Hope, Free Love and Republishing the Revolution
The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.
- The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions – Larry Mitchell
At the beginning of the year, when claustrophobic darkness still pulled tight around Glasgow I was half-listening to an NTS Radio show that was interspersed with excerpts from The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a queer-cult fantasy novella written by Larry Mitchell in 1977. I’d given up listening to regular radio just before Christmas, the reporting on the recent election had been so biased and misleading that all news sounded like bullshit. There was a new virus spreading that was causing fits of panic and fervid dismissal of panic simultaneously and I thought I could shut it out. The Faggots and Their Friends and its hopeful, druggy escapism was an antidote to my lingering doomer mind set. When the UK lockdown was finally implemented after weeks of chaos I bought myself a copy of the book.
The Faggots and Their Friends is set in Ramrod, a crumbling empire ruled by the paranoid and vicious ‘men without colour’. The allegory here, like everything else in the book, is not subtle. Ramrod wages brutality and empire with the same might as America has done and continues to do. The Faggots and their friends (the Queens, Fairies, Dykelets, Faggatinas et al) are a colourful, ethereal community shunned by the keepers of Ramrod. Though some rungs on the ladder may have shifted over time, the hierarchy of neglect that The Faggots and Their Friends represents remains intact.
After being out of print for the best part of forty years, The Faggots and Their Friends was re-published last year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that sowed the seeds for its existence. In a preface to this new edition filmmaker and activist, Tourmaline writes: ‘Climate change, white supremacy, transphobia, ableism, and all systems of oppression are terrifyingly alive today.’ She holds up, as many others have done in the intervening years The Faggots and Their Friends as a sacred queer text. She reminds us that ‘in this moment of immense conservatism and austerity, the faggots point to sharing and distributing the abundance we already have.’ The world of the Faggots is indeed one of oppositional abundance. They thrive on a bounty of endless love, sex, community and nature. Sustaining themselves on foraged fruits and the ‘tasty orgasm juice’ that is available to even the poorest faggots. This plentiful utopia loosely mirrors Mitchell’s own attempts at communal living. Mitchell was a member of Lavender Hill, one of the few lesbian and gay communes in the Back to the Land movement of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Lavender Hill was uniquely and conspicuously committed to what Morgan Bassichis bluntly calls in the book’s introduction: ‘Faggotry.’ Reading further into the ‘delight over dogma’ approach that sustained Lavender Hill during the decade of its existence it’s difficult to ignore the white, generational and class privilege humming faintly in the background. Knowing that Lavender Hill was only possible as a result of the brief financial security and freedom that the post- War years gave to a certain tier of American society leaves a bitter taste. Though maybe it’s jealously? I’m still not entirely sure.
Mitchell understood that endurance in protest movements comes in part from an immortalisation of the past. The folkloric style of The Faggots and Their Friends mimics the oral-history story telling that has long been one of the primary ways in which black, queer and other marginalised people’s history has been shared and preserved. This version of history often holds more truth about the wider world than the distorted and bombastic historical narratives we are fed in school and in movies. On the history of Ramrod Mitchell writes: ‘the men want everyone to remember and commemorate only their moments of victory and plentitude. The men hope that only they have such moments. So history becomes a chronicle of wars and brutality and state splendour.’ Last month an infamous, bird-shitted slave trader statue in the city nearest my hometown was finally toppled. There was more to learn from the dent it left in the ground than there ever was in the cold, hard bronze of its replicated body.
Many of those who contribute to the revolution are not lucky enough to see the fruits of their labour and so the passing down of exertion and hope and light is as vital as the direct action it seeks to preserve. This was made painfully apparent during the AIDS crisis that followed only a few steps behind The Faggots and Their Friends publication. Learning from past movements, Mitchell acknowledges how the energy of oppression can only be effectively harnessed when those who had been oppressed strive for unity in their emancipation. The Faggots and Their Friends offers very little in the way of narrative, something too easily distorted by our fluctuating memories or forgotten entirely. Instead Mitchell embellishes the story with succinct, powerful and wry aphorisms handed down from past revolutions. Ned Astra’s beautiful psychedelic illustrations of entwined bodies frame statements entitled WOMEN WISDOM, in which avatars for the feminist movement named, ‘strong Women’ share with the Faggots mantras of their hard-earned experience. ‘It is catagories in the mind and guns in their hands which keep us enslaved.’
It is these revolutionary proverbs that I suspect have contributed heavily to the books longevity. I recognise one particular line of ‘Faggot Wisdom’ from placards at multiple demonstrations. It reads: ‘There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for a lifetime’. In 2020 these read almost like tweets. Morsels to be exchanged for instant brain chemical gratification. Barely a few pages in I couldn’t help pulling out my phone to take a picture of the affirmation that sits at the head of this newsletter. I shared it to my Instagram before I’d even turned the page. It would be easy to dismiss the sharable nature of The Faggots and Their Friends but that kind of cynicism is so at odds with the books ethos that to do so would be almost sacrilegiously futile, a rotten-hearted misreading of Mitchell’s intentions.
Holding my slim, red bound copy of The Faggots and Their Friends in my hands feels like holding a small piece of countercultural history, a worthy accompaniment to books on real, radical history. Part of me wishes that instead of ordering it online during a prolonged period of Government sanctioned isolation, someone had handed me a bootlegged copy years ago, as if somehow that would make a more authentic reading experience. In reality I am glad that it’s back in print and easier to share now than at any other period in its history. I agree with Tourmaline that today especially - as IKEA queues begin to form again whilst people across the world fight in the streets for the right to live, get paid, fuck whomever they want and walk the streets without the threat of violence or death- we need the Faggots and their friends, armed with their trippy guts and gumption to show us how to fight and endure for the bright and abundant future we deserve.
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Burning House Books News:
This weekend after almost five years of selling online and dragging suitcases bursting with books to pop-ups and fairs all over the country Burning House Books is opening as a real bricks-and-mortar shop!
The soft launch will take place over the 1/2 August from 11am-5pm. Normal opening hours will be Weds-Sat 10am-5:30pm.
You can find Burning House Books here:
Unit 20
Argyle House (The big yellow building)
The Hidden Lane
1108 Argyle Street
Finnieston
Glasgow
G3 8ND