# Lesbian Avengers Founded in **New York City in June 1992** by **Sarah Schulman**, Anne-Christine d'Adesky, Maxine Wolfe, Marie Honan, Ana Maria Simo, and Anne Maguire — a direct-action lesbian-political-organizing group that emerged in part from frustration with [[ACT UP]]'s perceived insufficient attention to lesbian-specific issues and from a broader sense that the marriage-and-respectability-focused mainstream gay-rights organizations were leaving lesbians' political demands behind. ## Tactics and Style The Avengers' founding manifesto opened: *"We're not waiting for the rapture. We are the apocalypse."* Their signature actions: - **Fire-eating** — Avengers performed open-flame fire-eating at public actions as a deliberately confrontational visual; the tactic became the organization's signature - **The 1992 Dyke March** in Washington, D.C. — held the day before the April [[1993 March on Washington]] (then attended by ~750,000), and the founding event of what became the annual NYC Dyke March tradition - **Direct-action school-board protests** — particularly against the New York City school board's 1992 rejection of the "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum, which had included age-appropriate lesbian and gay family content - **Newark, Hempstead, and other suburban-school-system organizing** — bringing direct-action tactics to school districts beyond Manhattan ## Why It Mattered The Lesbian Avengers represented a brief but consequential **lesbian-specific direct-action wave** in the early 1990s, parallel to and intersecting with [[ACT UP]] and [[Queer Nation]]. The group's organizational lifespan was relatively short (effectively defunct as a national entity by the early 2000s), but the **Dyke March tradition** the group launched is now an annual fixture in dozens of American cities and one of the most visible continuing legacies of early-1990s queer direct action. The Avengers also produced an influential 1993 organizing handbook — *The Lesbian Avenger Handbook: A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution* — that has been republished and re-used in subsequent generations of queer organizing. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Sarah Schulman]] - [[ACT UP]]