Hello from… France:
Where I am lounging around in a friend’s house down near Montpellier, a miraculous half hour from the sea.
But lucky for you, a couple of months ago I was asked to write an essay on the Lesbian Avengers’ Dyke Manifesto for the Argentinian magazine with the great name Moléculas Malucas. It had been a while since I’d read the text carefully. Every time, I’m shocked at how radical it is. And how incredibly suffused it is with sex. Which is partly why it is… more radical than ever.
If you can read Spanish, check out the essay and this great translation of the manifesto, El Manifiesto Tortillero: más radical que nunca .
If not, continue below.
The Dyke Manifesto—More Radical Than Ever
A couple of years ago, I was going through old boxes and found a battered piece of yellowing newsprint with a red typeface. One side featured a quick history of the Lesbian Avengers and tips on how to start your own chapter, and on the other was the Dyke Manifesto.
I marveled at how it was both earnest and whimsical, so fearlessly irreverent that a few years after writing it I’d practically blushed in shame. After all, identities and politics are serious business, right? Right?
I’m starting to have my doubts.
The Manifesto was written in 1993, not quite a year after the birth of the Lesbian Avengers, a direct action group focused on the visibility and survival of lesbians. Before I joined I barely had the courage even to say the word lesbian. I didn’t quite believe I was one. I knew I liked girls, sure, but I avoided that word which sounded so permanent, so dirty, monstrous, even. Even now for many people it conjures up humorless man-haters, over-sexed pervs, the girls you’re afraid of in the locker room. Other scary, immoral, detestable things.
I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. The word was literally signaled danger, I’d had it hurled at me like a brick. “Lezzie, lezzie” chanted by a crowds of screaming girls outside a dorm room I shared with a “friend.” I’d had actual bottles thrown at me from passing cars, “Fucking dyke.” I knew you could get raped because of it—because nothing was worse than saying No to some man.
It was even worse after Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan went to the 1992 Republican National Convention to declare a war, a Culture War, on the enemies of America, which included AIDS-spreading pedophiles, decadent lesbian artists, rioting criminal blacks, bra-burners, and tree-huggers. His speech launched or bolstered a thousand anti-gay campaigns in the U.S., all of them followed by violence.
Still, every time we dared step into the street as Avengers, Lesbian Avengers, that word, lesbian, was redeemed. We were a dangerously delightful marching band giving out balloons to school children saying “Teach about lesbian lives.” We were furious fire-eaters transforming the fire-bombing deaths of a lesbian and gay man. We were a celestial choir serenading homophobes during a St. Valentine’s Day snowstorm, dancers waltzing together in snow the next day as we reunited a statue of Gertrude Stein with her lover Alice B. Toklas.
By the time the Avengers decided to organize a Dyke March in Washington, D.C. on the eve of the historic March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, the word lesbian evoked power, a supercharged mix of anger, joy, absurdity, humor, sometimes even naked desire, and I was absolutely giddy every time I said it. And I said it a lot that spring afternoon when a handful of us gathered to write a manifesto at Anne-christine d’Adesky’s East Village apartment.
She had laid in a supply of Rolling Rock beer, and legal pads, and we popped open green bottles as we sat around her formica table with our pens. I remember there was KT, an artist and musician, also Kat, a girl she hung out with. Plus Anne’s roommate, Brenda, who had long blonde hair and a cherubic face and used to play the drum at demos. Maybe the choreographer Jennifer Monson was there, too, though I’m not sure anymore.
We came from different places, had different backgrounds, though I’m pretty sure that most of us knew about Emma Goldman—who wanted a revolution you could dance to, and Rosa Luxemburg—who wanted freedom to dissent, and Valerie Solanas—who joked (kind of) about forming a Society to Cut Up Men (SCUM).
As for me, I’d done a degree in art and art history which is positively riddled with manifestos, so my own brain was full, too, of the Futurist Marinetti, who wanted to demolish libraries and museums (and feminism), and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara who sneered at the deplorable and obsolete idea of manifestos, but then wrote a long one. Then there were the bible verses I’d memorized since I was three (We are the Apocalypse and Rapture), song lyrics by Girls in the Nose (More Madonna, Less Jesus), and TV jingles for dog biscuits (activism builds strong bones).
We created a glorious cocktail part political manifesto, part lesbian love poem, that was audacious, playful, sincere. Like the Avengers. And when we brought it back to the group, they loved it, at least for a while. Especially when the artist Carrie Moyer created an amazing design, putting it on a broadsheet in the bloody red of St. Valentine.
In D.C., we handed thousands of them out trying to persuade lesbians to come to the Dyke March. The result was beyond our wildest dreams. A tsunami of dykes, twenty thousand of them took to the streets, marching to the White House where the Avengers ate fire and we all chanted, “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.” Better yet, many went home and started their own Avenger chapters. We ended up with something like sixty chapters working for lesbian visibility and survival worldwide.
The Dyke March was, and is, important because the message is in our bodies. It means something to be disorderly, raucous, happy behind our own lesbian banner, to take up space in public, in the real world, where we rarely see women, much less dykes.
Even now, everything public is still default male. And not just hetero, even gay men have cruising places. Politicians and culture and society are male. Public space is literally male. Women sometimes sit in cafés, but not every café. And I have never in my life seen a group of women or girls just hanging out on a street corner for hours and talking. It’s dangerous. We women move through spaces, we never stay there and claim them. Either literally or symbolically. Seeing one or two lesbian faces on TV, in your local politics can’t compare to suddenly being the majority. Not even the one in ten on the street or whatever it is. But the 100 percent. Like we are—ideally—during dyke marches.
Re-reading it now, in 2021, the Dyke Manifesto is just as radical. It creates an interior space for dykes, refuses marginalization—by anyone, not by straight society, not queers who still want dykes to go away.
First, the Manifesto assumes lesbian liberation and power rather than pleading for it. “We’re not waiting for the rapture, we are the apocalypse,” it declares. And even as it acknowledges the cost of our social invisibility—discrimination, poverty, homelessness, violence—it doesn’t set us up as powerless victims. We have the tools to fight all that. “The power of dyke love, dyke vision, dyke anger, dyke intelligence, dyke strategy.” All we have to do is mobilize.
Second, it puts lesbians squarely at the center of the universe, not at the bottom of a laundry list. We dare revel in our lives and communities, our homo desire, our diversity, our complexity, our incredible hilarious human tendencies, which even include bad relationships. It’s not our fault if the world doesn’t see how great we are.
This is why, as a rhetorical strategy, rather than raging against stereotypes of lesbians or bemoaning them like victims, the manifesto is free to laugh at them, and to taunt all those bigots who believe homos are pedophiles, that lesbians are oversexed home-wreckers. “Subversion is our perversion” and “we recruit” it declares, like a big fuck you.
Maybe most importantly, the manifesto kept the spotlight on sex and desire at a moment when Gay Inc. was already talking primarily about love and marriage, erasing the very roots and the history of our marginalization. The images they created, and still perpetuate, gave the misleading impression that lesbians and gay men just held hands and gazed longingly at each other, perhaps having one chaste kiss when they were finally allowed to celebrate a domestic union. (Marriage since 2015 in the U.S.)
The Manifesto, meanwhile, calls for lesbians to arise from their beds (where we have sex). To leave the bars (where we court each other—and have sex). Declares activism should not only be loud and bold, but “sexy, silly, fierce, tasty…” Demos are great places to cruise women. We “don’t have a position on fur.” (Or fur pies.) We refused to go back in the closet. Or forget the connection between the world’s hate and our desire that was subversive precisely because it was lesbian, homo, a woman saying yes to other women and no to men, slamming the door on their patriarchal noses. And we paid a high price for it.
The Avengers made the connection even more clearly a few months later, declaring the theme for first New York Dyke March, “Lesbians Lust for Power.” In the promo, we asked, “What does it mean to lust? What does it mean to desire? How many times has your desire been too painful or too dangerous to express? Have you ever been punished for wanting the wrong thing? …the wrong lover? The Lesbian Avengers believe that DESIRE is a POWERFUL WORLD-ROCKING FORCE. DESIRE moves us to reach out and to demand respect and civil rights for lesbians. A BURNING DESIRE for women moves us to explore and express our lust and love even in the face of danger. A FIERCE DESIRE for justice takes us into the streets every time Dykes are threatened.”
What could be more radical than that? Believing that lesbian lives actually matter? That lesbian lust does? It’s why the Lesbian Avengers Dyke Manifesto is more than some historical document, but a goad, a provocation, a cry demanding a new lesbian generation wake up.
Well, that’s it for now,
Nostalgically yours,
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