Demand your place in the world.1
Dedicated to increasing lesbian visibility and raising awareness of lesbian issues, the Lesbian Avengers was founded in 1992 by a group of six New York City-based lesbian activists: Ana Mario Simo, Sarah Schulman, Maxine Wolfe, Anne-christine d’Adesky, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire). Each of the activists were heavily involved with other gay and lesbian organizations in the city, including ACT UP and ILGO (Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization).2 Ana Maria Simo would also go on to found Dyke TV.
Though Dyke TV did not identify itself as a project of the Lesbian Avengers, it was often called the “propaganda wing” of the Avengers,8 and its producers set out to address the whiteness of the mainstream lesbian movement. Its On the Road segments showed lesbian life around the country, while its international episode provided glimpses of lesbian life in the Philippines, Yugoslavia, and Thailand, and its Lesbian Health segments focused on the ways lesbians of color were disproportionately affected by certain illnesses. As the world’s first television show by and for lesbians, Dyke TV sought to reflect the diversity of lesbian life, though board meeting notes reveal that Dyke TV also struggled to adequately appeal to lesbians of color to produce for the show.
For its time, Dyke TV was the longest-running piece of gay and lesbian media on television. Though it reproduced some of the problems of mainstream lesbian activism, it also made those problems the focus of its work, encouraging the lesbian community to reflect and improve together. For its 12 years on-air, Dyke TV’s work was deeply linked to the political mission of the Lesbian Avengers: demand a place for your community in the world and, when those spaces do not exist, create your own.
Footnotes:
- “What is a Lesbian Avenger?” clip from Dyke TV, Episode 2, 1993, Dyke TV Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Massachusetts. ↩
- “An Incomplete History…” Lesbian Avengers, http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about/history.shtml. ↩
- “Lesbian Avengers eat fire,” Carolina Kroon, n.d., Lesbian Avengers, http://www.lesbianavengers.com/about.shtml. ↩
- Elizabeth Currans, “Enacting Spiritual Connection and Performing Deviance,” in Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers: Women Transforming Public Space, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017), pp. 41 – 57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1w6tds2. ↩
- “We Recruit with Pam Grier,” Carrie Moyer, c. 1993, Lesbian Avengers, http://www.lesbianavengers.com/images/moyer_design.shtml. ↩
- Currans, “Enacting Spiritual Connection,” 46. ↩
- “We Recruit,” Carrie Moyer, c. 1993. ↩
- “Mary Patierno, Mary Patierno Interview Transcript,” Nov. 26, 2016, Lesbian Herstory Archives AudioVisual Collection, Dyke TV, Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York, New York, http://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/exhibits/show/dyke-tv/item/843. ↩