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Here is how I felt at my first ACT-UP Women’s Committee
meeting. I felt young. Hair too long. Good enough dyke camouflage.
Right shoes. Who are all these
women? Adults.
Glasses that look like Annie Liebowitz, on dykes with perfect
doll cut short hair and I felt like a poseur. I
am here on a date with the desirable Miss Simone Santorelli. I must be so very very wonderful myself
to have landed her. What a crock.
Once, I was in
Fire Island sharing a house with a bunch of women and I was taking a shower. It was late afternoon and I was taking my
time. Getting all the sand out of my hair for
the evening. Shaving, yes shaving, my legs. One of the women broke into the bathroom and started
yelling about the AIDS crisis.
“People are dying
and no one is doing anything about it. In the
streets. People are dying in the streets. The West Village is a concentration camp. Filled with men who shuffle down the street, men who
danced at Studio 54 like last year. Men who fought
at Stonewall. And no one is doing shit
about it.”
Especially lesbians. We were laughing our superior fucking heads off. No condoms, no anal sex, no 100 partners a week, no
AIDS you motherfuckers. No one came
out and said it. Lesbians picked each
other up like glaciers, faggots like mayflies. And
now we were riding atop the crisis; no harm no foul.
It wasn’t even
that simple. We were jealous.
I was very jealous. Everything
I am saying about all lesbians I mean about myself double-time. I still am green monstered about D.’s sexual proclivities. I could ride the subway downtown from Columbia with
him to Queens for Indian food and sari shopping. We
would go one stop, he would get off with some guy, I would get off discreetly
after them and read. He would come back fifteen minutes later or ten or five
wiping the cum off his lips, and on we’d go. It
could happen every stop until I made him listen to my stomach growl or warned
him how soon the shops closed.
I hated him for
that. I could go to the Cubbyhole with him, and
I would talk to three women from New Jersey who were married but knew they
were gay and that was my night, and he would go home with the one other gay
man dragged along by some lesbian for company.
I could not,
I am repeating this for effect,
I could not get picked up, and he
always could.
We will revisit my infirmities later.
We, the lesbians, lipstick or otherwise,
were jealous. Suddenly the exact behavior we hated
was causing our brothers to die in the streets.
Hmm.
Whose crisis?
Mine actually. My crisis. From
day one. From 1984 when I picked up the New
York Times and saw the article that first gave the acronym GRID. Gay-Related Immunodeficiency.
And I knew. I had my
first anxiety attack. My first Valium. My first blanked-out day from Valium. When I came out of the balloon feeling that everything
was just right, I knew everything was just wrong.
And it stayed wrong and got worse.
First it was Jose’s
lover. Jose was Sister D’s Fashion Institute of
Technology roommate. I never even knew Jose’s
lover’s name until he got sick. He lived
on far West 57th street and we took care of him around the clock for about
a month. He had pneumonia.
He went to St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital and died.
They said it was the gay disease.
We knew what it was.
My mother called and said to come
home to Connecticut.
Then it was the guy who lived next
door to me in Brooklyn. Old Italian guy. Stopped me on the street and said,
“I’m a fag too, and I’m sick.”
Showed me a purple bump on his arm. We had no idea then what Kaposi’s Sarcoma was.
He got so sick I didn’t know what
to do. I took him to the hospital on 7th Avenue
in Park Slope and he died.
Gay disease.
My mother came to visit and took
me to Elizabeth Arden.
I got a facial and the best color
fuck-me red lipstick I’ve ever seen.
Who died next?
That was when no one died for a whole year. Then everyone
died all at once.
Everyone I knew died all at once
and the West Village became a mortuary.
A fucking concentration
camp. I know that’s not a cool thing
to say, as a Jewess.
And gracious Larry Kramer founded
ACT-UP and people got mad and I got political. I
got politics to go with my wardrobe. And a job
to go with my politics and a life to go with my job and clothes to go with
my life.
*
My first ACT-UP Women’s Committee
meeting was a strange one. The boys. The boys. It
had been all about the dying boys. The strange-looking
mottled purple dying boys or the live flesh clone ones pumped up hard and
mad to show they’re alive.
The Chelsea Clone boys in the cut-offs
and muscle shirts.
They looked so good and we all turned
our heads and thanked them, thanked gods, whichever ones came to mind. I thanked Shiva.
“Thank you for coming along as these
graceful curvy faggots and for being beautiful.
We need a little of this when everyone is dying around us.”
When the best levity is Sister D.’s
friend saying,
“Of course I have the plague, my
dear, I was very popular in the 70s. If I didn’t
have it I’d lie and say I did. ”
ACT-UP was all about no glove no
love baby. Posters were all over GMHC and the
NY Department of Health AIDS Hotline, and then came the ACT-UP Women’s Committee
and I was scared.
Here comes my infirmity.
It has taken me this long to get
to it so you know it’s bad.
Women scare the shit out of me.
Make me nervous.
I want to cry. I feel inferior.
Like I am doing something wrong.
I can’t ever get it
right. I can’t even do lipstick. I just stick to the night color in the day. I can’t even pick the right fucking shade. I suck at being a girl let alone relating to them. I hated the thought of the ACT-UP Women’s Committee. Unless it was staffed by faggots and junkies,
I didn’t want to go. At least with drag queens
like Sister D I could be schooled in how I was supposed to act by people who’d
been schooled in how to be women.
I’m a prime studier of the world
of drag. Being a woman is all drag. Not just drag queens. All
women are drag renditions of women. We only
succeed when we fail to live up to the standards. We
are the best women, I think, or at least we are the ones I can live with,
when we throw in the towel. Give up on that Connecticut
ideal. Be real. Even
if real is a guy in a dress. Real is not perfect.
My mother is the perfect woman. She comes into the city from Connecticut and takes
me to Elizabeth Fucking Arden because that’s how she wants to spend her time. The pillows in her living room match her throw rug. I can’t explain it because that would mean I understand
it.
The point being, Sister D. is more
honest than my mother when he shaves his pubes and tucks his penis back
and out of the way. And I am scared of women
who don’t get this. Even dykes. Even me. Because the dykeola part of me
gets this and wears 40s dresses with Doc Martens but the Connecticut part
of me still shaves her legs. And I won’t date
women with bad haircuts or those little tails of hair growing down, the ones
they’ve never cut, or who . . . oh, you get it. And my best friends are Sister D and Artemis,
both of whom I grew up with, in Connecticut.
I suck as a revolutionary.
So I’m scared of bars, I am
scared of girls and I’m scared of Simone Santorelli who I want to sleep with
more than anything in the whole world.
*
How did I end up
at the ACT-UP Women’s Committee? Fate. No, God.
There is a Jewish proverb about horses.
Actually, it may not be a Jewish proverb, but I heard it
at a wedding at the Gay Jewish Synagogue and here it is.
There are three kinds of horses,
which do you want to be? The first kind God leads
gently to the water, the second not so gently but it goes, and the third
God drags and whips the shit out of and still the horse has not gotten to
the water. Most of us are the third kind of horse.
Here I am, a lesbian, who is scared
to death of women. I would say that the goddess
is whipping the shit out of my ass.
This going to an ACT-UP meeting,
planning a demonstration just for women, all the fuss about women, being
there with a woman when I’m a dyke. This might
have been construed as a date under normal circumstances but with me there
are no normal circumstances.
With Simone all there ever are are
contingencies.
Ever.
She is a trapeze of contingencies.
The woman is a flying fucking
circus of exes and breasts and shoes and minor fame and god only knows what-all. I simply followed in her wake as we entered the Gay
and Lesbian Community Center and melted into the crowd.
I would not have gone. I
would not have gone. I would not have
gone. Enough men are dying.
Demos are demos. I’ve been arrested,
a lot. I hate it.
I do it. I march in Gay Pride. I muff dive. Okay. I work at the New York City Department of Health AIDS
Hotline as my job all day all week, 40 hours a week.
I did not need to go. This was
the goddess and the whip thing. I am the third
kind of horse.
LET’S
HAVE SEX; LESBIANS AND AIDS
Guidelines
for Protecting Ourselves:
- You can safely engage in the following activities: body rubbing, social (dry ) kissing, massage, hugging,
voyeurism, exhibitionism, fantasy, costumes, masturbation, finger penetration
wearing latex gloves or finger cots, individual vibrators and sex toys.
- Most probably safe: French
(wet) kissing, protected oral sex using a dental dam, S/M without the exchange
of body fluids.
- Unsafe: unprotected oral sex,
unprotected rimming (mouth/anus contact), unprotected hand/vaginal anal contact,
any activity that could draw blood, sharing sex toys, urine or feces in mouth
or vagina.
[A Publication of the Women’s Action Committee of ACT-UP New
York]
Lyssa
Wonders About the Subway
I once dated this
Puerto Rican girl who told me that I had a sign with “Fuck with me” written
all over my back. A white girl from
Connecticut who smiles. On the train. Forget it.
I keep waiting to
be as scary as Simone. You know. Go to the Bronx and feel safe.
Walk down Fifth Avenue knowing my family owns a plantation
in Haiti, like Simone’s actually does, but let’s not forget she’s white, and
rich, like me, but she feels so cool that she belongs anywhere. I know full well it’s not going to happen to me.
I’ll never feel cool. Not like Simone does. Not
like Sistah D., who feels cool in a dress and heels.
I will always feel like the big old dork that I am. Moving to the East Village isn’t going to change that. Moving to San Francisco isn’t going to change that. Having my own track marks, or the life to go with
them, my own coterie – like Simone, nothing.
Not even getting the girl is going
to change that.
Not even curing AIDS.
*
At my second ACT-UP Women’s Coalition
meeting we planned a big now demonstration.
One in which we will go up to Shea Stadium and give out safer sex
information to all the straight chicks who are obviously too stupid to figure
out for themselves that men are bad news and that sex is dangerous. This sounded like a bad idea to me for many reasons.
If I were straight I would never
take advice from someone who looked like the woman standing next to me. Short, chunky, big glasses, purple toenails, flat-top
dyed black-black, jeans rolled up at the bottom, men’s work shirt, and Doc
Martins. I would run away fast. I’d fuck her. I mean as
a dyke, I’d fuck her. If I were a straight chick
from Queens, I’d have my boyfriend beat her up.
Me, maybe, I would take advice from
me. On an off day. An
off-dyke-day, when the Laura Ashley creeps past the desire for the right
leather jacket. That perfect leather
jacket in the sky that, of course Simone owns. That
black jacket belonging on a Harley, with the zippers everywhere and perfectly
worn in. My mother could even understand
this because it may not be a couch pillow or a purse, but it is the perfect
accessory and she understands the need to accessorize.
The jacket goes with the Laura Ashley dress I am sometimes
guilty of wearing, and it goes with converse high-tops.
This demo is also a bad idée
because straight people believe AIDS has nothing to do with them, and because
women think they are their man’s only partner, and because no one believes
they have ever done it with a junkie, and because a bunch of queers at a
sporting event outnumbered by drunk men is bad.
Especially while we are telling their
bitches to blow them with a condom on.
Even if we show those bitches how
to roll that condom on with their mouths, a la bath house bad boys or West
Side Highway hookers.
Anyhow, we planned this demo and
all I can think is, shit, I have to take the train to Shea Stadium. I hate that. The Subway
fear alone is going to be a pack of gum just in one direction. But I can’t let on, since I am new and Simone’s hanger
on.
I’m just yessing everyone to death.
AIDS IS NOT A BALL GAME
Single: Only one woman has ever been included
in government-sponsored tests for new drugs for AIDS.
Double: Women
diagnosed with AIDS die twice as fast as men.
Triple: Since
the 1984 World Series, the number of women with AIDS in NYC has tripled as
a result of sexual contact with men.
Most Straight
Men Still Don’t Use Condoms.
[leaflet
by ACT-UP/NY Shea Stadium Action, 1988]
Having A Ball
For all I know, it’s just
us, me and Simone. This, in my mind, is another
date.
I was actually more worried about
what to wear. What do you wear to shock all of
New York and maybe get the shit kicked out of you by Met fans, the police,
the security guys, who else, oh, the people on the subway.
I mean you have to look good. Not shocking.
I’ve forgotten what straight girls wear. I walked around the village looking at people for
days beforehand. Here is what I came
up with: neon-colored lace, pink t-shirts, yellow patent leather pumps and
lots of crucifixes. I couldn’t go there. The best I could do was a black and white striped
tank top and cut-off jeans shorts. At
least I owned both of them back in high school when I did boys. Does that count as camouflage?
But it was okay. First
of all because Simone makes everything around her cool.
Very cool. I had to fake feeling
fine. I hate baseball. I’m not the field hockey, basketball, softball kind
of dyke. I hate organized sports or
organized religion or organized anything. Even
organized demonstrations. I much prefer lying
in the road chanting at the cops, “Your shoes don’t match your purse.” It may have less of an HIV-related point, but it feels
more anarchist and less scary.
Every woman I have ever slept with
was there. Really. When
I say 400 people were there, I mean 400 faggots and dykes. It was like going to the theater downtown. The ACT-UP bigwigs had these signs printed up that
were queer, in the way we said it in fourth grade. “Oh
my God, that is so queer.” White print on black background. They said stuff like, “Don’t balk at safe
sex,” and “Strike out AIDS.” Huge signs that spanned
whole rows of people. We were supposed to hold
them so that people could read them. How
could anyone miss them?
Simone and I made out a little to prove a point. I hated it because I was sure I was going to die. Someone would remember me when I had to go pee, and
say, “That’s the dyke who was kissing that blonde girl.
Get her.”
I don’t do so well in the real world.
Before we got to sit down we handed out flyers that had
hits and runs about safe sex directed at men. Straight
men. Even though I am petrified of women that
does not mean I identify with straight men.
Just the opposite in fact. I don’t
think I get them at all. I wanted to go to a
pay phone and call by brother and have him explain many of the things going
on at the game, not the least of which was the spitting.
Mostly I wanted to sink into the floor.
It was just like dancing school.
Everyone is looking at me, my hem is showing, I look stupid. Except here, it is true. I
look mortifyingly out of place and stupid. I
am not a Met fan or a Yankee fan. I am a pussy
fan, but not this kind of pussy. There were women
everywhere and I wouldn’t fuck a one of them.
Except the aforementioned hundreds I’d already slept with.
I really wish I made a better revolutionary. I really wish I swash-buckled my way through the demo
like I have through others, but I didn’t. I usually
like getting arrested. I feel self-righteous. I mean, I go through most of my life feeling self-righteous
anyway, so getting arrested just makes me feel justified.
Makes it feel directed and valid.
This was different. I was one second
from crying the entire time. One second. If someone had tapped my shoulder, I would have jumped
down Simone’s shirt and given myself away.
Any minute these guys were going
to get sick of this mishigoss and turn on us.
International kick-a-fag-or-dyke day at the ballpark. Instead of a tie to take home, or a lunch box, or
a signed ball, or hat, you get to bash a homo.
It’s one thing to expect police brutality, and it’s one thing to
know that walking down the street holding hands with your girlfriend looking
as you do (gay as hell) is asking for it, but this was another thing all together. We were inviting ourselves over to the land of straight
people for tea.
Arrest me sure.
We have a coffee can with money in it in the kitchen for
bail but, much worse, we did not get arrested: we were on TV. Not only did 20,000 people see us in the stadium,
but the whole demo was on C-Span. The
signs must have looked good on the screen. The
signs and the kissing and the chanting, if they caught that. The organizers must have been beside themselves. Publicity for the cause.
My cause too. I was pretty happy. Then my mother called.
My mother, with perfect psychic
abilities to catch everything on TV, be it reruns of her favorite show or
her daughter kissing a girl, called the next day and said, “Fine figure you
cut last night.”
I could pretend to have absolutely
no idea what that meant. Unfortunately,
years of developing my own psychic abilities with my mother allows me to decipher
it this way. She said something like,
“You have publicly humiliated me in front of the world, and even after that
expensive Ivy League education you seem to not understand the rules. Why did you not turn out like your brother? By the way, changing the world is not a realistic
vocation. Please find a husband. Preferably a doctor.
Settle down. Move home to Connecticut
where I can keep an eye on you and the grandchildren you will give me. Once you give up this awful and embarrassing lesbian
phase. It is too bad that now there is a public
record of it. Now your future husband may never
be able to run for public office.”
I wanted to ask something neutral,
like did my lipstick look okay, but thought better of it.
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