Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (12 page)

But back to Fifth Avenue. That time we were there for the Easter Parade, the only day of the year New York’s women engage in extravagant frivolity, putting parrots on their heads, or whole flower gardens, erupting in kitsch. They reminded me of those old-fashioned drag queens who would throw on a girly frock, high heels, and wig but leave beard stubble or a mustache on their faces so you’d know they knew just how mostly artificial gender was. We waded into that, Ana, me, Chanelle, two Michelles, the architect Rebecca, who did the hat consults, and a freckly Italian photographer, Miriam, who took a picture of me as Atlas holding up the giant globe at Rockefeller Center while people spun around the ice rink.

Women in the crowd smiled at us almost uniformly when we gave them delicate Avenger eggs that Rebecca had emptied out and decorated with little painted bombs and bits of that nylony ribbon you wrap packages with. They were real works of art, those eggs. Ana and I saved one carefully wrapped with tissue paper.

You can’t always go out there with your fist raised.

Half these Avengers were from InterAction, International Actions, a group I’d started at the Avengers to work on the international front. I was finally using my own brain, or at least my gut. I figured that if Avenger chapters had started to pop up all over the place, and if we were sending people across the country as reinforcements, and NAFTA was getting signed, and the EU taking wing, that the Avengers should start to think in global terms. Especially since it was in New York that the UN convened and consulates were housed. And if New York was handy for national media outlets to call attention to murders in Oregon, it was just as good to publicize how dykes were killed in Armenia or institutionalized and tortured with electric shock in China (or Cuba). Even Rudolph Giuliani declared in his inaugural speech that he wanted to make New York the capital of the world, once again.

I figured it was time to plant our own country’s flag, and like the
Village Voice
writer Jill Johnston, to declare our own Dyke Nation.

InterAction’s first action was ambitious, expensive, and relied on drag. On April 30, 1994, five or six of us slung on our best girl clothes, like skirts and blouses and dresses and shoes that weren’t made of canvas and didn’t have holes. Then we took a cab up to the UN Headquarters where they were holding a black-tie dinner for UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women. There was no way we were going to be able to muscle our way in, so we’d bought hugely expensive tickets and crammed propaganda into our pantyhose. The security guys went through our purses and grabbed the pamphlets there, but didn’t search anywhere else. We felt very clever as we climbed in the elevator.

Upstairs, in what looked like a made-over conference room, were elegant women in sequins and silk, saris and other kinds of fancy dress, accompanied mostly by men in tuxedos and smoking jackets. We looked like squatters next to them, and very white, but they let us in anyway and showed us to our table, which was just past the enormous dessert buffet. The women chefs preparing the dinner were all big deals, especially the one who did these outrageous sculptures with chocolate. There were also puff pastry things. I was sorry we were going to miss the grub and considered, just for a minute, forgetting the protest to stay there and stuff myself. But I didn’t.

We were Avengers, after all. With a mission inspired by all those hundreds of pages of literature that UNIFEM put out without using the word
lesbian
once. Because the primary concerns of all women were birth control, violent husbands, and economic independence, and there wasn’t this other category of female that on top of all that also had to deal with being considered criminals, or sinners, or sick, raped “correctively,” or killed. No, they thought the solution to the problems of all the world’s women was to teach them how to raise poultry.

Our response, “You can’t raise chickens in jail.”

The plan was pretty simple. Just making a quick speech at some point, speaking aloud the word they’d redacted out of their global vision, and reminding them we existed, ten fingers ten toes, with our own urgent concerns. We sipped ice water for a couple minutes and tried not to make eye contact, and when one of the elegant bejeweled women took the mike and welcomed everybody, we exchanged looks, took a deep breath, and stood up.

The good thing about this sort of event is that no one ever expects an interruption. The woman at the podium just stood there in shock as Michelle Cronk, a blonde massage student, approached and very politely said, “Excuse me. I’d like to say a few words.” The woman stepped away from the mike and Michelle read our list of demands. Nothing outlandish. Just for UNIFEM to include lesbians in their basic calculations. Like when they talked about violence against women, they should acknowledge the doubled risk for dykes. While Michelle talked calmly, and eloquently, the rest of us went around the room and began to hand out pamphlets. A few of the stuffed shirts and fancy-dressed guests refused, outraged that their nice, self-congratulatory supper had been interrupted by the dykes. The rest took them out of politeness or curiosity, even asked a few questions. Then security arrived and all hell broke loose.

They were total storm troopers, six and half feet of muscle that picked us up like puppies by the scruffs of our necks and dragged us out. They tried to cover our mouths as we shouted, “Women won’t thrive until lesbians survive.” Or something like that. What I remember most was lying facedown on the scratchy carpet near the elevators with a beefy guard’s knee on my neck and my hands behind my back, while a small Mary Lumetta jumped on the guy and shouted, “Get off of her, get off of her!” Which he eventually did. But not before I had to bear the weight of the two of them and wondered just how much my spine could take.

They hustled us all downstairs to a basement that looked a lot like a modern kitchen all gleaming white tile and steel and took mug shots and demanded ID, which they copied. They had actual cells down there, but they didn’t lock us up, though some woman came and threatened to turn us over to the Seventeenth Precinct cops who were lurking outside and charge us with a federal offense. Yeah, us, the terrifying and ragtag bunch of revolutionaries who didn’t have anything more harmful than a handful of Xeroxed pamphlets stuffed in our pantyhose. Then with a little smirk she tossed us out, warning, “Your mug shots will be up near all the entrances. So don’t try this again.” Then we took the elevators up to the surface where they released us like animals into the wild, and we joined the nearby demonstrators, who cheered when we appeared and demanded the news. “Hey, hey, ho ho, dykes are women, too, you know.”

And right away Sarah Schulman came over and busted my balls. “We were worried. You were inside a long time. What if they’d kept you? You hadn’t made any provision for someone to communicate. You were totally irresponsible. No exit strategy. No legal backup. The whole thing was shit.” She was right, of course. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly the Bay of Pigs. “Chill out,” I said. “Everything was fine. You should have seen Mary jump on the security guard’s back and try to get him off me. She’s a hero. And Michelle Cronk was so calm up there with the mike. We had a real impact.”

Or so I hoped. We didn’t get any media coverage at all. But we’d spoken a forbidden word into the silence. “Lesbian, lesbian, lesbian.” And we would do our own PR where it counted, too, among queers.

While my organizing skills may have stunk compared to other superefficient Avengers (even Ana agreed I should have had a better exit strategy), I wasn’t wrong about the timing. Queers from all over the world flooded the city during the Stonewall anniversary, and we met a bunch of them at a conference put on by the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Campaign. All we had to do was set up our table, and these girls would see the name there, Lesbian Avengers, or
Vengadoras lesbianas,
and they’d rush over to take the pamphlets, sign up on the mailing list, and beg to hear what we’d already done. They oohed and aahed when we described how we’d invaded the UNIFEM banquet. Like U.S. dykes, they were sick of asking politely for their rights like eternal beggars. You want to feel powerful? There’s no better way than going out there and demanding stuff, toot sweet. Right now. They were ready to be heroes. Or at least party with them.

Dozens accepted the invitation to the Avenger fund-raiser at Ana’s. We thought it would be a little cocktail party, but a good seventy or eighty dykes came, mobbing the place, and sucking down our liquor as fast as they could, demanding more and louder music—something you could dance to. You got salsa? And girls made out in the corners and twirled each other around, barely pausing when Ana’s downstairs neighbor came up and knocked on the door, announcing she had to work the next day and if we could maybe keep it down a little . . . ?

Too bad, darling. We were celebrating a revolution. Shouting over the music, the handful of Avengers who bothered to attend, tried to collect addresses and pitch the Dyke March coming up on Saturday. We were competing with the Gay Games, and when we pressed them, people were nervous. A Dyke March? “You’re sure there won’t be arrests?” “Haven’t been so far.” And they said they’d think about it, fetched another rum or scotch or beer. Then spun each other around some more.

When we ran out of ice, I made a run to Roger’s deli over on First Avenue. It was a relief to get out of there, with all those voices, all those demands, though a couple of Latin American dykes came with me. They thought our lives were strange and asked about how we did things, even why we had to go out for ice. They were from different countries and argued about whether Ana and I were rich or poor. “The apartment is big.” “No, it’s small.” “There’s nothing in it.” “There are paintings.” They talked like I wasn’t there at all, until they asked if I was a typical American, and I said I didn’t know. “It’s a big country. Lots of people. I don’t know them all.” And they thought that was hilarious, and I was incredibly witty. And complimented me on my Spanish like everyone did, as if Americans were such barbarians that knowing even a few words redeemed you.

The party seemed like it would never end. Then suddenly, a few decided they wanted to go to a real lesbian club, word spread, and then, like a plague of locusts, they departed the ravaged field, leaving little shed skins of empty cups behind. You could hear them buzzing in the street, their voices fading. What energy! So much it scared me. Imagine if we recognized it ourselves. If it could be harvested.

The only peculiar thing was that a few people asked us if we did our actions topless, like the one at the elementary school. With children. “No. Are you kidding? Who told you that?” But nobody could ever say.

16.

We were calling it the International Dyke March and figured it would be big, but how big? Pride Week that year was marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots when queers at the Stonewall Inn in the Village refused to submit to one more night of beatings and arrests and threw themselves a riot, which bloomed unexpectedly into a full-fledged liberation movement. Celebrating it, the city embraced us, at least temporarily. Couples that usually kept themselves at arm’s length walked the streets holding hands. Gay-friendly stores flew rainbow flags. We filled hotels with fancy dress balls, and trashy private parties overflowed onto fire escapes where no one cared that the only things holding us in the air were a few pieces of rusty metal that had already started to separate from the brick. We were already so unlikely. Never meant to survive, as Audre Lorde said. So we swapped spit on street corners, in trains, waiting for restaurants, just like annoying straights.

While even we could see the benefits of incremental progress and long-term thinking, the official events still seemed just a little too full of lobbyists in suits and ties. A little too self-congratulatory as long as Christian extremists still portrayed us as monsters, and gay men died by the tens of thousands as Americans muttered, “Good riddance.” It was still too early for polite politics. At the International Dyke March in New York, the Avengers called on lesbians to Incite the Riot. As in D.C., we handed out thousands of palm cards, and a new manifesto,
OUT AGAINST THE RIGHT,
written by the newly christened Lesbian Avenger Civil Rights Organizing Project (LACROP). In it we proclaimed that “Butch, femme and androgynous dykes, leather queers, drag kings and queens, transsexuals and trans-genders will not be thrown to the wolves so that straight-acting ‘gay people’ can beg for acceptance at our expense.” “We have to respond on our terms, not theirs.” “
1,000S
OF ANGRY DYKES CAN’T BE WRONG—AND WON’T GIVE IN. EVER
.”

I thought the manifesto was great, an important call to action. But its earnest, angry tone also signaled a huge shift in Avenger sensibility. I didn’t really notice its importance at the time, just recoiled a little when somebody said they were glad to dump the old one. “I never was comfortable with it,” she said. “It was silly.”

“Yes,” seconded somebody else. “I expected something more serious.”

Several Avengers exchanged knowing nods, and I wondered why they hadn’t said anything before. I’d thought it was so beautiful, so funny, joking, “subversion is our perversion.” I felt absolutely mortified. I often did. Like during that discussion over the final “Sally” press release. For months, the Ministry of Propaganda had been working to get coverage for the International Dyke March. Besides doing the usual, they decided to also use teasers featuring a character called Sally. I wrote the copy for the final, thinking of all the dykes I’d been reading about or working with as part of the international group, and wrote, “SALLY wears saris and Doc Martens . . . SALLY speaks all the best languages . . . SALLY says, I shouted loudest at Tiananmen Square.”

When the text was presented to the meeting, I remember expecting kudos for inclusiveness, or at the worst a criticism that it was an annoyingly poetic laundry list. But somebody said, “I’d like to know why there’s no images here of African Americans. Did you do it on purpose?”