 She's been recognized by the New York Press Association for her column in New York's gay city news And she's a recipient of the John Joan Heller Diane Bernard fellowship for her project documenting the lesbian Avengers Please welcome Kelly Cogswell So eating fire, I'm gonna read a couple of sections from it The first half of the book is kind of the rise and the fall of the lesbian Avengers and Then the second half of the book I stay a lesbian and I stay an activist So I tell that story and also kind of thinking about what those things actually mean I've been thinking lately that I'm kind of getting 1992 flashbacks when the lesbian Avengers started because I'm You know riots after the Rodney King verdict our familiar The anti-queer activism and a lot of anti-woman stuff going on so Anyway, so let me take you back to 1992 the way I got into the book If I mentioned Catherine first, it's because I'm trying to remember what those days were like What I was like actually when the East Village really did seem like a small town and my dyke friends live just around the corner Dragging their politics and art into the street. I Remember neighborhood fixtures Like a homeless black man down near fourth who ranted about honkies in the man and would spit at anything that moved There was a cracked white woman too on st. Mark's place Who had set up a card table with tattered anti-porn pamphlets and a faded blow-up of that playboy illustration that had a woman going through a meat grinder? There were also the ambulatory skeletons of people dying with AIDS and I ventured into a couple of act-up meetings at Cooper Union But there were so many people so many men. I Also tried a women's action coalition meeting, but whack was stuffed with those good-smelling soho types who had never applied for Medicaid Closer to me was that young black woman who went around the park with band-aid colored leggings smeared in the crotch with an enormous bloody stain Mostly I traced the neighborhood one concrete block at a time with my notebook and pen Looking for a moment or two of grace Like that time in the middle of the night. I saw this man playing guitar Playing Bach on his guitar in front of the most holy redeemer church all around crumbled brown bags and pools of piss He played with such concentrated joy even the drunks halted in their reeling dance back home That grace is gone now Gone for me anyway like Keith Herring's funny fucking figures the anguished cries of David Warnerovich and the tower in the community garden It's sixth and B that rose up bit by bit until it reached two or three stories all scrap lumber broken dolls and old shoe strung on It got too high Aspired too much with that permits and probably was a menace Amy moved to Boston a long time ago on and I went to France for a while When we got back in 2010 Catherine was one of the few old-timers left who I'd kept up with Not long ago. We ate big greasy burgers at Paul's Which still has the giant plastic hamburger outside? Afterwards we went back to her place near the park and listen to a little music They're not the indigo girls or Sinead O'Connor and talked a lot About art and politics the big scar on her chest and the tiny ones on my belly When I walked home to Anna's two hours this time through the silent streets I tried to erase the chic restaurants all the fancy apartment buildings and cute little shops and Feel what lay beyond This is the first lesbian Avenger meeting By the way, the lesbian Avengers were a direct action group that started in New York And then they spread all over the country and in several other places as well And we ended up with 60 chapters worldwide including a big chapter here in San Francisco that Went on for years and actually outlasted the New York Avenger chapter Gradually the room filled up with women Somewhere around my age 26 others still in college some old enough to have grown kids But all a little nervous and eager nobody foamed at the mouth or anything though Nobody brandished a sword or a cape or a breast The first meeting of the lesbian Avengers was actually kind of bureaucratic The way somebody officially called the meeting to order and the six organizers introduced themselves After them it was our turn None of the names stuck at first, but I remember the multitude of accents Hispanic British Irish East Coast West Coast flat Midwestern my faint Kentucky twang and even a few homegrown New York Drawls then share then Sarah Shulman or somebody talked just enough to lay out what the lesbian Avengers was supposed to be a Direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility And I nodded my head like I understood though that phrase direct action didn't mean much to me The closest I'd come to organizing anything was that time back in Louisville when I tried to get the kids in my youth choir to protest the firing of the minister of music Deb was a kind energetic woman I babysat her kid When I came to her defense the pastor denounced me in private as a confused little girl Then in public as an agitator and I'd faded in shame Visibility didn't really mean much either Except in the most basic sense I'd never thought about how the world changed or about the world at all for that matter Martin Luther King gave a speech and that was that public schools were desegregated White teachers were horrible to black kids and young white girls got their asses grabbed in the hallways by young black guys getting their own back I'd been to now's March in Washington in 89 to photograph the marchers for an installation that I was doing But my friends had to identify the VIPs in the shots. Oh my god. You got glorious dynum who? But this idea of going to the source aiming to change what people thought how they saw each other and saw us Was something new to me That first Avenger meeting Sweating in that metal chair. I was really just there to be among girls and find out if I belonged. I wanted to Anybody would I could almost feel the gape-mouthed of watching the organizers talk about something called the rainbow curriculum And why they decided our action should be in support of it. I Didn't say much though plenty of others did all the dykes there seemed so incredibly smart creative Ready to take their place in the world and there I was with them Pretty soon we broke up into five or six groups and got to work There was research to do flyers to design Interviews to place money to raise and strategies and ideas to hash out preferably involving balloons Successful actions don't organize themselves So we did the first action and then we were asked to participate in an anti-violence march on Halloween weekend Which is in New York City is always a bad weekend for a queers to get bashed And it was at a time with lots of anti-gay violence all over the country Including the murder of two queers in Oregon An African-American lesbian and a friend of hers a white gay man They lived in the same rooming house and they were burned alive their home was fire bombed with the Molotov cocktail And so the Avengers decided to build a shrine to them and do something to Bring attention to the fact that these queers were getting killed all over the country, but in particular these two people and It was part of the the question was how do you transform this horrible image of two queers getting burned alive and Our solution was to learn how to eat fire So it's chilly and dark at father demo square the street lights barely shown You could hear the march coming from blocks away with whistles and chants The call and response of whose streets our streets as we reclaim the village making it safe Suddenly the marches were around us a nervous angry crowd with signs No one nine the anti-gay Oregon measure bigots go home and Justice for Marsha a murdered black drag queen and trans activists the cops were ignoring Lysander climbed up on a plastic milk crate in front of our homemade shrine and we formed lines off to her right and left She was a deeply religious person who wore an Elmer fudcap Other Avengers handed out candles and the small crowd lit them as Lysander began to read from her notes It was as much a homily is an activist speech Her voice shook a little but the people fell silent as she talked first about the nearby dike bashing Where a gang of kids attacked two lesbians just for a bracing Then about Oregon where had he made Cohen's and Brian mock had been burned alive We lesbian Avengers have built this shrine. It stands for our fear It stands for our grief It stands for our rage and it enshrines our intention to live fully and completely as who we are wherever we are We take the fire of action into our hearts and we take it into our bodies and We stand here and now to make it known that we are here and here. We will stay Our fear does not consume us their fire will not consume us We take that fire and we make it our own and Lysander touched the torch to her tongue where the flame stayed lit long enough to light a second torch and the Avenger to her Right and left let their own and so the fire passed down the line from tongue to torch to tongue on My side from Rachel to me then Sarah then Allison her roommate and we raised our flames Triumphantly into the air leaned back and swallowed them down The crowd cheered a little uncertainty at watching a circus trick transformed into a sacrament. I Took a couple of shifts at the shrine encampment the village was one of the most gay friendly places in the city and Also the most dangerous because the homophobes knew where to find us and There we were handing out leaflets with the words gay and lesbian smack dab on the front Explaining how violence and murders followed hateful anti-gay campaigns like sharks follow the scent of blood. I Remember being cold and sitting on scrunched cardboard to keep the damp from rising up from the concrete and Outreach workers at the homeless brought warm blankets that we returned when it was all over We peed in the coffee shop at the corner the revelers of Halloween came and went like the fading light We stood vigil and bled into the gray city Sometimes other queers joined us for a while lighting candles to their friends who were dead from violence or AIDS The sidewalk was a constellation People brought us slices of pizza and paper cups of coffee Somebody brought the news that the Vatican had finally lifted the Inquisition's edict against Galileo The world did revolve around the Sun More than one romance was born when Avengers huddled together It became hard to leave after your shift part of you wanted to stay there forever Claiming at the very least that corner of the city inserting yourself as a speck in the public eye Kelly Cox all thank you so much