The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

Oppression births art, hatred inspires love, and revolutions bring change. It would be easy to say that these are the main ideals Larry Mitchell had in mind when he created the astounding, dangerous, oppressive, and fantastical world of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions—but there is so much more to discover inside the book’s pages, including playful, erotic illustrations by Ned Asta.—Interview Magazine Inspired by Mitchell and Asta’s life in communes such as Lavender Hill in Ithaca, New York, the book feels like a small treasure, a care package from another era providing a witty blueprint in creating chosen family and world-making outside of dominant institutions. Though it was out-of-print for years, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions was certainly never out of circulation, exchanged between friends and lovers throughout the years.—Filthy Dreams "Beauty is currency; sexuality is sustenance. But more valuable than that is friendship—which usually involves some degree of sexual intimacy. Pleasure will keep you going. So will humor, possibly more effectively."—Slate "First published in 1977 by Mitchell’s own Calamus Press, The Faggots has circulated in PDF form in recent years, shared across the Internet as both queer consolation and fuel for fighting. Nightboat Books has now brought it back into print with introductory essays by filmmaker Tourmaline and performer Morgan Bassichis. Not quite speculative fiction, not quite allegory, and not quite polemic, The Faggots surveys a dystopian empire called Ramrod in its twilight years, where state agents struggle to enforce heteropatriarchal discipline as their kingdom crumbles around them."—The Nation

"For years, the book remained out of print, living only as a PDF shuffled between friends. Nightboat Books reprinted the cult classic in 2019. This is a book to read when it’s time to act."—***Electric Lit

"It’s 1977. The faggots, the women, the fairies and the queens have each other for love, sex and inspiration. They have the natural world, music, the body, feelings, crannies of cities in which to be, believe, touch, dance, dream, fuck, and grow. This was the liberation vision of Larry Mitchell from another time, another consciousness. With this new edition of The Faggots and Their Friends we can remember the collectivity of fun and pleasure and the necessary faith of silly hope as part of our legacy and wish for survival."—SARAH SCHULMAN "Oh! This book is so delicious and timeless! Open the pages, enter the fantastical, familiar empire of Ramrod, and hear someone whisper to you: here are the ways to survive. This is how we have always survived, swallowing every aspect of each other, holding on to each other, becoming more fabulous together. This book instantly awakens in the reader our inner faggots, strong women, queens, queers, fairies...even our men. We are held accountable for how free we are being in our lives, and then we are invited, no, required! to open even more to our own power, our own pleasures, our own revolution. This cult classic is in the lineage of pleasure activism - you must read it and then pass it along to someone who needs to be reminded that their freedom is necessary for all of us. This is a guide and an escape, whimsical and practical. Hit this pipe. Again."—ADRIENNE MARIE BROWN "Arrayed so earthly and erotically against the men, and the Man, and his world; but also before them, and beside them, to show them how to be beside themselves beside the women, the faggots & their friends fuck and style and till and dig so deep down through the sterile danger between revolutions that revolution comes to flower every day, before and after itself, as absolute embrace, a continual folding and holding in their arms. Just imagine what’s real: that there is such a time and place. The faggots & their friends say right here, right now. Larry Mitchell says, say it again!"—FRED MOTEN "We need this book so badly. The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions invites and models the deep grieving, mutual care, love, play, commitment to pleasure, and frivolity that is so essential right now, as we face existential political and environmental crises, increasing numbness, and disconnection. Faggots & Their Friends brings to life the spirit of collective, mirthful invention in the face of dire circumstances that characterized radical experiments of the 1970's, and brings longed-for inspiration to today's fruits and nuts. Best of all, this book is fun, and moving, and sexy. It cultivates our imaginations for surviving the current disasters and creating ways of being together that we desperately crave. This gift from the past is arriving right on time, right when we need it."—DEAN SPADE

Vorwort
It took me a long time to come back to the power and magic of image, art, fashion, aesthetics, and not least of all GLAMOUR. The faggots helped me find my way back. The faggots reminded me that superficiality, style, messiness, and play are not bad things, they are transformative ways of being. Our glamour is not superfluous to changing the current order, it is instrumental. Our glamour, our joy, our magic, are not commodities to be ripped off and sold back to us by corporations, they are ours. When they try to steal our essence, we slip away like snakes and leave them only the shedded skin. Now, even more so than when I first left professional community organizing, is a moment of immense violence and protracted struggle. Climate change, white supremacy, transphobia, ableism, and all systems of oppression are terrifyingly alive today. Many of us feel afraid and alone. Our images are being extracted at a rate and on a scale that is unprecedented, while at the same time our self expression is monitored, censored, and repressed. We are told that to make change we must take individual responsibility for systemic oppression, above all be respectable. We are truly between revolutions. But this book is right on time. In this moment of immense conservativism & austerity, the faggots point to sharing and distributing the abundance we all ready have. They invite us to move closer to our own unruly selves, to wear color in a sea of grey. The faggots outstretch an invitation to us all to be a freak or a fairy, to snuggle and guzzle the cum of our friends, and be in the tender care collective of moonbeam and lilac and pine tree, hollyhock and lose tomato. I hope you'll join me there. --Tourmaline

Autorentext

Larry Mitchell was born in 1939 in Muncie, Indiana and died of cancer in 2012 in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of many works of fiction that explored queer life and radical politics in New York City’s Lower East Side and East Village in the 1980s and 90s. Mitchell founded Calamus Press, an early small press devoted to gay literature, and with Felice Picano and Terry Helbing, co-founded Gay Presses of New York in 1981. Mitchell received a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, and was a professor at the College of Staten Island for 25 years. In addition to The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977), his novels include The Terminal Bar (1982), In Heat (1986), My Life as a Mole and Other Stories (1988), which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Acid Snow (1993). He helped form multiple communes, including one on Staten Island—which collectively wrote the Great Gay in the Morning: One Group's Approach to Communal Living and Sexual Politics, published in 1972 by Times Change Press—and one outside of Ithaca, NY, called Lavender Hill, which is the subject of …