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THE FAGGOTS & THEIR FRIENDS BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS

Copyright © 1977 by Larry Mitchell & Ned Asta

Preface Copyright © 2019 by Tourmaline

Introduction Copyright © 2019 by Morgan Bassichis

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

Third Printing, 2019

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

was first published in 1977 by Calamus Books.

ISBN: 978-1-64362-006-0

Additional design and typesetting by adam b. bohannon

Additional text set in Minion

Cover art by Ned Asta

CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Nightboat Books

New York

www.nightboat.org

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Tourmaline

INTRODUCTION

Morgan Bassichis

THE FAGGOTS & THEIR FRIENDS BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

TOURMALINE

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 what the neighbors might do next 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. (80)

I remember reading these words for the first time many years ago, and how familiar they felt. I have been where Heavenly Blue was, so many times, and I’ll be there again: imagining that respectability and responsibility could stop the immense violences that so many of us have to live through and often die from. All my life, I have been hyper-responsible, worrying about what needs to get done, feeling I must be the one to do it. I have worried about paying the bills, and what will happen when I inevitably am not able to pay them, yet again. I have worried about being perfect, about being respectable. I have worried that I would go mad (I have certainly already gone mad). I have worried about not having enough love. And I have, like so many of us, wanted out, but not known where out was.

I am still here because I have also been held, in these moments of despair, by lilac and pine tree and moonbeam and loose tomato and hollyhock. I have been held by dandelion and cedar and Marsha and tourmaline and pumpkin pie and moss. I have been held by my friends, my very own faggots, who after all this time still let me cry and stare and slobber and scream and stay silent. I have come undone, and this has kept me alive. The faggots have helped me believe that if we are to ever make it to that next revolution it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are. The faggots remind us that to become undone is our greatest gift to ourselves. It is truly our greatest path to being response-able – to feel our feelings authentically makes us able to respond to the conditions around us with an open heart.

Some of the faggots are so poor that they have to live on only what is free. The tasty orgasm juice is free. So some of the faggots live on it. From other faggots they receive this juice quickly, secretively, and in abundance. (35)

The faggots are constantly reminding me that in moments of apparent scarcity, our best defense is to respond with abundance. When it feels like we are truly abandoned, there are moonbeams and trees to turn to, to talk and make love with. Bees to listen to. It seems counter-intuitive. We have been taught so forcefully, especially in the deeply conservative time that we live in, that we must look out only for ourselves and indeed conserve our resources. That our resources are what others have deemed valuable - money, time, material things. But the faggots have other ideas. They say that “the more you share, the less you need.” They make a way out of no way, and build a life together in fugitivity. They see renewable resources where others might not. They see their sluttiness and madness and magic as surplus, not lack. They thrive on cum alone.

The faggots have never been asked to join the vanguard. The faggots, it was noticed, do not know how to keep a straight face and the vanguard demands constantly straight faces. The faggots, it was noticed, want only to eat so they can play love play while the vanguard demands endless talk about the hunger of others and the seriousness of work. The faggots, it was noticed, are too quick to believe that the revolution had come and so too quick to celebrate. The vanguard demands that the revolution go on forever and so demands that the celebration only be planned, never enacted. (22)

On my birthday this past year, I woke up thinking about Marsha P. Johnson. Not just about how she started the Stonewall riots (yes that too) but about the parts of her life that get left out of the story. I woke up thinking about her most unruly parts, about how many blow jobs she gave to “nevers” at clubs, how she would get tossed out of those same clubs, and especially how she would often walk naked down Christopher St. after throwing her clothes in the Hudson as an offering to Neptune. How much power Marsha had! How much magic in front of and behind the veil!

When I was a community organizer I really internalized the message of much of movement organizing at that time: aesthetics and beauty and art in general were secondary to the movement. The most authentic way to be a community organizer was to dress and live in austerity. You didn’t dare wear fantastic colors, or wear glittery faux fur to the protest. Your politics had to be pure and thorough, you had to stay sharp and have an analysis and always have it together.

I remember going to organizing meetings with other trans people, many of whom were also disabled and poor and people of color, and most of us could barely stay on topic. We were too busy talking and emoting about our basic survival needs: housing, welfare, healthcare, community, not being harassed every time we left our home. We were too busy dreaming up another space-time, where and when we could be our full selves.

The queens display infinite wierdnesses to the world. For them, style is the path into the unique self and so to transcendence. They long for everyone to reveal themselves wherever they are. (63)

Right around the same time, pop culture realized it could make a profit off of trans people. It hurt me to see tokenization couched as representation—in fashion, art, music—to see one or two of us in systems that so often harmed us. But I was also drawn to these worlds, and craved to be able to make art that reflected our beauty and magic back to us.

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 loose tomato. I hope you’ll join me there.

INTRODUCTION

MORGAN BASSICHIS

1

Larry Mitchell knew we would need this book. You and me. In 1977, he made us a care package of prophetic messages in the form of a slim black and red volume, hoping it would reach us.

NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH: The fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer. The earth, scarred and gouged and stripped and bombed, will deny life to the men in order to stop the men. The fairies have left the men’s reality in order to destroy it by making a new one. (53)

And here we are, living in yet another period of both intensified repression and infectious rebellion, gathering all the tools we can find to overcome the deadly interlocking forces of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, fascism, and climate change that threaten our collective survival. Pour yourself a cocktail or some weird probiotic drink and pass this book around. Bottoms up!

Part-fable, part-manifesto, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions introduces us to clandestine networks of chosen family making lives and plotting revolt in Ramrod, an empire in decline ruled by the cruel patriarch, Warren-And-His-Fuckpole, and his minister of hate, Mildred Munich. This world is inhabited by a mythic cosmology of revolutionary protagonists—the faggots, the queens, the women who love women, the queer men, the faeries, the strong women—and, of course, their opponents, the men.

Wherever the faggots settle they wish it to be near the women. It is from the women that they learn wisdom and magic…. They are friends of the faggots. They constantly exchange information with each other on the present state of the madness of the men. They commit espionage for each other so that each can survive. (91)

In the world of the book, one’s role is not determined by some narrow essentialist notion of biology, but rather by one’s allegiance to either the oppressed or the oppressor: “All the men could be faggots or their friends”(8). Social categories themselves are portrayed as coercive and unstable, and therefore opportunities for solidarity and play. Friendship is understood as a means and an end amidst unceasing violence—the bridge and the destination. It is racial capitalism that makes “a small group of men without color very rich” (1) and keeps ruining the fun for everybody else:

The faggots who worked knew that it’s useless to have rich people. The rich did no useful work and received large amounts of money for it…. The poor faggots said, ‘There is only one choice for us. Take it away from the rich men or go mad living in their world.’ (28)

A trip to San Francisco in the early 1970s inspired Mitchell to write The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. He asked his friend Ned Asta, a Queens-born graduate of the School of Visual Arts, to illustrate it. Initially conceived of as a children’s book—evident in its playfulness and deceptively simple mode of address— The Faggots & Their Friends became Mitchell and Asta’s record of a decade of their experiments in radical communal living and queer friendship from the late 1960s through the late 1970s. The book grew in particular out of a commune they founded with others outside of Ithaca, New York, called Lavender Hill.¹

Publishing the book proved difficult: “every gay person in America had a manuscript because no one would publish anything gay,” Mitchell told queer historian Stephen Vider in 2012. “I thought, why don’t I publish it myself?” Mitchell founded Calamus Press—a reference to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Greek myth of Kalamos, who was transformed into a river reed after he drowned himself mourning his lover, Karpos²—and published The Faggots & Their Friends in 1977.³ For the 1981 newsletter of the Gay’s the Word bookstore in London, Mitchell wrote:

My political development, from militant anti-war activity to left-wing gay liberation had convinced me that we could not continue the endless, tedious struggle against the militarists or the patriarchy unless we had our own culture and community to nurture us, teach us and take care of us. I knew that we must have our own institutions—newspapers, bookshops, health clinics, publishers, artists, neighborhoods—if we were to survive.

Despite being out of print for much of the last few decades, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions has stayed in circulation through multiple DIY reprintings, on xerox machines and scanners, and through the generosity of friends. It is beloved by many. My friend Bobby gave me a copy—his boyfriend Blake had found it in a used bookstore—in 2005, while we were living together in an apartment on Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco above a head shop called Distractions. Colby lived there too. Lis had just moved out and Dean visited regularly. The dot com bubble of the late 90s had burst a few years earlier, but the rents were skyrocketing again, and the Google buses were starting to clog the streets. At least there was still phoneless sex to be found in the nearby Panhandle and Buena Vista Park. San Francisco was already over, everyone told me, like New York, like everywhere, but I seemed to have landed in a holdout of the city’s persistent queer spirit that had been so badly bruised by the era of tech vampires, $15 smoothies, and gay marriage. Do not get me wrong: I love an expensive smoothie, but at least I hate myself for it.

It was during those years that this group of queer weirdos and so many others before and since then modeled for me how to do friendship. Friendship was not an idea or a status you took for granted, but something you did, over and over: When your friend is flying into town, you find a car and pick them up at the airport, and you take them to get burgers at In-N-Out. When it’s your friend’s birthday, you bake their favorite cake (Earl Grey if you’re lucky) and make them a beautiful card from thick pieces of paper and stickers you have collected for the purpose. When your friend needs a place to stay because they are visiting town or recovering from surgery or getting out of prison, you make them a bed from the extra pair of sheets and pillow you keep for visitors, and you leave them a snack in the fridge. In the shadow of structural abandonment, political alienation, family rejection, chronic illness, state violence, and medical neglect, queer friendship saves us. Queer friendship—that thing that is sometimes called mutual aid, solidarity, disability justice, care, organizing, abolition, or maybe just love—is what raised me in San Francisco, and what forms the lifeblood of this book. Bobby inscribed my copy, “Come home soon.”

My friend Dori had a framed page on the wall of her bathroom in her apartment on Guerrero Street, “The strong women told the faggots that the more you share, the less you need”(38). Craig read from his copy at a memorial for Kaitlin’s grandfather, “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”(21). I read from mine at a Passover seder at Gregg and Kristine’s house, “The queens elaborate their dens in the rubble to create hidden places where one can live for long periods of time safe from the cold, sharp eyes of the men. And they elaborate their forms of outrage” (52). How many times has this book been passed between friends and lovers? I was rummaging through Mitchell’s papers and photo albums held at Cornell University and found this letter he received from a reader living in upstate New York in 1980:

It should be in the hands of every queer fairy gay queen in existence (which includes just about everybody, including the amnesiac Men). I belong to a Fairy Circle and at one of our gatherings following, appropriately enough, a celebration of Beltane up on a wooded hill in Inwood Park with about 50 witches (male and female) last May, we sat in our circle and took turns reading from your book with great hilarity and delight. It has given me a renewed enspiritment, and hope.

II.

Larry Mitchell was born in Muncie, Indiana in 1938. He came to New York to get his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. He had family money and a big apartment on the Upper West Side that he invited his friend David Hirsch—one of the founding members of Lavender Hill—to move into. They met at Art Bar in the Broadway Central Hotel on Broadway between West 3rd and Bond in 1966. “We had sex but it wasn’t very successful,” David told me in August 2018 as we sat and ate bialys in the house that he and the other communards built in the summer of 1973. “But we talked a lot.” How many enduring queer friendships start this way, with mediocre sex? Larry met Zelik Mintz, another founding member of Lavender Hill, at the Continental Baths in 1969. “It was amazing, you’d be sitting around in your towel listening to Patti Labelle or Bette Middler. I went home with Larry and I just moved in. That’s how it was with our friends. People would come to visit us and they would never leave.”

If you talk to any of the members of Lavender Hill—made up of white women and men, all gay or avidly bisexual, mostly Jews and Italians from Brooklyn and Queens—you will soon find out their entire sexual history. It’s more factual than salacious—they will tell you what kind of food they were into (dessert), what music they were listening to (Aretha Franklin and Laura Nyro), and who they were having sex with at the time, including one another. “Horniness makes the faggots uneasy and nasty and distracts them from the revolutions”(12). David was cruising in the Rambles in Central Park when he met a gay witch who gave him a flier for a Gay Liberation Front meeting. (Isn’t this how all of us got into activism?) It was the fall of 1969, a few months after the rebellion against the NYPD at the Stonewall Inn. They went.

David and Larry joined a gay study group inspired by feminist consciousness-raising circles, led by fellow GLF member Arthur Evans, author of the book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Mitchell reflected on the radical anti-assimilationist gay political consciousness he developed in this period:

I was thrilled to be gay because there were two things I didn’t have to do now—go into the army or get married. And of course over the years the two things that the gay movement fought for was to be able to go into the army and get married. But we were thrilled that we didn’t have to do that. We thought it was fantastic! The gay movement did not follow us there. It went towards acceptance, and we were not about acceptance. We were about changing the rules. We were about opposition.⁴

Mitchell was a longtime professor at Richmond College, later renamed College of Staten Island, and taught courses such as “Community-building” and “The sociology of men.” Yvonne Fisher was one of his students. Over rugelach she told me about the teacher who changed her life:

He sat the class in a big circle, on rugs, and didn’t say anything for a while. I kept looking around thinking, Where’s the teacher? And then he started talking. He was so committed to radical theory without calling it that—feminist, gay, socialist thinking. Richmond College was a hotbed of excitement, radicalism, and feminism at the time.

A main focus of his teaching was on practical applications of socialist ideals. He helped to form a commune in Staten Island, loosely named the 25 to 6 Baking and Trucking Society, and invited his students to move in. Yvonne was thrilled to join. “It was both straight and gay, but the politics were all gay. And people really believed not just in gay politics but in feminism, fighting racism and the war in Vietnam.”

The Staten Island commune existed for about three years before a political split prompted the straight members to leave. The queer members collectively created a record of their growing political consciousness in Great Gay in the Morning!: One Group’s Approach to Communal Living and Sexual Politics, published in 1972 by Times Change Press:

The straight men were the ones who most insistently enunciated the doctrine of ‘do your own thing’ and ‘it’s all free’ and ‘don’t tamper with the good vibes.’ We began to feel that this hippy ideology was a cover for privilege and power and laziness and irresponsibility. We felt like we were doing most of the work and we were paying for all of it. They were being taken care of. (13)

The struggles over who did the “shitwork” continued—something you are familiar with if you’ve ever been a part of an organization or a family or a society—and initiated this circle of friends into the pleasures and pains of living together radically:

We are preparing ourselves to live in a post-scarcity, egalitarian, world-wide society. The material resources necessary to make this society a reality for everyone exist now. We need only take them back from the ruling classes who stole them from us in the first place. We, as white, middle-class Americans, will have to lower our material standard of living so that the poor of this country and the rest of the world can have what they need. We are trying to do that. (24)

The group began to experiment with rural living, forming a shortlived commune in Fleischmanns, New York, and later purchasing 80 acres of land in Spencer, New York, in the unceded historic territory of the Cayuga Nation, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. None of the early communards had any building experience. Despite the difficulties, the prospect of building something together was alluring. Ned remembers, “I came to do shingles and I never left.” Zelik invited his twin brother, Lazar, to move upstate and help. Lazar reflected on this process in an early issue of RFD, a quarterly magazine on queer rural living founded in 1974:

The idea of building our own house was intense and easy to romanticize (which I tend to do constantly). Physical labor had never appealed to me on any level. Nonetheless, building the house was a trip. As the floors and walls went up, the mysteries of construction fizzled. The excitement of eight or ten people lifting a wall was totally unique. To know where each piece of wood came from in a house really turned me on.

Around this time, many members of Lavender Hill became involved in Moosewood, a collectively-owned vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca opened in 1973. Most of the Lavender Hill members have worked there as servers, dishwashers, cooks, hosts, or cookbook authors at one time or another, many as full collective members, providing a source of income and community over the decades.

In this transition from Staten Island to Upstate New York, the community deepened its commitment to creating “gay-liberated zones,” influenced by lesbian and feminist separatist movements but intentionally committed to multi-gender space that included queer women and men and challenged dominant gender norms and internalized patriarchy. Allan Warshawsky, David’s boyfriend at the time and a founding member of the commune, remembers, “We were playing with gender. We called it ‘genderfuck’, and this was 1971. The men were wearing dresses and lipstick, sitting around in our beards and our house dresses crocheting.” For David, “We were inspired by the Cockettes, but it wasn’t a performance, it was just rural living.” On his couch in Brooklyn, Zelik told me, “We would use ‘per’ with each other instead of her or his, and we started writing ‘Mx.’ on our letters to one another. We were making stuff up.” Are you telling me my generation wasn’t the first to do this? Hold the phone!

There were a number of nearby communes outside Ithaca, all with different orientations and ideologies, but Lavender Hill was unique in its commitment to, well, faggotry. Allan told me a story about another commune that was hosting what they said was a costume party:

Within minutes, we had taken quaaludes and opened up the box of costumes and put on makeup and glitter and we show up there and there was maybe one guy who had a blue eyelash or something, and that was it. And then there was us… All those orthodoxies, you had to have a statement, know who you are, have rules and regulations, have a mission—we didn’t have that. We didn’t want to!

Lavender Hill opted for delight over dogma. (They’ll often text me before we see each other, “We better have fun!” The premium is on pleasure.) They staged plays, played music, threw parties, participated in the local feminist theater group, Mischief Mime, and formed a short-lived theater company called the Pink Satin Bombers. Lazar and Ned joined Hot Peaches, the radical downtown New York queer performance troupe founded by Jimmy Camicia in the early 1970s, which included Stonewall warrior Marsha P. Johnson. Performance, like the commune, became a medium for making joyful, ephemeral collectivities. “In the spaces created by ruined buildings the queens have made a dazzling new world.” (60)

III.

People often ask me if Lavender Hill still exists, and I have a hard time answering yes or no. Maybe? Sometimes? It has changed, for sure. They don’t all live together anymore; the house they built together has plumbing and wifi. They have “boundaries” now, Yvonne told me, and walls made out of solid materials, not just fabric. Larry, Ned, Lazar, and Zelik moved back down to New York City and started a life in the East Village. The prospect of living rurally and all together felt less compelling; relationships got strained, something you are familiar with if you’ve ever been a part of relationships. Their movement back and forth between “the great gardens of the faeries” and “the devastated city” is mirrored in The Faggots & Their Friends, both figured as vital geographies for the work of making the next revolution.

The AIDS crisis erupted, people started dying in unthinkable numbers, and it changed everything. Lazar was diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in 1986. “The experience of Lazar’s illness, which took about two and a half years, changed us,” Yvonne said. “We spent our time at ACT UP meetings and demonstrations, die-ins, in Washington DC or wherever we were, we showed up.” Thinking back on that time, Zelik said, “I remember feeling, we’re in the middle of a holocaust, and most people don’t know it’s going on.” They found ways to care for others: Yvonne worked at an abortion clinic and became a therapist. Zelik became a social worker at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, working with people with HIV. Mitchell Karp, another member of the commune, joined the HIV/AIDS Discrimination unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Ned’s son Tazio was born while Lazar was on his deathbed, and Zelik’s son, whom he had with a lesbian friend, was born a few months later. Zelik was losing his twin brother and becoming a parent at the same time; the two things were happening at once. They all buried Lazar at Lavender Hill, put roses and glitter in the ground, and gave him a tombstone engraved with the Stylistic’s lyric, “You are everything and everything is you.” Thinking back on that time while cooking green beans, Ned remembered, “Tazio would be on my shoulders, and he’d be screaming, ACT UP! Fight AIDS! at a demonstration against Cuomo or at a die-in. I remember I taped a photo of George Michael on the inside of his crib. Is that weird?” A breast cancer survivor herself, Ned went on to co-found the Ithaca Breast Cancer Alliance with Yvonne’s partner, Andi Gladstone.

Mitchell continued to chronicle the queer life around him, now in the East Village in the 1980s, at the dawn of the Reagan era and the mounting AIDS crisis. His work became more biting and pessimistic. The Terminal Bar and My Life as a Mole are polemics about queer melancholia, friendship, and gentrification in the shadow of apocalypse. Chapter titles include “Queers Dishing the End of the World,” “The Limits of Cocksucking,” and “The Rented Room: Wage Slavery.” Mitchell described The Terminal Bar—his portrait of The Bar on Second Avenue and 4th Street, a popular hangout for artists and activists in the neighborhood—as “the shape of gay consciousness as the world ends.” And of course pleasure persisted. Ned laughed over a glass of wine as she told me about a party she and Larry hosted at their apartment on Second Avenue during this period:

I was making a big salad, and I said, Oh god, Larry, we have vinegar but no oil! What do I do? And Larry said, here just use this, and I said, What the fuck is that? And he goes, It’s seltzer, just put the seltzer all over it, with the vinegar, nobody will know, who the fuck cares. He let me pay a ‘sliding scale rent,’ maybe $50, just so I would feel like I was doing my part.

Larry lost his eyesight over the course of many years, and eventually got sick with pancreatic cancer. Near the end of his life, he drifted from the rest of Lavender Hill, focusing on his relationship with artist Richard Morrison. The pain of the falling out is palpable in the group. “Richard was his caretaker and his set of eyes,” Allan remembers. “And Larry loved him. And Larry felt he had to make a decision, to choose between Richard and his friends.” Larry died in 2012, with the rift intact.

The lives of the other members of Lavender Hill, now in their 70s, are still very much woven together. David and his partner John moved back into the communal home they all built together, where they tend to their gardens and cats and bake bread. Ned lives down the road at another former commune, where she grows flowers and vegetables and swims nude in her pond all summer long. Yvonne and Allan live in town in Ithaca, as does Tazio. Now in his 30s, Tazio has lived with many of the communards over the course of his life and considers them all family. Yvonne said quietly after dinner one night, “We continue to take care of each other.”

Their care for one another is transmitted through The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. It became the prompt for the performance adaptation I organized at the New Museum in the fall of 2017 as part of the exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, curated by Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe. The painter TM Davy and I started writing songs based on text from the book in his apartment in Brooklyn and then on Fire Island. Musician DonChristian Jones and sister burlesque clown act Michi and Una Osato joined us to bring it all to life. There were multiple tambourines. Before the first show, the five of us drove upstate to visit the living communards, to look through their family photos because they are also ours, to get their blessing. We cried with them over vegan chicken pot pie at Moosewood, and sang them our songs. Later that night the five of us took mushrooms at a cabin in the woods because that’s what you do.

We performed our “musical” on three consecutive new moons in a psychedelic living room set designed by the artist Anna Betbeze to warm the New Museum’s austere top floor Sky Room, which overlooks an unrecognizably gentrified East Village. I joked at the beginning of the show that there were rumors this was going to be the next Hamilton and that what the audience was about to see was “inprogress,” meaning that any part they didn’t like was “in-progress.” There was a potluck before each show that somehow miraculously amounted to an actual meal and not just potato chips and seltzer. The audience was invited to read selected passages from the book between musical numbers, each taking the risk to speak out loud in a room of intimate strangers. It is very fun to invite people to say “tasty orgasm juice is free” into a microphone in a museum.

Many of the living communards came to the November show. We interviewed them from stage about quaaludes and friendship, and surprised Ned with a song and a cake for her 71st birthday, but the gift of intergenerational joy was for all of us. Legendary trans activist Miss Major came to the December show, and we got to ask her about the trans retreat center she’s building in Little Rock, Arkansas. What an honor it was for us to perform for these two living embodiments of revolutionary hospitality.

We ended the show by inviting the audience to join us in singing one of The Faggots & Their Friends many prescient and practical lines, “We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ’cause nobody else is goin’ do it”(36). This is not only a call to weave together networks of care to counterbalance the state’s continued and escalating abandonment of life deemed disposable, but a call for what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have described as “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”⁵

This book, like Lavender Hill itself, presents not a perfect utopia, but rather an unfinished aspiration, a play about the space between then and now, here and there, the “between” where we all live. In his research on the gay commune movement, Stephen Vider writes,

The communes it seemed were always on the brink of falling apart, changing members, or moving—and in some cases, they had already collapsed. And yet this very instability, impossibility, might also account, in part, for the commune’s attractiveness—it was always waiting to be tried again, modified, perfected.⁶

Lavender Hill is ours now, and so is the The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions—something between a prayer book and a dream journal, dirty as hell, waiting to be passed around among friends.

1 Lavender Hill members included Ned Asta, Sunny Bat-Or, Yvonne Fisher, David Hirsch, Bobby Jake Roberts, Mitchell Karp, Lazar Mintz, Zelik Mintz, Larry Mitchell, Joseph Modica, Francesca “Luna” Santini, Chaya Spector, Steve Waring, and Allan Warshawsky. See Austin Bunn and Bob Hazen’s 2013 short film, Lavender Hill: A Love Story.

2 Thank you to TM Davy for introducing this myth to me.

3 In 1980, Mitchell worked with author and publisher Felice Picano to form Gay Presses of New York, affiliating Calamus Press, JH Press, and Seahorse Press. Their first publication was Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein.

4 Larry Mitchell interviewed by Stephen Vider, January 12, 2012.

5 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions (2013), 114.

6 Stephen Vider, No Place Like Home: A Cultural History of Gay Domesticity, 1948-1982, PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2013, p. 184. See also Stephen Vider, “‘The Ultimate Extension of Gay Community’: Communal Living and Gay Liberation in the 1970s,” Gender & History, 27, no 3 (2015), 865-881.

“Ain’t nobody perfect

‘Cause ain’t nobody free”

from “Blues for Mama”

Let’s drink to the old faggots who were there and helped make this happen just by being there.

It’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free.

The first revolutions destroyed the great cultures of the women. Once the men triumphed, all that was other from them was considered inferior and therefore worthy only of abuse and contempt and extinction. Stories told of these times are of heroic action and terrifying defeat and silent waiting. Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep.

The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance. The men remain enchanted by plunder and destruction. The men are deceived easily and so the faggots and their friends have nearly enough to eat and more than enough time to think about what it means to be alive as the third revolutions are beginning.

The faggots and their friends now live in Ramrod. The leader of Ramrod is Warren-And-His-Fuckpole. He is the leader of Ramrod because he is the most paranoid and therefore the most vicious man in the land. Warren wants to know who the leader of the faggots is so he can rationalize with him. But the faggots have no leader. They have only dead heroes.

Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the fierceness of its weapons and the touchiness of its leaders. To support their violence, the rich men without color who own Ramrod send their tax collectors out to steal the people’s work; they send their shifty-eyed ones out to sell the people machines which do not work and security which is not dependable; they send their thugs and goons out to take peacefulness away from the people. The more the rich men without color can steal from or take from or sell to the people, the more violence they can buy.

Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the elaborateness of its violence and its eagerness to use it.

The faggots and their friends live the best while empires are falling. Since the men are always building as many empires as they can, there are always one or two falling and so one or two places for the faggots and their friends to go. When an empire is falling, the men become so busy opposing the rebellions elsewhere and searching for the reasons why this is happening, that they have no time to watch the faggots and their friends at home. The populace, tired of hearing only of foreign defeats, allows the faggots room to play. This entertains them. The men, desperate over the ingratitude of the foreigners and their declining fortunes at home, forget and let the faggots play. Once the empire is gone, the cause of the present evil must be found. And the faggots and their friends along with others often get chosen. Then times get bad and the faggots and their friends fade.

Ramrod has an empire. They have not had it very long yet already it is shabby and disreputable. Everyday the faggots and their friends can see, hear, and feel Ramrod’s empire disintegrating as the men lose more and more things they never owned in the first place.

When things are loose, you can tell the faggots from the men. The men wear grey and the faggots wear all the other colors. When things are tight, the faggots hang all the other colors in their closets and fade back into the greyness of the men, known only to each other and wait.

WISDOM OF OPPRESSION

For a thousand years the women did not trust the faggots. They would allow the faggots to arrange their hair into elaborate, beautiful designs. They would allow them to fill their houses with carved wood and soft fabrics. They would allow them to play music at their parties. But they did not trust the faggots for they knew the faggots only as men and they could not trust men.

The men have never liked the faggots. So for a long time the faggots hid from them. Unacknowledged, the faggots served the men. They created their masterpieces, educated their children, cooked their food, arranged their gardens, planned their houses, worked in their factories and rubbed their backs. The faggots’ energy was drained and used by the men. The faggots’ activity helped to keep the men’s empires alive.

The faggots lived with the men without ever being part of the men. It was necessary to develop secret ways to know each other. Vibrations passed through the eyes and the tips of the fingers were the ways the faggots knew each other. Once they learned to find each other anywhere they went, they learned that they were everywhere. Then they began to talk to each other and to love each other in earnest. And then slowly the faggots taught each other a trick. They learned how to be active in front of the men without identifying with the men. They learned how to do for the men without being used by the men. They could smile inside as they performed. They could laugh no matter what the outcome of their actions for the men were. They began to detach their souls from the men, while leaving their bodies visibly available for activity. The faggots learned that they could create the men’s masterpieces, educate their children, cook their food, arrange their gardens, plan their houses, work in their factories and rub their backs without caring how it all turned out. They learned how the oppressed survive.

THE FAGGOT VERSION

All the men could be faggots or their friends. They once were.

There still exists a faint memory of the past when the faggots and their friends were free. The memory lives in the faggots’ bones. The memory appears at night when the bones are quietest. In darkness the faggots remember that once they lived in harmony with each other and their world. They adored the women who loved women and the women who loved women adored the faggots. Suddenly and strangely, some of the faggots began to show a dis-ease. First they cut down the trees which protected the other faggots from the wind and rain. Then they burned the earth which fed the other faggots. Then they killed the young animals and ate them themselves. Then they began to enslave the women—all the women. As the dis-ease advanced they stopped touching the other faggots and at that moment they became the men. They attacked the unsuspecting women who loved women. Bloodshed and devastation entered the bones of the faggots and began to drive the memory of harmony away. The women who love women and the faggots were the only ones who knew the cure for the men’s dis-ease. But the men did not want to be cured. Their crimes against the others became more numerous and more demonic. More of the faggots became men and so more became implicated in self-loathing, a dis-ease of otherness. The men drove the healers away. And the healers went into invisibility to wait for the men to turn on each other.

At night in their invisibility the faggots remember freedom. They exchange the magical cock fluid and stroke each other’s tired bones in memoriam and defiance.

The faggots cultivate beauty and harmony and peace since these are states that the men do not know about. The lucky faggots live in the most beautiful places and make love in the most beautiful places and dance in the most beautiful places. Since the men are blind to beauty, they do not know that the lucky faggots live in the most beautiful places. And the lucky faggots do not tell them. Instead, they ask the unlucky faggots to come and join them.

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.

The faggots cultivate the most obscure and outrageous parts of the past. They cultivate those past events which the men did not want to happen and which, once they did happen, they wanted to forget. These are the parts the faggots love the best. And they love them so much that they tell the old stories over and over and then they act them out and then, as the ultimate tribute, they allow their lives to re-create those obscure parts of the past. The pain of fallen women and the triumph of defeated women are constantly and lovingly made flesh again. The destruction of witty faggots and the militancy of beaten faggots are constantly and lovingly made flesh again. And so these parts of the past are never lost. They are imprinted in the bodies of the faggots where the men cannot go.

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 splendor. Art attempts to transform men’s brutishness into men’s benevolence. The faggots know better. They know that one man’s victory means the defeat of others and that some men’s plentitude means that others go hungry. The faggots refuse to celebrate the men’s lies.

The faggots with the women cultivate the domestic arts. By now the public arts, under the control of the men for 2,000 years, have become too unpleasant for anyone else to practice with pleasure. All the former great public activities have been turned into games of chase and grab and hoard and expand and protect.

Occasionally, to remind themselves what the men have done, the faggots enact the ritual of the brutalization of the public arts. They sit in a circle. No one is allowed to smile. One faggot, with defiance in his face, removes his leather belt. Without words, he challenges another faggot. A brutal chase around the circle then begins. It ends when the faggot without the belt, bleeds. The sequence is repeated until each of the faggots has been, in turn, brutal and brutalized.

The faggots must live, so they take money from the men to appear to participate in public activitiy. They do commerce and education and governing. But their souls are not absorbed by these activities. The men’s souls are absorbed along with their perceptions and their minds and their love. The men believe that the brutality of the public arts is reality. The faggots along with the women know better and so have turned their prodigious talents to the cultivation of the domestic arts and the domestic arts flourish.

The faggots do not lust after power. The men feel secure only when they are distant from the people and making decisions for everyone. The men care less what they decide than that they alone can decide. The men never ask the people what they want. They decide what they want to decide. And then they force others to follow their orders. The men hoard power and use it coninuously to make sure that they still possess it. The men hoard power and use it brutally to demonstrate that they are the men.

The faggots sneer at all this power grubbing and seek love.

A FAGGOT FABLE

Some faggots were more beautiful than other faggots. The beautiful ones only wanted to touch and be touched by the other beautiful ones. Orchard was the most beautiful of all and all the beautiful faggots wanted to touch Orchard. One day Orchard made himself ugly, very ugly. When the beautiful faggots saw what he had done, they wept and then turned their backs on him and forgot him. Only the ugly faggots now wanted to touch Orchard. So he gathered them all together and took them to a mountain top where they lived in harmony and joy. As they learned to love each other more and more, Orchard and the other ugly faggots grew more and more beautiful. After many years they floated down from their mountain top into the town. The beautiful faggots were astounded by these newly arrived creatures. The beautiful faggots wanted to touch them all and love them forever. But Orchard said, “No, you are too ugly for us. Go and love the ugliest faggot you can discover and then we will love you in return.” So they left the town and did as they were asked to do, spreading the notion that to love the ugliest will make both beautiful. At last, one day, all the faggots everywhere were so beautiful that no one had to think about it any more. Now they all loved and touched each other with great pleasure and ecstasy.

Some of the outcast women, the faggots developed “trashy” into a high form of disruptive behavior. When the men talk about the freedom of work and dirtiness of sex, the trashiest faggots move fast to the nearest public place where danger from the men is always present and proceed to spend endless amounts of time having glorious sexual pleasure. The men will do anything as long as they don’t enjoy it or talk about it. The trashiest faggots love who they do and talk of it often.

The faggots have never been asked to join the vanguard. The faggots, it was noticed, do not know how to keep a straight face and the vanguard demands constantly straight faces. The faggots, it was noticed, want only to eat so they can play love play while the vanguard demands endless talk about the hunger of others and the seriousness of work. The faggots, it was noticed, are too quick to believe that the revolution had come and so too quick to celebrate. The vanguard demands that the revolution go on forever and so demands that the celebration only be planned, never enacted.

The dreamboats of Ramrod still live in the devastated city. They have lost their muscle tone and their faces, without make-up, show deep wrinkles. Their hair is thin and wispy. They crave stimuli and so are always in public places.

The dreamboats used to walk among the faggots, never allowing the faggots to touch them, taunting them with their hard male beauty. But they no longer go among the faggots. The faggots no longer want them. They laugh at the dreamboats and call each of them “Mister Bullshit.”

So now they must loiter uptown, in the men’s bars. The men, with cruelty in their hearts, taunt the dreamboats about the old days when every mommy and daddy in the world wanted them and all the faggots loved them with their imaginations and the other men were jealous of their golden hair and bulging biceps. The men talk to them about the present where there are no mommies and daddies and no panting faggots to desire them and their biceps have collapsed.

When the bar closes, as it must, they each go home alone to try to get it up. Most nights they fall asleep before anything to remember happens.

The men spread disease among the faggots, one of the things they love most to do to those they despise. The men will only cure diseases they themselves suffer from.

Once the faggots were overtaken by a new mysterious weak feeling. They could hardly leave their houses, they turned a bright yellow, they became unhappy and death seemed near. The men called it a name, but refused to help anyone who had this state. The men said this state arose from an overuse of the cock, which the faggots knew was a lie.

So the faggots stayed in their beds in their houses, reading the classic love texts, dreaming of a soulful revolution, drinking the potions that the strong women made for them until they were cured.

The queer men live miserably in the devastasted city of Ramrod. They are not friends of the faggots.

When they get up at the proper time in the morning, they put on the men’s clothes, spray themselves with the men’s odors, eat the men’s instant breakfast and go to work for the men. Using all the tricks their fathers taught them, they manage to appear to be part of the men. They speak in low, well-modulated tones; they have definite opinions on all subjects that might be mentioned; they look distracted when being asked a favor; they decide when it is time to decide and they act decisively whenever it is time to act. On public occasions they speak sentimentally about the challenges ahead and the past glories of Ramrod. In private they speak of the loneliness of power and the satisfaction that comes from arranging the lives of others.

There are some delicate moments for the queer men but they handle them in a manly fashion. They do not have one woman whom they fuck, but this, they explain in a low, knowing tone to the men who inquire, leaves them free to fuck any women whom they can get their hands on. They are inconspicuous at night but this, they explain with aggressive bravado to the other men, is the time they use to plan strategies for the next assault on reality.

Their fathers are proud of their achievements; their mothers are suspicious of their lack of warm, human contact. Their fathers, who will believe anything, know they are men; their mothers, who hope for the best, know they are not quite men.

At the proper time they leave the men’s work and return to their solitary rooms. They take off the men’s clothes and prepare themselves for the small possibility of pleasure that the night might bring. Now, if the men’s work has not exhausted them completely, they have some moments to do what they cannot help doing. They put on their costumes and their sunglasses and move cautiously onto the streets. Pleasure is chancey here; maybe, probably not. Without encountering a significant stare on the street, they move into a dark, wood-covered room. Chances are better here. Everyone stands still for awhile and drinks and looks at each other, while pretending not to. A significant stare here and there, a few friendly, though innocuous, words spoken and they move on to those hidden places where all cocks are equal and all cock juice equally precious. Here chance disappears. Here release is guaranteed. Here the queer men meet the faggots. And here, without knowing it, the queer men and the faggots commit themselves to each other.

EVEN WEAK LINKS IN THE CHAIN ARE LINKS IN THE CHAIN.

A FAGGOT FABLE

The faggots who worked knew that it’s useless to have rich people. The rich did no useful work and received large amounts of money for it. A few of those who owned things and did no useful work for large amounts of money were queer men. So one day the poor faggots told the rich queer men that this shit had got to stop. There could no longer be rich and poor. The rich queer men agreed in principle, embarrassed by the entire discussion, but protested that they were powerless to do anything.

The poor faggots said, “Nonsense. If we can think of it, we can do it.”

The rich queer men said, “The men who own most are greedy and violent and death-intoxicated. They liquidate any threats to their greed.”

The poor faggots said, “There is only one choice for us. Take it away from the rich men or go mad living in their world.”

The rich queer men talked of the powerful protection that property brings. The poor faggots talked of useful work and sharing whatever there is. As they talked, they each knew the other to be sincere. And then they knew that further talk was a waste of time.

So without invitations, the poor faggots moved in with the rich queer men. They slept on fine linen sheets and ate imported ham. They drank from crystal goblets and sat on velvet chairs to chat. They insisted that the servants take off their uniforms and join them. They were polite to the jewels.

The rich queer men were naturally dismayed at this new order in their universe. They threatened to turn the poor faggots out, which only made the poor faggots more charming and helpful. The rich friends of the rich queer men smothered them in sympathy for their new hardships, while the poor faggots brought life into their huge, barren houses. Genuine affection sprouted from the cracks in decorum as the rich queer men realized that their bank accounts hardly noticed the new arrangements.

Money and privilege remained intact while the sharing of luxury increased. The rich queer men remained rich, but the poor faggots no longer lived poorly. The poor faggots were not finished, but they rested for now. And the rich queer men relaxed into stylized disapproval on public occasions and occasional grumblings on the yacht.

DISRUPTION: TACTICS

Whenever the faggots leave their small liberated areas to enter the spaces of the men, they cause scenes. They do not really mean to do this. But the men cannot resist looking, pointing, yelling, or pushing the faggots. Let two faggots kiss discreetly in the dark corner of a crowded restaurant and pandemonium will break out. Let two faggots begin to rub their bodies together rhythmically to some slow melody and hissing will begin. The faggots have accepted all that they know and see as the way things are and so can no longer be shocked. The men live in the fantasy that everyone is like them and so are constantly shocked.

Ås they grow older the queer men learn from the faggots all the techniques for telling who will do what with whom. As they grow older, they learn to identify each other and occasionally two or three queer men will become friends. Such friendships are lived through in secrecy. These friendships are dear to the queer men for they are the only contact they have with love. It is with their friends that they elaborate a sensibility of self-preservation. They share with their friends that detachment which comes from leading two lives, one of which is respectable and admired and the other of which is despised and fugitive.

The queer men continue to hope that the men will stop caring so much about who is or who is not sucking cock. If the men would stop caring so much, the queer men could then be men, only men who suck cock. They could eliminate the life that is despised and fugitive.

But, alas, the men continue to care too much. So the queer men have to continue to hope too much and continue the life that is despised and fugitive.

This hoping and this constant detachment from their lives leaves the queer men tired. They fall easily into stupors and cant and irrelevancy. Their energy is low so they can only manage to carry on as they have always carried on. There is no energy to merge the acceptable and the unacceptable into something new and probably also unacceptable.

SONS AND FATHERS

The faggots created a rite of cleansing. The faggots sit in a circle. The first faggot enters into a father’s head while the second faggot becomes a son. Then they enact a part of that endless story. With a blink, the second faggot enters the father and the third faggot is born into a son. And another part of the endless story is revealed. Like a wind over sand, faggots are transformed from father to son to father to son. A father’s hatred and a son’s anger; a father’s ambitions and a son’s failures; a father’s fantasies and a son’s rebellion reenacted until the spell of dead generations is broken. With a scream of laughter the faggots see, and for a moment they love each other freely, fathers making love to sons, and sons making love to fathers.

THE FAGGATINAS AND THE DYKALETS ENTERTAIN THE PEOPLE

Through each recurrent holocaust, as the streets of the men fill with death, the dykalets and the faggatinas re-enact the sagas of the hideous, hidden violence of the men. They go onto the streets and with a look, a gesture, a sound and a word, re-create what is meant to be forgotten.

In the middle of a rubbish filled street in the devastated city a small crowd gathers to watch the dykalets and the faggatinas enact the sage of the strong, young woman who led armies into battle, winning great victories for some of the men. A cheer is heard when the woman finally stands tall on the bloodied bodies of her enemies. When the battles end, the men convene and decide that the strong, young woman must exchange her combat boots for dainty satin slippers and her sword for a crochet hook. In a speech full of passion and defiance she refused to be what she is not. The men, shocked at this breach in the established order, kill her. The crowd is in tears as it begins slowly to dissolve. Suddenly, a warning cry is heard; the men’s goons have been spotted. Hurriedly the players gather up their props and vanish into the crowd as the crowd disappears into the rubble that surrounds it.

Ön an abandoned pier on the river of filth the dykalets and the faggatinas enact the saga of the faggot who was publicly tried, imprisoned and finally exiled for being too amusing. The players strut aristocraticly delivering ironic, witty insults to the men as the crowd laughs and applauds. But the men are not amused. One of their empires is falling and they do not find it a time to laugh in public. So the men organize to destroy the faggot who dares to make fun of them. Just as they are about to banish the faggot from their land, the sirens of the men’s goons are heard. The crowd throws money to the players and runs like hell. The players catch the money and quickly take out beach towels and sun lotion becoming week-end tourists trying to find some sunlight coming through the dirty sky.

In a bombed-out section of the devastated city on a pile of junk that was once a house the dykalets and the faggatinas enact the saga of the woman with color who sang her pain so powerfully that others had to listen. She sang of the pain of women and the pain of the poor. The players sing from their souls and the crowd joins them. They clap and shout and moan. They remember their past and see their present through the music. The woman with color sang so passionately that the men feared insurrection. In their fear they plotted her destruction. They weakened her with poisons and then locked her up for taking the poisons. The crowd becomes enraged at this senselessness and when the men’s goons arrive, as they always do, the crowd hurls the rubbish on which they stand at the goons. The goons, caught off guard, retreat. The players and the crowd hug excitedly and quickly fade away to avoid a second fight with the goons which they know they would lose.

Some of the faggots are so poor that they have to live on only what is free. The tasty orgasm juice is free. So some of the faggots live on it. From other faggots they receive this juice quickly, secretively, and in abundance. There are hidden meeting places where the poor faggots can go.

For convenience, these meeting places are scattered all about the devastated city in empty trucks and wooded parks and abandoned buildings and obvious toilets. Sometimes the not-so-poor faggots, after a satisfying meal at home, will go to these gathering places for their dessert.

The faggots leave their mothers who bore them in physical humiliation and loved them as much as they could love themselves. Their mothers’ homes nourished them and protected them to the moment just before madness. Then they fled, leaving their mothers’ homes more desolate and barren than before they arrived. Their mothers weep, knowing that their only desire will remain unfulfilled.

The faggots reached out to their fathers. But their fathers are abstract and empty and have no energy to reach back. The faggots try to answer their mothers’ unspoken pleas for the answer. Their fathers ask for nothing and so the faggots never know what to say to them.

The queer men cannot say the truth. When the men ask them, “What did you do last night?”, they hear themselves saying, “Oh, I finally fucked her” or “Oh, I stayed home and studied the documents” or “Oh, nothing, a drink and a hot bath.” These are lies. The truth is that last night they sucked cock or left the men’s reality for another space or sank into the depression of aloneness. They are, after the men leave them, different from what the men see.

This constant deception does not make the queer men respect the men less. It does make them view the men differently.

In Ramrod the only way to tell the sane from the insane is by who has the keys. The sane have the keys, the insane do not. The sane have the keys that lock doors to keep the insane in(sane). Those with the keys guard their keys carefully.

The faggots, to mock and undermine normal reality, elaborate on the wearing of keys. One day all the faggots appear with keys. Keys on long chains and on short chains; keys on the right side and keys on the left; keys on the cock and keys out the ass; keys on the tits and keys under the arms; keys to proclaim sanity by those who the men see as insane.

The men believe that activity results from frustration and frustration results from never being able to get what you want. The perpetual out-of-reach. The men frantically scurry about with great schemes and much noise to try and reach the out-of-reach. Each tries to be first or richest or strongest or most potent. Each compares himself to the others and each is always inadequate; less than first, not yet rich enough, or strong enough, or potent enough.

None of this leads to happiness, but then the men do not look approvingly at happiness. None of this leads to contentment but then the men care nothing for contentment. They fill their heads with inflated notions of total control and empire and strength and sexual conquest. They fill their bodies with meat and drugs and dirty air. And they rush about in a frenzy making messes and ugliness and fear everywhere.

And when they tire they sit with each other and lament and blabber how little they are appreciated and how hard they try and how nothing ever works out quite as they plan.

THINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS EASY FOR THE QUEER MEN

A man says, “Why don’t you and the little lady come for dinner next week?”

A queer man must find something to say, maybe, “I don’t possess a little lady.” No, that will never do. Maybe, “She’s staying with her mother, who’s very ill, you know.” Why not, “My boyfriend and I would love to.” Come on, it’s always the same. “Thanks so much, but it’s impossible right now. Things aren’t that good between us. We’re trying to work it out. But it’s hard. And you know….” And on and on and on and on and on as long as it takes to create a girlfriend who can be disposed of whenever the bluff is called.

Once again a father inquires of his male child, “Isn’t it time you got married?”

A queer man siys wearily what has been said so often, “I just haven’t met anyo. ie yet.”

The sad father says, “It is time. Love is not everything.”

The queer man almost explains, then says, “You just don’t understand me so stop asking.”

The sad father stops asking and does not understand.

A woman falls in love with a queer man.

She says, “I like being with you because you don’t try to paw me all the time.”

The queer man says, “Yeah, I know.”

They go to fancy places and opening nights and cool parties.

She says, “I’ve told you so much about myself, but I feel I don’t know that much about you yet.”

The queer man says, “Yeah, I know.”

She says, “Love without sex is new for me.”

The queer man, sad at this deception and her confusion, says, “Yeah, I know.”

The men never talk about how they feel. They pretend to be machines. A replaceable part when something wears out. Some oil in the motor to keep it going. Testing the machine to find out how much it can withstand before it stops.

They pretend to be machines correctly programmed. Say the proper words and move the proper way. Follow the instructions. The personal is saved to bore women with. The personal is unreliable and makes no money.

One machine knows nothing about the other machines. So all the machines become fearful and suspicious. They fear defects in their own programming. They suspect others of plotting to overcome them. And they hide more of themselves hoping to fool the other machines.

The faggots find it hard to be near the men. The faggots know that you choose to either obey the programs or to defy the programs. They find it troublesome to be around those who say the program is inevitable.

When the empire of Ramrod was strong and the men in control, more or less, there appeared a group of women who adored the faggots. They sat with the faggots through long bleak nights; they ate elegant, uproarious dinners with the faggots; they advised the faggots on matters of the heart.

The men hated these women and called them fag hags. “Any friend of a faggot is not a friend of ours,” the men would say as they slapped each other with drunk hands.

This made Toni and Jerri feel bad. They figured, if you like men, it’s better to be with faggots. This way you don’t get raped. Toni and Jerri knew that fag hag was not a friendly way to describe them.

For a long time Toni and Jerri worried and got depressed. Until one day, in the bright sunshine, on the edge of the ocean, they saw that they were not fag hags but smart, strong women. They were strong for loving whom they wanted to love and smart for loving gentle men. So they set themselves free to love their faggot friends and the faggots celebrated.

DISRUPTION: TACTICS

The faggots never tire of fucking with the men’s minds. Once all the faggots let their hair grow long, wore necklaces made of silver and shells and clothes of colorful, elaborate fabrics. They looked so stunning that the men over-looked their principles and began to look stunning also. When the men all looked like faggots, the faggots cut their hair, put on black leather and looked like the men used to look. The men were annoyed and pretended not to notice. Growing bored with basic black leather, the faggots began to elaborate. They wore black fish-net stockings and high heels with their black leather jackets. They carefully sewed imitation rhinestones all over their black leather pants. They wore feather boas as they rode their motorcycles through the devastated city. They wore flowing gold lame gowns and workboots with their short hair and dirty fingernails. They drank beer and swore, in velvet robes and furs. They sipped champagne and talked refined in paint-splattered blue denim. The men did not want to look at any of this. And when they had to, they became confused and petulant and unpleasant, which pleased the faggots.

The women who love women wrote a song for the faggots. It was called, “Anything you do that the men don’t like is o.k. by us.”

After a thousand years the men have begun to lose energy. They have explored and elaborated their games unhindered until they have become trapped in repetition. They say the same words until these words no longer hold any resonance. They do the same acts until they become like a dream. It is hard for the men not to become cliches. Violence has been seen in its every conceivable form. The domination of other living things has become total and so boring. Distance from others has gone so far that the men are strangers to everyone. Paranoia from success and despair over failure are so well known that to talk about them any more induces sleep.

As the energy of the men declines, they find that they can no longer compel everyone else to explore what they can barely explore themselves. As the energy of the women grows and the energy of the faggots and their friends grows, the men begin to lose confidence in their ways.

SURVIVAL: STRATEGY

As the energy of the men decreases, the faggots and their friends come aboveground. They know they do not have much time before the men will notice. So, as quickly as they can, they begin to arrange themselves into an intricate new world. They need access to food and to warm spaces, to hiding places, to excitement and to each other. The great gardens of the fairies begin to expand, producing food in abundance. The fairies shower the plants with so much love that the plants, with gratefulness, produce all they can. Spaces to be in begin to be created around the great gardens, warm, woody spaces, softly illuminated.

The faggots, passing as men, procure spaces all over the devastated city. Although the men have divided all the city space up and given each space a name so it could be used for only one purpose, the faggots turn everything they can get into spaces to live in and to eat in and to love in.

The queens elaborate their dens in the rubble to create hidden places where one can live for long periods of time safe from the cold, sharp eyes of the men. And they elaborate their forms of outrage.

NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.

The fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer. The earth, scarred and gouged and stripped and bombed, will deny life to the men in order to stop the men. The fairies have left the men’s reality in order to destroy it by making a new one.

The fairies are the friends of the faggots. They help each other whenever they can. The fairies do not live among the men. They live in trees and caves and bushes. They come out at night to dance and sing. The men know that there are fairies but are not sure if they have seen one or not. Only the faggots have seen them for sure. Sometimes the fairies dance and sing for the faggots and sometimes the faggots dance and sing for the fairies and sometimes, the best times, they dance and sing together.

The great gardens of the fairies prosper. The fairies worship their plants and they grow and bear abundant food. In the afternoon, they sing and chant and weed. As the sun cools they make love with each other, surrounded by tomatoes and marigolds. At night they sleep curled around the cucumbers or intertwined in the beans or covered by the corn. When they awake in the cool mornings, they stroke the plants and give them food. And sometimes the fairies are so overcome with love and passion that they lie in the watermelon patch and masturbate.

In the winter the fairies live in long, log houses. They learned how to build the long, log houses from the gentle people who once lived on the land. The gentle people are now gone from the land. The men, believing that gentleness would disappear when the gentle people vanished, slaughtered them.

The queens, named to commemorate the glorious past reign of the women, are also friends of the faggots. The men hate the queens and try in every way to exterminate them. The queens are not, however, afraid. They laugh at the men and taunt them for being so stupid and coarse. Sometimes the faggots join the queens to laugh at the men and tell them they are stupid and coarse. Usually the faggots sit and listen while the queens tell of their thrilling adventures and applaud when the queens, once more, escape from the clumsy clutches of the men.

The queens dress in those parts of the devastated city which the men have abandoned. In the spaces created by ruined buildings the queens have made a dazzling new world. It is all trickery, of course. Fabrics and dim lights and soft pillows and tinkly sounds and sweet smells and laughter everywhere as the queens dress for the streets. The queens live on the streets. They eat off the streets; they conduct their business in the streets; they have their love affairs on the streets. They make the men on the streets very uncomfortable, sometimes even violent. It amuses the queens to see the men in such a state.

One night deep in the catacombs of the devastated city where the queens were dressing, one of the queens, in mock desperation, cried, “God save the Queens!” Another queen in serious explication replied, “God needs a hot fist up his tight, horny ass.”

“I mean, reaaaly, everyone knows god died last year.”

“Oh? How did that happen?”

“Well, the story is that one day a bunch of queens knocked on the pearlies and Gabriel being, you know, sympatico, invited them in. The queens were lounging on a fluffy, pink cloud combing their heavenly white wigs when god spotted them. ‘Not on my clouds you don’t,’ he screeched and ordered all the queens off his clouds. Well, you can imagine, after they split, things got pretty dull on those clouds. I mean absolutely nothing of any interest was happening. Then word came back that all the queens were having a really hot time in their new home. JC, who was tired anyway of sitting on god’s left hand, split to join his friends. God, always uptight about what the neighbors would think, simply died of mortification.”

“Get your acts together, Queens, we gotta hit those streets.”

“Honey, you look like those streets done hit you.”

“It’s the new disaster look.”

“You’d be a great ad for war.”

“Slap that silly queen and get his ass moving. The streets need us.”

The queens luxuriate in variety. They often make fun of the faggots for their drab uniformity and their addiction to the men’s fashions. The queens display infinite wierdnesses to the world. For them, style is the path into the unique self and so to transcendence. They long for everyone to reveal themselves wherever they are.

The Great Goddess of the Earth and the fairies’ special books have led the fairies into a living ritual. They get up with the sun to sit on the earth and think about beginning. After an hour they are aware and focused and so proceed to do the tasks that need to be done. These are done slowly, deliberately, calmly. The fairies become absorbed into the tasks so that their nature is revealed to them. The fairies receive joy from this knowledge. The tasks change with the seasons. Spring is plowing and planting, summer is cultivating and building, fall is harvesting and storing, winter is fixing and elaborating the inner spaces of house and self.

When the sun is high, the fairies gather to cook and eat and chant. The chant brings them into restfulness. They allow themselves to be carried away into calm psychic places. When they return, slowly, refreshed, they begin the afternoon yoga. In the summer they practice the yoga of play. They use movement and making sounds and playing natural instruments and acting out fantasies and swimming and picking flowers and sitting under trees and making love and walking and being with the cats. They are helped in their summer yoga by the small white mushrooms that grow abundantly under the bean vines. In the winter they practice the yoga of making things. They weave and bake and crochet and pot and sew and paint and work with wood and glass and leather and strings and words. They are aided in their winter yoga by the long, dry plants hanging upside-down from the ceiling. In the spring they practice the yoga of being on the earth carefully and in the fall they practice the yoga of seeing the plants transform themselves.

The afternoon yogas end as the sun approaches that moment when you can see the crack in the world. Then the fairies gather to quietly celebrate. The darkness is for living together. The fairies eat and talk and sometimes read and sometimes dance and sometimes touch. The darkness is for doing whatever makes being together feel good. When the body signals, the mind relaxes and the fairies sleep.

The ritual is suspended for celebrations, during natural disasters, for human sufferings and one month every winter when all the fairies go to the devastated city and turn into faggots.

When the faggots visit the fairies it is always like entering a wonderful dream. It seems like a dream to the fairies also. The earth is gentle and nourishing. The plants grow and flower and fruit. The sun and rain and moon and wind come and go and all the living things are thankful. The fairies treat the earth well, yet they do so little compared to what results. They never imagine that their effort matters all that much. They aid and abet. But most happens because it happens. They live with the miracle of growth and change and it is so constantly astounding that it seems like a sweet dream.

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.

IT TAKES ALL KINDS TO MAKE THE REVOLUTIONS

The Queens are poor and raunchy.

They live on what others no longer want.

They have no power.

They have no social place.

They almost have no allies.

All this makes them angry and amused.

It makes them restless and out of place.

It makes them high-spirited and disruptive.

They know that it takes all kinds to make the revolutions.

Others do not know this yet.

The Queens are out and are not coming back. They wait for the others to join them.

The Queens find the queer men a source of infinite amusement.

“Did you see that?” a Queen yells as a queer man walks by.

“His eyeballs were bouncing all over the street.”

“Trying not to see you in your pink taffeta bathrobe.”

“Trying to get a good glimpse of my basket.” The Queens think the fairies are cute.

“But how can you live with all those trees all the time?”

“I mean, I hear they don’t even have sidewalks there.” The Queens think the faggots are sweet, but not yet serious.

“I saw them holding hands.”

“Well, my dear, everyone holds hands these days.” The Queens find the women a source of infinite inspiration.

“Get a load of Scarlet Redhair tearing up the drapes to make himself a frock.”

“Sadie TomTom is fucking upset cause his missionary couldn’t get it up last night.”

The Queens remain originals, not like any of the others that the men will ever see.

From deep in the elaborate rubble where the queens dress comes a cry. “We must do something! The situation is fast approaching the desperate.”

Suspecting a queen’s private drama, the others continue to create themselves in silence.

“Soon when they have no one left to throw their bombs at they’re goin’ to start throwing them at us. Mark my word, Queens, they’re making more bombs every day. More and more and what do you think they’re goin’ to do with them. I mean we know the men are crazed. I tell you this shit has got to stop.”

Now the other queens listened for they knew the cry of insight which can precede propaganda by the deed.

“I mean, they’ve got more instruments of destruction than anybody ever. And they’re not gonna just sit around and stroke all those bombs. They’re gonna use them. They’re spending everybody’s money to make all these horrid things. Really, germs and nasty chemicals and what the fuck do you think they’re gonna do with all this shit? Honey, you and me are gonna get it, unless we get them first.”

The others knew what he said and were ready for the concrete.

But the queen who spoke what they all knew to be true lost himself in self-creation and, for the moment, the moment passed.

The faggots have the routines of community and the rhythms of the streets to live by: visiting, lunches at small cafes, late day tea, walks, accidental encounters, organizing, issuing manifestoes, putting on plays, changing lovers, shifting alliances and living arrangements and gossip, endless gossip. They share shifting notions about the men and power and how to take it away from them. They find routines in their collective lives and turn them into rituals. They created the ritual of the brief encounter, the ritual of dying love, and the ritual of outrageousness. They live in a world invisible to the men.

Moonbeam is one of the faggots. Moonbeam loves those whom the rejected have rejected. He learns most from those who have lost all that the shabby world has to offer. He searches for those who have lost the respect of all others but have kept their own self-respect.

One day he met Eva Destruction, a Queen who had lost his energy for splendor and his desire for comfort. He wore garbage and dirt to blend in with the street. In the midst of the filth shone his eyes. When Moonbeam saw Eva’s eyes, he relaxed and began to weep. He knew he had found one who could teach what he had to know.

With Eva he learned that he could break all the men’s rules. With Eva he learned how to break the most fundamental of the men’s rules; with Eva he became a complete non-man. He no longer looked like a man or talked like a man or acted like a man or felt like a man. Moonbeam was happy.

One bright afternoon Moonbeam caught the interested eye of another faggot walking past him. They both slowed down and quickly found an excuse to stop. Moonbeam looked in a shop window, the other faggot cleaned his fingernails. They glanced at each other and as the ritual for brief encounters proscribes, smiled discreetly. The other faggot moved slowly on down the street looking back twice to indicate that Moonbeam should follow. He did, his heart pounding and his imagination running wild. They entered an abandoned building and amidst the debris, without a word, made delicious love. The other faggot’s name was Loose Tomato and he and Moonbeam became friends.

Loose Tomato loves to fuck-up. The men, obsessed with propriety, demand polite action from others in their world. Loose Tomato is never proper. In the men’s indoctrination centers he farts in the classrooms, he calls the teachers “boss,” he smokes magic substances in the halls, he steals silk bed sheets from the president’s house, and he wears cheap dresses to elegant occasions to which he has not been invited in the first place.

When he drinks too much of the men’s deadly elixirs, he leaves consciousness and then he can piss in empty wastebaskets, throw up on the carpet before dinner and walk naked in the streets.

His manner is tough and crude but his soul is kindly and generous and laughing. He is always dancing on the boundary between eccentricity and insanity. He cultivates the spontaneous and the unexpected which can lead one absolutely anywhere.

Lilac is a friend of Moonbeam and Loose Tomato. They met one night in a dark corner. They moved quickly, nearly without noticing, from warm talk and laughter to deep friendship. Lilac is a romantic addict. In telling a story or doing an action, Lilac always exaggerates, or dramatizes, as he likes to think of it. This makes things more real for others.

Pinetree is Lilac’s sometimes lover. Pinetree is idealistic yet sensible and down to earth. He can be easily seduced by the deep, longing look in Lilac’s eyes.

Lilac and Pinetree met in an orange grove. Each was alone and hungry for touch. Their first days together they did not speak, they kissed and licked and sucked and caressed until the hunger was gone and they knew they were no longer alone. Passion, a precious gift from the great goddess, flowed around them. Lilac sometimes wept, but mostly he purred. He purred after a quiet meal in the garden. He purred walking hand in hand with Pinetree in soft rains on cool city nights. He purred lying naked on hot faggot beaches as the waves covered his body wrapped around Pinetree.

Some days Lilac would be in a trance. The smell of Pinetree’s body would stay in his pores and make his nose twitch all day. They made love at night and in the morning and the odors would get strong and definite and hypnotizing. The odors evoked love and spurred on love and made Lilac remember love. By afternoon they would begin to fade and Lilac would retire for small moments to smell himself and what remained of Pinetree.

These days were best when they were spent with his cats. The cats knew, for they too could become transfixed by love smells. He would lie naked on the bed and the cats would smell him and lick off the love that Pinetree had spread all over him. And as they licked, they would become, like Lilac, abstract and transformed. They would lie with him and their noses would twitch as they all tried to keep the memory of love alive and well.

Lilac, in his joy, pressed flowers and sent them to his friends. He made things out of lace and ribbons and bright paper. He wore long robes and danced in the sun. To see people and plants grow made his heart calm.

He moved across the marred landscape of Ramrod finding quiet places to love in, visiting the great gardens of the fairies, gossiping behind closed doors with the Queens and acknowledging the women who love women lounging on the hot sidewalks of the ruined cities. As he yearned for Pinetree’s arms, he found romance everywhere. His heart stayed open to any who would pretend with him for a moment that love could thrive in the paranoid wierdness of the men.

Lilac is never sentimental for sentimentality makes him weak and weakness means defeat by the men. He is, however, superstitious. When the morning glories that he and Pinetree planted together refused to grow, he knew their passion was growing weak. Warm, caring, gentle friendship then began to grow.

Pinetree dreams of a glorious, non-violent revolution. Between the dreams he is proficient in the practical. He is certain that he has enough money, which means he always has more than he needs. He is certain that he has a place to live, which means he always has several places to live.

He stays in solitude a lot to keep his dreams of the glorious, non-violent revolution alive and he wishes Lilac and the others would stay with him and his dreams.

To make his dreams real he lives quietly through his reactionary emotions. He experiences desires to control his environment and he experiences jealousy when his pleasures are threatened and he experiences possessiveness of property. He accepts these emotions much as he accepts depression and the men’s brutality. They have to be acknowledged and gotten through.

To make his dreams real he celebrates his revolutionary emotions. He experiences joy in sharing and he experiences completeness in loving and he experiences satisfaction in work for others done with compassion. These emotions he writes about on papers stuck to walls and tells strangers about on boats. These he will not forget.

If he can live as if the glorious, non-violent revolution has happened long enough, he will awake one day to find that it has happened.

Sometimes he is confused about the meaning of what he feels. Then he is depressed and afraid and longs for his friends Lilac and Loose Tomato and Moonbeam to sit with him.

Hollyhock lives in the faggot community of the devastated city. He inhabits a cool space where faggots, weary of the streets, refresh themselves. He entertains all who visit with funny stories of the old days when it was bad. His body is bloated, his face lined and his hair is falling out. Yet Hollyhock in ruins is still magnificent to view. The weary faggots sit in the coolness, drinking quietly, watching the beauty live in the decay of Hollyhock’s body.

But Hollyhock does not live here in contentment. He likes his cool space and his faggot friends but he feels cut off from something that if he had would make him feel more whole and he does not know what it is. So he entertains and his life goes on. Yet at night alone he wonders what is missing and if he will ever find it.

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 what the neighbors might do next 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.

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.

Next door live the tribe of Angel Flesh. The concept of Angel Flesh makes Lilac quiver and Loose Tomato giggle with glee. The house of Angel Flesh is old, elaborate and slightly tilted. Vines completely cover the crumbling porches. Inside is misty, hung with soft fabrics, and smells of jasmine and the sacred substances. Lilac was, when he entered for the first time, immediately calm.

Each room in the house is devoted to a different living form. One is filled with velvets and feathers and make-up and sparkles and costumes and silks. It is where the faggots go when they want to transform themselves. Another room is for plants to live in; another is for quiet music; another is for silent eating; and another is for methodically drinking teas of healing herbs. All who live there move softly about the house, living all through it.

At night they sleep all together in the central room of the house. The fire glows over the large pillows that cover the floor with the tribe covering the pillows. They each have given to all the others complete access to each other’s body. They massage each other until the secrets of tension and pain are revealed. Now they massage each other again to cure the pains. They learned to heal each other by saying magic words over and over again and they learned to bring loving vibrations to the body to make it strong again. All this they share with all those around them who want to know.

Each night in the big central room of the house, when sleep comes, they hold each other until they hardly know where one of them stops and another one begins. Those who come to visit sleep with them in the great central room on the huge pillows with the fire glowing.

Down the street in a house sitting nearly on the sidewalk, with not one drape on any window, is the House of the Heavy, Horney Hunks, known affectionately in the neighborhood as Horney Heaven. These faggots love to fuck and suck in public, in bathrooms and in parks, in trucks and in warehouses, under bridges and near train tracks, in front of their naked windows and in the parking lot nearby. To stimulate their lust they make movies of their activities, which they show selectively in the neighborhood, and they sniff ancient potent powders, which they sell discreetly in the neighborhood.

In the barn in the back of their house they run the Faggot Fuck Palace. Here on wooden floors, fluffy pillows and round, spinning beds and soft carpets the faggots love each other. Here in swirling water and steamy rooms and soft lights the faggots love each other. Here, with their heads filled with the magic powder, the faggots sing an old tune, dance a new step, tell a bad joke and thank the great goddess for such a fine palace.

Ön the corner the Gay as a Goose Tribe looks after the mellow space they have created there out of an old grocery store. They covered the walls with old wood, hung ferns everywhere, allowed three pussycats to live there, put soft chairs and homemade tables around and made food for the community in an old, funky kitchen in the back. They read palms and the magic cards and the sacred stars. They make music and dance the old dances. Moonbeam can sit all day and half the night in a soft chair, eating sprouts and sweets, knitting and watching the faggots and their friends play. All the communities’ information moves through this mellow, corner space. Pinetree never misses a day for to him the communities’ gossip is the same as the news from the revolution.

Åt the end of the street sits a carved house with close-cropped lawns and discrete flower gardens. Here live a group known on the street as the Boys in the Backroom. They can put the fix in to help a friendly faggot in distress. They help protect the community from the dangers of the men. They can play all the men’s games, and the dirtier the better. They say they have, over many years, taught themselves to look, talk and act, although not feel, like the men. They did not learn this easily nor with great pleasure. But they learned it well.

They live quietly, listening to old music, reading old books, surrounded by old things and drinking a lot. They like each other enough to stay home and get drunk together. Hollyhock visits one night every week. He draws comfort from the order of their lives and from their humor, the source of their sanity, which is ironic and bitter. They know too much of the men’s evil to believe in anything anymore, except domestic tranquility and work for others.

In one of the rooms is a long table. Here they sit together to write their briefs and their tracts and their analyses and their letters of protest. They write with eloquence against the men, using the men’s own language to embarrass them and sometimes even to rout them.

Daffodil and Woodthrush, after lifetimes of pleasure and pain, moved with friends into a structure of light and gleaming wood next to the Boys in the Backroom. Daffodil and Woodthrush had lived together in a love with a delicate balance for many years. Then one day the love turned to hate and they both went crazy. Daffodil wrapped himself in grandeur and descended upon the men. Robes and jewels and scents moved through the streets. The men thought this vision was a woman and so they stole from him and yelled at him and hit him. They loved him and then they hated him for the pleasure. He thought then that he deserved it. He could not be worthwhile unless Woodthrush loved him. Woodthrush became melancholy. The language of the academics obsessed him. He dreamed of accumulating knowledge and awoke tired from the weight. His sexual organ shrivelled up. It would occasionally twitch involuntarily.

Love came back to Daffodil and Woodthrush as soon as they understood reality. In the joy of reconciliation they joined with friends and moved to their structure of light and gleaming wood next to the Boys in the Backroom. Here they are free to move their heads into the revolution. Here they learn to trust the reality of feelings surrounded by reassuring ritual.

They call themselves Elegant City and in their structure of light and wood they pursue the bourgeois rituals of old. The forms remain pure. The instructions are carefully, though never obsessively, followed. The table is set properly and the spoons are used in the proper order. The liquors are drunk in the correct sequence and each sits correctly on the couches to talk. Although the talk is subversive and salacious, it is never loud or coarse. Their life has become elegant and stable allowing warmth and sharing and radical action to flow outward.

The No-Name Tribe live in an inconspicuous house, set back from the street, shaded by tall, enveloping spruce trees. No one in the community speaks about them or what they do, although everyone speaks to them. They live quiet, apparently decent lives, sitting at home in front of large looms weaving cloth and tapestries. They study esoteric manuals, old maps, calligraphy and the banking system.

Exactly who is a member of the tribe remains publicly, purposefully, vague. They try to be present in the community, yet inconspicuous, for they are one link in a vast network of fugitives from the men. For this work they needed a community to fade into and faggots among faggots all look alike to the men. Here they feel safe.

They are experts at recreating the official documents of the men to make new official identities for the fugitives. They know about bombs and how to make them; they know about locks and how to pick them; and they know about prisons and how to get out of them. Although they do not do any of these things themselves, they aid the fugitives, who do do these things, in any way they can. Sometimes they receive money taken by force from the men and give it to the fugitives; sometimes they give the fugitives information the fugitives need to outwit the men; sometimes they drive the fugitives from one place to another in their spiffy Mable’s Bakery Truck.

Those times, and there are many of them, when the fugitives are hidden even from them, they sit at home in front of large looms weaving cloth and tapestries and studying esoteric manuals, old maps, calligraphy and the banking system, and talking about the time when the faggots and their friends will be free.

There are many other faggots who live here on Pansy Path—eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells of all kinds: street merchants and belly dancers, glass-cutters and leather-feather collectors, corner poets and medicine fags, sewers of cloth and imitators of stars. Day after day, witnessing this exquisite elaboration of types, Lilac’s imagination will begin to vibrate from being so stretched.

The Tribe of the Rising Sons is pleased to have found this place to be. Pinetree is amazed that the revolution has come so far and looks so beautiful; Lilac is thrilled; Heavenly Blue feels at home and safe; Loose Tomato talks of moving to the Bronx and marrying his sister; Hollyhock feels full of activity and faggot contact; and Moonbeam realizes he can, here, cease to be a non-man and become a person.

Wherever the faggots settle they wish it to be near the women. It is from the women that they learn wisdom and magic. Fortunately, under the highway, on the edge of the faggot community, work the honest women. They sell their skills to the men who will pay the most. So much to wash the dishes, a little more to paint a room, more than that to fix a car and much, much more to fuck. They make a decent wage, steal from the men whenever they can and go home after work to their own independent lives.

They are friends of the faggots. They constantly exchange information with each other on the present state of the madness of the men. They commit espionage for each other so that each can survive.

Beyond the elevated road in Amazon Acres live the women who love women and the few of their children that the men will let them keep. Pat and Lee and Meredith live here in this world so unlike any that the men live in. Sometimes Pat and Lee and Meredith invite the Rising Sons to dinner and sometimes the Rising Sons invite them to dinner. They exchange the latest stories about the men, stories of atrocities, violence, mendacity and stupidity. They wonder if the men are getting weaker; they wonder what is to be done to make the men weaker; they wonder if they are doing it. They talk of recent love affairs and hate affairs, friendships and death. The women, by now, know that they will win. They know that the days of the men are numbered. Life comes from the women and can go on only if they win. This knowledge, from deep inside, makes them jolly and strong. Meredith chuckles at Pinetree’s hopeless, and so seemingly realistic, assessment of the power of the men.

“Well, of course,” she says, “that is what the men want you to believe. But everyone will die if the men are allowed to go on with their ways, even the men. Those who do not want to die just yet must stop them and we will.”

Heavenly Blue isn’t sure. He knows the men fear life and might kill us all rather than give up. He wants to believe Meredith but hs faith is weak. Lilac encourages the women to talk. Their talking soothes his doubts. Their talking might make it so.

The faggots once called themselves the men who love men. But they discovered that they did not love men, they loved only other men who loved men which was not that many of the men. The men who hate others were false and death-inflicting and obsessed with being strangers. The men who hate others hate the men who love men. And this hatred is so strong that it turns the men who love men into the faggots.

Take the case of Pinetree. When he was young his gentle mother told him that when he became a grown-up he would be a grown-up man. Pinetree liked to think about this. He liked men, grown-up or not. So he thought it would be OK to be a grown-up man.

When he left his gentle mother for the men’s indoctrination center he heard other voices, harsh voices, demanding “Be a man, at once.” He did not know what to do and so became confused and frightened and longed for his gentle mother.

Then the harsh voices told him what to do. “Be mean to all the others and distrust other men. Be mean to all the others and distrust other men.” Over and over in every tone the harsh voices could manage they repeated the instructions for being a man. “Be mean to all the others and distrust other men.”

Pinetree discovered that if he did not appear to be mean to all the others and to distrust other men he would be hurt by the harsh voices. So he appeared to be mean to all the others and to distrust other men while longing to share with all the others and to cherish the other men.

By the time Pinetree left the men’s indoctrination center he knew that he would never be one of the men. He could not follow the admonitions of the harsh voices, he could barely appear to follow them anymore.

In the devastated city, where he found himself alone and bewildered, he began to notice other men who appeared to share with all the others and to cherish some of the other men. Pinetree did not know if what they appeared to be was what they felt, but what they appeared to be was what he felt so he took a chance.

One quick glance led to a longer look which led to talk and touching and a good night kiss.

Another quick glance led to a longer look and a smile which led to talking and walking and lying in a big bed entwined with another man.

A long look led to a smile which led to talking and drinking and walking and making love and having breakfast and talking and walking and saying, “Tomorrow.”

Pinetree was not a man and was not alone. He learned that he was a faggot and that there were lots of faggots. They had all heard the harsh voices and none of them had believed them.

Lilac knew from an early age, mainly from his grandmother, that it was not so wonderful to be one of the men. He also was told from an early age, mainly by his grandmother, that he did not have to try to be one of the men if he did not want to. He never wanted to and so he never tried.

He stayed by himself and played in fantasy. He lived in a world where he could be a mother or a father or a husband or a wife or a passive object or an aggressive force. He could be whatever felt like him. Some days he wore his grandmother’s long dresses and some days he wore his own short pants. He was Rita and Lana and June as often as he was Van and Cary and Tyrone. He was glamorous when he woke up and seductive at night. He knew how to get a man from an early age and he practiced this in his mind and waited.

When he was young, the other boys called him sissy.

As he grew, the other boys called him faggot.

When he was a young man, the other young men called him effeminate.

When he walked down a street in the men’s section of the devastated city, the men called him queer.

Poor Lilac, he hardly knew what to call himself. Maybe a queer, effeminate, faggot sissy. Yet he did know what to do when one day he met another man who had been called names and who had lived in his own dreams and who also knew what to do. It felt even better than Hedy and Jayne and Marilyn had led him to imagine. After that when the men called him names he would smile. He knew a secret.

Loose Tomato grew up tough. No one ever suspected that he was scared every time he walked down the street. Any lip and they got their ass kicked. Nobody fucked with him. Nobody asked any questions.

He found that he liked wrestling most of all, but also general roughhousing and shower room smells and boys’ sexual talk. Later he grew to like drinking with the boys and hacking around in the car and letting faggots suck him off. Then he discovered that he liked to suck the faggots off and his life changed. He could no longer wrestle in innocence. He got a hard-on from the shower room smells. When he got drunk with the boys, he became so friendly the boys got edgy and nasty. He wanted to talk to his friends about cock sucking, but was afraid of their fear and brutality. He began to drift away from the old neighborhood and the old bars and the old boys. He was looking for another who could have a few drinks and suck some cock without a lot of violence. He found him leaning up against a wall in a dark, crowded bar. They had some drinks, smiled a lot, held hands and finally went home to suck some cock. It was all done with innocence and joy.

As the old boys figured out Loose Tomato’s trip, they began whispering ‘faggot.’ The whispers spread until everyone was saying ‘faggot’ out loud. Loose Tomato got angry at the word and angry at his friends. Occasionally he would come back to the old bars and threaten to kick some ass. But his heart wasn’t in it and he did not convince them. Mostly he spent his conscious life in bars looking at the faggots. Sometimes he went home with someone. He was waiting for the day when he would love.

Moonbeam always tried to be a good boy. He played nice with the other kids; he never talked back to his mom and dad; and he kept his room tidy. He took care of his loyal dog; he made good marks in school; and he went to bed on time. They lived in a nice house with nice neighbors in a nice small town. Everyone behaved as they were expected to behave in this only of all possible worlds.

From an early age Moonbeam knew what shape his life would take. He would imagine it over and over. As he grew up he would go to good schools so he could become a good worker like his dad. He would marry a good girl so he could have good children like he had been. He would belong to a nearly-fancy country club where he would play a good game of golf and a better game of bridge. He would live in a nice house and die at the appropriate time leaving enough money behind so his good children could go to good schools to become good workers like their father had been.

He knew the shape of his life so well that when it was time to begin it he was bored with the whole idea of it. Hoping to leave the boredom behind, he proceeded to do the opposite of what had been expected of him. He left the good school and refused to work. He moved to a dark room in the devastated city. He spent his nights in bars where he played a lousy game of pool and always got drunk. He masturbated and never had dates with women.

As it became clear that his strategy was working, Moonbeam moved deeper into the contrary. His hair grew, his clothes disintegrated, his head filled with women’s wisdom. He allowed himself to become a criminal and then he fell in love with a faggot.

This was too much. His good parents forced Moonbeam, for his own good, to have contact with one of the men’s mind butchers. Moonbeam told the mind butcher lies and the mind butcher told Moonbeam lies. This did no harm. Then the mind butcher put Moonbeam on a rack and shot huge amounts of energy through his body to his brain. This could do harm so Moonbeam hid from the mind butcher and his good parents until they all lost interest. And by then he was so deeply into being a faggot outlaw that there was no going back.

THE FAGGOTS ARE ALWAYS IN SOME KIND OF TROUBLE

One day Loose Tomato and Moonbeam went to see the Bishop. He was dressed in flowing rich robes. Loose Tomato was so thrilled at the sight that he wanted to give the Bishop a gift so he splashed some tasty cock juice on the Bishop’s robes. The Bishop became incensed, enraged and overcome. What will the other Bishops think he screamed and ordered trouble for the faggots.

Once when he was young Hollyhock was ordered to join the men and go off and kill some other men. When he arrived at the killing place, he was so overwhelmed by the gentle beauty of those he was to kill and they were so overwhelmed by his sweet radiance that they fell into each other’s arms for love. General Waste-more-of-everything went bananas and ordered trouble for the faggots.

Heavenly Blue once worked in one of the men’s indoctrination centers. He played with the kids and treated the girls and boys alike. This soon came to the attention of the authorities. They were shocked and ordered Heavenly Blue to begin at once to work, not play, with the kids, and to treat girls like girls and boys like boys. He might have complied with the authorities if he could have remembered what they said exactly. But something was always coming up with him and the kids to please him and make him forget the authorities. Authorities must be obeyed or else they cannot be called authorities. So in a hail of denunciation and alarm they ordered Heavenly Blue removed from the center and ordered trouble for the faggots.

SURVIVAL: STRATEGY

Once the men tried to stop the queens. First they declared them non-existent. If they did not exist no man could be punished for harming them since they did not exist. The queens refused to hide. They dug deeper into the ruins of the devastated city. On the streets they continued to love and talk and plan and notice. And the men continued to beat them and starve them and lock them up when they could catch them trying to kill them softly. Often the fairies would come from the country and the faggots and the fairies would transform themselves into queens and join the queens on the streets. The men would think that there were oh so many queens and go away.

But they always came back with harder, bigger ramrods to make the queens into men. The men became more ferocious and the queens suffered. Gradually, the queens began to fade away from the sight of the men. The men thought they had liquidated the queens, but the queens had merged into the general strangeness of the city.

Since the queens looked something like women sometimes and since the women who love women look something like women sometimes and since the queens and the women who love women were friends the men lost the queens among the women who love women.

At another time the men began to get paranoid about the women who love women. There were so many of them and they kept attracting the women who men fuck. So the men began to issue more frequent pronouncements on the propriety and etiquette of the ownership of women. In a moment of panic, after Warren-And-His-Fuckpole’s daughter announced that now she was a woman who loved women, the men declared all women who men fuck, state property, and all women who love women, outlaws. The women who love women did not notice that their lives changed much. They had always been out of the law and the men saying it once more did not make it any more true.

But sometimes the men would become vicious beyond the ordinary because they could not stop women from loving women. At these times the women who love women would merge into the general strangeness of the city.

Since the women who love women look something like men sometimes and since the faggots look something like men sometimes and since the women who love women and the faggots were friends the men lost the women who love women among the faggots.

IF THE MEN GIVE YOU SOMETHING, YOU GET NOTHING

Loose Tomato is sitting on a pillow drinking a mint julep and writing a love poem when Lilac rushes in with the news that they have all just become legal.

“How can faggots be legal?” Loose Tomato scoffs.

“It’s true. The Boys in the Backroom just got the word from a slimy stool-pigeon who knows everything.”

As the surprise spreads down pansy path everyone gathers at the Gay as a Goose Cafe to wonder at such an unexpected event.

“The men would never do such a thing.”

“Maybe they will want to register us all now to make our liquidation easier.”

“Maybe they got confused and thought they were making faggot killing legal.”

As the days pass it turns out that it is true.

Pinetree says, “It can’t last.” Lilac swoons at the thought of being legal. Loose Tomato starts elaborating tests to see just how legal he really is.

After a week the faggots of Horny Heaven put a neon sign on their barn proclaiming it as the Faggot Fuck Palace and invite everyone to a party. The party goes on for nearly a week. No one can think of any reason to stop celebrating this peculiar event.

Barely recovered from so much good feeling, the Boys in the Backroom hear from the slimy stool-pigeon that the men without color did make a mistake and will not allow this situation to continue.

“The faggots and their friends got 140 days. Then the party’s over.”

The faggots wait. What form will the men’s wrath take this time. The big money says, “Let God take care of this one. He’s done little enough lately.” So Mildred Munich, whose direct line to God was widely whispered and whose hatred of faggots is legendary among her short-haired fans, is hired to lead the men in one of their favorite games—humiliate the faggots.

Every morning Mildred Munich pours over the book of insults that the men compiled for just such situations. Every evening she appears in front of crowds of stone-faced, tight-assed look-alikes who scream as she shouts the insult of the evening. The faggots and their friends are called sick, sinners, liars, traitors, seducers, perverted, weak, silly and ugly.

The faggots and their friends organize themselves quickly. The Boys in the Backroom issue eloquent denunciations of Mildred Munich’s filth and contact all of their important contacts seeking support. The fairies send food to the Cafe which gives it away to all who need nourishment for the fight. The Fuck Palace begins a round the clock suck-in in order to raise money. Heavenly Blue is panicked. He takes to his bed to be alone with his fear. Lilac is frantic with anger. He and Loose Tomato and Pinetree move about the community collecting and sharing information. The queens leave their elegant dens in the rubble and take over the streets.

The faggots and their friends fight knowing they will lose. 140 days and the neighbors and the colleagues and the families and the men’s money and power and Mildred Munich’s hate speeches make, through legal means, the faggots and their friends illegal once more.

“I feel more like my old self already,” Loose Tomato exclaims.

Heavenly Blue thinks being illegal is better. “When we were legal they called us every dirty name they could think of. Now maybe they will shut up.”

Lilac, who had been thrilled to be legal, now has to agree. “We can get on with our subversion,” he chuckles as he eats a mushroom.

“I guess,” Pinetree muses, “we know now that if the men give you anything, you get nothing. If we want it, we got to take it away from them.”

ACTION: FIERCE AGAINST THE MEN

One warm and rainy night, the faggots and their friends were gathered in one of their favorite cellars dancing and stroking each other gently.

Suddenly, the men, armed with categories in their minds and guns in their hands, appeared at the door. The faggots, true to their training for survival, scrammed out the back windows, up into the alley and out into the anonymous night. The queens, unable to scram in their gold lame and tired of just surviving, stayed. They waited until boldness and fear made them resourceful. Then, armed with their handbags and their high heels, they let out a collective shriek heard round the world and charged the men. The sound, one never heard before, unnerved the men long enough for the queens to get out onto the streets. And once on the streets, their turf, mayhem broke out. The word went out and from all over the devastated city, queens moved onto the streets, armed, to shout and fight. The faggots, seeing smoke, cautiously came out of hiding and joyously could hardly believe what they saw. Elegant, fiery, exuberant queens were tearing up the street, building barricades, delivering insults, daring the men.

So they joined the queens and for three days and three nights the queens and their friends told the men, in every way they knew how, to fuck-off.

CELEBRATION

Each year the faggots and their friends celebrate the coming out of summer. On the summer solstice they show themselves to the world.

The fairies make floats of hay and locust branches on their trucks. They make clothes from the daisies and the buttercups and the pansies and the Indian paint brushes. They move slowly down the country roads singing to the maple trees and the wild roses. In a field high in the hills they gather to eat sweet pea flowers and drink dandelion wine. The wine and the smell of the flowers make them exuberant. The soft bodies and the melting sun make them ecstatic.

The faggots arise late and have coffee in the garden. They slowly prepare to appear on the streets to celebrate. They sit, surrounded by their beloved plants and loose cats, to comb each other’s hair. Some of the faggots have only wisps of hair falling in long curls from the ring of their scalp; others have wild, free hair floating all over the garden. Their hair is carefully brushed and braided repeating a loving action yet one more time. They dress according to their latest dreams, take some of their magic substance and stroll out into the streets.

The queens are already there. They have been preparing themselves for days. The faggots are dressed for play, the queens are dressed to live in another world. They have allowed their tatters of tinsel and lace to turn them into fantastic creatures that the world has never seen before. On this one day, all the men play golf and leave the faggots and their friends alone to cavort and amuse each other in the streets of the devastated city.

Through the streets alive now with balloons and streamers and children and animals and laughter and songs and glitter, they meander until they reach a large field in the middle of the city. Here the women who love women sing songs of defiance and love and instruct the faggots and their friends in new ways to perceive.

Together and joyous, they form a circle to salue the great goddess. They sway and chant; the circle begins to move, faster and faster; sound and movement make them high. Exhausted and elated they fall to the ground laughing. The great goddess is pleased.

ACTION: BOLD AGAINST THE MEN

For general outrageousness, Airamel, one of the queens, was locked in Ramrod’s camp for the undesirables. There he could not resist pouting and cooing and prancing and provoking the Ramrod men locked up with him. The undesirables have a chant, “Fuck a queen and you’re a faggot. Fuck a queen and you’re a faggot.” which was supposed to protect them from Airamel’s charm. Yet often the chant failed. Then Airamel would get raped. And each time this happened was further evidence that Airamel must remain locked in.

As might be expected, Loose Tomato had fallen in love with Airamel. When Airamel was taken away, Loose Tomato wept. He missed Airamel so much that he became numb and desperate. So one day he walked into one of the men’s money depositories with one of the men’s guns in hand and ordered everyone to shut up, be calm and hand over the cash. Then he called the delicatessen and ordered pastrami on rye for everyone. Next he called Warren-And-His-Fuckpole to announce his demands: the money, Airamel, and two tickets to someplace else. Since the men control the whole world and none of the men anywhere like faggots and queens, it was hard to figure out where this someplace else was to be. Warren was livid as usual and called out his thugs and goons who could think of nothing to do but move through the streets terrorizing people. The Boys in the Backroom quickly arranged for the release of Airamel and the No Name Tribe slipped him into hiding. The queens of the devastated city surrounded the money depository to play havoc with the goons and the thugs, creating so much chaos that Loose Tomato slipped away with the money and his pastrami on rye to join Airamel in hiding. They had found a place to be.

ACTION: GENTLE AGAINST THE MEN

For the love of his fantasies for a glorious, non-violent revolution. Pinetree decided to act. He made a very small sign which said ‘freedom’ and sat down in front of the house of Warren-And-His-Fuckpole. He just sat there, smiling, drinking water, talking to anyone who came by about the glorious, non-violent revolution. Moonbeam and Heavenly Blue and Hollyhock came every day to sit with him. Lilac, afraid that the men would hurt him when no one was watching, sat with him each night, all night. The longer he sat there, with his little sign, saying his gentle words, the more distraught the men became. Warren-And-His-Fuckpole was close to collapse. Something had to be done.

So the men read out their rules and marched into their courts of vengeance. Lilac alerted the Boys in the Backroom who strolled into the courts of vengeance and shamelessly out-maneuvered the men.

The men then brought out their mind butchers who examined Pinetree from a distance and pronounced him out of his mind and therefore dangerous to public reality. Late that night the men came for Pinetree. Although his soul ached, Lilac was brave in order to make Pinetree strong. They took him to a Ramrod camp for undesirables, locked him in a cage and fondled the cold metal key of their victory. The Boys in the Backroom moved swiftly but unsuccessfully to free Pinetree.

Lilac and his friends were fearful. They cautiously approached the weavers of No Name for help. The weavers listened gravely, smiled sympathetically and told them to go and find a place to live near the great gardens of the fairies. Pinetree would join them soon.

They all left the devastated city at once and went to the fairies who received them with softness and kindness. They built a small house of hiding in the woods at the foot of the hill near the stream. And there they waited. Until one night, late, they heard Pinetree’s song of love floating down the stream toward the house of hiding.

How delicious that re-union was.

Soon, too soon for Lilac, the Tribe of the Rising Sons moved back to the devastated city to resume the appearance of a normal life. Pinetree remained behind with the fairies to create a new face and a new past to get him through this new present. He emerges as Jack Daniels, a soft-spoken, male, housepainter. He moved to a new devastated city to practice Jack Daniels and to wait for the other out-of-sight faggots to contact him.

The Tribe of the Rising Sons know they will not know Pinetree again until the revolutions are more advanced. They know they will not see Airamel and Loose Tomato again until the revolutions are more advanced. They go back to the devastated city to see what is to be done next.

HOW TO PROCEED: EMERGING WISDOM FROM THE WOMEN

The faggots and their friends and the women who love women can keep the men off balance for a long time by subtly, but continually, changing their identities. The men who are in charge of controlling it all find it difficult always to know how many of each kind there are and who they are. Each group can grow and shrink as the men’s changing ferociousness demands.

But the men’s viciousness will grow as their panic increases. They carry with them the knowledge always that there are enemies. And even when the men have trouble seeing the enemies clearly, they do not stop punishing. To punish, at random if necessary, is believed effective against the enemies. The faggots and their friends and the women who love women know that for a while they can find some safety in the confusion they can create. They have some time to develop their resources to survive.

Yet at some point, collectively, they will begin to know that the men will continue as long as they continue. They can play with the men’s categories to try to neutralize the men’s guns. Yet this will not make them free. They begin to know, from the inside, that they cannot be free until this dance is stopped. The men will not stop for they have nothing else to do. This dance brings the men riches, power and fame and they will keep it going as long as they are able. The faggots and their friends and the women who love women can, they begin to know, stop and do no-thing. That is something for them to do.

They will begin slowly to move their energy from the men’s deathly dance to a stillness. No movement and high invisible energy will be their goal.

They will begin slowly. They will fast a few days at a time until they do not need to eat unless they want to eat. They will put aside, from time to time, their magic substances until they do not need their magic substances and take them only when they want to. They will begin to abstain from sex to rest from the exhausting chase and get. They will stop flirting and seducing until they no longer need another warm body to feel real. Then they can make love when they want to. As what they need decreases, their activity decreases. They will then be close to doing no-thing and therefore close to not being what the men created them to be. They will cease to be other and the men will begin to fear for their own sanity.

The men’s needs are strong and overwhelming. They need the faggots and their friends in order to know who they are not. But the faggots and their friends will no longer need the men. They can sit and produce high, invisible love energy or they can do anything. But they will not need. And when the faggots and their friends cease being the faggots and their friends, the deathly dance of the men will begin to wane and a new dance will begin to emerge. Then the third revolutions will engulf us all.

The idea for the faggots and their friends came to me one drizzling, stoned night hanging out on Castro Street in San Francisco watching those amazing faggots playing on that amazing street. I thought it would be a children’s book and I worked on it on and off for a couple of years. By then I thought it was done and I knew it was not a children’s book. My friends read it and, as friends do, praised me for my efforts. They, however, did not think it was done. So I worked on it again on and off for another year when I decided it was done. I asked Ned, with whom I live in the Lavender Hill commune and whose work I had long admired, to illustrate it. I did not want to become involved with a big publishing company so I submitted the manuscript to small presses. The straight ones found it not to their liking for various vague reasons and the gay men’s publishing concerns, while positive about the content, were all so broke that they could barely publish the few things they were already committed to publishing. So we decided to do it ourselves. It is an old American tradition after all. With the support of our loving friends here it has been easier than we thought and much more fun than we anticipated. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is the first book from Calamus Books. We are eager to publish other books by gay male or lesbian writers which, in our opinions, will aid the progressive forces within the gay male/lesbian movement. We are eager to hear what you think of this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE 2019 EDITION

Thank you first and foremost to Ned Asta, John Campione, Yvonne Fisher, Andi Gladstone, David Hirsch, Francie Lyshak, Zelik Mintz, and Allan Warshawsky for opening their hearts, homes, and living histories to us. Special thanks to the many brilliant friends who have provided invaluable feedback on this project: Gregg Bordowitz, Matt Brim, Douglas Crimp, Svetlana Kitto, Kaitlin Noss, Sumitra Rajkumar, Dean Spade, Stephen Vider, Craig Willse, and Sacha Yanow. Deep appreciation to Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe for generously supporting this project from its inception through their exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, and to Anna Betbeze, TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Osato, Una Osato and Sacha Yanow for being heavenly collaborators in bringing this book and its history to the bright lights of the Bowery and beyond. Thank you to Stephen Vider for being an angelic guide throughout the research, Felice Picano for being our champion, Gregg Bordowitz for wise counsel from start to finish, Contagion Press for helping to keep this text in circulation, the American Indian Community House in New York City and the Native American Cultural Center in Rochester, NY for land acknowledgement guidance, Brenda Marston at Cornell University for taking such good care of Larry Mitchell’s archives and our queer histories, and Stephen Motika and Lindsey Boldt at Nightboat Books for all their labors of love. Endless gratitude to Tourmaline for liberatory words and friendship over these many years, and finally to Larry Mitchell, Ned Asta, and all the members of Lavender Hill for giving us so much.

MORGAN BASSICHIS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

LARRY MITCHELL was born in 1938 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 & Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977), his novels include The Terminal Bar (1982), In Heat (1986), My Life as a Mole and Five 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 a 2013 documentary by Austin Bunn.

NED ASTA, born in Brooklyn, New York, has been a member of the Moosewood Restaurant Collective in Ithaca, New York since 1980 and was a founding member of the Lavender Hill Commune. Asta was a member of the New York City queer theater troupe Hot Peaches in the late 1970s, and later co-founded the Breast Cancer Alliance of Ithaca, with Andi Gladstone.

TOURMALINE is an activist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work highlights the capacity of Black queer and trans people and communities to make and transform worlds. In her films, Tourmaline creates dreamlike portraits of people whose stories tell the history of New York City, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (Happy Birthday Marsha, co-directed with Sasha Wortzel, 2018), Miss Major (The Personal Things, 2016), and Egyptt Labeija (Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, 2017).

MORGAN BASSICHIS is a comedic performer living in New York City, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. With TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Osato, and Una Osato, Morgan adapted The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions for performance at the New Museum in 2017. Recent shows include More Protest Songs! at Danspace Project (2018), Damned If You Duet at the Kitchen (2018), and Me, But Also Everybody! at MoMA PS1 (2015).

NIGHTBOAT BOOKS

Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries. We publish books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. Please visit nightboat.org to learn about our titles and how you can support our future publications.

The following individuals have supported the publication of this book. We thank them for their generosity and commitment to the mission of Nightboat Books:

Kazim Ali

Anonymous Jean C. Ballantyne

Photios Giovanis

Amanda Greenberger

Anne Marie Macari

Elizabeth Motika

Benjamin Taylor

Jerrie Whitfield & Richard Motika