https://iwriteinbooks.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/eating-fire-kelly-j-cogswell/

A young, starry-eyed Kentucky twenty-something lands in New York City in the early nineties, sketchbook, guitar, and dreams in her pockets. In the grunge and starlight of the ACT-UP era, Kelly Cogswell runs in and out of light and shadows with her merry band of Lesbian Avengers, artists, and writers, finding her home and finding herself in the process.

Sounds good, right?

It sounds like fiction and reads like it, too. I’m sure there is some flowery prose added to some of the elements of the book but I tracked down events and names and dates and, yes, folks this is really Kelly’s life.

I ended up picking this up for a paper, last semester, and it has become one of my favorite recommendations.

Though the queer culture of New York and the time period vary from other times and places, the narrative and energy and action are so clearly representative of the queer communities we’ve all encountered, in one form or another. I find so many narratives written by men for these communities which is great in and of itself, however, it’s sometimes very needed to have that strong, clear, queer female voice singing out for this purpose.

I’m really glad I’m back to reviewing, going into this semester so I can work a little real-life work into the fictional stuff. Especially the sexuality fiction, but the harder stuff in general, is always better taken with a lot of the true history behind the concept. ( )

Lesbian feminist guerrilla theater

Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly Cogswell (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95).

It’s been more than 20 years, so it’s time to pay attention to the wave of gay and lesbian activism of the early ’90s. In this case, that’s a good thing.

Kelly Cogswell helped found the Lesbian Avengers in 1992, and this book chronicles her transformation from recovering Southern Baptist to—literally—fire eating lesbian. Lesbian Avengers were known for being almost as much about protest art and street theater as about political action, which makes the portion of the book devoted to their early activity fascinating.

Frankly, the Lesbian Avengers were a lot of fun, and the perfect antidote to the lie about lesbian feminists lacking a sense of humor. They had irony, sarcasm (not the same thing as irony), and a playful sense of guerrilla theater.

Less page-turning but far more important are the sections about how Cogswell came of age as an activist, learned from her mistakes, faced up to the conflicts within the group (including those over racism), and managed to stay involved.

Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger is focused on Cogswell’s experience; it’s less analytical and far more personal—which is kinda the point when it comes to politics.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published on Thursday, April 3, in the Sacramento News and Review: “Protest art and action.” ( )

Eating Fire opens in 1992. The Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is fighting for the right to march in New York’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade; anti-gay violence is prevalent; the AIDS epidemic is underway; mainstream gay and lesbian activist groups are rejecting their fringes in an effort to present themselves as normal and “framing their campaign as a question of abstract equality and civil rights, and not about those creepy flesh-and-blood homos.”

The author, Kelly Cogswell has arrived in New York from Kentucky, having abandoned her Southern Baptist faith, ready to live a life full of art, words, and action. She is one of the founding members of the Lesbian Avengers, a direct-action group determined to keep the fringe at the heart of things, celebrating and empowering this part of the community, rather than sweeping it under a (very tasteful, I’m sure) rug.

Cogswell’s voice is sure, brimming with passion and intelligence. She drops readers into the middle of this historical moment, taking them on a wild and wide-ranging ride. She builds a home for herself in the Lesbian Avengers, whose organizing includes the principle that “Butch, femme and androgynous dykes, leather queers, drag kings and queens, transsexuals and trans-genders will not be thrown to the wolves so that straight-acting ‘gay people’ can beg for acceptance at our expense.”

One of the most valuable messages of Cogswell’s book is that direct action is an essential tool for political change: “Everybody should know how to use it. Especially dykes who rarely have lobbyists or representatives or cultural power…. Every time the Avengers pulled off an action, we weren’t just making lesbians visible or trying to change society. We were changing lesbians. Creating a new kind of dyke who saw public space as hers, who could step out into the street and make noise, be herself, feel at home in the world. In some ways, we were the last utopian group of the millennium, aiming not only for justice, but for pure freedom.” This mix of celebration, self-affirmation, wicked humor and outrage is all too rare in the U.S.’s current political discussions, and our current era is lessened by this fact.

Eating Fire captures the way that the internet transformed activism, allowing groups and individuals to produce low-cost, high-quality reporting, argument, and education. At one point in her book, Cogswell, whose lightening-quick mind has her offering claims and rebuttals one after another, gives the role of technology in the more recent “Arab Spring,” a nod, while reminding us that revolution requires much more than a strong on-line presence and regular tweets: “the triumph of nonviolent organizing [that was the Arab Spring] was getting called a revolution by the internet despite crowds in the street day after day, despite years of activism.”

Reading this book can remind us to be our own bravest, weirdest selves: “Visibility isn’t change itself, but a kind of wedge others can follow.” In a time when the politics of visibility seems much more about obstructionism than creativity, we need this book, this reminder of what we have done—not because we need to return to the past, but because of the necessity of working towards a transformative future. ( )