Stacy Erra was an early member of the Sirens as well as the founder of our sister club The Lavender Jane Gang, a group of women bikers who worked hard to maintain their sobriety. Stacy was a fierce and charismatic poet. Some of of us were lucky enough to witness her breathtaking reading from the stage of the Women's Motorcycle Festival in 1988. When she was finished the room was breifly frozen in silence and then erupted in wild cheering and applause. I looked around me and noticed that I wasn't the only one fanning myself. In the late '70's and early '80's Stacy read her poetry in venues in the Village including St. Marks in the Bowery and at Carnegie Recital Hall. She never accepted traditional women's roles and according to her lover wore a motorcycle helmet in her high school yearbook picture. She supported her performer's life working as among other things, a carpenter, taper and wallpaper hanger. Stacy struggled mightily with her addictions, sometimes winning, sometimes not. AIDS was already ravaging her body when she joined us but at that time there were few treatments and no one had even begun to consider the needs of women with AIDS. Disease and organ failure progressed quickly and she searched in vain for adequate health care at the end of her life. The stigma of AIDS was so great then that her family preferred her obituary to state cirrhosis of the liver as the cause of her death.

In the winter of '89 Stacy rode her 700 Shadow over to visit friends not knowing that she would be too weak to ride it home. Soon after she slipped into an hepatic coma from which she did not recover. Stacy was a very complex person who was mercurial, fascinating, and very intense. Those of us who were drawn to her light are deeply saddened that it was extinguished too soon.

Tribute by Cheryl Stewart