Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (13 page)

“I’m deeply offended,” said somebody else.

Then it was open season on my “insensitivity,” with plenty of attacks from young white women burnishing their antiracist credentials, and afterwards a big gaping silence that I was supposed to fill with a commie-style self-criticism or cheap Freudian analysis, confessing, I suppose, an unconscious desire for the erasure of black America. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes blank in the face of all those death rays until Marlene finally said, “I don’t think it was intentional. Let’s just add a phrase or two. All right, Kelly?”

“Perfect,” I said. And cheerfully scribbled down their suggestions, like it was water off a duck’s back and my hands weren’t shaking. Fucking activists.

Internal squabbles didn’t paralyze me yet. Not when I saw how many dykes were pouring into Bryant Park, dragging their new friends from Brazil or Spain or India or South Africa, and marching even without guarantees of safety, I remembered why I put up with the nonsense. After a brief confab with the cops at the beginning, we took Fifth Avenue with an enormous banner, a marching band, and huge inflatable globes bouncing through the crowd. Our own Irish dykes Anne Maguire and Marie Honan were at the front, at least briefly, before others took their place. There were tons of New Yorkers, and international dykes, plus Avengers from all over the States who had come in an ambitious caravan that they’d called a Pride Ride so as not to offend anybody. Doing actions along the way, one group set off from Austin, Texas, and took a route that went through KKK country, including Vidor, Texas, and Ovett, Mississippi. Another group began in Minneapolis, passed through Lansing, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, and converged with the southern group in Philly. Canadian Avengers turned up, too.

At Twenty-third Street, I climbed a lamppost and looked back. The march was as big as D.C., and we filled the Avenue like twenty thousand dyke ants waving Avenger signs and homemade poster boards, blowing whistles, shaking noisemakers, bellowing, ripping our shirts off. It was our street. Our city. For a couple of hours, it was our world. At Washington Square Park, the Avengers gathered around the fountain, displaying banners from all over the country. And after making a short speech and consecrating the moment by eating fire, they joined the cheering crowd, plunging into the water with dogs and backpacks and lovers and best friends.

With twenty thousand dykes, the march should have made the cover of every rag in the city, with all the work we’d done offering press releases and photos. And follow-up calls. But out of the fifty articles covering the Stonewall anniversary celebrations in the
New York Times,
we only scored nine lines. Nine lines. Ana counted. She bought the papers and smeared her fingers with ink going through them line by line. We didn’t make it at all into the
Washington Post,
the
Chicago Tribune,
or the
Los Angeles Times,
though the
San Francisco Chronicle
published a nice photo of the Dyke March there. Nope, in New York, all we got was a little radio and TV coverage. It was like it never happened.

Worse, GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which was supposed to be the media watchdog, gave the
New York Times
“top honors for outstanding national coverage of Stonewall history, culture, and events.” When we sent them a two-page report proving that the International Dyke March was virtually ignored, GLAAD awarded us one pathetic line in a second press release, as if the Dyke March was just a minor event and even they didn’t think twenty thousand dykes in the street was particularly newsworthy.

I remember Maxine Woolf, with her lifetime in radical lefty movements, asking, “What do you expect from an institution?” And I partly agreed but also thought it was a bad sign when stuff like this ceases to surprise you, and all you do is shrug. Wasn’t it outrage that pushed them to create the Avengers? Later on, Ana told me how before she helped start the Avengers she walked around like a ticking bomb, sick of being invisible, of how dykes blabbed in conference rooms while fags took to the streets. Finally she told her friend Sarah, “We should do it, start our own direct-action group,” who sent her to Maxine, who wasn’t as phlegmatic as she pretended, already mulling over her own idea that there should at least be a hotline or something that dykes could dial up for an instant action. Together, they drew in the rest.

After the International Dyke March, it was Ana going ballistic by herself over the coverage, because she was convinced media was the key to any power at all. If you weren’t seen, you weren’t heard, simple as that. She found out that GLAAD, which was supposed to be standing outside of things with their watchdog teeth bared, had actually been hired to run the PR campaigns of several LGBT organizations and had done it out of their official offices. Their reviews of the media had a direct correlation with how well the rags had covered their clients—international focus (International Lesbian and Gay Association), fight the right (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force), historical perspective (Stonewall 25), and AIDS (Gay Men’s Health Crisis).

It was the first time I realized just how smart Ana was, how relentless. She buried GLAAD in paper. Faxes, letters, memos denounced their conflict of interest, how they’d ignored dykes and, for that matter, people of color. Because Ana started counting how many times they were mentioned, too. And her tactics worked. Kind of. GLAAD was a media operation, after all, used to damage control. They arranged phone calls and meetings, offering tight, polite smiles and promises to do better, though denying the conflict of interest. They blamed funding for everything. “Our monitors are volunteers, after all. After all, we have such limited resources,” they claimed, though they picked their teeth with gold toothpicks compared to groups like the Avengers that were funded with house parties and kissing booths.

Ana stewed in her own juices. Made me stew in mine. Wondering what the Avengers could do to bust through that glass ceiling. Wondering what I’d gotten into with Ana. I was a lump next to her, even if I hated restraint as much. Being erased. Being confined to our little corners. Even when I was a toddler and my aunt Connie tried to stuff my chubby legs into itchy white tights, I wriggled and fought. Then there was that time at the swimming pool with my sisters when the bigger kids grabbed me like they always did, dunked my head under the water, and I kicked out with all my force, elbowed, threw my head back, writhed, bit. Left them bloody and bruised and shouting, “What the heck?! It’s just a game. Vikki! Kim! Your brat sister’s nuts!”

Ana was me times ten. Times a hundred. She was Avenger concentrate, and starting to simmer. I tried to hypnotize her to sleep. “Imagine we’re back in Nice, sitting on the beach. There are all the pebbles. The waves are pounding. The sky is blue. The air is soft . . .” And she’d get all relaxed, then irritated. “I’m almost asleep. Would you quit talking, please?”

17.

It wasn’t quite true we were invisible. Lesbians were always a staple of straight guy porn, the butt of their jokes. Especially in New York’s Hispanic media. When Ana stopped by a group of Latina lesbians, Las Buenas Amigas, to pitch the International Dyke March, she met Carmen, a high-priced Cuban lawyer who’d been keeping tabs on Spanish-language media, taping radio and TV shows on Telemundo and Univisión. Their comedy skits were all stereotypes, all the time. And not just with queers. White Hispanic guys in shoe-polish blackface played these stupid
negritos,
then came back to do a scene as stupid Mexicans in enormous sombreros. Sometimes it was stupid women with enormous tits, or stupid
mariposas
homos stuffed into tiny ridiculous pants. I was shocked, along with Ana, even if I knew people of color weren’t immune to bigotry after hearing a Bengali immigrant going on about how lazy American blacks were.

The radio station Mega KQ 97.9 FM was among the worst. Their morning shock jocks had a repertoire of jokes about raping fags, with plenty of elaborate pranks like the one calling people up to tell them they had HIV, then laughing at their horror and humiliation, before announcing, “Jes’ joking!” They sneered at Indian cab drivers and weird disgusting dykes, and didn’t even bother coming up with punch lines to skewer black people, just came right out and said they were stupid and had bad hair. They were more offensive than Howard Stern, just as popular, and way more powerful if you figure that for the two million Hispanics in New York this was often their introduction to America. It wasn’t just bad for the objects of their scorn, it saddled them with a bigotry that made them unfit to succeed in a city where their coworkers or bosses might be Jews or queers, Pakistanis, or African Americans.

Hitting la Mega was a no-brainer when Ana decided to head up an action herself. Especially because the Spanish Broadcasting System that owned the station was a national force and was being used as a model across the United States. The trick was to find the right angle. If we held a picket, they’d just poke fun at us on the air, “Oh, those ridiculous dykes. They have no sense of humor. We’re not bigots. We’re equal opportunity offenders.” Naw, we had to do something bold, something dramatic, something worthy of the name Lesbian Avengers.

Our house became a vortex of planning for one of the Avengers’ most daring actions. The small group included Melanie Fallon, the Scottish girl, along with the Irish dyke Sheila Quinn, and a couple of others. Embroiled in fund-raising for InterAction, I mostly just watched it unfold. Ana and Melanie got their seed of an idea from watching a Costa-Gavras movie,
State of Siege,
in which leftist militants in Uruguay kidnapped an American “advisor” of the repressive right-wing regime. When the group went to the Avenger meeting, they only reported it was something ambitious and risky and important. They didn’t want the news to leak. We’d imagined the Avengers would leap at the chance for a new project, some real excitement, but the response was lukewarm at best. Most were far more interested in preparations for an action at the Alice Austen house in Staten Island. They were going to infiltrate a reception dressed as lifeguards to “rescue” this photographer’s lesbian history.

We didn’t worry about it then. The Mega action was for a small group anyway, a tactical strike force, though we also organized a public demo.

The group prepared as carefully as characters in
The Dirty Half-Dozen
or
Ocean’s Not Nearly Eleven
—getting ready to knock over a bank or casino, or kill Nazis. Celinés, a cute Latina student, volunteered to be the scout. She went to our target and begged for a tour. Pretending to be enthralled, she made notes the whole time about where the security guards were, the elevators and stairs, and how many steps it took to get from place to place. She came back with a detailed map, and they blocked out their route on our living room floor using masking tape. The door is here. Security there. Rehearsing it again and again, the conspirators all contributed to refinements in their plan. I watched green with envy, because I was stuck doing legal support and had to stay safely at home with a list of phone numbers.

It was impressive watching them work. They thought things through, came up with contingencies, exit strategies, feared the worst. Ana pushed hardest, standing there with a stopwatch and rehearsing her Avengers like a theater director. Until they quit giggling and, blindfolded, knew which way to turn.

On August 17, 1994, they went up to the glass and brick high rises of midtown and invaded the Spanish Broadcasting System. One persuaded the guard to let her in, then held the door open for the others to enter. In moments, they were on the floor of the broadcast booths. Melanie and Sheila blocked the stairwell and controlled the elevator. Ana, Harriet, and Celinés took over the sound booth and studio broadcasting
el Vacilón de la Manaña.
They had an easy time of it, surprising the techies and DJs, replacing the usual blather of sick, bigoted jokes with demands for an end to hate radio. When their calculated minutes had ticked to an end, they beat a quick retreat, taking the elevator down, as security pounded on the stairwell door and the cop sirens got nearer. They separated on the street, fleeing to assigned locations. Phyllis Lutsky was the getaway driver, careening full speed in midtown traffic to retrieve them from their hidey holes.

While this was going on, there was a small Avenger demo outside with only twenty or so dykes, though they made a lot of noise and had good signs. Raúl Alarcón Jr. was the president of the Spanish Broadcasting System, so they had placards we’d made with his photo reading “WANTED: For inciting hatred against Latina lesbians” and shouted, “Boycott la Mega.” “Mega KQ is hate radio.” And “Mega KQ es Mega Caca [shit].” My contribution. They handed out hundreds of bilingual flyers.

I arrived late, stuck at home and waiting for word until Ana reported from a hotel bar, absolutely breathless, “We pulled it off.”

We were so excited, going back to the main Avenger meeting. My god, we’d invaded a radio station. Broadcasted our own message. Were excited to do more about hate radio. Everybody clapped and cheered, but that was about it. The radio action group only picked up a couple more people. A lot of new members seemed content to just sit there, applauding when Marlene Colburn or Max would report how the new group in London had invaded the Queen Victoria monument near Buckingham Palace. Or Sara Pursley announced that LACROP had gotten a grant or a major contribution. Maybe that’s what they thought activism was.

That was about the time that Sara went to Idaho to work with four other LACROP members. There was yet another statewide antigay amendment in the works, and they were going to work with members of a tiny Avenger chapter in Palouse. New York meetings would be launched with tales from the land of Ruby Ridge and the Aryan Nation in which the Lesbian Avengers were heroes. The foes weren’t always skinheads or homophobes pushing antigay legislation, but bureaucrats from the national LGBT organizations. They were playing the same closeted game in Idaho as they had in Maine, framing their campaign as a question of abstract equality and civil rights, and not about those creepy flesh-and-blood homos. We heard they made volunteers sign releases promising to refer any questions to designated spokespeople—as if the ordinary worker couldn’t be trusted to hold the party line. They also warned local activists not to work with the Avengers, those out-of-control, irresponsible activists who demonstrated naked in front of schoolchildren.