Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (4 page)

We hissed in frustration. Queers couldn’t keep up. More antigay campaigns started every day, and each was followed by violence. If we were going to get anywhere, we had to rouse a national press that was mostly ignoring the story. Somebody had to knock on their door, beat on it if they had to, and announce the casualties of the “Culture War.” What good was it being in New York if the Avengers didn’t answer the call?

On November 19, a couple of weeks after the encampment, we met outside the Plaza Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was rush hour, and Fifth Avenue was a river of angry light. Our marshals quickly blocked the traffic, and before the cops could do anything, we’d taken the street. A bunch of us had torches made out of small sticks gleaned from the trees at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and wrapped with rags. When we lit them, the cops moved in, warning us we weren’t allowed to have open flames.

Hell, we weren’t allowed to do a lot of things, but that wasn’t going to stop us. There, on Fifth Avenue, the skyscrapers rising up on either side, we burning dykes took off down the street with the cops in hot pursuit. At first, when they caught us, they’d just put out the torch, drop it on the ground, then move on. It took them a while to notice somebody else would pick it up, relight it, and take off again playing cat and flaming mouse. I was just about the last one with my torch held high, the crowd cheering as I refused to relinquish it to the cops. How could I, in the city’s twilight, surrounded by dyke voices calling out for justice, for freedom? For once I was brave. I didn’t let go and move on. I held tight to what I had.

Even after the cops wrestled away the last torch, we continued marching to Rockefeller Center, home to NBC with plenty of other media outlets nearby. There, other Avengers had reassembled the shrine to Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock. And Marlene Colburn, with Mandela’s high cheekbones and same angry resolve, raised her bullhorn and condemned the antigay amendments in Colorado and Oregon, calling out the names of dead queers and demanding attention be paid as the antigay measures, written on flash paper, went up in flames.

That was the first time we stepped out as lesbians onto Fifth Avenue, the symbolic heart of the city, and the first time in decades lesbians owned the street. Something shifted in me. With the Avengers guarding my back, I was briefly, fearlessly myself. I was transformed. And these early actions, with their rituals changing hate and fear into a kind of resolve, bound us together in ways I didn’t understand until a long time after the group itself combusted.

5.

A few days later, just before Thanksgiving, the Avengers held a Speakout Against Violence over at the Center. I’d never seen so many dykes in one place, especially African Americans and Latinas. It was like subway cars from the Bronx and Brooklyn all got tipped out in the West Village. Everybody had stories to tell. Mostly worse than mine. I was already gone from the house when I told my mother I was bi so there was a limit the damage her rejection could do. I’d been harassed and insulted on the street but never ended up in the hospital like some of these dykes, put there by random strangers. Or worse, by their families who attacked them inside their own homes. They had mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who didn’t just snicker or sneer or pray. They beat the holy crap out of their own flesh and blood. Or raped them, kicked them out into the streets when they were just kids so they had to beg or turn tricks. We were the experts in family values.

The mike went from hand to hand to hand. The voices were raw. Some hesitant. Some self-pitying and whiny. Others pitiless and enraged. All as suicided by society as Van Gogh ever was. I can still hear their voices. Maybe because we’re still being attacked, no matter how many times we climb on the deck of that metaphorical destroyer and wave a giant banner, “Victory.” No matter how many legal bones we’re tossed.

That year we had no illusions about what America thought. What we had were friends like us, and in the best queer tradition we celebrated Thanksgiving with a gathering of the homoclan in the Avenue B loft. Somebody brought a Tofurky sort of thing. Somebody else did potatoes. Stuffing. Then there was cranberry sauce. Assorted casseroles, curries, salads. The whole deal except the bird, which even now I avoid in my return to meat-eating. We joked about green beans slimed with cream of mushroom soup and opened bottle after bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. And put on loud music. And laughed and ate and drank all day. The only traditions we skipped were the red-faced fights, bitter squabbling, broken crockery, and tears.

We even gave thanks. That we’d found our true families, queer ones. And that we weren’t in Colorado where more and more lesbians and gay men were getting the shit kicked out of them, even before Amendment 2 took effect.

Colorado queers fought back tooth and nail, filing lawsuits, and organizing an economic boycott, which mostly meant getting people to avoid Coors beer and cancel ski trips. That wasn’t a problem for me since I didn’t like Coors, anyway, and skiing wasn’t at all on my agenda. In early December, the Avengers decided to be more proactive when we heard the Denver mayor was coming to New York on December 7 and 8 to promote tourism. There wasn’t much time to plan, so the meeting just settled on a boring picket outside the Regency Hotel where the guy was having a power breakfast. I didn’t see the point of standing there with a poster and shivering in the cold, so I didn’t sign up to go. Apparently the handful who turned up agreed. One Avenger just asked the obvious, “Why don’t we go in?” A few moments later, eight dykes burst into the hotel conference room tossing leaflets to the journalists and chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer. We’re NOT going skiing!”

The mayor’s mouth hung open in shock. There was an uproar. It was scary, fun, and it worked.

I should say up front that Wellington Webb wasn’t a bad guy. He was Denver’s first African American mayor and was actually pretty gay-friendly himself, appalled at the amendment. But he’d come to plug Colorado tourism in the midst of a gay boycott and that made him a target. Small groups of Avengers followed him for the next two days, busting in on meetings and making their point, then getting out before security arrived. After the first day, a dyke from the mayor’s own office leaked the Avengers a copy of his schedule, and his pursuers would get to his appointments before him and goad bored reporters into grilling Webb about Amendment 2. He added more and more police protection, but intimidation didn’t work. Neither did stealth. Once he sent his limo around to the entrance while he took a cop car and tried to sneak into the back, but the Avengers figured it out and zapped him anyway. We laughed our asses off when Avenger and journalist Ann Northrop came to the meeting and told us about it in her sardonic, East Coast drawl.

After he was a guest on a radio show and Avengers bombarded him with calls, he retired in defeat, canceling not just the rest of the New York trip, but the six-city extravaganza he had planned. And on December 21, the
New York Times
finally published an editorial. After declaring their sympathy for the liberal Mayor Webb, and bemoaning how economic boycotts hurt everybody, they admitted it was necessary in this case. Not just to change the law in Colorado, but to discourage other states from passing similar measures: “The boycott is a legitimate weapon in a democratic society and, historically, one of the most effective.”

We passed the newspaper clipping around at the meeting, amazed at the power of a handful of big-mouthed dykes. The action wasn’t as dramatic as fire-eating, but it was effective. And unexpected. We broke as many taboos. Imagine intruding into that fancy hotel and screaming when the only sounds you hear are the clink of cutlery, the polite murmur of power.

A couple of weeks after targeting the Teachers Union for their lukewarm support of the Rainbow Curriculum, Avengers hit
Self
magazine on January 25, 1993. We’d sent a letter asking them nicely to respect the Colorado boycott and skip their ski weekend in Aspen. When they didn’t respond, we paid a house call, chanting awkwardly over the muted clatter of fingers on keyboards, the ka-ching of advertising dollars pouring in. That was enough for Alexandra Penney, the editor, to storm out of her office, absolutely freaking: “Why are you doing this to us?”

The
New York Times
thought it was hilarious. So did
Newsday.
And the
Daily News.
Hell, everybody did. Because Penney wasn’t just any old editor, but the author of
How to Make Love to a Man.
And she’d been zapped by the Lesbian Avengers. Afterward,
Self
pulled their trip, proclaiming it had nothing to do with us. Nope, nothing at all.

Hearing about the actions was almost enough to redeem the season of sanctimonious good cheer and endless focus on the family, no matter how dysfunctional. For Christmas, I’d been to Pennsylvania with Amy, tucking away my grandmother’s two holiday cards. She’d peppered descriptions of dental work with complaints about my attitude. “Maybe you want to forget us, but we can’t forget you. We love you.” It set my teeth on edge, that little forgotten grain of truth. Yes, I’d once been loved. Propped between my sisters on the couch for holiday photos. Sprawled on my dad’s big belly and listening to the beating of his sentimental heart.

But what do you want from a mixed marriage, the poor Southern Baptist woman putting all her hopes on the genial Catholic bourgeois man? Enough ink’s been spilled on the usual heterosexual misery. By the time I was twelve, my bright, sensitive mother was lost to bitterness and hate. My oblivious father drifted further away. Everybody suffered. Though it was good for a few horrible stories. The time my mom flipped out and threatened to run her car into a brick wall—and then denied it. That time in high school, after the divorce, when my dad dropped me from his insurance and refused to pay up when I had to have a bone tumor chopped off. The doctor said it was benign, after all. But a few months later when he found a lump on his dog (nothing at all, said the vet), he still paid to have it removed. And proudly told me so at his Derby Party, tears welling up in his eyes.

Which is why I fled to the Parkers’ even if it meant shivering in a cold colonial attic and being quoted at by Amy’s two skinny little sisters and tiny beanpole brother who knew all of Monty Python and had, as a result, a particular fascination for the sex lives of mollusks. Short, round Amy looked like the mailman’s kid next to them, though she could quote Monty Python, too. Her mother interrupted her Christmas cookie baking mania just long enough to make a lemon meringue pie because she knew it was my favorite. Which made me tear up because it was more than my own family did.

During the Christmas Eve party, I drank gin and tonics in the kitchen with Amy’s father and I made him blush with extravagant curses this Scottish girl Melanie had taught me at the Halloween encampment. I guess I wanted to bust a hole in all that season’s familial pressure, expectations, and disappear into the ether. But her dad didn’t freak out, just teased me back with jokes about some disgusting lentil burgers I’d made once when I was still Amy’s significant other a couple of years before.

It sounds kind of sappy. It was. But it was nice to let my guard down a little. Eat cookies. Get drunk. Rely, again, on the kindness of strangers.

6.

In February, somebody, possibly me, suggested a stink-bombing campaign. Not everybody was thrilled. Fire-eating may have been a circus trick, but it was really impressive, transformative even. But what kind of gravitas do stink bombs have? I didn’t care. When it came to self-image, I didn’t need to spring from the head of the virgin huntress, Athena, like plenty of old-time feminists. Give me Medusa or Loki any day, the Merry Pranksters, the glorious Dadaists, or the irreverent Van Dykes with sex workshops and T-shirts sporting a gun-toting Patty Hearst.

In no time, the working group came up with the perfect slogan, “Homophobia stinks,” identified plenty of smelly targets, and we were off. I paired up with Melanie Fallon, the curly-headed Barnard student with a slight Scottish accent and the gawky elegance of a colt. She was the one I’d met at the Halloween encampment who had shared her foul-mouthed mother’s creative curses. Her father was a scientist. Her younger sister very American. Our target was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the epicenter of antigay activism in New York. ACT UP had made their own stink there a year or two before, invading a mass at the drippy neo-Gothic building to protest how the Catholic Church spread HIV with their campaigns against condoms and queers.

When Melanie and I got uptown on February 12, 1993, there were tourists everywhere, and plenty of security guards. I was sweating and nervous, sure I had a sign indicating “trouble-making dyke” on my back. We whispered in the corner, giggled, and tried to think it through. The committee had mostly considered the metaphorical aspects, not the practical ones. The space was too enormous for a little stench to penetrate. We needed a crew of twenty and a crate of stink. We decided to go ahead anyway. I dropped a couple of glass vials on the floor, but when I stepped on them with my tennis shoes, they wouldn’t break. Melanie finally crushed them with her big Doc Martens boots. But in the big cathedral, the vials barely had the impact of a fart. We slapped a sticker on the back of a pew and left.

Another Avenger cell had more impact in their attack on the rancid Jack Hale. He was a lawyer for the archdiocese of New York, and they loaned him out to whatever bigot needed him next. Like the antigay granny Mary Cummins. Or the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was responsible for banning ILGO from the upcoming St. Paddy’s Day Parade. The plan was to break a huge amount of stink bombs in the elevator of his office building and put a sticker on the inside doors. People would get in, notice the stench, and see the sticker when the doors closed. It went better than anybody dreamed because when Mr. Hale went on TV that night to slam Irish queers, he was stupid enough to complain at length about the stink bombing, holding up the sticker the whole time, just as if he were paid to. So thanks to Mr. Hale, all of New York got to see the Lesbian Avenger logo and read our message, “Homophobia stinks!”