LA's "Lesbian Attack" Gets Stuck by the Man.

“Lesbian Attack” is a relatively new action group from creator Haley Jones who asserts,”Lesbian ATTACK!’s mission is to infiltrate Los Angeles’ best straight bars and gay ‘em up with the hottest women we know. We don’t make deals with the bars; we don’t warn them we’re coming and we don’t advertise. This is a grass roots effort. Just OUR favorite women and THEIR favorite women.”

Next week ’s event has been announced with plans to attend an irrelevant sports bar on Melrose. In her most recent announcement Jones explains, “Though we don’t take money or warn the bars, we do want to take care of you. So we’ve booked the VIP room upstairs for a “private social mixer” to ensure everyone entry to El Guapo. Downstairs, there will be plenty of brews and confused boys. Upstairs, you can take a break from freaking out the straights with our private bar tender and DJ.”

At first, I was excited about the positive visibility efforts this group professed to make. But as the event approaches, it seems efforts are moving away from meeting our heterosexual community members on common ground. To attend a hetero-normative space and peacefully assert our relevance as lesbian women there is positive. It is important to challenge the claiming of space by hetero-normative society as well as their assumptions that women fit gendered norms of heterosexual desire and desirability. However, it is completely ineffective to “attack” an established heterosexual space and then retreat to our own “private room with dj and bar tender”. What lesson to we teach about inclusion when we ourselves practice separatism within our own public demonstration? Is it not more appropriate to engage the community you seek to “infiltrate” where they are? Are we not seeking to take down barriers that hegeomonic institutions insist between our sexual practices? It seems the outcome one would hope for in such an event is the building of personal trust and percieved commonality between individuals. As in, we lesbians show up and are charming beyond belief and some heterosexuals walk away saying, “That was fun. I didn’t know “lesbians” were so nice and “normal”. I thought they were all man hating Feminists.” How can this type of exchanges occur when the “activists” of “Lesbian Attack” have booked a private room in the straight club they are attending for all their members to socialize, away from the “freaked out straights”? I’m also dissapointed that these events are created for “the hottest women we know”.  As if  the relevancy of women as lesbians will only be apparent if we are visable through the heterosexual male gaze. Inviting “hot lesbians”, read “striaght looking lesbians”, reinforces heterosexual norms. It fails to challenge the primacy of heterosexual activity and desire in public space and rather agrees that women are only valuable when they fit male perscribed standards of beauty. What if women who don’t practice femme identity attend? Are queered representations of lesbianism unwelcome at “Lesbian Attack”? For a group that is demanding inclusion, it seems detrimental to practice exclusion and seperatism within their own activism.