Nick was sitting on my bed paging through an old gay and lesbian magazine as I sorted through my belongings. I hadn’t exactly told Nick I was moving in with Melissa, just said I was bringing over some of my gear because I spent so much time there. “Six Activists Storm Helms’ Office, Gay Protesters Face a Year in Jail,” Nick read the headline from the August 1, 1990 issue of Outweek aloud. “Wait, is this you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
WASHINGTON—a band of six activists staged a raucous demonstration in the congressional office of Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina on July 17, and each of the six may face up to one year in jail and fines of up to $600 apiece . . .
“‘At 1:30 p.m.,’” Nick read, “‘demonstrators entered the mail room of Helms’ office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building by a back door. Once there, they used Helms’ facsimile machine to transmit press releases . . .’ That’s quite funny.”
We’d also used the phones to call newspapers and TV stations. I’d written a resignation letter for Jesse Helms, and we refused to leave until he signed it. In it, he apologized for being a homophobic bigot.
Nick was laughing. “That was in one of the gay papers here. I remember talking about it down the pub with some mates, and someone wanted to send you lot flowers across the pond.” She put the magazine back in the box with other items from my arrests, like bracelets made out of discarded flex-cuffs and a summons to appear in DC Superior Court for “unlawful entry” and “demonstrating in a capitol building without a permit” from an arrest at the FDA in 1988. The bright yellow paper had my thumbprint in the corner and described my hair as “brown frizz.” My jail paperwork from 1987 described my hair as “brown and blue,” and my jail receipt listing the possessions taken away from me at the time of my arrest read: “orange sweatshirt, jeans, one red and one black sneaker, six earrings, gay-rights shirt, two pens, three pieces of paper, one novel, yellow police tape, two lesbian-rights buttons, six tampons, a flex-cuff.”
“What’s this?” Nick pulled out a 1981 issue of the British gay newspaper Gay News and paged through it. “Why’d ya keep this one?”
In that late May-early June issue I’d learned about the British men deported from America for being gay, which led to my arrangements to fly TWA and leaflet my own flight back to the States. There was an article explaining that the annual gay pride march was being held in Huddersfield that year to take a stand against the viciously antigay policing in the north and one announcing the first-ever, women-only Lesbian Strength march in London.
“Oh my God, is this you?” Nick was looking at the headline “Whistles and Hooters Greet Bullet Mayor.” There was a picture of a group of protesters in front of Trafford town hall, and there I was with my sign, “No .303 for Me—Lesbian and Proud.”
I looked at my much-younger self. “How the bloody hell did you ever recognize me?”
“You told me all about lugging your sign on the bus, you silly twat,” Nick laughed.
“I forgot.” I grabbed up my rucksack. “Wanna grab something? I’m ready.”
“Wait a minute.” Nick put all the papers in with my clothes and picked up the bag. “Show these to Melissa. She’ll be dead impressed. Speaking of which, you should just stay at Melissa’s permanently. If you got rid of this bedsit, you wouldn’t have to busk so much.”
“Well,” I admitted, locking the door to my room, “she has asked me.” We stood outside.
“You’re over there all the time anyway. I want you to stay in London. I’d go spare if you ever left. D’you know what I mean?”
We stopped at a café for fried egg sandwiches and chips then got on the tube and took my things to Melissa’s flat.
“Ta for helping me,” I said.
Nick tucked the dark-green St. Christopher medallion she always wore into the neck of her fuzzy, black-and-gray striped jumper. She zipped up her sturdy, black cotton jacket and left to meet up with some mates.
I started Blu-Tacking the pictures I’d brought to the walls of Jake’s room. The recording equipment was set up in there, and I figured I might as well make it as conducive to creative musical thought as possible. I’d photocopied and laminated black-and-white Kurt Cobain photos from Charles Petersen’s book Screaming Life and had other pictures from Steve Gullick and Stephen Sweet’s book Nirvana, magazines like Rolling Stone and the NME and a few gorgeous ones in neon-bright colors by photographer Michael Lavine: Kurt with Day-Glo pink hair and Kurt in a bluish tinge with a cherry-red Epiphone. I put the picture of Kurt in torn jeans, sneakers, and a flannel shirt, with his fist against his head, looking like he was having a complete mental breakdown right on the door.
I had a rare picture of Kurt playing a Gibson SG and a few of him with Telecasters, the guitars of choice for Chrissie Hynde and Joe Strummer. There was a battered, black Telecaster with a black pickguard and a beautiful, slim, bird’s-eye-maple custom neck listed at two hundred quid in one of the guitar shops I frequented, but I called it “the guitar with the thousand-dollar neck.” If I could save enough money from busking, I was going to buy it.
Melissa had let me print out photographs from her computer onto photo paper, and I hung those up, too. My favorite was one I’d found of Chrissie Hynde in a blue denim jacket, PETA T-shirt, and cowgirl hat being arrested in New York City at a PETA demonstration. Her shirt said, “Fighting Animal Abuse All Around the World.” I’d been wearing the same T-shirt the last time I’d seen her. That was the concert where I hung onto the front of the stage and she was right above me, and for two solid hours everything in my life made sense. For the encore, she’d come out with a dazzling, sparkly-gold Telecaster that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Even the headstock was gold. And I had a picture of her much younger in her trademark red zipper jacket and black boots in Paris. I had a photo of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones onstage looking somberly out into the rain; the Jam performing in a downpour; Patti Smith with her wild mane of hair, now with a touch of gray; Davey Havok; Ann and Nancy Wilson; and a Who poster from Carnaby Street.
I heard Melissa at the door. When she came upstairs and looked into my room, I said, “I’m afraid you’ll get sick of me.”
“I won’t get sick of you. What I’d like is the opportunity to see you enough to get sick of you.” Melissa mussed up my hair.
“I brought over my Nirvana bootlegs.”
“Then at least I know you’re not gonna disappear,” she said wryly.
“I think we ought to tell Nick about our relationship. It’s too hard not telling her, and if she finds out later, she’s bound to be really hurt. I feel like I lied to her today when I said you wanted me to move in but didn’t say why. And I can’t do that.” Melissa bowed her head, the floor lamp lighting up her hair like a halo, and I continued, “I don’t mean to pressure you. But you’ve been mates a long time, and I don’t want anything coming between you. That would be devastating for everybody.”
“This is going to sound daft, but I feel like if I tell her about our relationship, I’ll fall apart and she’ll know I was raped.”
“She can’t possibly know that,” I said. “You’re just feeling self-conscious having so many feelings resurface. And if you want her to know but don’t want to tell her or can’t, I’ll be happy to talk to her. I will.”
“You know it’s not because I’m ashamed of you or anything like that, right? It’s not because you’re a woman. It’s that we haven’t—and I don’t know if I can. And I feel so vulnerable, like I’ll split open if I tell her.”
“She doesn’t have to know each intimate detail. She just needs to know we’ve started seeing each other romantically.” I started unpacking my clothes.
Melissa picked up the copy of Outweek. She glanced at the magazine and gave a hint of a smile, sitting down on the bed. “I heard about this.”
So you did have an inkling of me, I thought.
Jesse Helms had wanted to quarantine people with AIDS. The refrigerator in his office had a large sticker that said “Keep the Refrigerator Beautiful,” and I remember thinking, the man who wants to put people with AIDS in concentration camps has a clean refrigerator. My “Helms = Death” poster broke the Xerox machine when I tried to make ninety-nine copies of it and his big, fat, right-wing head got caught in the paper feed. I scattered a box of forty tampons all over his office and said I was campaigning for rights for the unfertilized. The US Capitol Police dragged us away, and I spent the afternoon handcuffed to a metal ring screwed into the wall of a police station. There wasn’t much of a view, so I stared at the words engraved on the silver handcuffs, “Property of US Capitol Police,” and tried making new words out of the same letters. Type, clap, lice, lip. Then I tried making a sentence. Pope foe of clit. The officer, who was using one finger to type up my citation, asked if I knew the name of the woman on Senator Helms’ staff who had phoned the police. I told him her name was Eva Braun, and he typed out the name of Hitler’s girlfriend while I spelled it for him. When I was finally released, I stepped out of the police station and it was raining so hard the car alarms were going off in the parking lot. I remembered shivering in my wet sneakers and ACT UP/DC cap, drying off the black-and-white “Earn Your Attitude—ACT UP!” button pinned to my black sweatshirt.
I told Melissa how I’d been one of a group of seven ACT UP women from DC and New York who were invited to give a presentation on women and AIDS to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, and his staff after we got arrested there. I wanted her to know that I, too, had done something medical. I hoped she’d be impressed and think we had even more in common. “How can medical doctors, even male ones, not understand lesbian sex when they supposedly know how a woman’s body works and where everything is?” I asked.
“It’s a failure of the imagination,” Melissa said.
I had arranged some personal items around the room to make it feel more like mine: a pin made out of a piece of green fencing that surrounded RAF Greenham Common from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp; my purple “Don’t Do It, Di!” badge from the marriage of Lady Diana; a light blue badge that said “I Have been Certified Handicapped by Dr. Runcie” from the time the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that gays weren’t sick, they were only handicapped; lavender, red, and yellow 999 badges; and pens from the London bookshop Gay’s The Word that said, “This Pen Belongs to a Homosexual.”
I glanced around the room and asked Melissa nervously, “Are you sure it’s alright?”
“It’s brilliant,” Melissa kissed me, “and I’m so happy that you’re here. Harriet was right.”
“About what?” I asked.
“You know,” she said.