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Kelly Cogswell on “Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger”

It’s been more than 20 years since the Lesbian Avengers got their start in New York City, but their legacy has been largely ignored despite their major successes and influence on dyke culture. The activist group began with a flier in 1992, posing the question: “Imagine what your life could be. Are you willing to make it happen?”

Writer Kelly Cogswell was one of the original Avengers and she shares her experiences within the group in her new book Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger. She was inspired to write the book after being asked to speak on the Avengers and realizing that little documentation of their efforts existed, and that includes more than 50 chapters of Avengers around the world.

“I was thinking of all of us,” Kelly said. “You know I’m using my story to tell the story of the Avengers because it make it more real for people. ‘This is what it was like at a meeting, this is what it was like to do a demo.’ I feel like this is all of our story, all of our history.”

The Lesbian Avengers was founded by six gay women in New York in 1992. Fed up with feeling invisibility, violence and intolerance, they recruited their lesbian sisters for direct actions and demonstrations, most of which Kelly details in her book. A member from the beginning, Kelly writes candidly about both the successes and the failures of the Avengers, and the ultimate undoing of the New York chapter that left many feeling disillusioned, Kelly included.

“I was kind of traumatized by the Lesbian Avengers for a while,” Kelly said. But when she realized there was no one documenting the work they’d done, she felt compelled to build the archives and write the book about her experiences.

“I think what made a difference was I had to start from the beginning,” Kelly said. “Back in 1992, what were things like? What were things like at the very first meeting? And then as I started to write about what we did I was able to recognize just what our accomplishments were. You know the Avengers ended badly but all activist groups end badly. They split, they fight with each other. Other kinds of activist groups end up shooting each other. All we really did was make each other cry.”

The Lesbian Avengers were plagued with the same kinds of issues most activist groups are: Differences in opinions met from extremely passionate and stubborn people.

“But we had huge huge accomplishments and also I knew there had been a lot of chapters but when I started doing research I found there were probably around 60 Lesbian Avengers chapters all over the world,” Kelly said. “And I started thinking just how much we we accomplished, even though in New York things ended badly. But that doesn’t erase what we accomplished and that doesn’t erase the impact the Avengers had. Because there were 50 chapters in the U.S. and chapters in Canada and Australia. And there was a huge chapter in London that was really active and all these dykes were out there creating visibility for everybody and what I’m finding out is that lots and lots of people participated in dyke marches, like in DC and New York-and they still have huge ones in San Francisco. And so when I go around doing these readings, I’m finding lesbians that are like ‘I was there.'”

Eating Fire shares the stories of the work that the Avengers did, from their first “Rainbow Curriculum” demonstration about homophobia in schools to their creating the first ever Dyke March at the 1993 LGBT Rally on Washington.

“I think the biggest legacy is the Dyke March you see going in those cities, by and large started by Lesbian Avengers chapters, even after the Avengers disappeared,” Kelly said. “But one of the things that we did that I think is still really really radical is that we took on the issue of homophobia in school and the school district needed to deal with the fact that there are lesbian and queer kids in schools, but also, if you don’t teach kids early on to-I hate the word tolerate really-but to essentially not beat the crap out of each other. Then they grow up and actually do that because most gay bashers and queer bashers are actually quite young. They’re full of hate and rage. If you get to them really really young, even when they’re in second grade, third grade, fourth grade, they can deal with the fact there’s lot’s of different people in the world. “

The Avengers created inspired artwork, balloons with “Ask Abou Lesbian Lives,” T-shirts reading “I Was a Lesbian Child.” They infused humor into their political statements and sang a love song outside of a homophobic Mary Cummins’s residence on Valentine’s Day. They reunited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by making their own Alice statue and placing it next to the one of Gertrude in Bryant Park.

Writers Eileen Myles and Sarah Schulman as well as filmmaker Su Friedrich were part of the Avengers, and Kelly said that many other photographers, artists, journalists and creatives were also a part of the group, which was part of their success. The other part was the fearlessness each one of them had at a time when visibility was low and homophobia was not only rampant but encouraged.

“We thought if you’re gonna do it go big! That was the thing with the Lesbian Avengers. We were not a modest group,” Kelly said. “Some gave us shit for that. But that was the good thing about the Lesbian Avengers. And when they were holding that big LGBT march in D.C. you know there’s very little concentration on lesbians, so we’ll have a dyke march! The biggest dyke march ever. I think the idea behind the Avengers was we need to be more ambitious, we need to think bigger. There has to be some way not to always be handing out fliers and to actually change the culture for us.”

Lesbians were coming together to demand respect and to be heard. The closet was not an option for these women, who learned how to eat fire in protest of the murder of a lesbian woman and gay man in Salem, Oregon in 1992. They infiltrated women’s luncheons to demand lesbians be recognized as women, too, and risked arrest and police brutality with their outspoken actions. Kelly hopes that her book will remind the world of the group’s existence and influence.

“I just kind of want to restore the Lesbian Avengers to our community because it was so thoroughly erased,” Kelly said. “We’re talking the experience of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of lesbians. We’re talking activists, people organizing, not just people marching. We’re talking thousands and thousands of people and they had an impact and all their efforts were erased. So it’s not just to restore the history but to think of what happens to your future if you erase your past. Because it’s easy to do stuff in the future if you know someone’s already done it.”

Kelly said she wants younger generations of queer women to know that the women of hers did not just “sit around complaining about things.”

“We tend to try to keep our heads down and socialize and pretend things aren’t as awful as they are,” Kelly said. “I mean we’ve had a lot of progress in legal equality but in terms of visibility in society, it’s still relatively minimal. There’s Rachel Maddow, there’s Ellen now, but compared to how many lesbians there are, the percentage-we’re still barely seen, I think. And we still don’t get-what writers do we have in our community that are doing with the lesbian experience that Toni Morrison is doing with the black experience? I think society at large doesn’t see the lesbian experience as something they can relate to.”

Kelly said she had a difficult time finding a publisher who would take on the book. She landed at the University of Minnesota Press but said she felt a large responsibility because getting her version published would mean that another book on the Avengers would likely not see print for a long time.

“It’s so hard to get lesbian stuff published,” Kelly said, “so I felt a horrible pressure to get it right.

Kelly said that she’s heard from a handful of her Avengers peers who find Eating Fire accurate, although it’s ultimately her own story, including her life after leaving the Avengers and New York altogether.

“I’ve heard from a few people and I think the consensus is I got it right pretty much. I mean I made an effort to see everybody’s point of view, even when I was describing how [we were] being kind of horrible to each other. Particularly some of the big players because when you’re working as an activist there’s a lot of intense emotions going on,” Kelly said. ” It can bring out the best in people, but it can bring out the worst in people. And I kind of felt like if I had to-I had to give everybody else a break because I wanted to give myself a break, too. I don’t think I always behaved well either. I think that’s kind of also clear in the book that I was sometimes appalled now. It just gained so much momentum I just think everybody kind of went nuts.”

Some of the issues the Avengers faced before their demise were the same kinds of things the community is still struggling with today. Bisexual women were upset with the name and focus of the group, while women of color did not feel accurately represented. Differing opinions on how radical the group should be or what actions were more important than others also contributed to inevitable disagreements, and Kelly ended up leaving before the group met its untimely end.

“I think this is kind of a tricky question because for some reason it seems to mostly affect lesbians,” Kelly said. “No one complains about The Black Panthers only focusing on issues related to being African-American. But for some reason when you’re a lesbian you’re expected to deal with bi issues, you’re expected to deal with trans issues, and these things intersect, I mean I think when you talk about lesbian issues, of course we have to talk about questions of gender. But I think it’s also important for lesbians to be able to talk about lesbian issues and not to feel-I think that lesbians should be more inclusive of lesbians! I think that when we talk about lesbian issues we need to make sure all lesbians are included. But I think it’s OK to say ‘This is a lesbian space. We’re talking about lesbian issues.” And if you decide a space is LGBT space, it better be LGBT and not just G. It depends on how you set it up up front.”

Dyke marches, which still exist in several cities and generally coincide with Prides each year, are open to anyone that is dyke-identified or an ally, but there are struggles facing organizers in 2014, such as if marches should be held in gay neighborhoods or challenge the more homophobic areas of a city. What would the Lesbian Avengers do?

“I think it depends on what your community wants. It can be good to have a dyke march in a lesbian neighborhood because you get to see yourself,” Kelly said. “I mean one of the things about activism is you’re trying to change society but you’re also trying to do something for yourself and see yourself in the context of other lesbians when you’re doing lesbian activism. Because that’s really powerful too. But if you want to create change in the larger community, in your city or your town, then you have to leave safe spaces and go where other people are, where you’re not expected, where you’re not usually seen. I think it depends what your goal is. Or maybe you need more than one march. Or you need a route that starts one place that is a little scarier to you and ends up someplace that’s safer for you.”

But in New York, the Avengers weren’t marching on Christopher Street.

“We chose to go down Fifth Avenue because it was the heart of the city and it was where big parades go down, like the St. Patricks Day parade,” Kelly said. “So we covered Fifth Avenue.”

Twenty years after the Avengers were created, lesbians have a stronger place in mainstream culture, but Kelly said we are still without the liberation we desperately need.

“I kind of feel like we stopped imagining what we wanted and we kind of shifted from a movement that was based on liberation and the idea that really everyone needed to be liberated from our parents’ world, our parents’ more conservative world and we shifted from liberation to equality and getting legal equality,” Kelly said. I could give you a big speech about why that is important but one thing really needs to work with the other thing because when you really…I always felt like when I was doing the Lesbian Avengers stuff that if lesbians were liberated and able to think bigger, than people like my mother would be freer too. We’re kind of in default mode. We write our check to HRC and the Task Force and get legal equality but it doesn’t deal with homophobia, for one thing. You can’t legislate against homophobia inside the family. You can deal with people who beat the crap out of you but you can’t do much beforehand. We have to think harder about what we want and how we can change the world we live in to make room for us.”

As part of that change, Kelly is seeking to document all of the other chapters of Avengers that existed around the world and hopes that those who were part of the movement will get in touch with her to help make sure the history is preserved.

“I would love to document the other chapters. I’m encouraging people to organize themselves to document what they did or send it to me, just like write up little accounts, xerox fliers, whatever. Because people did really creative things. People had billboards in their communities, lot’s and lot’s of stuff. It wasn’t just in New York people were creative.”

Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger is available now. Visit lesbianavengers.com for more information on the Avengers or how to send your Avengers history with Kelly.

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