Life Lessons: Larry Mitchell and "The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions"

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a story about surviving tyranny, and that can take many forms. Published in 1977, this parable about patriarchy takes place in and around the land of Ramrod, whose men make targets of those unlike them—the women, the faggots, the queers, and the queens. Its author, Larry Mitchell, first conceived of this story as a children’s book, but it grew to become a collection of wisdom, a manual of tactics, and a chronicle of the diversity of queer living. Searing in its critical view of power and loving in its embrace of all the ways that the oppressed have learned to endure it, Faggots and Their Friends became a legendary text, long out of print and circulated through dog-eared photocopies until it was republished in 2016 and then again in 2019 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

The story’s characters and texture are drawn from Mitchell’s experience of collective living in the 1970s, and the book was illustrated by his friend Ned Asta. He was a member of the long-running Lavender Hill Commune outside Ithaca, New York, which was composed of queer women, men, and others who branched out from an earlier commune (the 25 to 6 Baking and Trucking Society) of which Mitchell was also a core member. In the day-to-day of living with others, Mitchell saw how the effects of sexism, homophobia, and masculinity shaped their interactions. He was also a sociologist and, during this time, was teaching on Staten Island at Richmond College (now the College of Staten Island). As an activist, long-haired radical, and out gay professor, Mitchell helped build an experimental curriculum at the college. Inspired by feminism and gay liberation, he taught a long-running class on the “Sociology of Men” that took the form of dialogues with students about their life experiences and the ways that the restrictive rules of masculinity burdened—in very different ways—women, men, and others. Taking its cue from feminist consciousness-raising, the course looked at everyday behaviors and the ways they reflected larger power dynamics. That course was developed and taught over the same years that Mitchell was writing Faggots and Their Friends. The book’s generous and often funny fables can be understood as an alternate way of teaching about revolution, responsibility, and community survival. Written with both anger and loving self-mockery, this tale is meant to give insight, sustenance, and hope.

This production of Faggots and Their Friends is the third adaptation of Mitchell’s parable. In 1981, Bil Sheldon, a theater student at Kent State was so excited by the copy a friend from San Francisco had sent him that he staged a reader’s theater version. Mitchell was unaware and only learned about it when he was told by the head of the National Gay Task Force, Lucia Valeska, who happened to be at the university for a conference and saw its single public performance. In the years since, Mitchell’s book continued to inspire as it passed from hand-to-hand, and there are many stories of devotees sharing its wisdom by sitting in a circle reading the text out loud to each other. In 2017, Morgan Bassichis organized a three-part musical adaptation for the New Museum of Contemporary Art that paid homage to this collective practice of reading the text. This production, produced by Park Avenue Armory and Factory International, premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2023, and went on to have runs at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Bregenzer Festspiele, Southbank Centre, Holland Festival, and Ruhrtriennale Festival der Künste. Composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman reimagined Faggots and Their Friends as a collection of storytellers and musicians gathered to share these tales of community, strife, and survival. Their adaption updates and expands on the narrative of Mitchell’s text, adding new connections to political shifts in recent decades and offering an even more strident call for collective action and mutual support.

David J. Getsy is a writer who pursues histories of queer performance that are in danger of being forgotten, especially from 1970s New York. He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at the University of Virginia.