mk zariel

So first I wanna tell you about Larry Mitchell, who's the author of this book.

He was born in Muncie, Indiana on July 12th, 1939, which he described as a nightmare.

He died on December 26, 2012 in Ithaca, New York after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

He lived with his partner Rick Morrison.

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, and I apologize if I didn't pronounce their names correctly, 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 book we're discussing that has what is considered a slur in the title, which I will use when referring to the title, The Faggots and 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, which was actually adapted into a film.

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, New York called Lavender Hill, which is a subject of a 2013 documentary by Austin Bunn.

I don't usually read the, um, illustrator's bio, but this book is heavily illustrated and I think, um, he and the illustrator worked kind of in tangent with it, so I wanna talk a little bit about the illustrator, who is, uh, who is Ned Asta, who was born in New York, um, in Brooklyn, and was a member of and has been a member of the Moosewood Collective, um, in Ithaca, New York since 1980, and was a founding mem- member of the Lavender Hill Commune with Mitchell.

Asta was a member of the New York queer theater troupe Hot Peaches in the late 1970s, and later co-founded the Breast Cancer Alliance in Ithaca with Amy Gladstone.

So that's a little bit about the, the authors and the, the author and the illustrator, and then I wanna read you a little bit about the book, and this is from, uh, Wikipedia.

So Mitchell was inspired to write The Faggot and Their Friends Between Revolutions following a trip to the Castro in San Francisco in the early 1970s.

He based it in part on his experience living in Lavender Hill, a queer commune in Ithaca, New York, that Mitchell and Asta were founding members of.

Mitchell conceived of the book in reaction to a lack of contemporary gay literature.

He initially planned for The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions to be a children's picture book illustrated by Asta, but it would ultimately become a novel of prose and illustrations.

Years after its release, the book proliferated through unofficial photocopied and later PDF reproductions, and developed a cult following.

Reviewing the 2019 reissue for Slate, critic John Russell comments on the story's contemporary relevance, noting that the descriptions of Ramrod's disintegration and the men's hostility toward the faggots and their friends- ... quotations are echoed in Trump's America.

Regarding the novel's utopian philosophy, Russell writes that he is of two minds and expresses discomfort over what seems to me like Mitchell's ultimate strategy of divestment from the world of men, which we'll talk about.