Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger
by Kelly Cogswell
University of Minnesota Press. 256 pages, $54.
THIS ROLLICKING STORY of the Lesbian Avengers, a “direct action group” that was founded by six organizers in New York in the early 1990s, shows why historical accounts are best told by eyewitnesses. Kelly Cogswell doesn’t attempt to supply the reader with a full set of organizational records, but she describes a defining moment in radical history in all its messy, colorful complexity.
The title refers to a circus act, “eating fire,” which the author and several fellow members learned to do as a public demonstration to draw attention to homophobic violence. The first “fire-eating” event memorialized the gruesome death in 1992 of a disabled gay man and his lesbian friend who were burned alive in their rooming house in Salem, Oregon, when skinheads threw a Molotov cocktail into the building. This event was followed by numerous protests, sit-ins, and educational campaigns. A set of color photos shows the author as a child with her sisters in Kentucky, as a young lesbian writer in New York, and in various events staged by the Avengers, including a Dyke March on Washington, D.C. Posters featuring the Lesbian Avengers logo of a bomb with a lit fuse are included. According to a flyer that the author helped to write, “Lesbian Avengers believe in creative activism: loud, bold, sexy, silly, fierce, tasty and dramatic. Arrest optional. Think demonstrations are a good time and a great place to cruise women.” The story of Kelly Cogswell’s life as an “out” lesbian intersects with the history of the Avengers, but the two stories have different arcs. The author’s long-time relationship with Cuban playwright Ana Simo, whom she met through other Avengers and to whom the book is dedicated, is shown starting with a tentative kiss. At the time, neither woman had faith that their cross-cultural relationship would last. Meanwhile, the actions of the Avengers were reaching their peak and creating spin-off groups in other cities. Accounts of street action, which form the foreground of the first chapter, “Activist Honeymoon,” fade into the background in “Enemies Within,” when internal conflict began to split the group. In this chapter, the author’s hindsight serves to illuminate personal and ideological attacks which seemed random and irrational to her at the time. Tracing the dissolution of an organization or a movement in retrospect is shown to be parallel to the post-breakup analysis of a love affair. In the succeeding chapters, “A Laboratory of Identity” and “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” Ana’s poignant history as an imprisoned young radical in Cuba and the author’s problematic relationship with her Christian relatives are front and center. Despite the odds, Kelly and Ana are shown gaining strength as a couple and drawing formerly disapproving members of both of their families into their orbit. Their on-line political journal, The Gully, outlived the Lesbian Avengers and reached a different audience. Although the author vehemently denies that cyber-activism can replace the type of guerrilla theater for which the Lesbian Avengers were known, she shows the inevitable changes in the Zeitgeist that followed the steady spread of computers. Kelly Cogswell is a writer, not simply a chronicler of events in which she happened to be caught up. Her account of the intersection of the personal and the political is moving, droll, and bittersweet by turns. For fans of the largely untold history of lesbian politics, this book is a must-read. ________________________________________________________ Jean Roberta is a writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan.
