Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (19 page)

Even the Puerto Rican media put the United States in its place. Venezuela got more airtime than Kenneth Starr and his vendetta. The TV ran a whole uninterrupted speech by Hugo Chávez, who’d beaten the elite for the first time in decades. The guy could talk without notes for an hour, had so much promise. Even if it turned sour later. Successive failures are par for the course for young democracies. His voice seemed loud in Puerto Rico, compared to its muted sound in the States.

Now and then we’d break our routine with a car trip across the island, or a visit to something like the Christmas festival at the Bacardi Artisans Fair. They had piña coladas and cod fritters, roughly stitched leather hats, and photos of the smiling patriot Albizu Campos before Americans drug him to jail. We were roasted and drenched a couple of times, before a handful of musicians crept on stage for the finals of the
décimas
competition. They had guitars, four-stringed
cuatros,
and
güiros,
gourds ribbed like washboards. Once the musicians had scooted their chairs into a comfortable arrangement, the competition’s rules were explained.

It amounted to this: the singers had to quickly improvise what amounted to a Petrarchan sonnet to a familiar tune, using as chorus a line that the judges gave them on a scrap of paper just seconds before the first chord was struck. Points were knocked off for faulty rhyme schemes, meter, meaning, diction, intonation, lengthy intervals between verses, and whatever else the judges thought of. The first few singers were amazing, but unsurprising.

The guy that won, Victor Manuel Reyes, pushed things a lot, at least formally. He was a thin young man with a baseball cap jammed on backwards. He nailed every rhyme and arrived at the chorus with flair. While the band played a quick interlude, young Reyes stalked the second verse. It was another crucial moment. Even a mediocre poet could manage one good verse, but the second was key. Beyond the rhyme scheme and chorus, there was development and meaning. The best singers to that point had developed their thoughts like salt water taffy, pulling meaning both toward and away from the repeated chorus like masters of the villanelle.

The audience was shocked when the iconoclast Reyes seemed to ignore his first verse, going in a different direction entirely. We held our breath. The structures began unraveling. He didn’t end thoughts at the end of the proper lines. The rhymes jarred. But the final chorus, in a dangerous straining leap, pulled it all together. I couldn’t say exactly how. The audience found itself both dazzled and uneasy. In the space of three or four singers we had grown used to conventions. Reyes had wrenched them to the breaking point. The judges, after much murmuring, gave him the top prize for it.

I thought it was a good omen, how a radical act was rewarded, even if it was just symbolic. It takes more guts than you think to break conventions, like bursting into the middle of a power breakfast: “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going skiing.” And Puerto Rico was a conventional, even traditional place. Which meant Ana stuck out with her short red hair and light eyes, her dykeliness in a place where most women still wore long hair, either the original brown or bleached blonde. Even the taxi drivers challenged her, “You’re from Cuba? Really? I would never have guessed.” While if I only said a few words, or none at all, they’d assume I was Puerto Rican, with my brown hair grown out, brown eyes. My adequate Spanish.

Before I left, I got into an argument with a girl at a dyke bar who asked where I was from. She had these blue eyes, naturally blonde curly hair, and should have been open-minded, but when I said I came from the United States, she repeated, “But you’re Puerto Rican, right?” “No. I’m from Kentucky.” “But you speak Spanish.” “I learned it in school.” A few years before, I might have tried to pass. But not anymore. I had decided to be what I was, an American, a dyke American from Louisville, whatever that meant.

I told her the girl
that Kentucky wasn’t very different from Puerto Rico. When Ana and I had taken that road trip across the island, we’d seen the same cinderblock houses on muddy hills as in Appalachia. The same trucks barreling down mountains, though carrying pineapples instead of coal. The nostalgic
décimas
spoke always of exile and home like bluegrass. We even shared the legacy of slavery. There was that time at the Plaza de Armas when we saw a bunch of women in Scarlett O’Hara hooped dresses that I suppose dated from Spanish colonial times when corkscrew curls were burned into “white” ladies’ hair by slaves. And my god, how the mostly beige people there treated black Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. And everything was just as McDonaldized, so there was nothing good for visitors to eat. Calderón de la Barca was right. With a few little adjustments, we could swap places, easy.
La vida es sueño.
Life is a dream.

On the way back, at the San Juan airport, I spoke Spanish with an accent that was a little too Castilian, and the easy-going immigration officer who had joked with all the other passengers as he peeked at their driver’s licenses demanded to know where I was from. I said Kentucky, which seemed like a lie if I spoke Spanish, so he actually demanded a passport. I had a couple of bad moments before I found the thing. He examined it for a long time with narrowed eyes before declaring me an American, and letting me get on the plane to the gray forbidding city of New York, where nothing had changed either, not even us.

Ana retreated to her desk where she’d surf for hours and days at a time. At 1 or 2 or 3
A.M.
, I’d bitch at her to come to bed, and she would, all red-eyed. On February 4, 1999, just a few weeks after we got home, Amadou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old Guinean immigrant, got gunned down in the Bronx by four members of the Giuliani’s Street Crimes Unit. They fired forty-one rounds, mistaking a wallet for a gun.

Ana and I went to a demo with buttons and T-shirts that made it clear we were dykes. We got a few curious looks, one or two hostile ones. Either because we were pale for the crowd or because we were homos. It didn’t matter. We were all in it together. We blew our whistles. Waved our sign declaring, “NYC cops give pigs a bad name.” With an illustration. It was a nice pig. Pink and snuffly. I drew it myself.

24.

Fast-forward a little. It’s 11:58:25
P.M.
, December 31, 1999. Ana’s off at a party. I’m home restless with a Y2K bug that has nothing to do with computers. I quickly make the gesture of mopping the apartment, then throw the dirty water out the front window at exactly 00:00:00 to rid the house of all last year’s residual spiritual and physical crap. It’s a
brujería
thing I don’t quite believe, but why not? It’s an annual reminder that some things end. Others begin. Might as well let go and hope for the best. It’s less trouble than shaving your head, anyway. The water splatters on the fire escape, then the sidewalk. Somebody below screams. I didn’t hit them, but in New York, everybody screams at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Cars honk their horns. Illegal fireworks shoot up from the roofs.

Afterwards, I take some aspirin and tidy up the bubble wrap from my new enormous pink iMac that looks more like an alien space invader than a computer.

It was an extravagance, bought when we got paid for the translating–typesetting gig Cathy Chang sent our way. I plugged the pink, bubble-headed thing into the wall jack and followed instructions, setting up my own e-mail and everything. Or trying to. Ana came home and put me to bed with a raging fever. I was beginning the new millennium with the flu. To be companionable, she caught it, too. Even sick, Ana crawled to her computer and slumped in front of it, following all the stories about that skinny little boy pulled wide-eyed from the ocean in November, then tossed right in the Miami shark tank. His father in Cuba demanded his lawful return. His Miami relatives refused to give him up in the name of democracy and freedom, and the right to denounce that tyrant Castro and wax lyrical about that tyrant Batista. Too bad about the peasants starving at the side of the road. Too bad about the dissidents screaming in the police stations or rotting in a ditch.

Ana simmered and steamed as photographers shot the kid on the jungle gym in a leather jacket and shades. He was following in his thug uncles’ footsteps like a baby Patty Hearst. Poor kid, she’d say about Elián. What assholes, she’d say about the Cubes, burning tires again in Miami. “They’re making Castro look good.”

She’d follow me into the kitchen where I was mincing garlic and tell me that, above all, she felt sorry for the father whose only crime was wanting his child back and wanting, too, to stay in the country of his birth. Didn’t that ring a bell? Ana asked, still coughing up a lung. Wasn’t he the same as a Native American parent whose kid was snatched and trapped in a right-thinking, English-speaking, white Christ-worshipping orphanage? Or like a dyke who lost her child because of who she was?

Yeah, I heard about it all, in triplicate, until the day I stared at the screen of the monstrous pink iMac and the solution became self-evident. Pure Hollywood, really, like a backyard musical that Judy Garland could have starred in with Mickey Rooney. “C’mon guys, let’s put on a magazine.” Once, I’d asked Ana what she’d do if she won the lottery. “Buy out Murdock.” As a little girl she dreamed of battered beige raincoats and fedoras, filing stories on the wire. After the revolution, and during that project
El Puente,
she was a cub reporter at a daily newspaper. In the Avengers, when she couldn’t get press coverage, she helped start Dyke TV.

So when she couldn’t stop blabbing about Elián and the lack of rational Cuban voices, I knew what I had to do. I roped in my friend Amy who was working at an Internet start-up, and she bought me a book on HTML and walked me through a basic design. A couple of weeks later, on February 6, 2000, we brought out our first issue of
The Gully
online magazine. It was so immediate. You wrote an article, or edited it, slapped it into code that looked like garbage scrolling across the page, but when you opened it in Netscape or Explorer it looked as real as anybody else’s site. And anybody anywhere with an Internet connection could read it. Free. No more of the begging and pleading I’d seen from the Avengers’ Ministry of Propaganda. Oh, please write an article, run this press release, pay attention to my dyke point of view. The best thing was that every reader was a link away from activism. Click here for more info. Click here to get involved. Where do you live? Here’s the number for your rep or senator. Or local troublemakers.

As Su Friedrich would tell me later, “Nobody really quits being a Lesbian Avenger.” It’s a habit. An autonomic function. And our first readers came from an e-mail list of activists we knew. But I also submitted articles to search engines and sites here and there that did roundups of news. It felt like dropping pamphlets from a plane. Or panning for gold. Every now and then we’d hit pay dirt when Yahoo News or
Mother Jones
online listed an article, sandwiching it between tidbits from the
Christian Science Monitor
or the
Miami Herald.
We’d suddenly get hundreds or thousands of hits, and I’d do a little butt-wagging happy dance, even if half sent hate mail, especially about the Cuban stuff. And because it wasn’t only paper and ink that were gone, but the traditional distance, their complaints didn’t go to a secretary in an office somewhere but directly into the vile pink monster.

I’d approach it warily. Take a couple of deep breaths. Fortify myself with coffee. Because checking my e-mail was like having a community board meeting for the Rainbow Curriculum suddenly appear in our apartment with all of the bigots shouting, “You Commie faggots should get your repulsive asses to Cuba if you love it so much.” “I hope you all get AIDS.” Weirdly, they’d toss in a few heartfelt pleas to understand the Cuban American community that was so easy to bash, and then start in again hating on the fucking faggots, our miserable homo flesh. I begged Ana to shut them up, come out as Cuban, play the jail card. But she refused to claim that authority. “It will mean you, as a Kentucky girl, have nothing valuable to say about Cuba. And Cubans have nothing to say about the rest of the world.” So their vomit kept pouring into my computer.

It wasn’t all bad, that closeness. When we covered Puerto Rican activists trying to get the U.S. Navy to quit bombing their island of Vieques, a gay man with a guest house a few minutes from the range got in touch and contributed a couple of stories. Ana swapped e-mails with journalists in Namibia who were trying to keep their newspaper alive, under pressure to quit writing about government abuses, which included attacks on queers. They seemed a lot like us. Modest, but determined. Flying by the seat of their pants. In 2002, a guy wrote us from Venezuela to say there was a coup going on there, largely backed by U.S. interests. Could you please cover it? With his help, we ended up publishing a story before the
New York Times.
Now, he’d be using Twitter or posting on his own blog or Facebook. But then, small as we were, it was often just us looking so far outward and welcoming people in. We made a new kind of community online, defined partly by identity and issues, but above all a certain rebellion against meanness, stupidity, and hate.

We took things personally, wrote so intimately about our new friends that many readers decided we were neighbors, and once we had the Spanish-language section going, we’d get these letters from Guatemala or Mexico wanting advice on local gay stuff. In truth, problems weren’t much different from place to place, especially when it came to queers. Time itself seemed to stick and repeat like Gertrude Stein or Mozart or mountain ranges. History, like nature, wasn’t based on arcs but fractals. When Namibia’s Sam Nujoma declared homos “un-African and unnatural,” “European,” and a national threat to independence, he was just repeating variations on a theme begun by the Cuban government of the 1960s and ’70s that used to accuse people like José Mario, like Ana, of perverting the revolution, being a foreign influence. They goaded citizens to violence, sent us fleeing in droves.