three-year-old demanding, “Guess who I am. Do you know who I am?”

Nobody really knows with dykes. Especially ones like Sara who masked herself in an army jacket, and blue jeans, and a wreath of cigarette smoke. But then you’d find out she went to Dartmouth and had done stuff in Africa that she’d tell you about like it was nothing. If you didn’t know better, you’d dismiss her, dismiss us all because we preferred shabby to chic, and often camouflaged ourselves as butch on the street.

Equal Protection Lewiston’s straight consultants couldn’t see her at all, even if they were heading up the fight to preserve the town’s pro-gay statute. They had actually thrown a fit when Britain’s BBC News wanted to interview the Lesbian Avenger Freedom Riders as part of their coverage. When the Freedom Riders got to Lewiston, EPL shoved them into a room with the windows papered over so that they weren’t visible from the street. And when the Avengers got sick of stuffing envelopes full of ugly promises that we queers wouldn’t try to adopt kids, EPL people said they could go hand out pamphlets as long as they didn’t look too dykey. After all, everybody hates queers, especially the poor, which Lewiston was full of.
The best way to win civil rights was to hide just who was going to get them.

When I was there, Sara introduced me to one of the EPL consultants. She was about what you’d expect, appropriately coiffed and made-up and perfumed. She smiled even more than I did and said how happy she was to have the Avengers on board. Then she told the story of how Sara had raised all this money for them, leaving out the part that EPL had seen the gay community as such a drain on the campaign they hadn’t even recognized them as potential donors until Sara came along and started calling them. Such good work! she reiterated. “Lewiston needs its own Avenger chapter.”

Beware of what you wish for.

A couple of weeks before the election, Sara and the others sent the New York meeting a copy of a letter they’d finally given to EPL, very politely notifying them that while the Avengers continued to share their goals, their skills could only be used to their full advantage working independently. And frankly, Lewiston queers deserved action from people who weren’t ashamed to be gay or lesbian. Their guts told them that a closeted, fearful campaign did more harm than good, and it was time to put it to the test.

I should have been glad, but I only felt anxious. Like we were going to get hauled to the principal’s office. I’d temporarily run out of nerve. It was partly the thrashing we got at the hands of Barbara Smith. Partly the snotty reminders from EPL that the Avengers had to do what the locals wanted. My god, we were outsiders. There were questions of class to consider, over-entitlement. We couldn’t deny how many Ivy Leaguers were in the room, how much accomplishment. Even if it wasn’t mine. I didn’t want to be cut off from the community that we were supposed to be working for. I forgot for a minute that EPL didn’t represent all of gay Lewistonians, or even most of them. Just the ones who had the money and the press lists.

In reality, the Avengers entered more deeply into the city, advised by local students, members of ACT UP Portland, and LGBT people too poor or queer to be poster children for EPL because they liked to hang out in bars, or were members of the Franco-American minority that maybe still had a French accent, or didn’t look freshly scrubbed. Many were pissed that the poor neighborhoods they dared live in had been totally ignored by EPL.

Looking now at the reports in the archive, I can’t believe how much the Avengers in Lewiston got done in the few weeks before the election. They helped churn out English–French literature, went door to door handing out pamphlets and registering voters, all as out queers. They hit low-income, high-crime areas that EPL had dismissed, and even their advisers warned against, shivered in front of literature tables, and found that the people who stopped to talk were surprisingly welcoming. Or maybe just surprised. Nobody ever went to their decaying neighborhoods, not liberals, not conservatives. Or fascists or commies. The Avengers were the first in decades to turn up and look them in the eyes.

Most important, they paid attention to local queers, taking voter registration forms to bars, persuading people to hold house parties where they showed the Avenger movie and talked about how Lewiston was part of something bigger, a national attack on LGBT people. They struck a chord, got kudos for standing up to EPL, which was widely resented. As one dyke told them, “You might be outsiders to Lewiston, but we’re all from Queer.” People from the community started getting involved, suggesting their own events, getting so excited they came out in front of TV cameras, even when they hadn’t meant to.

Though strictly speaking, queers were defeated at the polls, the Avenger strategy worked. The
Lewiston Sun-Journal
reported that wherever Avengers and out queers had hit the streets, the gap narrowed substantially. We almost won. On the other hand, the areas that EPL thought they had in the bag, based on their “professional” polling data, actually did the worst. Equal Protection Lewiston was furious, spreading it around that the loss was the Avengers’ fault, these New York dykes parachuting in and demanding to do things the way they did them in the big city. Know-it-alls. Outsiders. Egomaniacs. Irresponsible. Insensitive to local issues. Which locals? Which issues? Who gets to decide?

The Avengers came back to a hero’s welcome. They’d even made the national press. The Avengers had helped plan a small demo for the day after the election, but so many people were angry after their defeat that a hundred protesters came out on the Lewiston streets, and the small die-in they’d planned was converted into a spontaneous march. Six people were arrested, including two Avengers and a lesbian teacher who picked that day to come out. The cops were awful, but the demonstrators scored a photo in the
New York Times.
Local queers felt energized. So did the roving Avengers.

Their faces positively glowed as they talked about their work. Laconic Sara Pursley actually seemed ready to burst. They’d learned a lot. Toughened up. It’s easy enough to develop a stance against your enemies, but not against your “friends,” who seemed to hate loudmouthed queers in the street even more than the homophobes in the state house.

It was a lesson we’d all have to learn. When the New Orleans Avengers publicized a photo of a lesbian couple kissing, the queer establishment there denounced the “radical” Avengers for undoing all their slow, patient (semi-closeted) work. There were also conflicts in New York where activists and lobbyists were duking it out over how to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall. The official organizers seemed to be turning it into a big, self-congratulatory celebration of how much they’d accomplished, and a chance to dress up in suits and ties and talk about their favorite word,
equality,
as if it solved everything. Others wanted confrontation. Queers were still dying of AIDS. We were still being beaten and raped and killed. For groups like the Avengers and ACT UP, the Stonewall anniversary was a call to remember our revolutionary roots as a
liberation
movement—the whole thing sparked by street kids, rent boys, and drag queens and butches who finally got sick of being hauled off by cops raiding gay bars and set the Village on fire.

Who was right? Could we coexist? Kafka thought activists were always doomed: “They rule the streets and that makes them think they rule the world. They are mistaken. Behind them stand the secretaries, officials, and professional politicians, all the modern sultans for whom they are preparing the way to power.”

13.

December passed in an uneasy blur. For Christmas, Ana and I split town and went to Paris. God, it was dark. It was dark when we got up, dark when we went to bed in that apartment we’d borrowed from some of Ana’s friends. It was partly jet lag, partly the medieval sun-deprived streets, mostly the endless rain. How it rained in Paris. Then rained some more. And after that it stormed. We’d eat breakfast in the afternoon, then venture outside in the streets where the sky was black, and the dark pavement streaked with water, though puddles reflected light from streetlights and headlamps and the yellow, steaming windows of bistros. I suppose there were holiday lights, too, but we couldn’t see them from underneath our umbrellas.

With sopping feet, we went to cafés and galleries and museums. I tried to find some key to enter the place. Some crack to sneak through. In high school, I’d been routed to Spanish. Only snobs took French. The knee-jerk prejudice had stuck, even if I loved Marcel Duchamp, and had a thing for Gertrude Stein, who had a thing for the City of Light. I tried to chill out. France was Ana’s second home, the place she’d lived after Cuba, where I’d probably never go, and didn’t particularly want to.

I knew a little bit about pottery, anyway. At the Louvre, I drug Ana to the Islamic art wing and showed her
azulejos
tiles, with the same abstract designs they had all over Spain. It was a legacy from successive conquering Arab waves that I’d learned about in high school. I didn’t think of them yet as Muslims but as
árabes
and
mozárabes.
I’d taken ceramics in college and blabbed to Ana about the composition of glazes and clays. When I had to piss, I discovered my French was as good as hers if I ignored everything people said and just followed their pointing fingers, “First go straight, then take a right, and you’ll find the bathroom.”

We went to the Picasso Museum. He was familiar, too. That balding, laughing man photographed on the beach. That earnest almond-eyed boy. I stared a long time at the sketches from
Guernica.
War seemed distant, but the agony and violence real, embodied in that lopped-off arm holding a sword. The wild-eyed horse.

Ana showed me all the places she lived and worked and studied, mapping the city with her life. From the movie theater where she took tickets to the place she lived during May ’68—which she had to explain. How students and workers rose up, sent de Gaulle fleeing to Germany, while the cops sent protesters fleeing over garden walls.

I still couldn’t overcome my aversion to what I thought was France. All that dark, monumental stone. The blackness of ages. Narrow suffocating streets. The horror of the Luxembourg Gardens where trees were manicured into careful, mathematical shapes. Across the river in the Tuileries, the arch lined up with the pyramid lined up with the other arch, and an obelisk. No wonder Duchamp had evolved here, inserting tendrils of ridiculousness to break apart the gray, gray stone. Give me Dada instead of the Enlightenment any day, I thought. Give me bicycle tires and broken nudes. No wonder the students had risen up. And before them the sansculottes. My god, I missed the wilderness of New York but tried not to show it.