Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (6 page)

I’d mostly walk on the treadmill when everybody was gone, glancing occasionally at the video camera to see if it was still watching. I only ran it for an hour. After that it was just me. A discussion with the universe, gestures on one side, silence on the other. I filled the emptiness with bookkeeping: taking notes of distances walked, calories burned, songs played, time putting my mediocre suffering on display, while elsewhere people were dying of AIDS, and my roommates pretended I was doing something as normal as watching TV. When Rennes’ latest boyfriend, Paul, would come over, he’d call out, “How’s it going, Sport?” as he passed through to Rennes’ room in the back where they’d put Sinatra on really loud, and fuck, squish, glop their way to the moon, the stars, old Jupiter, and Mars. I sent them subliminal messages, “Isn’t that what public toilets are for?” “How about a nice back room in a bar?”

The only day I skipped was drizzly disgusting St. Patrick’s. The street corners were still marked with patches of calcified snow that looked more like coal deposits than something you’d want to put in a cone. Uptown, a sparse crowd shivered on Fifth Avenue, while queers gathered in front of the Plaza Hotel with their own Irish band of bagpipers and drums and kilts getting ready to protest ILGO’s exclusion from the parade. It was getting to be a tradition, for me anyway. I’d been there since ’91, the first year they applied to march. When the Hibernians turned down their request, a participating group invited ILGO to join them. I’d just met Marie and Anne and joined the fun, along with David Dinkins, New York’s first African American mayor. To show his solidarity, he walked with us instead of out in front, and for his trouble got hours of insults, catcalls, and abuse, plus a couple of beer cans tossed at his head by a vicious crowd.

The year afterward, ILGO’s application was refused again, but the city gave us a permit to hold a countermarch going up Fifth before the official parade. The crowd had at us again, screaming insults and threats. “You should all die of AIDS” was popular. So was, “You have your own parade” and “This is our parade, not yours.” As if
queer
cancelled out
Irish
and Lucy Lynch hadn’t had brothers in Long Kesh, and Anne Maguire had never worked on the campaign of the legendary Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. Nope, not Irish enough. Disqualified. Visa canceled. Even though the parade was begun in the first place to fight bigotry against the Irish.

When we got to the end of the parade route, the cops trapped us in a pen with those wooden blue sawhorses and wouldn’t let us out until we’d seen every last Irish bar, county association, and monstrous step-dancing troupe where little girls wore false everything from hair extensions to eyelashes. The worst were the lines of cops and firemen who passed in their dress uniforms all shouting threats and insults, flipping us the bird. A reminder that queers couldn’t count on the people who were supposed to protect us, who we were supposed to turn to after getting attacked on the streets.

That was ’92. In ’93, when the Avengers were at full tilt, the city was refusing to let ILGO even do a countermarch. “We can’t guarantee your safety,” was the excuse, though Dinkin’s sinking poll numbers probably had something to do with it, along with pressure from the archdiocese in an election year. After all, queers lived unprotected every day in New York. In the time I hung out with ILGO, this big guy Tarlach MacNiallais got beaten to within an inch of his life. Little fairyish Brendan Fay lost his job teaching religion at a Catholic high school for girls after he marched with ILGO the first time. Later on in ’93, he’d get stabbed while he was walking home in Brooklyn, the blood from a punctured lung spilling out all over the sidewalk. The cops said it wasn’t a bias crime, though the first reports had Brendan’s attacker shouting antigay slurs. Anonymous callers regularly left violent messages on the answering machine for Anne Maguire and Paul O’Dwyer, who co-founded ILGO. After threatening to kill them, they’d say, “I know where you live.”

But when it came time to ban us from the parade, suddenly the city was worried about our safety. And for our own sake threatened to arrest any of us who even stepped foot onto the street.

When the band switched to a jig, we got ready for action. Demonstrators without green cards skedaddled to the far sidewalk, so they couldn’t get grabbed by mistake and put on the next plane out. And the rest played the Hokey Pokey with the cops. You put your right foot in, you put right foot out, you put your right foot in, and the cops slap cuffs on your ass and drag you away to the St. Paddy’s Day wagon.

Two hundred twenty-eight got booked, hands twisty-tied behind their backs. Mine were cutting off circulation, so climbing on the bus, I shouted, “My cuffs are too tight,” and the pissed-off cop behind me gave a hard shove and I fell face forward onto Maxine Wolfe’s shoes. And that was that. The parade took place just the way they wanted, as if nothing had happened and queers didn’t exist. Just baton twirlers and marching bands and cops and firemen. All the Irish with their county banners, all the crowds of gaping tourists and fraternity boys getting drunk and celebrating the one day everybody in New York was Irish. Except for queers. Queers weren’t Irish. Queers had their own parade.

The other conspicuous absence was Mayor Dinkins. He didn’t go to the parade at all that year. He had a convenient case of diverticulitis.

At the cop station, they were nicer than I expected, giving me a copy of my mug shots when I boldly asked. Later, I stuck them up on the caduceus. After fingerprinting, they gave us brown paper towels and put us in cells off to ourselves, segregated by gender. We swapped names, talked, tried to get the ink off our hands. Some of the girls had been arrested a bunch of times, mostly with ACT UP. They were practically connoisseurs and seemed almost disappointed the arrests had been so peaceful, and that the toilet with no seat in the corner didn’t even really stink.

I thought a lot about lunch. And peeing. Alone.

I finally broke down and used the toilet, making everybody turn away but still shield me from view. We got out after a couple of hours.

ILGO threw a big bash that night, but I didn’t go. I didn’t do a stint on the treadmill either. Ana Simo had been arrested, too, and when we were leaving the precinct I asked her if she thought I had to walk. When she said, no, I proclaimed her the Pope of New York. She shook her head in embarrassment, but it was too late. I was absolved.

8.

Easter came, and the performance ended. Something felt resolved, though I didn’t know what. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the caduceus and just left it standing in the living room, entangling the members of the Dyke March committee in barbed wire and rotting tampons. We’d already been meeting for ages, since somebody came to the center raging that the March on Washington people had scheduled almost nothing for dykes except a couple of artsy events, and power breakfasts where lesbians dressed for success would drink mimosas and honor each other.

We decided to hold our own march, a Dyke March, and when my hand shot up to be co-coordinator, it surprised me as much as anybody. Like that time they’d asked for someone to facilitate an Avenger meeting and I volunteered because I’d once read Robert’s Rules of Order after getting elected Governor of Kentucky Girls State, that mock government thing, in high school. After the first session, Maxine Wolfe said I was the best facilitator she’d ever seen, getting consensus, moving things along. After several more, efficiency became tyranny, and they got out the hook.

The Dyke March prep went better, mostly because the Avengers were running like the well-oiled machine you hear so much about and almost never see. It helped that at the end of meetings we’d go around the room and say what our task for the week was. You’d be ashamed not to say anything, or let it slide. Ana Simo and Carrie Moyer were in charge of promo and media, dubbing themselves the Ministry of Propaganda. Maxine did the marshal training and logistics. Lidia, a visual artist, did the amazing banners. A committee organized fund-raising parties that pulled in hundreds of dykes to drink beer and watch go-go dancing activists and videos of our first actions. And when we sent out notices across the country to every dyke bar, bookstore, and newsletter we ever heard of, Marlene Colburn, who spoke so strongly in front of Rockefeller Center, fielded the calls. It was like magic, how vans got rented, hotel reservations made. Blonde fire-eater Alison had a crew working on sewing machines in the street outside the loft on Avenue D, I think, and they made Avenger capes and painted shields. Somebody taught line dancing.

That’s right, line dancing. What kind of dykes was I mixed up with, line dancing?

That androgynous, slow-talking journalist Anne d’Adesky organized the writing of the manifesto that was going to convert the lesbian masses to the Avenger cause. She invited everybody to her place on Seventh Street, laid in a supply of Rolling Rock, and a handful of us gathered around a Formica table like one my grandmother had. I couldn’t tell if it was a kitschy sneer or a celebration of the America I came from. I didn’t ask. Anne had a way of slouching back in her chair after making a point that made her seem irrefutable. At any rate, there was me and KT, who was an artist and musician, and Kat, a girl she hung out with, and Anne’s roommate, Brenda, a dyke with long blonde hair and a cherubic face who used to play the snare at demos. Maybe Jennifer Monson was there, too, though neither of us is quite sure today. And we popped open green bottles and tossed out lines dipping into our collective semi-consciousness, which was full of Emma Goldman, who wanted a revolution you could dance to, and Rosa Luxemburg, who wanted freedom to dissent, and Valerie Solanas, who wanted to cut up men, and the Futurist Marinetti, who wanted to demolish libraries and museums (and feminism). My brain had goofier stuff, too, like TV jingles for dog biscuits (activism builds strong bones) and bible verses I’d memorized since I was three. (We are the Apocalypse and Rapture.)

It became part political manifesto, part lesbian love poem, audacious, whimsical, sincere. Like the Avengers. And when we brought it back to the group, they loved it. Or seemed to. Especially when Carrie Moyer put it on a broadsheet in blood red with the manifesto on one side and a Lesbian Avengers 101 on the other, offering a brief history and basic organizing tips. I still have a few squirreled away, their crimson fading but not the words.

A group of Avengers went down a little early to D.C. for a demo about lesbians and AIDS. The rest of us followed in a convoy, everybody excited and nervous, especially me. I was afraid that things would go wrong and it would be mostly my fault. I hadn’t written my speech. I scratched notes in a notebook, chewed my cuticles trying to prod a feverish, empty brain. When Sarah Schulman told me I had to say something in front of the White House, she didn’t give me much help: “You’re a poet. It’s going to be great.” Maybe she envisioned some MLK moment, with the crowd spread out on the lawn, a mike, and TV cameras as I eloquently described the Lesbian Dream. But I drew a total blank.

Back then, I didn’t dream of a future, lesbian or not. I’d started college sure I was going to be a medical missionary. Within months, I started having strange pains in my feet and hands, and a rheumatologist in plaid golf pants offered his warning, “Pick a profession where you don’t use your hands or feet.” He’d mistakenly decided I had rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Which almost seemed cool, because lupus is what killed Flannery O’Connor. I think that was also the year a girl first lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed it in the half-dark of the Greyhound bus somewhere between Texas and Lexington. And the year I’d tagged along to a women’s studies course and had that shock of recognition you only get once or twice a lifetime when they showed me the list of presidents and I suddenly understood what it meant—that there were no women on it. Almost none in the Senate, a few in the House. None again among the pastors and preachers and brothers I knew. Which was why they’d dumped Deb as minister of music, the only woman ever to hold a responsible position, and why they’d humiliated me when I protested. Yeah, they kept me in my place, and my mother in hers, which didn’t absolve her of complicity, for watching me curl my fingers around a coffee cup and screaming in horror, “
YOU’RE HOLDING YOUR CUP LIKE A
MAN
!”

It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality. I cut my ties. Soon left Kentucky. Unmoored, I moved from one city, one thing to the next. Waiting for hours in free clinics. Writing poems that were all intuition and rhythm and feelings deeply, but quickly, plumbed. Making these mute gestures in front of 2x4s. Still grappling with being a lesbian, no matter how it seemed. Half the reason I’d volunteered to facilitate meetings was that I’d have to use the word. The first thing we said every meeting, after asking if there were any cops in the room, was the tag line: “The Lesbian Avengers is a direct-action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility.” It was a mouthful, but it meant I had to say the word,
lesbian,
lesbian,
lesbian.
And it came down to me, trying to articulate the Lesbian Dream? Good luck with that. Somebody turned up the radio. The vans got trapped in D.C. traffic. It was going to be a disaster. Not just my speech. The whole fucking thing. I was sure of it.

When we got to D.C., I was a nervous wreck, and the Avengers didn’t help much, most scattering like cats when they were supposed to be blanketing the city with the Lesbian Avenger broadsheet and our club cards for the Dyke March. Finally, the handful of people who always did the shitwork, like Alison and KT, saw what was happening and pitched in. After a while, people began to turn away the flyers, but with big smiles, “We already have one. Yes, we’re coming.” I was still nervous. People always say that and never do.

We went early to Dupont Circle. We didn’t have a permit, and the ACT UP women and Avenger marshals went over tactics one more time. The goal: to keep everyone safe, block streets when they had to, negotiate with the cops who would no doubt be nervous. Especially near the White House. Just a couple days before, the feds had stormed the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, and ended up with seventy-six corpses on their hands, including twenty kids, and David Koresh. A lot of people were angry with the government. Not us particularly, but who knew what the cops would assume?