RIP Elizabeth Meixell, Madge the Manicurist Now and Forever.
“On my days off from WHAM I would be an organizer,” Elizabeth told me in a 2016 interview. “I was not a leader in any way. But I knew how to organize things. I wasn’t an organizer. But if someone walked in I would give them paper and get them involved.”
Humble and engaging, times with Elizabeth marked some of my happiest, most meaningful moments in New York.
I was one of those Elizabeth helped get organized, as I posted after I heard last week.
When you are the new kid in town and an icon says come play with us, you are invited, it changes your life. Thank you Betsy. Thank you for teaching me and laughing with me and inspiring. Thanks for always reminding me Jesus loves the white Male fetus and god is a lesbian. And that your friends need to be there when you get our of jail. And it's fun getting away with it. And abortion is healthcare.
Jamie Leo felt the same way:
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“Elizabeth Meixell
You lifted us, inspired the living daylights of us, kept us laughing nonstop as you pushed us past any levels of doubts, hesitatiation, or exhaustion, and will continue to be a core guiding force in our lives.”
Brian posted a similar note:
“Just found out my dearest friend, Elizabeth Meixell, passed away. Here are some photos my phone put together of her. Yasha Bunchik, which was her activist mom de plume (ha!), is forever. Rest in power you amazing woman. Sister Mary Cunnnilingus, the extra “N” is for good taste. Madge, I guess you’re soaking in it.”
Diane CurtisWHAM! (Women's Health Action & Mobilization) Alum posted:
"I had changed. I was an aggressive woman. Up until that point, up until about 1987, ’88, one might have had on my tombstone, 'She never caused a stir.' But luckily, I lived."
- Elizabeth Meixell, ACT UP Oral HIstory, Sept. 30, 2010
The incredible, inimitable, indomitable Elizabeth Meixell has left us. There are so many memories and stories to be shared about this fierce and loving woman, and I hope you all will share yours, but for right now, in this group, I just want to be clear that WHAM! would not have persisted, would not have accomplished half of what it did, would not have even had its archives preserved, were it not for our own dear Yasha Bunchik. I am heartbroken. May her memory be a blessing. May all of us who knew her continue to be inspired by her joyful unending determination in all that we do.
Luckily, she lived.”
For a while there, Meixell was everywhere in my New York world, at the community garden, the drag march, demos, act up meetings, old stories Caroline told her about movements that had taken place long before I got to two. I loved seeing her at Dias y Flores garden on 13th street. I loved talking with Meixell about it all, even when I couldn’t make it and she understood, without judgment.
In between demos, Elizabeth allowed me to interview her three times, her interviews, full of laughter and stories of friends connecting reproductive autonomy and AIDS activism, of gardens and a need to laugh and organize, became the basis of my dissertation, two books and countless articles.
In Queer-Political-Performance-and-Protest, Meixell is quoted from and referred to throughout:
“For ACT UP member Elizabeth Meixell, part of the
process was breaking apart social isolation and connecting:
It’s like coming out and fi nding out that there are so many others with
the same opinion as you. If you have this opinion and you stay home
with it, you’re not connecting. But if more people are out on the streets
saying “This is how I feel”. . . . And “My nephew is a wonderful gay
man. You’d really like him. Here’s his number.” You are making more
connections that way. You are coming out.
I asked Steve Questor about his favorite action of all time, he shows me a postcard from 1990 bearing
the words, “No Choice, No Liberty” over an image of the Statue of
Liberty, with a banner reading, “Abortion is Healthcare, Healthcare Is
a Right!” He recalls:
Action Tours decided it needed to make a statement against the global
gag rule. And we went online and it’s not hard to fi nd the measurements
for the Statue of Liberty, ‘cause the Parks Service is proud of that. But
we found out that you needed a banner hanging off the pedestal that
would be thirty by thirty feet. It was a 900 square foot banner. So if
you have 900 square feet, you can say a lot. So we decided to have it say,
“Abortion Is Health Care. Health Care Is a Right!” We painted it in
Elizabeth’s basement. That was when Elizabeth started answering the
phone “Church Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society” because
she spent just days and days and days sewing the hem on the banner so
we could sew a chain into the bottom of it so it would hang. What was
so fun about that one for me was it was all this group work.
For Quester, the best part of the day was how well the affi nity group members
worked together.
In that final 2016, Meixell recalled the scene a little differently:
“...there would be no chain in the bottom of the banner as there had been with the Statue of Liberty which clanged against the back which was, every clang… and they’re all running to get down the stairs and I, as usual, I never had any fun because I was always central no matter what it was. My well-organized mind would convince other people to do the dirty work but the support…
Interviewer: You would not be the one doing it. It’s important to organize others to…
Interviewee: It was.
Interviewer: Was there a conflict there? Was there a fight there?
Interviewee: Well, let me tell you about the conflict. Keeping them on track to get up front. So, they were meeting some place, I don’t remember where the meetings were, and then Steve and one other guy, who I know and shall remain nameless here, because I don’t blame him, stopped coming to the meetings. Two meetings before didn’t show up…
Steve Questor was going to do it and this other guy, who’s a friend, was going to do it too. We would meet in this guy’s apartment on 5th Avenue and he was a day trader before we had ever heard about day trading. That was what he did. So, he had an apartment on 5th Avenue and 10th or 11th Street. Can you imagine how great that was? It was really nice in town. So, he said he would do it instead of our person who had dropped out. so, he will be letter A and so our gang went to Sax’s, including all the people who had clever diversions set up, like Karen and her mother, and a birthday party at the table and the Santa…
Macy’s won’t retire. John Winkleman had the idea to do it. He wrote the song. Winkelman…
Interviewer: Brilliant.
Interviewee: He is a brilliant guy when it comes to defense. Oh yeah. So what happened was as people were there with their diversions and so they unlocked the window and the other guy wouldn’t climb out. Letter A would not climb out. B was climbing out but Philip Paul Cypress agreed to do it and so there was a Connecticut newspaper that wrote ‘Two Skinheads were out there.’ That was two emotional conflicts. Who wants to climb out on a narrow parapet? Narrow, narrow, and there was guys with guns above them on the roof who said, “Hands up, hands up.” And Steve, like a third grade teacher he is, spoke very calmly in a clear loud voice. “We are just going to drop this banner. We are not going to do anything…” He told them what he was going to do and they did it. They dropped the banner and there were cameras all around. There were guns trained on them. Steve the guns trained because he was central.
Interviewer: So the pope was down below?
Interviewee: The pope happened to be coming or going at that moment. Just happened to be. We just thought that we couldn’t plan it. It just happened to be that the pope happened to be there at that moment. So none of us ever complained to the first guy who dropped out early, nor to the second guy who we really didn’t know, but that’s the thing with volunteers. You can’t complain if they don’t show up. If you’re going to sell balloons at the garden event, if they don’t show up you can’t complain to them because it’s very much a volunteer situation. I don’t see how people can do it in politics but nobody ever mentioned to him that…this was the fear thing. We all have major fears that we deal with but that’s something you can understand. Climbing out on a banner.”
A cornerstone of play is getting away with.
In Rebel Friendships, I conclude with a rumination on a conversation with Meixell which distills a philosophy of friendship, mirrored within the dialogue between the two of us. Referring to friends such as Meixell I write:
“They certainly have helped the activists discussed in this story. Throughout
my life in New York City, the good days and organizing have begun and
ended with different cohorts of activists, affinity groups that ebb and flow
as the years move forward and as people move out of town, retire from
activism, or stay involved. On a fall Sunday afternoon, we went to visit
Elizabeth, also known as Sister Mary Cunnilingis of the Church Ladies for
Choice, whom I have known since the late 1990s in New York City when
we all met at the bar Dicks at Six after hours of AIDS activism and street
antics. Welcoming us in, she showed us her Church Lady gear and memorabilia.
We shared stories about activism, friendship, harm reduction, and
a generation of reproductive rights activists. There is nothing simple about
friendship, noted Elizabeth, acknowledging the fights and skirmishes that
have worn on AIDS affinity groups such as the Church Ladies. “There are
people I would walk across the street to avoid, but not until there is a cure,”
she explained, paraphrasing ACT UP icon Andy Velez. “But until there is
a cure, I am going to work with them.” Until there is a cure for living, we
all are going to depend on each other. After all, none of us is going to get
out of here alive. It is the image of a city of friends that still inspires me, I
explained to Elizabeth as we gossiped.
“That’s always been your approach,” she followed.
Looking down, my daughter, who was with us, was drawing. She wrote,
“The circle is round, it has no end, that’s how long I want to be your friend”
on a small drawing of a circle.
Looking at the picture, I was in awe. It seemed to hint at feelings I have
long held about activism and my circles of friends, connecting it and each
other into an ever-expanding
circle of friends and engagement. I still
love the Church Ladies, who connect their efforts with those of expanding
movements—from
women’s liberation to gay liberation to ACT UP
to harm reduction—using
parades, protests, bikes, and marching bands
that help transform the city into a living, breathing work of art. This community
and culture of resistance is a circle I feel honored to be a small part
of. It is a space where we grow, where friendships endure, where losses are
grieved, and where we feel part of everything. For me, this is a sketch of a
city that connects friends and art, streets and stories, and gives life sparkle
and color, tragedy and laughter. These are all the bricks and mortar of Benjamin
Barber’s cathedral of interdependence. They lead us to a place where
we depend on each other rather than institutions, bringing us together,
inviting everyone into the cathedral rather than leaving anyone behind.
Revolution means we need each other, explained Mark Andersen early in
this story. What really connects this circle is that we need each other. May
the circle be unbroken. Hopefully, we can all meet at a barbeque.”
Finishing the interview, Meixell gave me a small plastic doll of a singing nun that seemed to resemble Yasha B, her church lady alter ego. I look at it now I realize its not the only gift she bestowed. One of the final times I met her, she gave me a wooden sign that says:
“A good friend will come and bail you out of jail…
But a true friend will be sitting next to you saying,
‘Damn that was fun!’”
RIP Elizabeth Meixell
Your gifts to us were many.
RIP.
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