The Lesbian Avengers: Have We Always Had the Same Issues?

Zine of the GayIn my personal experiences in queer “activist” spaces, I have often felt a dissonant feeling about the uncommitment for action. This “activism” with no action! The “activists” becoming more “actors” at a performance of progress rather than tangible change. In my objective mind and what I will always tell people first, the mentality I go into these activist spaces is something along the lines of…

… that all effort is worthwhile, all efforts towards progress should not be halted just because they are not radical enough. We need to eat to enact the revolution. We need to make sure we survive today to protest tomorrow. The effort of the improvement of current living conditions should never be considered obsolete. Mental and physical health is super important, take care of yourself above anything. How could we honor the martyrs all around the world if we do not continue doing anything we can? How can we say that all the effort up until now is worth nothing? Isn’t the most revolutionary thing to have radical hope and to enact it in any way possible?

Lesbian Avengers DYKE MANIFESTO Perhaps it is because of my young self in these times of grand disillusionment with the world, but in my heart and people that know me deeply know I want to scream and bite people’s heads off for the incompetence and inaction that occurs. The anger that lights my eardrums on fire for the way that people cannot see how it is a waste of time to put energy on discourse on trivial matters is when people’s lives are on the line! How selfish it is to put your own feelings and ideologies first above the group! What happened to coalition-building?! How selfish and elitist it is to feud and then refuse to work together on the common goal because of your conceptions and perspectives on how you understood the theory that you read (or didn’t read)! Why is everyone just sitting around and talking about how they can’t do anything? What do you mean you are so angry you do nothing? How are you not so angry and do something? How could we honor the martyrs all around the world if we do not continue doing anything we can?

I believe both of these things at the same time but it does make me feel dizzy when in discourse I am told they are opposition. In contrast, I see them in innate relation. Doing everything we can, rest and action, despite it all is radical hope. To be a revolutionary you must be so angry at the world for its current state and its capacity to be better. Being impatient because it can be better and it isn’t. Imagining always ends up with me being on the street. Being an activist is having the radical hope that the revolution isn’t raining down on a random day like the rapture but you are going to be part of it.

Consciously I am aware that rarely have none of us gone through a truly unique experience. However, considering how every mind is an island, sometimes we forget the sea. Our antecedents and shoulders in which we stand upon to look out into the sea. As I was scavenging a zine to write about I stumbled upon the fabulous and extremely validating manifesto zine for the Lesbian Avengers. A hilarious and extremely dykey call to action, impatience, and mobilization effort. What a comfort…

Founded in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers were a direct action group focused on lesbian visibility  and survival. According to their telling of their history: “Too impatient for lobbying or letter-writing, these fire-eating secretaries, students, cab drivers, journalists, artists and teachers joined together to create fabulous street actions that inserted lesbians into public life, forced political change, and redefined dykes as the coolest, most ferocious, girls on the block.”

The Lesbian Avengers' Civil Rights Organizing Project (LACROP)
Via: The Lesbian Avengers

The Lesbian Avengers’ Civil Rights Organizing Project (LACROP) went further, taking a group of lesbians where they’d never been before — into the heart of heartland politics. LACROP transformed grassroots organizing by putting local activists front and center, pushing them to be fully out, and eschewing mainstream campaign tactics that relied on people remaining in the closet. In Maine, it organized door-to-door canvassing and led community forums where people came out publicly—including teachers and small business owners. Where mainstream efforts in Idaho tended to do one thing, LACROP did almost the opposite: putting local queer people at the front of, and in charge of, goal setting, public events such as speak-outs and kiss-ins, and door-to-door outings sharing personal stories. By empowering queer people to come out and to engage directly with their communities, LACROP defeated an homophobic initiative in rural Idaho and laid long-term infrastructure for social change.

“Media was often key…The Lesbian Avengers shaped their actions for visual impact, and had media committees dedicated to outreach and ‘propaganda.’”

In the zine we have archived, the manifesto shows us this in the dykiest way possible. Bright pink and in all caps, I am truly being showered in lesbian rage. Calling out all lesbians from all corners and crevices they may be hiding in…

“IT’S TIME TO GET OUT OF THE BEDS, OUT OF THE BARS AND INTO THE STREETS TIME TO SEIZE THE POWER OF DYKE LOVE, DYKE VISION, DYKE ANGER DYKE INTELLIGENCE, DYKE STRATEGY. TIME TO ORGANIZE AND IGNITE. TIME TO GET TOGETHER AND FIGHT WE’RE INVISIBLE AND IT’S NOT SAFE- NOT AT HOME, ON THE JOB, IN THE STREETS OR IN THE COURTS WHERE ARE OUR LESBIAN LEADERS?”

The first page of this zine is a punch in the face but you like it. A punch that tells you to get your lesbo s*** together while having a good laugh. Truly enveloping yourself into the evil dyke archetype that gets matters mobile. There is an ever present sense of that impatience and exasperated feeling that any person, including myself, is overcome with one point or another that fuels a certain kind of anger:

“WE’RE NOT WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE. WE ARE THE APOCALYPSE. WE’LL BE YOUR DREAM AND THEIR NIGHTMARE.” 

The Lesbian Avengers queer political language and “propaganda.” Using catchy short sentences of action and purpose such as the ones we have been too heavily familiarized with in campaign cycles. This time around in the most queer way possible of such language: instead of performative words to gain votes, its real promises. Instead of comforting and digestible slogans, we have “predatory” lesbianistic and often sexual threats to enact fear and recruit!

On the following page of the zine we are introduced more formally to the main aims and goals of the Lesbian Avengers: Who are the Lesbian Avengers? What is direct action? And why no abstract theoretical discussion?

Welcome AvengerThey define direct action as “a public intervention ranging in creative form from marches to street theater to speak outs to cathartic spray painting of anti-hate slogans.”

Such creative interventions are what should be at the core of mobilization efforts to make the public uncomfortable, aware, and inconvenienced. Reminding that lesbians are here.

WHY NO ABSTRACT THEORETICAL DISCUSSION? How many of us have sat in meetings arguing political theory to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, to the point where we run screaming to the nearest dance floor for release from the frustration?! To keep our work pro-active and fulfilling and successful, we focus our political discussions on the creation and purpose of an action. We agree to disagree on political ideology--it is too easy to create false polarities. We also encourage women to take responsibility for their own suggestions--be willing to make them happen. Instead of saying "Someone should..." try saying "I will." or "Who will do this with me?" In our meetings, if you disagree with a proposal on the floor, instead of tearing it apart, propose another way of realizing the goal. The Avengers is a place where ideas are realized, where lesbians can have an impact. A crucial part of that is learning how to propose alternatives instead of just offering critiques. Be willing to put your body where your brain is--matter over mind!In the section on abstract theoretical discussion they ask “How many of us have sat in meetings arguing political theory to the point of mental and physical exhaustion, to the point where we run screaming to the nearest dance floor for release from the frustration?!” ME! ME! ME!

I will not make the case against abstract theoretical discussion, if anything I am all for it. I want to surround my life with abstractism, art, and theory. In the overdetermination of understanding and defining, we have lost the sauce. What the western mindset has failed to realize is that abstractism and theory is not the thing itself but the action of forming meaning and nomenclature for aspects of experience, humanity, and existence, that are based in reality. Simply that our language doesn’t not have tangible tools to describe such elements. What we are describing is very real and the action that must be connected to it must be very real as well. One drives the other and vice versa. Theory and abstractism exist because of reality. Discussions around theory that don’t leave you stimulated and itchy with the capacity and fuel to do something… going out to the street, creating something, forming a connection… babe. Discussions on political theory that lead to inaction because of political polarity… isn’t that the antithesis of why we are here? You forgot to touch the grass that you have been reading so much about! It’s right there!

Their communiqué-style newsletters gave activism the duality of action and being cool. “Look how much we’re getting done, and how much fun we’re having while we do it.” Using camp design, being loud and threatening about their lesbian activism, and putting their money where their mouth is, the Lesbian Avengers reminded me of my frustrations are not alone and to drown in my anger so it turns into passive resentment. There is always the fuel for it… like vandalism to a Navy billboard:


Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).

Queer City, Pt 2: Rachel Pepper – “Life in the early 1990’s was about living in the moment”

Zine of the Gay

QUEER CITY. EDITORS RACHEL 3 The female editor of QUEER CITY is Rachel Pepper. By day she's a high-powered book clerk at A Different Light, San Francisco's queer bookstore, by night she splits a dual personna of club-girl extraordinaire and house bound recluse. She writes a bi-weekly column for the Bay Area Reporter called "The Outer Limit," is a San Francisco correspondant for OUTWEEK mag, and loves to undertake time consuming, low profit projects like this one. Check out her first solo 'zine effort, CUNT, a hot hip dyke publication she knocked out in three days of frenzied creative hysteria. Rachel's a self-described "ACI UP Type" who participates in activist politics, dyes her hair blonde, is pondering getting a tattoo, and is a strong-willed Taurean. You can sometimes find her on the stage of Club 0 dancing nasty and cruising the scene with her friend Daula, or soaking in Osento's hot tub with her master gal Deborah. Se loves cute women in black leather jackets who are bold enough to approach her in bars and ask for her phone number. Snap to it, girls. TOP PHOTO BY ELIZABETH MANGELSDORF BOTTOM PHOTO ALEX
From Queer City

After I spoke with Alexander Chee about Queer City, he connected me with his coauthor, Rachel Pepper.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Queer City distinguished itself from other queer zines and cultural efforts of its time in having two co-authors of different genders, attempting to bridge the gap between the city’s dyke and fag scenes as well as to the document queer, trans, leather, and/or SM scenes that existed outside of or in more complex relationship to those boundaries.

In her sections of the zine, Rachel writes about good spots for women amidst the male-centric world of the Castro (“And if you’re feeling particularly raunchy, consider getting your labia pierced. After all, if Susie Bright could do it, so can you!”), “the truth about girl bars” (“When the dance floor is too packed, slam dance everyone out of your way or create your own dance floor somewhere else”), and the city’s top attractions for out-of-town lesbian visitors (“And you must take your bod to Osento, our women’s bath house, where you can join women of all sizes and colors sitting around the hottub or in the saunas. Rather than any bar, Osento, whose business is spread primarily through word of mouth, is the true heart of San Francisco’s women’s community.”)

Rachel kindly provided the following recollections by email:

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Life in the early 1990’s was about living in the moment. There were few distractions: no internet, no cell phones. We lived intently every day, in part because we were young and passionate and queer and in love with it all and each other, and also in part because so many of us were dying. We only had each other, and we lived for each day we had alive. It was the most incredible time of my life. I worked in the epicenter of it all, A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco. Part bookstore, part community center, part waystation for disenfranchised queers. We were the pulse, and I reveled in it.

Queer City was born from our restless quest for meaning, for love, for leaving our mark, and to say: we were here, we do actually feel blessed to live here, and maybe you can get here too. We also liked the union of young dykes and gay men- a newer concept in 1990. We wanted to represent unity as young queer people. Making the zine was fun. It was all done by hand, low tech, then photocopied down the street at Copy Central. I think I assembled it by hand too. Then we sold it in the bookstore, and it was very popular. No doubt it traveled around the world. We made a limited run of T shirts too, which sold out. I think I’ve still got one around somewhere!

 

I wasn’t really influenced by other zines, I think we just had our own vision and went for it, but other classic zines I loved at the time included Hothead Paisan. I even ended up getting a tattoo from Diane DiMassa to celebrate turning 30, then flew to London afterwards. Ah, youth!

Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.

Queer City, Pt 1: Alexander Chee on the DIY spirit of early-90s San Francisco

Zine of the Gay

“Queer City is a dream. Queer City is when you were 10 or 12 or 18 or 24 and you thought that you were the only freak in the entire world like yourself and that you were trapped forever. You wanted to die rather than lie, wanted to flee and be free. Then you moved away or ran away or hitched and when you told them you were in SF they went ‘Oh, I see,’ as if everything made sense, and though you wanted to say more it evaporated in the face of that tone in their voice. You wanted to say more but you weren’t read to burn bridges, or anything else. Yet.

Here you are. We’ll tell you where you can go, how to get there, but the rest is up to you. Have fun, be safe, watch our for your brothers and sisters. Welcome to Queer City.”

Queer City zine, printed on blue-gray paper, with blocky lettering and a central oval image of rows and rows of tract homes. In the bottom right, it reads, Volume 1, $4.50Queer City is a charming, bitchy, opinionated guide to the San Francisco of 1991: where to eat, how and where to cruise, which nights to go to which clubs, and the kind of gossipy, hand-on-your shoulder kind of advice that makes you feel like you have a cool older friend showing you around. (“if you think noone is watching you make out with that girl at Club Q, you’re wrong, but do it anyway”)

It’s a version of San Francisco that I never had the pleasure of seeing, having only visited the city for the first time in 2015, but one that looms large in my mental landscape since I’ve read about it many times across the work of many writers.

I was surprised and delighted to get to the final page of the zine and see the name of one of those authors who had made the San Francisco of that era come alive for me. Alexander Chee’s 2018 essay collection How To Write an Autobiographical Novel includes recollections of organizing with ACT UP and Queer Nation, of Hallowe’en in the Castro, and of running from police who wore latex gloves as they beat gay protestors with batons.

Page from Queer City reading "Alex Chee", with a collage of photos.Along with Rachel Pepper, who I’ll be interviewing next week, he was one of the zine’s two coauthors: Queer City aimed to bridge the gap between the city’s dyke and fag scenes, as well as to document queer, trans, leather, and/or SM scenes that existed outside of or in more complex relationship to those boundaries.

When I sent a message through Alexander Chee’s website contact form to ask him about the zine, he replied immediately. We spoke on Zoom, and I had the pleasure of reintroducing him to Queer City, which surprised him in being both “cuter than I remembered” and, at $4.50 in 1991 money, which is over $10 now, costlier. (“I’m a little shocked to see the price tag, to be honest. Fucking expensive zine.”) The following is a version of our conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.

 

∇Δ∇Δ∇Δ

Former location of A Different Light San Francisco, which closed in 2011. Photo from Wikimedia Commons user InSapphoWeTrust.

Lee: So you mentioned that you were working at A Different Light Books and lots of folks you knew were making zines, and that was how Queer City came about.

Alexander: Yeah. I don’t know if people know this about independent bookstores, but they function as, or functioned back then as, or maybe our bookstore specifically functioned as, a kind of community center, an information booth.

A Different Light had the first shelf of books, for example, devoted specifically to information for people living with HIV and AIDS, and people would call all the time for various information-related questions.

All of this was before the internet of course. And we were also selling city guides by these very corporate gay places. We would look at them and think, “Not in a million years. I wouldn’t go to any of these places.” And people were moving to the area all the time, basically to be queer and to explore their sense of identity and sexuality, and their desire for adventure. So it was a desire to respond to that as well.

I think it’s important for everybody to try making a zine at least once if they want to be a writer, partly because you get over this sense of waiting for permission to communicate your message.

Lee: What were some of the other zines that you people in your life were making or that you were reading or aware of at that time?

Issue #5 of Diseased Pariah News, via the Internet Archive

Alexander: My friend Choire Sicha and I would sometimes make zines just to communicate with each other. I mean, we talked a lot too. But I seem to remember he made me a birthday zine once.

Our friend D-L Alvarez, the artist, had a really cute and sexy zine called Brains that I liked. I think the tagline was like, “for guys who wear glasses who like guys who wear glasses” or something. It was basically for nerdy queers.

Andrea Lawlor and I go way back to Iowa City in 1992, I’m trying to remember when their Judith Butler zine came out, if it was before or after I met them.

Diseased Pariah News. Hothead Paisan was amazing and hilarious.

We both wanted [Queer City] to [help] people have a sense of what was going on outside of their respective gender and sexual orientational preferences.

Lee: I was wondering about that. It seemed like there was a strong point being put on having editors of different genders. Was the scene pretty balkanized by gender at that time?

QUEER ISListening to Sinead O'Connor, Girls in the Nose, Fifth Column, Revolting Cocks, but probably not gay men's choral tapes or super zappy women's music. Except "Turning it Over" on rainy Sunday afternoons. the BOX Club Uranus Knowing queer cinema isn't Longtime Companion but is Barbara Hammer, Bruce LaBruce & GB Jones, and Azian Murudin. Being present but not necessarily admitted. Getting off on the work of Pat Califia, no matter if you're male or female. Queer means never having to apologize for your opinions when you've offended someone--especially when you've purposefully tried to. Putting a Rubberman poster up in your bathroom and a Jessica Tanzer print up over your bed. If you're a woman you find gay male porn films more stimulating than lesbian-produced ones, and that if you're a gay man, you sneak into your dyke pal's room to look at her Ca Our Backs. Men and women both wearing day glo stickers, labryses, and cockrings. Piercings and tattoos Considering Interview, Homocore and MS. all integral parts of your regular reading. Knowing who Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller were before their NEA grants were denied. Queer is a melding of lifestyle and identity. Cocteau Twins This Mortal Coil Dead Can Dance Going into Queer Nation with your male roomie and knowing that he will be greeted more warmly by the lesbians, and you by the gay men. nice & queer LIBERATION NOT ASSIMILATION POSITIVELY QUEER
From Queer City zine

Alexander: I mean, I remember doing a go-go act at a lesbian sex club, which was one of the weirder gigs that I’ve ever had. I did it with a friend who I won’t name here. I don’t know what they want people to know that they were there.

But yeah, I think the activism was bringing us all together. I had come out there with a bunch of friends, predominantly a lesbian crowd. There’s a picture of me in college that’s like me and 10 women friends that I like to call “Alex and the Lesbians”. And they were the people who were around me as I moved out to San Francisco.

At Wesleyan, we were a very mixed group, partly because we had to be. It was a small school, so we didn’t have the luxury of the kinds of balkanization that were happening in the scene that we arrived in. So we were sort of like, “why is it so weird?”

I understand gender exclusive spaces in certain ways, certainly everyone is tired of us having people descending on a gay bar for a hen party.

Another part of this that I think is not visible, is that Warren, who’s listed here [in Queer City], was a housemate of ours. It’s basically our apartment. We had an apartment above the It’s Tops Diner, directly across from the sex club 1808 Market, which I think has since closed. It was so cheap. We each had two rooms. So Queer City is very much a product of our household, as well as A Different Light Books.

Lee: Was this the only zine that you made that was for public consumption, rather than as a friend thing?

Boy With Arms Akimbo poster, via University of Rochester AIDS Education Collection

Alexander:  Yeah, I think so. I was a part of a few different zines at the time, a few different cultural efforts.

There was something called Boy With Arms Akimbo. It was a queer art activism group. A lot of the people I knew at the time were exploring different ways of thinking about media and how we were going to communicate with each other, and how we were going to organize community and organize politically.

Lee: I was thinking about how you’ve written about feeling very ambivalent about doing an MFA as someone who was coming out of the more DIY, punk-y, activist-y background. I was curious how zines fit into that for you, in the different ways you’ve engaged with writing and putting writing into the world over time.

Alexander: I think it’s important for everybody to try making a zine at least once if they want to be a writer, partly because you get over this sense of waiting for permission to communicate your message.

I’m thinking of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah who has a great story about zines. He and his friends made [a zine] shortly after Trayvon’s death. He was so sure that it was going to change everything. And then of course, it didn’t really. But I think when I think back to his story, what I would add [is that] it changed him. I think it was a big part of him becoming the writer that he is.

Lee: I felt so grateful that zines have been the way that I came into the world of making things, and that the perspective of people who are waiting for institutional permission to make something is really alien to me.

Alexander: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the liberatory sense of it is something that stays with you, whatever else you end up doing.

Lee: Yeah, absolutely. It can be applied to so many things in life: that you can just do if you give yourself permission to.

Alexander: Right. And I’m not surprised at all that, for example, Choire has gone on to have the career that he does, given the way that he was applying himself to making zines.

Lee: San Francisco at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties sounds like it was such a particular and pivotal time and place. What are some things that stand out to you about that time, or that people might not understand who weren’t there?

Alexander: I guess it felt apocalyptic. It turns out that was premature. I mean, it was apocalyptic in a way. A prelude.

I wrote about this era recently for my newsletter, about how to orient yourself in relationship to writing and publishing, whether or not you get an MFA. It’s something my students ask me about a lot.

Part of what I was trying to say is, if you don’t have a scene where you are, here are some ways you can think about making them. If there’s no reading series where you live, what if you tried to create one? A writer’s group: what if you tried to create that?

And I think that [in the time Queer City came out] there was a sort of DIY, activist, “if you thought of it, you gave yourself a job” approach to culture, and I feel like a lot of people are very much waiting for somebody else to do it, and wondering, and almost angry, about why no one [is doing it], when actually that’s the clearest sign that they should do it. So that’s what I was trying to get people to get past.

"OutWrite - a literary force of the '90s" judged Lambda Book Report. "Literally overwhelming" reported the Seattle Gay News about OutWrite90. "An event that symbolizes the excellence of gay and lesbian literature" proclaimed The Advocate on OutWrite91. OutWrite90 and 91 were the largest gatherings of lesbian and gay writers in history. You are cordially invited to the event that will surpass both. Out Write 92號 The 3rd National Lesbian & Gay Writers Conference
OutWrite ’92 promo materials, via Northeastern University

I think back to all these experiences that I was having back then, and how often they were the first of their kind. Working on the first OutWrite conference, which was the first national American LGBT literary conference. Working on the startup of Out magazine, when I moved to New York in 1991, which was the first magazine of its kind.

I felt, “Well, of course, this is what we have to do because it’s needed.” I wasn’t getting too caught up in like, “how cool that it’s historic” until later, maybe decades later. Because at the time, it was like, well, we’re trying this and it might not work out.

Because of this, I had this very, very gay resume, at a time when a lot of people would not, but if I didn’t have it, I looked like I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t published anywhere. I hadn’t worked anywhere. Literally, all of my experience was gay. So in a way, I had to make it work. I had to be a part of it because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I remember in 2004, 2005, a former student who had gotten a job at a major men’s magazine in New York was at an editorial meeting where my name came up, well, he looks a little too gay for us. He was really surprised to hear the editors talk about me that way. And I was like, oh, OK. I had imagined that they talk about me that way, and that is how they talk about me.

Lee: Not even subtext, huh? Just right out there.

Alexander: Right there.

Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.

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