Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly Cogswell

Author:Kelly Cogswell [Cogswell, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lesbian Author, Lesbans, Feminism
ISBN: 9780816691166
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-02-21T06:00:00+00:00

20.

When I wasn’t working on the radio project, I tried to write a poem about my grandmother, describe how it felt to live exiled in a place where people from Kentucky were sometimes subtitled on TV, if they appeared at all. I’d stare ambivalently at the weather map and point it out to Ana. “There, right there. That’s where I’m from.” And she’d look, searching for a minute, then turn back to her work.

The coalition was pushing forward despite the weirdness between Ana and Carmen. They wrote letters and faxes pressuring the sponsors to complain to the station, tried to get the mainstream press to cover bigotry in the Spanish media (even Anglos should have noticed the blackface when they were channel surfing), and asked the FCC why they didn’t enforce the same rules governing obscenity in the Spanish-language press as in the mainstream. Were they American or not?

The videomaker Janet Baus, who had Cuban roots herself, held a fund-raising party at her house for Latina lesbians, and Ana got a friend of hers, Carmelita Tropicana, to do a benefit show of her new performance, Milk of Amnesia. It was a hit with Las Buenas Amigas even though Carmen and Patricia seemed doubtful about such a highbrow event. “Half the members have never even been to the theater!” But everybody laughed at the jokes and practically fell on the floor in hysterics when Carmelita appeared in man drag as Pingalito, “Little Dick.”

We organized a flyering campaign for several neighborhoods including Bushwick and Spanish Harlem, and Ana and Melanie and I went to the Avengers and tried once again to pitch the project: “It’s historic.” “It’ll have an incredible impact in a city wracked not only by homophobia but color lines.” But we only picked up a few including a white girl, Kristen, and a young black woman called Yancey. And we were back to wondering why almost no white Avengers came to the demo, and why the group was unaffected by our excitement even though we’d taken over a fucking radio station and mobilized all these new activists. Was it straight-up bigotry? A demographic shift? It seemed to us the Avengers were more and more full of dykes that had come from the Midwest to go to Barnard or NYU and had remained isolated and fresh-faced in their dorms. Flatbush and El Barrio were like foreign territories to them. They sweated hearing anything but standard white English. Is alienation, or cowardice, the same thing as racism?

I was nervous myself when we had the very first meeting of the coalition. I smiled and smiled as I played hostess and opened the door, asking people to remove their shoes to save the floor, and would they like a drink? A snack? There was beer in the fridge. Food on the counter. Most of the black women were bigger than me and made me feel like a dwarf. The Latina dykes were louder, chattered, came in gaggles. Way in the back of my

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