the f*ggots and their friends between revolutions
a queer text which opens the way to something entirely new
Larry Mitchell’s queer fantasy The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is one of those books which is fundamentally unlike anything I’ve ever read. It feels at once totally alien, with staggering amounts of imagination used in creating its world, and painfully familiar. Familiar both because it’s rooted so firmly in the material concerns of the ‘70s queer community it was created in and because it feels so peculiarly prescient, prefiguring many aspects of queer identity as it has come to be understood in the decades following its publication. Although its world is so unlike our own — we neither have faeries who live in the forests nor do we live in a land called Ramrod ruled over by Warren-And-His-Fuckpole — it feels so instantly recognisable, so obviously allegorical. Through that allegory, though, it does an incredible thing: it transforms the familiar stuff of queer life into something magical, which it uses to open up entirely new ways of imagining queer futures.
Let’s start with the allegorical mechanisms of the world Faggots imagines. The book acts, to an extent, like a tour through Ramrod’s empire. Along the way, you meet, among others:
The faggots — most easily understood as gay men, but specifically those who exist outside of patriarchal normalcy; the gay men who would today be described as ‘queer’.
The strong women — essentially synonymous with feminists, but specifically radical and Black feminists.
The queens — drag queens, in the book’s understanding, although their experiences obviously have much in common with trans women.
The women who love women — lesbians; I don’t feel like I need to expand on this.
The faeries — Radical Faeries specifically but more generally countercultural and spiritual queerness.
The men — the dominant force; patriarchal society; colonial violence; empires in decline; war; men.
The Boys in the Backroom — analogous with queer activists and advocates, notable for their ability to use the men’s techniques against them.
The queer men — gay men who attempt to assimilate into patriarchal society, generally closeted; however, they will occasionally have sex with other queer men or faggots. Ironically, this group’s present-day analogues are generally those gay men who are least comfortable with the descriptor ‘queer’.
Every group in the book has a pretty obvious analogue outside of it. In this sense, it might appear that describing Faggots as fantasy doesn’t quite fit; as presented here, it would be easy to imagine that all it does is describe the world we live in but with different labels, a particularly direct form of allegory. It even manages to predict the future, like when it gives a description of a ‘disease’ the men spread among the faggots from which they are saved by working in solidarity with those around them. This was written several years before HIV/AIDS started to be felt in America’s queer communities, but it’s eerily relevant to it.
But there’s a fascinating imaginative work in the text which turns these subjects — which could so easily slip into the mundane — into the revolutionary and transformative. Possibly the best example of this is the following section, describing a group of faggots’ mutual care for one another (this is the first bit of the book I read, in Tourmaline’s lovely preface):
Heavenly Blue worried all the time. He worried about the bills and the roof that needed repairing and the strange men who always watched the house and about Hollyhock’s unhappiness. He worried most of all that he would go mad. His worrying got the bills paid and the roof fixed and drove the men away and calmed the neighbors down and helped Hollyhock be happier. And finally his worrying drove him mad. It was the madness of looking inward and being afraid. There had never been enough love and warmth around him and he thought he had gradually dried up inside. He wanted out but he did not know where out was. Lilac and Pinetree and Moonbeam and Loose Tomato and Hollyhock gathered. They held Heavenly Blue in their arms for days, they let him cry and stare and slobber and scream and be silent. They paid the bills and looked after the roof and watched the street for strange men and talked to the neighbors and Hollyhock kept himself happy. Their house filled up with comfort and routine and gladness until Heavenly Blue could no longer resist and became response-able again.
The worries which move Heavenly Blue to breaking down are recognisable, I think, for most queer people — paying the bills, keeping your house liveable, danger from bigots, your friends’ happiness, your own health — and we’ve all felt close to collapsing under the strain of just existing as a queer person in this world. We’ve all needed the care and support of our loved ones, both the emotional — being held, being allowed to express your emotions — and the practical — filling in the gaps of what you can’t do yourself. The prose, too, is not what you’d expect from most fantasy texts — the narration is direct, descriptive, and in simple past tense; the only deviation into perfect tense is when it briefly slips into Heavenly Blue’s thoughts.
And yet, it feels somehow transformative. It feels like this act of care shifts this story into offering a new way of being. Its limited sense of causation — it never tells us how or why subsequent events arise from prior ones — makes everyday forces like ‘comfort and routine and gladness’ appear almost magical. By allowing us to do the work in understanding the causal relationships here, it forces us to identify with the characters by thinking through these connections and working through their pain alongside them.
Simultaneously, the relatively plain prose itself seems to allow the reader to look at what it describes as if it’s unfamiliar, even if it isn’t, a mechanism which is supported by the unusual names. It’s as if it adds an intervening layer between us and the world of the text, increasing the analytical work we have to do to access them. In abstracting these familiar stories, the text makes us able to trace their real properties more clearly and therefore to deploy their peculiar magic to turn them into something new.
That the book is so conscious of the material conditions we suffer under is an important part of how it conjures spaces for new realities. It is through the pain and difficulties that Heavenly Blue and friends experience that they begin to face outwards and create a new world. The fantastical names and the simple, descriptive prose allow us to safely confront the inadequacies of our own world, and in following as the characters recreate their own, we can see a path to doing so ourselves.
In this way, the text opens up new possibilities, allowing us to see how networks of care and connection can render ourselves ‘response-able’ and begin to work to create that better world. Simultaneously, the characters themselves start to make something new:
Heavenly Blue now had a house filled with his friends. Contentment overwhelmed him. After much chattiness they all decided to call themselves the Tribe of the Rising Sons. Everyone felt quite elated about the name and about the house and about Heavenly Blue's recovery. They painted the house pink and the trim lavender. They carved peacock feathers in the wood around the door and planted roses in the front yard. Then they all began again to be who they were. Quickly, they all go out into the neighborhood to discover their friends and find a faggot world being made.
Insofar as it’s useful to understand this text as a fantasy, therefore, it’s in the way that the best fantasy doesn’t just offer up new worlds, but allows us to see our own with new eyes. This is the step which is, to me, essential to creating a better future: beginning to see the present in new forms. The extraordinary, gorgeous art by Ned Asta supports this, too. Sometimes it stands alone, taking up entire pages or spreads:
These illustrations are always important, feeling like they’re representing a whole new way of seeing the world, and they adorn the spartan prose to create a real imagination and depth. If the text as a whole feels like it’s working with us to build another world, these illustrations feel like glimpses of it. Note especially, for example, the second illustration above, which comes in the middle of Heavenly Blue’s story and represents the faggot neighbourhood he and his friends are part of. It offers us the possibility of seeing what a world for us might be. They’re important, also, in their insistence on sexuality and pleasure:
The book takes a decidedly materialist approach to many aspects of queer realities, but it also insists on joy and sex as essential parts of being in the world and becoming connected to others. We’re told that:
The faggots consider it their sacred pleasure to engage in indiscriminate promiscuous sexuality. No faggot, regardless of age, race or physical appearance, should ever be horny. Horniness makes the faggots uneasy and nasty and distracts them from the revolutions. Sexuality, like all the necessities of life, must be free and easily available. So the faggots secure spaces where each can be anonymous, where all cocks are equal and all cock juice equally precious. "Feeding the faggots" they call it. Two rules govern these places of nourishment. First, all must remain quiet so the soft sexual noises can be heard. Second, anyone who is done must do. If you get, you have got to give.
This isn’t sexuality as secondary to the world-building transformations this book is engaged in; it’s sexuality as a central part of those transformations, as itself a kind of praxis in creating the kind of cooperative and joyous world you want to build. It therefore criticises the revolutionary vanguard which excludes the faggots because they ‘do not know how to keep a straight face and the vanguard demands constantly straight faces’, because pleasure is an essential component to any new reality worth building.
The illustrations are also sometimes attached to the wonderful bits of ‘Wisdom’ the book offers, like:
These always feel like gifts: they point us towards new ways of thinking about the world, and let the book step outside of its allegorical confines and directly address the reader. While the images are fantastical, the Wisdom acts almost as a textbook for how to create the new world the book as a whole invites us to.
The book repeatedly, also, emphasises the importance of solidarity within any such movement, asserting its absolute belief that the only adequate liberation is total:
It makes absolutely clear that all oppressions are interlinked, and that without overthrowing these discourses and systems of power, we will never be free. It knows the material oppressions and systems of thought which bring into being all of this discrimination. Even as it understands that groups like queer men — those who try to fit into patriarchal society — might be regressive, it also knows that they too are oppressed by the system they have to be part of. It understands that the men oppress us, but that they ‘pretend to be machines’ and doing so makes them isolated, ‘fearful and suspicious’. Faggots knows that revolution is for everyone.
It also knows that a revolution can achieve those aims and is absolutely confident in the idea that revolution must and will come. The title gives the hint: revolution is inevitable and is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ whose conditions ‘result from the premises now in existence’, as Marx and Engels put it. One bit of Wisdom we are offered is:
The language in which this extract thinks about revolution — as something which will happen and which we will win — is the language used across the entire book. It imparts, too, a lesson for its readers quite like the one the faggots learn from the strong women. It’s easy to find our lives too difficult to imagine something new or the possibility we might win instead of simply survive. But we have to imagine that change will happen, and work towards that; doing so is the only way we will stop getting our asses kicked, and start winning.
This book comes from another time, when the queer community was extraordinarily different to how it is now, but it feels like a breath of fresh air, something entirely new. It comes from another world, but it feels so deeply relevant to our own.
By grounding its imagined revolutionary future — which is only ever rendered as a future we have to work towards, and never fully pinned down — in these scenes of suffering, this book points us towards something new but is never utopian. By asserting the primacy of pleasure within that future, it offers a vision of a better world which is decidedly queer.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a fantasy of and roadmap to a world we have to build together, but it does not think that will be easily accomplished. It invites us to start the essential work of freeing ourselves. It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read.