First Glasgow Lesbian Avengers Meeting Flyer
A photocopied flyer detailing the first meeting of the Glasgow (Scotland) chapter of the Lesbian Avengers. The meeting was set to take place on March 29th in 1995, at the Glasgow Women’s Library. It was, in fact, women who worked in the Library that founded this chapter, wanting to draw awareness to international anti-lesbian discourse and lesbian struggles. The Avengers were initially founded in 1992 in NYC, by six women; Ana Simo, Anne Maguire, Anne-Christine D’Adesky, Marie Honan, Maxine Wolfe, and Sarah Schulman. During the peak of the AIDS crisis, anti-gay ballot measures, and the dominance of gay men’s visibility in LGBTQ+ activism, the Avengers looked to recenter women and lesbians in feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. The international chapters of the organization began to crop up around 1993, following the large turnout of the inaugural Dyke March, demonstrating a need for global activism and awareness separate from the anti-gay rhetoric of the US at the time. When this chapter was founded, Section 28 was in full effect in Scotland (banning local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality), which could have been what the Glasgow Lesbian Avengers were primarily drawn to action by.
The black and white photocopied flyer depicts an edited image of Tintin (a character created in 1929) peering nervously into a box of edited images of the Lesbian Avengers signature bomb logo. The tagline “The LESBIAN AVENGERS is a direct-action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility” hovers just above the picture, with a one-sentence line underneath including the words “...Change is in the air and this is not a time to cling to the past.” With Tintin being an extremely recognizable reporter (especially in the UK), this suggests the Avengers seem to be drawing on their organization as a facet of LGBTQ+ activism needing to be paid attention to, therefore bringing lesbian issues to the surface. By using Tintin, a male, colonial-era nostalgic character, the Avengers may have been repurposing his image in order to attribute the new movement to something already-established and beloved.
Preserved artifacts such as this flyer, especially by the location in which this first meeting was held, detail the growing need for lesbian-centered activism in a world bogged down by both anti-gay rhetoric as well as LGBTQ+ media centered on gay men. Not only was this flyer created by female library workers, the same workers who founded the chapter, but their movement was one spread through local reinterpretation. By using a character typical to the UK, they personalize a sector of the Avengers movement without copying the NYC flagship. The digitization of this flyer allows for a wider range of people to experience it, interact with it, and for many young lesbians in this current age – to get a glimpse of those who came before them. Typically, paper flyers are temporary pieces of media – there and gone with the weather, or the ending of an event – but this preservation allows for the Avengers work to be studied more closely, and for the waves of their movement to be examined under different lenses. Digitization such as this (in a digital feminist lens) shapes whose feminist history is accessible and discoverable beyond the initial event.
