Take your basic dyke protagonist. Introduce her battle against the modern edict of gender and sexuality. Chronicle her story of resistance. And the mainstream plot thins. She engenders multiple climaxes. She is the anti-script: queer as folklore.

We work for the dyke stories scribbled in the margins: the bi-dyke home-schooling her “farm of four feminist sons”; the Latina intersexed queertrans slam poet; the rainbow-mohawked, 57-year-old lesbian who rides her motorcycle from town to town doing breast-cancer education; and the fierce activists, teachers, and artists who amplify community struggles against divisiveness, apathy, and Home Depot.

During our summer tour, these lives have been an antidote to the monocultural media outside our hotel-room door. As CNN legitimized our court-appointed jester, as corporate radio spun us into a static blur, as we cruised across the land of CEO to shining CEO, it became evident that our grass-roots oral tradition must drown out the corporate-sponsored immoral tradition. If truth be told, our lives, our mouths have to be telling.

That’s why we began Feed the Fire Productions: indignant since 1998. FTF is a for-progress organization that celebrates political, feminist art forms, particularly spoken word. We work to carve cultural space for sounds that bite, creating slam poetry programs for youth that ignite their righteous passion, leading drag king workshops, and bridging the worlds of dyke culture and spoken word.

The Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City’s Lower East Side was our earliest home for slam poetry. It was like a radical think tank, an alternative form of media, a Rainbow Coalition meeting where allies gathered to brainstorm about how the world should go. The notion of a slam is to return poetry to the people by transforming it into an interactive art form. Random audience members are selected as judges, to debunk the elitist myth that only critics know poetry. In turn, poets are responsible for making themselves heard in a raw and immediate way. What follows is a personal and political revival. These are people not only telling their stories, but critiquing the global cultural forces that have shaped them. All with humor, vulnerability and fervor.

The political force of this coming together of minds lies in its diversity. How often do you sit in a room for an hour and experience the life of an incest survivor from the Ozarks, a Trinidadian poet who discovers his best friend died from AIDS, an Asian poet defending Bruce Lee’s integrity from stereotype, a dyke threatening to construct a “your daughter’s a big fat dyke” billboard outside of her homophobic parents’ local Wal-Mart? It is coalition-building in its most useful form, suspending culturally enforced fear of, and alienation from, one another, and prodding connection from its lonely hiding place. What results is a grass-rooted community that should make Bush question the rich soil in which he is so shakily planted.

We draw much of our optimism about the growing social justice movement from this community where we originated, and the allies we have gained along the way. Our first mentor was a former Black Panther; he urged us to develop our art, and to value our optimism that mass mobilization through spoken word was possible. He was right. We have found support in so many variant and convergent movements: labor union, anti-globalization, anti-death-penalty, pro-hemp, welfare-rights, riot grrrl and Green Party activists have become family.

Clearly, greater queer visibility over the last eight years has made other progressive movements take active notice of our voice(s). There are a lot of us, we are powerful, we have spent our lives deconstructing social dynamics, and, from our experience, people want to know what dykes have to say.

So, what do we have to say? How active is the dyke voice in reinventing the queer narrative? Lesbian chic has proven itself a media-inspired myth insofar as the Employment Nondiscrimination Act is not yet passed, marriage and adoption rights are a battle, and our one “no sex in dyke city” television show was cancelled. Nonetheless, corporate America has begun the insidious process of integrating queer life just enough so that we feel assuaged, so that the lines are blurred, so that PC passion feels unnecessary, unhip and strange to the ear. Commercials debase our authenticity by stealing our stories and art forms. Our queer community events are drowning in corporate beer sponsorship. Our maxed-out rainbow credit cards are not keeping our independent community bookstores alive.

So, is our goal a viable alternative party, or one big circuit party? Shouldn’t our goal be a just society that affords equal benefits and creative freedom to all of its members, not simply to married people and corporate personnel?

We need a common vocabulary, a shared poetry. Like the coalition-building language(s) of the slam poetry scene, we queers need to speak to each other: intergenerationally, trans-inclusively, race-consciously, sensitive to varying abilities and sharply attentive to class politics. About our individual lives. About our possibilities for a common direction.

We are lucky as a movement to be honorary grandchildren of a lineage of out and proud dyke radicals. We have always had these truth-telling queers — the media without the mediation of corporate gag rules. These have been a people documenting their resistance, telling their stories with unfiltered information. Let’s honor that tradition.

Dykes must be pirates, steal back airwaves from their status as floating real estate, steal back our voices from CBS. Our dyke community must be refreshed with the intake and outtake of storytelling breath, not just the focus of Oxygen.

There is a powerful community of dykes in spoken word: Sister Spit in San Francisco, the Morrigan, Cliterati in Atlanta, Mothertongue in D.C., Suncrumbs in Pittsburgh, House of Woman in New York City, SlamSisters nationally and individuals creating and distributing CDs, books, and chapbooks. There are independent queer/feminist/progressive radio stations airing our voices and independent labels supporting our work. This is our public broadcasting.

Sometimes, the work feels overwhelming, as if we’re all just taking wild stabs to dissect things. Sometimes, the point is simply to say, “We notice.” Sometimes, we’re opening our mouths wide just to remind ourselves and the world that we can, that tongues clicking against teeth are revolutionary. That these mouths belong to us. That we have the right to dispel our indignation and clarify it outwards, not let it muddy our insides. That for all its problems, the world is a provocative place.

The corporate monolith wants us to feel divided, desperate, to give up searching for what matters and accept their production of meaning. But as Howard Zinn says, we traveling activists and artists know that we are not alone. As we take our nomadic mouths around the country, we are greeted each night by hundreds of people who care about the world, who care about you, about one another.

If there were ever a time to put your queer shoulder to the wheel and push left, this is it. Welcome to four years of Bush. Bust out the lube; this is going to be rough. Spread open your guts. Dive deep into your lungs. Let the poetry come.

Alix Olson and Amy “Neeve” Neevel are co-founders of Brooklyn’s Feed the Fire Productions, which released Olson’s debut CD, Built Like That. They are nationally and internationally touring artists and are board members of SlamSisters, a national nonprofit organization promoting female spoken-word artists and youth education. For further information and booking, check out http://www.alixolson.com

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