The Lavender Menace

Iris sat down beside Olivia and her textbook reverted into her hands. Her midterms had been delayed, but she would still need to complete them by the end of February. A pen & pad reverted into her hands.

"Hey, you never did tell me what's, uh... you and Amelie?"

"She's just an ex-girlfriend." said Iris. "We never necessarily broke up with each other, it was mostly... after Natasha died, I was too caught up to talk with her. I'm not terribly certain either of us wants to risk ourselves attempting to mend what we once shared. But she is my friend, now, and I'm hopeful she'll remain that."

"I hope so, too." Olivia smiled. "Anyway, you still gotta study, right?"

Iris nodded. "Feels like most of this is just intuition."

"Yeah, it's pretty easy. I wish they had more history and shit. You know, all that stuff's pretty cool."

"I didn't know we had much history."

Olivia nodded and told Iris of this:

The emergence of Revenants in the 60s had temporarily destabilized the country to such a degree that it had been thought, before the creation of Urasaria Academy, that it might be necessary to kill all hosts at birth. The accumulation of professionals & students has fortunately limited the damage a massacre-inclined host may have once been able to do, decades ago.

It was under such conditions that a group of lesbian hosts splintered off from all mainstream movements for lesbian acceptance, helmed by a woman known only as the Lavender Menace.

Hitherto historians have linked her to the tide of economic conditions or this-or-that ideology. In this view, historical subjects are receptacles of their conditions; there can be no great men nor women. Naturally, this omits free will and consciousness, and makes humans subservient to forces outside of their command that can only be seen post-hoc. Every individual human is seen as inevitably led into creation by their circumstances. While some find value in this viewpoint, the idea of the Lavender Menace as hapless to circumstance is not one that finds import with many lesbians nor students.

Nor do the attempts to dismiss her as a mass-murdering psychopath. Murder was a frequent tactic of the Lavender Menace, but so was as American an image as rebellion. She was eloquent and humble; she did not seek to be exalted, which made her to be a good candidate to be just that.

Evidence of this torrid ideological analysis is frequent in previous texts of her. Mark Holmes' biography "The Ideology of America's Most Terrifying Woman" claims that she was an egomaniacal prone to fits of anger and that 'she wished to end the construct of heterosexuality'. In his view, "the all-encompassing ideology of the Lavender Menace in seeing enemies where there are none has much resonance with other terrorists and fascists". This analysis is supported by a total of 6 citations to 2 documents written by the Lavender Menace, and the appellation of 'narcissistic' is applied by two behavioral psychologists interviewed for the book, as well as those with a vested interest against her, such as the families of politicians she assassinated or descendants of corrupt police officers.

The bad historiography continues in the present. Media figures like Jane Kerouac made a brief, but lucrative, career off of claiming to know the 'pro-homosexual ideology' that drove the Lavender Menace, with a bevy of lunatic claims such as that her goal was the "forced conversion of all women into the homosexual lifestyle" and the "genocide of heterosexuals". Her claims are seen now as bigoted and wrong, but such dismissals of her continue to form the bulk of scholarship on her, almost none of which has been written by lesbians.

To begin, the Lavender Menace (here used interchangeably between the group she formed and the individual herself) was not the first group of lesbian hosts who found their new superpowers (and in some cases, sexuality) useful for political activism. After the 1963 hospitalization of ten police officers alleged to have raided a Los Angeles bar for gays and lesbians, a document was released by the two female hosts who claimed to have acted to protect their community. It made six demands of society:

"1. The banning of discrimination against homophiles in all facets of life, from the professional to the personal sphere, concurrent with the repeal of all laws meant to punish or curtail activities between two consenting adult men or women."

The term homophile is an interesting one, though it has fallen from use. Initially, it was conceived that the most effective strategy for gay acceptance was to not reference sexual activity; the suffix -phile used to denote romantic love in an attempt to appeal to straights.

"2. The right for homophiles to no longer be harassed for engaging in public displays of affection.

3. The right for homophiles to no longer be forced to live out their romantic lives in the underground world where they can be terrorized by police and blackmailed by criminals using the very laws references above.

4. The establishment of a national right for marriage between two adult men or two adult women.

5. The establishment of a government agency where female hyperhumans are allowed to work to apprehend male hyperhumans who terrorize our communities and are not punishable by traditional law enforcement."

While small government agencies propped up out of need for law enforcement, Urasaria Academy was the first of its kind that allowed women, as it had previously been believed that female hosts/hyperhumans were more likely to disobey orders in fits of ferality, and that they (with some justification) would not be willing to apprehend other female hosts.

"6. The end to all campaigns of terror that the police have visited upon us for decades and which continues to only ramp up as we try to carve our own methods of life."

The Lavender Menace once commented on this document in a journal entry a month after its release: "Having read what I can of the situation in Los Angeles, and the way three female hyperhumans drove away the police, my assessment is that the situation on the West Coast seems far worse than on the East. The LAPD, in particular, is vicious and conducts raids frequently, often entrapping young women and men by pretending to be interested partners before arresting them."

The Lavender Menace herself reached out to these women, and though separated by geography, lent support to their cause for peaceful reform.

However, the event was not written of in any wider media outlets: corroborating documents number only in the single digits of local papers, usually with derogatory language towards the 'raving manifestos of dykes'. A week later, ten male hosts would be dispatched from the National Guard during another police raid, and murder the three female hosts.

Given the legality of such, nothing could be done judicially. Without their former protection, many became afraid enough to no longer frequent the bar; it closed only a year after. For months afterward, there was the sense that the cultivation of respectability and distancing of the movement from female hosts was the best method for attaining gay acceptance in America. It is interesting now to see much of the justifications still linger: "(…)hyperhumans with female appearances are male in temperament and demeanor, incapable of displaying empathy or altruistic kindness", reads one supposed scientific paper of the time. Mainstream protests became centered around decorum; strict gender-conforming dress codes of men in suits & women in dresses, and in which gay participants were not allowed to hold hands (ready to be enforced by a karate chop to split up the two affectionate offenders).

This was what the Lavender Menace observed as 1964 began. Documentation of her Revenant is sparse and when it activated even moreso. Both enemies and friends note that she had a broad Revenant with abilities that, though seemingly all in contradiction with one another, are attributable to the general flux of thought and afterthought.

Her mind became dominated by the 1963 Los Angeles raid. She believed that this had shown the failure of peace as a strategy, yet she also knew that a wanton mass murdering host would only further violence against civilian lesbians and bring no satisfaction but her own. Her writing, while acknowledging such feelings, condemns them:

"Of late I have talked to other women whose hyperhumanity recently sprouted, young women who have already been accustomed to our lifestyle. They often became caught up in exhilaration and the naivete that because they are powerful they shall make the world weak. Matters are not quite so simple. They wish to rule over others, to be caught up in something wild and forceful. In private and in the most personal of conversations, these young women tell me that they have looked at how Hitler ran down the Jews in Europe, Mussolini invading Spain, Mao in China.

That the actions are right or wrong does not seem to enter their minds: they say that they feel forced to do so, that it is the fault of heterosexuals. They hope that one day a strong female hyperhuman will rise and whip them all into a band together, tell them what to do, and then they will end fear and shame. The intensity of their anger and how they simmer in their fantasies of violence would certainly frighten the average human. Such emotion is understandable, but must be refined into intellect and patience, for the mind is the artificer of emotion."

Compare this to an interview she gave five years later, by which time not a news channel would decline her:

"The killing of innocents, as the media claims, is really very strange talk. Last week there were three police officers who had beaten to death two men in a public park. We had a great success in tracking these three down and killing them while ensuring no harm but to our desired targets.

Earlier you interviewed the widow of one who says that the Lavender Menace cruelly took the life of a husband, a father and a friend. To that I would respond: who said we are not innocent and that shedding our blood is justified? That it lesser in degree? Who says our blood is not blood, but their's is? The two men that were killed were also lovers, friends, and had families, of course. For decades the nation has ignored this senseless violence practiced against us and yet when we protect ourselves, the entire media apparatus rallies to condemn us. Not once have I heard an ounce of condemnation of heterosexuals who drive their exiled children to suicide, or consolation to the women who languish in jail after they are entrapped under false pretenses by officers of the law. Our loneliness leads many of us to misery, yet you mock it; you cultivate our despair and luxuriate in it; you say that we ought to be left in our own assigned corner of society, yet when we try to form a semblance of life in that corner, you invade it and demand that we move to your whims. Do not be surprised that now a group of female hyperhumans have decided that we will no longer be moved.

What I find most curious is the idea, much pleaded by the nation's supposed intellectuals, that the federal government should have me killed. Five years of failed attempts should have proven that matters are not quite so simple as speech. But underneath it there is a swell of desperation; that these killings would stop if only the Lavender Menace were killed. This is incorrect. Killing the Lavender Menace is the surest way to guarantee that these killings will not stop. You may think me cruel, but you would be perplexed to learn that some of my fellows consider me a pacifist. Despite the mad ravings of those who write books for lucrative media deals, most of the training we do is not teaching female hyperhumans to kill. Murder is as easy a task for a hyperhuman as breathing. More difficult is teaching them how and who to kill, and that the reason they do so is not unfettered revenge, but because the decades have shown that we cannot trust traditional law enforcement to defend us.

Now that the yoke of that oppressive grip has been returned at only a fraction of its original strength, there is screaming and much consternation. The world gathers to condemn us. But it is them who have stolen the ability for us to live normal lives. One cannot laugh at us, mock us, imprison us, kill us and rape us, and then claim that we are insane for resisting. One must be stupid to make such an argument, or think that others are. After our peaceful requests for respect were denied for decades, who would not then decide it better to be feared than loathed?"

The Lavender Menace obviously did engage in excess. Her estimates of kills ranges in the thousands, at least for hosts, although this number doubles in each retelling. "Her power and speed led many of us to think she hosted multiple Revenants," recollected one grizzled rogue host, who had lost her pinky to a tank shell while fleeing one of their many hideouts. "She could manipulate matter, and she would often control it as much in recreation as she did in our professional activities. In volleyball she was untouchable: she loved to play forward net."

The personality of the Lavender Menace does not indicate that of an egomaniac. The assurance of herself in her own superiority as a host and faith in her success is easily interpreted as arrogance, but this is not so: the Lavender Menace was convinced of her superiority as a host because she remains one of the strongest hosts who have ever lived. Examples of her supposed fanaticism come from political polemics meant for agitation, not any private correspondence.

"Despite her immense power, she was very willing to be subordinate underneath others when necessary for the success of the mission. She would learn quickly, but only rise to command when it would be to the betterment of our mission. When it would be time for us to dig new tunnels, she always deferred to another one of us and would follow their orders for the shortest routes, both to safety and protecting civilians. She would dig the tunnels herself and then walk with us every morning to make certain that we knew every possible route, for she said that there would come times where we would be separated."

In the decades since many small groups of hosts have attempted to pattern themselves after the Lavender Menace, such as the Gorgons, though there is no accurate comparison to be drawn but in the self-righteous puffery of the latter, and whose borderline-literate screeds continue to be falsely compared to the well-wrought and thought-out essays of the Menace.

Federal response to the Lavender Menace was both disastrous and comedic. Declassified documents detail many attempts at assassination that rely on stereotypes of female hosts that persist to this day (that they are barren or possess both sets of genitals) or what can be kindly termed a misunderstanding of their anatomy: millions of tax dollars were funneled into a program proposed to find a way to control the menstrual cycle of hosts, which would presumably reduce their aggression.

In particular, many of the efforts to apprehend her was the stereotype of lesbians as sexually promiscuous. One investigator writes: "In many manners she acts like a man and little like a woman. She speaks directly and scorns the use of emotional appeal, and her use of violence is measured: almost every use has a logical, if flawed, justification." This is at odds with the narrative that has been established like in books' like Lawrence Smith's, who proffers up "she had no attachment but to violence... the archetype of the common thug given female form."

Michael Rich has written of a controversial program in which the FBI hired prostitutes to solicit or otherwise seduce the Menace. None succeeded. The undergirding of the program is a familiar refrain to lesbians: the idea that their relationships are fleeting, intensely sexual, and overall not as important or devoted as heterosexual romance. Such is the hold of this narrative that many historians still refuse to entertain the possibility that these attempts most likely failed because she was **already** involved with another woman.

"In the early days, she could often be found in her room writing." recalls one former compatriot. "It would not surprise me if she had kept a romantic partner from us. She was intensely secretive because she wanted us to know as little personal details about each other if one of us were captured, but she had many female fans. I recall once Marilyn had walked in on her in the middle of writing a letter to someone, and when she asked who she was writing to, Lavender became very embarrassed and retreated from discussion. We did not really ask further, as she was always busying herself. She read much political philosophy and kept herself abreast of political situations; sometimes she would say that she was going off herself somewhere for two hours, and only when she returned, would we learn that she had broken ten women out from prison."

Unplanned operations were not the norm for the Lavender Menace, though they often played to her favor.

By 1972, she has been the Lavender Menace for eight years. She had hosted a Revenant so powerful that it would have assured her riches and servants had she ever desired such, yet given it up for a lifestyle that required her to live in poverty; she had outlasted many government assassinations; led women to battle and trained new hosts; had been wounded and almost lost the use of her right eye in 1970; she had organized a growing coalition of female hosts who needed an outlet for their ability to violence. By now no politician would be openly homophobic, but her public perception rated below cancer and hemorrhoids.

What she knew was that the government had begun construction of anti-host weaponry specifically designed against the Lavender Menace. According to the incomplete science of the time, the heart was the weakest point of hosts, and by attacking directly, then it would destroy the bacterial colony and its Revenant. Gaudy proclamations in newspapers read: "Top military scientists have estimated that within ten years, a civilian will be able to destroy a hyperhuman using a special type of gun so small it fits in your pocket." Ludicrous predictions aside, very little of this science was correct: current science has now established that the strongest part of a host is their heart, indeed because that is where the bacterial colony is and the closest-range Revenant defense is possible.

An explosive device was developed that promised to end the Menace. It was a multi-stage device that began by resonating a high sonic frequency to disorient a host, then explode in a mix of shrapnel and toxic gas, a concoction much like that of an acidic antibiotic, that would wipe away a Revenant colony. A single plane would be necessary to drop it upon the Lavender Menace's current home in the suburbs of San Francisco, but it would be concealed by Revenant and undetectable by electronics. A wind-wielding host would ensure that the bomb did not go off course, and tests established only a 1mm fluctuation of error.

Of course, this turned out disastrous. Not only had the plane malfunctioned midflight and almost crashed before making it to the suburb, but the fluctuation of 1mm had not tested for real-world situations, and the bomb hit a street over from its target, exploding across five homes and killing each heterosexual family within. Images of children suffocating on acidic gas; itself a weapon the Lavender Menace had never used; were now replayed across almost every television in America.

After months of questioning, government officials were forced to admit that it had been part of a plot to assassinate the Menace, who they claimed to be behind the apparent malfunction of the plane. Even the public did not believe this; the Menace had made a public appearance only a few minutes after in Tallahassee, and even if homosexuals were still ostracized, most were not willing to sacrifice their own children in pursuit of a woman who merely made the same demands as every other gay organization in the country and which were rapidly being adopted (whether as protection or genuine acceptance did not really matter).

Furthermore, the Lavender Menace had formed a sort of lesbian spirituality around herself. In some cities, one can still talk to old lesbians who talk of the young woman who protected homes from raids and cleared out housing for gay men and women exiled by their families.

During ten years of operation, she had survived several assassination attempts; she had commanded a small force of five hosts into commanding worldwide attention; she had been wounded, but survived; she had been ambushed and yet would be the last to withdraw, garnering her respect even among the federal agents who sought to slay her; and now, the very weaponry that had been developed to smite her had malfunctioned before it could approach her, turning public opinion against her enemies. She had arose from as improbable an event as the emergence of Revenants were that had divided these new hosts into two halves; that of heterosexual men and homosexual women; that had seen one of the most marginalized minorities on the planet suddenly become one of its most powerful. To many gay men and women this was evidence of divine intervention; proof of a greater being's love for the women who defended their community and baffled their enemies.

She had manipulated the media and wrote polemics that, though stating little new, were effective precisely in that their lack of originality resonated with ideas all had already been reared underneath. Many lesbians will still dismiss the theory that she may have, in knowledge of what resonance the imagery would enact, manipulated the bomb herself to deliberately strike children. To those who would decry that as the murder of children, she likely would bluntly opine: "Ten children dead to save thousands of our lives in the future is a bargain history rarely allows."

And distorted though their histories may be, many students still pay allegiance to the idea of her. Almost every female host can name a time where, as a young teen, they have dug into their wardrobe for a purple piece of clothing and wrapped it around their faces, contorting a shirt or dress into a mask and pretending to be the Lavender Menace.

It has also become a Urasaria tradition to continue the hero name The Lavender Menace, granted only to exceptional students like Marisa Gwynvere. The government has attempted, many times, to prevent this practice. When they will not mint the badge, students forge them themselves. When they demand the student who chooses the name change it, despite the usual Urasaria bickering and drama, there is for a moment that upswell of solidarity that had once claimed five female hosts.

The government will continue to fail until they understand she was not merely a sexually lascivious thug given female form, and that what she constitutes symbolically is likely a thousand fold more potent than what form she took in life. After all, she displayed all qualities that good students are told they should possess: duty, courage, and violence in justice.

There is much ink left in this novel, however, and it is better spent on current Urasaria students, not political figures, however much the instruments of their own narratives may echo a timbre of depth alike; but perhaps there will again be a return to her.