For my birthday this year, my boyfriend got me a bright red little book with an even louder title: The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

Alt text: Bold red and black book cover of Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. The cover is red depicting two black ink style towering fluid shadow figures encasing the title with branching curved members and meeting hands by dripping heart. This alternate cover includes the address to calamus books (p.o. box 689 cooper station new york, NY 10003)

It’s written by Larry Mitchell and illustrated by Ned Asta, friends and Lavender Hill commune cohabitors whose experiments with queer modes of group living in Ithaca, NY, in the 1970s inspired this fable of radical queer survival. Whimsically illustrated and delivered in short segments with a heavy dose of refrain and repetition, the book is reminiscent of a children’s story, although longer and with content unsuitable for kids (phrases like “tasty cock juice” and “House of Heavy, Horney Hunks” come to mind). In fact, Mitchell’s earlier draft of the story intended for it to become a children’s book, but I’d venture to guess that that draft looked very different.

The Faggots & Their Friends is set in the declining man-run empire of Ramrod and follows various groups of faggots and their allies in arms as they share knowledge, build networks, and ultimately carve out spaces for themselves to live communally for the betterment of all. “Part 1: The Way It Is” outlines the groups: the faggots, the queens, the fairies, the queer men, the women who love women, and the strong women, as well as their collective adversaries, the men, whose power, selfishness, and arbitrary rules hurt everyone—themselves included. “Part 2: The Energy of Oppression” zooms in on a cast of characters with fun queer names like Loose Tomato and Heavenly Blue as they build and maintain their community amidst the ruins of Ramrod. (Haters of enby names like “Socks” and “Bug” will be crushed to learn that unconventional monikers are nothing new in our community!)

Being a leftist queer very interested in the diverse ways that sexualities and genders have been constructed throughout history, I was delighted by the identity categories that The Faggots & Their Friends defines. The queer men pass for men but fuck each other in secret, the fairies are those woo-woo, earthy crunchy gays you can find IRL at those Radical Faerie campgrounds, the queens are androgynous, fabulous, and live amidst Ramrod’s literal garbage, and so on. They’re united in their nonconformity and the objects of their sexual desire, but they’re decidedly not a homogeneous group. Each brings their unique tools to the fight against the men, and only together do they survive in the face of the men’s oppression of them. Beautiful.

There’s so much to appreciate about this book, so read it yourself! Courtesy of the Internet Archive, here’s a free PDF of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Enjoy, and do please let me know if you’d like to start up a queer commune.

In solidarity,

Angel

PS: To give you a taste of the wit, fun, and perspective of the book, here’s one of my favorite passages, found on page 67:

“The men love papers. They love to sign them, file them and move them around. They believe that certain papers are sacred and display them. They buy papers from each other and they lock papers up. They store them in huge underground hiding places so other men who are their enemies cannot have them. They make women sit endlessly in airless, tall buildings making new papers for them to write on and then send to other men to write on. And if enough men who the men think are important men sign a paper, it becomes either famous and is put on guarded display or it becomes important and is hidden away and gossiped and speculated about endlessly. All the men accumulate paper. But if a man can accumulate enough of the correct papers he can become powerful. Then he hires other men to watch over his correct papers. Most men never get hold of many correct papers. Still they hoard and protect the papers they do have hoping the market will change.
The fairies use their papers to start fires and to wrap up the trees in the winter.
The faggots throw their papers away every spring when they clean out the winter tribal odors.
The queens use their papers to wipe their asses with.”

If you would like to read more of Angel’s pieces check out his website here.