Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly Cogswell Page A

anniversary of Stonewall. The official organizers seemed to be turning it into a big, self-congratulatory celebration of how much they’d accomplished, and a chance to dress up in suits and ties and talk about their favorite word, equality, as if it solved everything. Others wanted confrontation. Queers were still dying of AIDS. We were still being beaten and raped and killed. For groups like the Avengers and ACT UP, the Stonewall anniversary was a call to remember our revolutionary roots as a liberation movement—the whole thing sparked by street kids, rent boys, and drag queens and butches who finally got sick of being hauled off by cops raiding gay bars and set the Village on fire.
    Who was right? Could we coexist? Kafka thought activists were always doomed: “They rule the streets and that makes them think they rule the world. They are mistaken. Behind them stand the secretaries, officials, and professional politicians, all the modern sultans for whom they are preparing the way to power.”

13.
    December passed in an uneasy blur. For Christmas, Ana and I split town and went to Paris. God, it was dark. It was dark when we got up, dark when we went to bed in that apartment we’d borrowed from some of Ana’s friends. It was partly jet lag, partly the medieval sun-deprived streets, mostly the endless rain. How it rained in Paris. Then rained some more. And after that it stormed. We’d eat breakfast in the afternoon, then venture outside in the streets where the sky was black, and the dark pavement streaked with water, though puddles reflected light from streetlights and headlamps and the yellow, steaming windows of bistros. I suppose there were holiday lights, too, but we couldn’t see them from underneath our umbrellas.
    With sopping feet, we went to cafés and galleries and museums. I tried to find some key to enter the place. Some crack to sneak through. In high school, I’d been routed to Spanish. Only snobs took French. The knee-jerk prejudice had stuck, even if I loved Marcel Duchamp, and had a thing for Gertrude Stein, who had a thing for the City of Light. I tried to chill out. France was Ana’s second home, the place she’d lived after Cuba, where I’d probably never go, and didn’t particularly want to.
    I knew a little bit about pottery, anyway. At the Louvre, I drug Ana to the Islamic art wing and showed her azulejos tiles, with the same abstract designs they had all over Spain. It was a legacy from successive conquering Arab waves that I’d learned about in high school. I didn’t think of them yet as Muslims but as árabes and mozárabes. I’d taken ceramics in college and blabbed to Ana about the composition of glazes and clays. When I had to piss, I discovered my French was as good as hers if I ignored everything people said and just followed their pointing fingers, “First go straight, then take a right, and you’ll find the bathroom.”
    We went to the Picasso Museum. He was familiar, too. That balding, laughing man photographed on the beach. That earnest almond-eyed boy. I stared a long time at the sketches from Guernica. War seemed distant, but the agony and violence real, embodied in that lopped-off arm holding a sword. The wild-eyed horse.
    Ana showed me all the places she lived and worked and studied, mapping the city with her life. From the movie theater where she took tickets to the place she lived during May ’68—which she had to explain. How students and workers rose up, sent de Gaulle fleeing to Germany, while the cops sent protesters fleeing over garden walls.
    I still couldn’t overcome my aversion to what I thought was France. All that dark, monumental stone. The blackness of ages. Narrow suffocating streets. The horror of the Luxembourg Gardens where trees were manicured into careful, mathematical shapes. Across the river in the Tuileries, the arch lined up with the pyramid lined up with the other arch, and an obelisk. No wonder Duchamp had evolved here, inserting tendrils