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larry mitchell, the faggots and their friends in between revolutions, illustrations by ned asta, calamus press, 1977

[“The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.

The faggots knew the first. Faggot ass-kicking is a time honored sport of the men. But the faggots did not know about the second. They had never thought about winning before. They did not even know what winning meant. So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better. As the strong women explained winning, the faggots were surprised and then excited. The faggots knew about surviving for they always had and this was going to be just plain better. That made the ass-kicking different. Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.”]

#larry mitchell #ned asta #gay literature #terra preta #wasteland radio

“The faggots act out their fantasies without believing them to be real. The men act out their fantasies always proclaiming they are real. The faggots’ fantasies create play— dressing up and dressing down. The men’s fantasies create responsibilities— going here and going that. The faggots’ fantasies are about love and sex and solidarity. The men’s fantasies are about control and domination and winning. The faggots move towards the limits of living in the body for they have known body ecstasy and want to live there with everyone always. The men move towards the limits of living among things for they have seen great collections and want to live there alone always.”

“FAGGOT WISDOM: There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for a lifetime.”

larry mitchell, the faggots and their friends in between revolutions, drawings by ned asta, calamus books 1977

#lesbian literature #larry mitchell #ned asta #book recs tag #gender stuff #history stuff #cw slurs

larry mitchell, art by ned asta, the faggots and their friends in between revolutions, calamus press, 1977

#larry mitchell #ned asta #art #gender stuff #wasteland radio #lesbian literature #cw slurs #remind me to transcribe

Faggots, Dykes, and Fairies: Welcome to the world of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, an interview by Ernesto Macias:

[MACIAS: How would you explain this book to someone who has never heard of it?

ASTA: Living with Larry and knowing Larry, he was always writing in composition books by long hand. Originally, it had all these funny names. He thought it was a kids’ book and then he showed me what you would call a script, I guess, of the book. I said, “Larry, this is not a kids’ book at all.” He said, “Yeah, I know, it’s my philosophy.” People used to call me “Loose Tomato” and they put Loose Tomato in the book.

BASSICHIS: Ned, will you say why people called you “Loose Tomato?”

ASTA: I was in my 20s and 30s. Sometimes I looked butch, but most of the time I looked femme. I would sometimes wear a loin cloth or a little tiny top or nothing. I always wore a tube top. Don’t ask why, but that name caught on. We were naked a lot. I think I’m a nudist, actually. I’m 72, and I’m still naked. I don’t know what to say about it. I live out in the country where nobody can see me. It’s very exciting. If you go on Vimeo and see Lavender Hill Love Stories, you can get an idea of what everybody looked like and what they didn’t wear.

MACIAS: Tourmaline, how do you describe the book?

TOURMALINE: I think that “72 and still naked” is a great way to describe the book.

ASTA: Oh God, really?

TOURMALINE: Speaking personally, a lot of my identity was as a movement builder, as a community organizer. Morgan and I would write each other these letters being like, “What if we were artists? Can we actually be artists?” Then we would send each other passages of the book that would help us figure out those questions. I would really describe the book as an invitation to get deeper with yourself and your truth and really shed the messages that can get so deep inside of us that keep ourselves small. To me, it’s a really profound invitation to be dependent and reliant on each other’s care, collective wisdom, and beautiful faggoty attire.

MACIAS: Morgan, how would you describe the book?

BASSICHIS: The words that I always use are part fable, part manifesto. I love how the book is about wanting everything, wanting all of our liberation in all of its dimensions, and all the pleasures in the here and now. It’s about demanding or inhabiting that freedom now in so many different iterations. It’s also about all these groups of people and different sets of chosen family inhabiting freedom in different ways. In some ways, Lavender Hill is part of that fable. It’s part of that folk tale. The book goes back and forth between these big statements almost like posters, things you’d read on a poster at a protest. I always say since my roommate Bobby gave [the book] to me when I was 20-years-old, 15 years ago, which is that it almost feels like new pages appear all the time. I’ve read it many times but it almost feels like I haven’t quite finished it.

ASTA: I still do that.

BASSICHIS: Sometimes I’ll describe it as a spell book. It’s about shedding certain genre definitions too.

ASTA: Everything you explained sounds like Larry’s philosophy, especially when you said “wanting it now, our time is now.” He always said, “Let’s not mess around. It’s now. We come out now, we do things now. It’s our time. We’re gay.”

MACIAS: What was the intent of the book back then, and does it serve a different purpose today?

ASTA: I was just thinking that way back then, when he was putting all the ideology, philosophies, and definitely anarchy into the book, even the colors being red and black, it had to be anarchistic. I’d been giving the old book out where I worked to 21 and 20 year olds. They’re so interested in it, whether they’re gay or not. It blows me away, because they’ll say, “Is this about Trump? Is this about what’s happening now?” And I think, “Oh my God, that was ’77 and we’re still fighting the same fight.” When Morgan brought it to my attention to reprint the book, I was kind of shocked. Now, it all makes sense and it’s coming full circle. The intent of the book was that we could live together, we could fight the establishment, we could make new things, and we could create a new world. I think people still want to do that.

TOURMALINE: I think that we’re in the midst of an uptick in violence against our communities. Every year, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects reports that the increase in hate violence, particularly homicide and murder of trans people of color, is on the rise. We’re seeing that at the same time as really intense climate collapse. We can’t change policies, institutions, or politics without thinking and feeling differently; we can’t reorder our value systems without having a shift in what we value. Every time I read this book, I see something different. It’s about really allowing yourself to understand how you already are dependent on so many other people and in order to exist in the world—we’re all dependent. Some of us know it more deeply than others.

BASSICHIS: I’m just basking in what both of you just shared. I think it’s really important to say that this book has never stopped having a life. It’s not as if this book had a life in 1977 and then now it’s having a life again in 2019, but it has been circulated and passed between people every year since it was published by Larry in ’77, and it has been circulated by people giving each other their copies. In fact, that is the first mythology I heard about the book. You get your friends together, you get wine, and you pass around the book. People have Xeroxed copies, people have put copies online, people have DIY reprints. This book never went away. I think that signals a kind of hunger that so many of us have for a revolutionary queer politics. This tradition of revolutionary queer and trans politics has never gone away, and I think, right now, we’re in a really exciting moment—a kind of resurgence of this radical trans and queer politics that so many of us, young and old, are saying means the end of white supremacy. We are all looking for nourishment that is not fake optimism, but is nourishment to care for one another and to build the world that we all long for and deserve. I think this book is part of that nourishment.

MACIAS: It surprises me that something that was written so long ago still feels so, like you said, necessary. The book was published in an effort to have more queer art or queer writing. We live in a time now where people can create their own art and self-publish. But back then, it was a real effort, and now we have–I don’t want to say an abundance–but we have much more to consume.

BASSICHIS: The context of this book was radical print culture. This need to communicate with one another, find each other, and to create a liberationist language that includes both suffering and joy and includes both resistance and mourning. Larry talked in one of his interviews about how no one would publish queer work. Of course, we also want to remember how gender, class, and race played in, and who, even then, had more easy access to getting things printed and continues to now. But I think this sort of hunger, this hunger to print things and to create language is still important.

ASTA: When nobody would publish his work, we were in Ithaca and he was like, “I’m going to do it myself. Forget it.” I think that was a sign of the times. Whereas now, I think it would be easier and there’d be people who would publish it. I remember going to the Oscar Wilde bookstore in the West Village, he was thrilled and signing books, but that was the first book. But it was like a flirtation of what he said, “I’m not going to wait for anybody to do it”.]

#larry mitchell #ned asta #cw slurs #wasteland radio #history stuff #terra preta