num_pages: 256
description: When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New Yorks East Village in 1992 she had just come out. An exSouthern Baptist born in Kentucky she was camping in an Avenue B loft scribbling poems and playing in an underground band trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed by the Lesbian Avengers instigating direct action campaigns battling cops on Fifth Avenue mobilizing 20000 dykes for a march on Washington D.C. and eating fireliterallyin front of the White House. At once streetwise and wistful Eating Fire is a witty and urgent coming-of-age memoir spanning two decades from the Culture War of the early 1990s to the War on Terror. Cogswells story is an engaging blend of picaresque adventure how-to activist handbook and rigorous inquiry into questions of identity resistance and citizenship. It is also a compelling personal recollection of friendships and fallings-out and of finding true loveseveral times over. After the Lesbian Avengers imploded Cogswell describes how she became a pioneering citizen journalist cofounding the Gully online magazine with the groundbreaking goal of offering queer views on everything.The first in-depth account of the influential Lesbian Avengers Eating Fire reveals the groups relationship to the queer art and activist scene in early 90s New York and establishes the media-savvy Avengers as an important precursor to groups such as Occupy Wall Street and La Barbe in France. A rare insiders look at the process and perils of street activism Kelly Cogswells memoir is an uncompromising and ultimately empowering story of creative resistance against hatred and injustice.
language: English
title: Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger
publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press