This second of two linked blogs relates to my current thinking of about the ‘personal-is-political’ movements and their slogans. As I reflect back on my life from the 1960s (I was born in 1954), I recall how fluid were the attachments we referred to as a ‘rainbow alliance The boundaries different kinds of identity, and their sometimes-ambivalent labels, were sites of split and fusion between the changes being asked of people. The second part of this blog reflects on looking towards seeing a production of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (based on the cult book of that name by Larry Mitchell & illustrated by Ned Asta. To be seen at Home in Manchester on Sunday 2nd July at 3.00 p.m., as part of a selection of the items from the Manchester International Festival.
The first blog in this pair relates to visiting an exhibition of work by Yasoi Kusama named You, Me and the Balloons at Factory International Manchester. Find that blog at this address: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/06/21/this-blog-relates-to-my-current-thinking-of-about-the-personal-is-political-movements-and-their-slogans-the-first-part-of-this-blog-reflects-on-an-artist-whom-i-did-not-know-till-no/. The blogs are linked by an underlying theme – a desire to understand the ways in which the personal still is political without the pitfalls of a merely defensive identity politics, which fetishes and over-prescribes the range of acceptable subject-positions, or assumptions in the use of the first-person in telling one’ story, appropriate to any one label of identity, such as is the word ‘gay’. One way in which identity labels become prescriptive labels lies currently in massive misunderstanding of the genesis of the ‘liberation’ movements in our name from the 1970s onwards, the time of my own personal-political awakening.
The author and the book
In my blog on Yasoi Kusama I meant to show how slippage between identity labels, notably between a self-proclaimed identity as ‘mad’ and that of ‘queer’ interpenetrate each other in that artist’s oeuvre; at least, as I understand it at the BEGINNING of my journey in it, and before seeing any of her work ‘in the flesh’. And the link between marginalised subject-positions (ways of saying ‘I’) and explorations of the boundaries thought by psychiatrically-informed thought to exist between sanity and insanity was certainly important in that period, owing something to the uses of psychiatry to police these margins (and the labelling of marginalised identity as ‘illness’) and to questioning of those boundaries by anti-psychiatry of the left (as in R.D. Laing) and the neoliberal right (as in Thomas Szasz). I don’t intend to rehearse those issues in history however, though I reference them too in many earlier blogs, such as those for which there are links in this sub-clause – on the history of psychiatry, the other on a recent novel that is, in part, about the subject.
I am seeing the musical play about which this is a preview soon but read the classic cult book on which was based only yesterday, and in its 2019 recent reprinting by Nightboat Books. Called The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, its original publication was in 1977, by an independent gay press, Calamus, set up by the book’s author, Larry Mitchell and by Felice Picano (see one of the few blogs on that author by me at the link). This is an important text and has contemporary reference, shown not least by the championing of its recent re-publication by our contemporary, the feminist transgender activist, Tourmaline. This is important since LGB activists often justify their transphobia by reference to the 1970s and it is their pernicious rigidity as identity politicians, inimical to the women they claim to support, feminism and the dialectical integrity of LGBTQI+ as an activist movement that seeks to honour diversity, and not rigidity, of identity. And the text, though it is inimical to certain expressions of contemporary achievement of the movement, such as gay marriage (of which more later), is a text about fluid free-movement between identity boundaries and the lowering of barriers to inclusion. One sign of this is boundary-porous play of identity is the recognition of that one between sanity (heteronormative in nature) and queerness (constructed by the conventional as a form of non-integrative madness).
That we see that in Kusama is explained by some (but not Mignon Nixon as I showed in the first part of this pair of blogs) as a reflex of Kusama’s own self-proclaimed ‘madness’ as a powerful determinant of her vision whether for a positive or negative effect (or a combination of these effects). Not so in The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. See for instance in the collage below, the picture of Faggot and Dyke infiltration into the city of Ramrod run by ‘the men’. Ramrod is meant to celebrate the phallic power thrust of the men but is full of hidden codes of resistance, including one which indicates, with moon (for lunacy?) and the hidden words ‘Too ill’ to indicate the role of the medical model for the interpretation of queerness in the city, as if it were madness. And see too the celebration of the queer mass taking over the men’s keys in a mad happening of a dance movement where bodies merge, even those of ugly men whose undercurrent of queer desire will out.
Pages 40f . (left) & 81 (right).
Such drawings defy some of the words of the text or give it nuance. For the text says:
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.
Yet the illustration is not of a rigid phallic public manner, in the manner if ‘the me’ in the book but a fluid dynamic outline in which outsides and insides become indistinguishable and bodies merge and whole swings its capture of keys, which appear throughout in metamorphic and biomorphised forms (my neologism for keys that ae also bodies of animals or humans or part thereof)to boot. Of course, the text reciprocates for it shows that faggots aim to ‘mock and undermine normal reality’. It even uses the fact that gay men used keys (worn to right or left of the body) to indicate their preference for an active or passive role in sex (though later in the text this binary form of preference is itself undermined).
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 the men see as insane. [1]
Likewise, nothing in this picture knows its place nor does it want to know that place. Self and other are difficult to differentiate within these dancers considered as individuals or wholes, for they are iun fact drawn as both with otherness not in metal key icons but also flora, fauna, or machine and empty space, which seems as active in the dance as are the delineated bodies for delineation after all is actually a porous boundary between space and the embodied in dynamic motion. This is keys liberated into the queer madness, though it might include the men-in-suits who have become naked to enjoy the faggots and fairies they pretend to despise. To put a key between sane and insane is not as easy as the text asserts and this is the kind of nuanced play with which this otherwise axiomatic illustrated text often confronts us.
As for the issue of identity, it is, in my view a highly fluid one despite the fact that labels for gay stereotypes become distinct groupings that could look as if they were meant to be types of the people we might name in the mass ‘queer’. There are fairies, faggots, pansies, and queens: all are as distinguished from ‘the men’ as they are from ‘the strong women’ – the first wave feminists I believe. ‘The men’ are those in whose interests and in whose image the city and society of RAMROD was meant to have been built but have we seen in the illustration I cited above ‘the marred landscape of Ramrod’ has become nuanced because of the fact of queer occupation – not occupation as an army but just a recognition of the fact that we all must live somewhere and to live covertly too has its pleasures ‘finding quiet places to love in’.[2] But these types are differentiated often, even between ‘the men’, who ‘pretend to be machines’, and the varied others to be later collapsed in the narrative.[3]
This is particularly the case with the faggot character, Pinetree, because: ‘He liked men, grown-up or not. So, he thought it would be alright to be a grown-up man’. What Pinetree discovers is that growing up as ‘a man’ means to hear voices inside his head, described as a classic symptom of schizophrenia brought about by family ‘double-binds’ as in Laing, that encourage him to “distrust other men” and be mean to “all the others”.
His trip to faggothood happens when he sees the contradiction of that situation in the reality of Ramrod’s streets, those ‘who appeared to share with all the others and to cherish some of the other men’.[4] The lesson is clear. Pinetree may think himself ‘not a man’ at the end of his journey but that is only a reflection of the contradictions of patriarchal society. The point is driven home in a lovely section of the book ‘DISRUPTION: TACTICS’. For here we learn that being a ‘faggot’ is to explore the world of appearance in ways that rigid thinking in the RAMROD men can’t. Men pass as faggots and faggots pass as men (if the latter want to which they don’t). Moreover, faggots don’t play secret games away from wives they otherwise dominate but instead openly ‘never tire of fucking with the men’s minds’. They know that they can make ‘the men’ copy their glamour only to change their attire so they ‘looked like the men used to look’. This shift and play with the rigid norms of ‘the men’ makes the men ‘confused and petulant’ but only because they realise but can’t articulate the false exclusiveness of the label ‘the men’ they bear. For, after all, men don’t become ‘confused and petulant’ if they are real men. Do they? What they actually do is to pretend ‘not to notice’ and ‘not want to look at any of this’. [5]
And the freedom to transition is embraced by the women who ‘wrote a song for the faggots. It was called, “Anything you do that the men don’t like is o.k. by us”.[6] How different from a world of J.K. Rowling and Joanna Cherry, the sisters of patriarchy’s indulgence! For Patriarchy is foiled by transition between rigid categories. Faggots we are told elsewhere actually ‘do’ the actions we call ‘community’, but their world is ‘invisible to the men’ and lives in ‘shifting notions about the men and power and how to take it away from them’.[7] Labels like ‘fag hags’ are for ‘the men’ not those who realise why women might prefer company that will not lead to rape.[8] Fairies are the heirs of rural ‘gentle people’ but are also faggots who garden, queens seem a separate category and become anyway what they are by dressing, being distinguished from faggots by not being ‘addicted to the men’s fashions’, using the axiom that ‘style is the path to the unique self and so to transcendence’.[9] Their transcendent form is the Great Goddess of the Earth.[10]
Pages 21, 77 & 65 respectively: Woman Wisdom (à la Aubrey Beardsley), & portraits of faggot Pinetree and ‘The Great Goddess of the Earth’
So, let’s look at the fact that ‘queens luxuriate in variety’.[11] It is this which allows both survival, overturns norms and makes for change. It is the secret of the variety of intersecting types who might be merely instincts, moods, and attitudes. It is the sign that ‘we’ will win because we are many not single as in ‘the men’s’ highly cultivated (and essentially false, single-mindedness. It is the reason for what is said in the first of the instances of ‘Women Wisdom’, so beautifully illustrated by Ned Asta, in the book about the nature of ‘revolution’. And it is ‘revolution’ based in diversity of type and commonality of inclusiveness. And ‘between the revolutions’ we need to respect diversity. If there is oppression in the appearances of gay some gay sexual relationships it is because we are almost nearly told straight in one of the best explanations of Daddy role-play sex (surely on the surface oppressive). The oppressive is transformed into play-acting sources of one’s oppression.
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.[12]
Moreover, even the obvious difference between ‘rich queer men’ (still absorbed in the interests of the status quo and the ‘poor faggots’) is explicable. The difference is, as with Christ, as large or small as ‘the eye of a needle’. Faggots are in fact the producers of art, culture and even at the service of the social but that is because they know more because that is ‘how the oppressed survive’.[13] We can’t deduce from a test anything but we can put to bed the tired reactionaries called ‘gender-critical’ I think, who only think they are revolutionary feminists (in fact their support base is uniquely of the political right – even hard right).As Tourmaline says of the trans women’s revolution: ‘Our glamour is not superfluous changing the current order, it is instrumental’.[14] For after all too it is only people who label themselves revolutionaries who definitively are the reverse, keeping a ‘straight face’ and sure that the celebration is not a part of revolution, demanding that ‘the celebration only be planned, never enacted’.[15] Thus, Joanna Cherry.
As for the production of the musical play, I do not know it’s relationship, if any to that described by Morgan Bassichis in the book’s introduction but only hope that is fun without it inviting people, as he did, ‘to say “tasty orgasm juice is free” into a microphone’, for I is shy, and our seats are in the Circle fortunately. But see you all there, faggot, fairy, queen, strong women and even ‘the men’ type friends. I will report back to you, I hope. Meanwhile, let’s not leave without a collage from that fine Aubrey Beardsley style Ned Asta illustration of the fairy so ‘overcome with love and passion’ that ‘they lie in the watermelon patch and masturbate’. And let’s see that half-title page showing an older faggot (I identify clearly) looking longingly at throwing off their mental chains.[16]
From page 57
Half-title
All my love
Steve
[1] Larry Mitchell & illustrated by Ned Asta (2019: 40) The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions New York, Nightboat Books.
[2] Ibid: 75
[3] Ibid; 44
[4] Ibid: 95
[5] Ibid: 46
[6] Ibid: 47
[7] Ibid: 70
[8] Ibid: 45
[9] Ibid: 63
[10] Ibid: 64
[11] Ibid: 63
[12] Ibid: 31
[13] Ibid; 6
[14] Tourmaline (2019: X) ‘Preface’ in ibid: VII-XI
[15] Morgan Bassichis (2019: XXVf.) in ibid: XIII-XXVII
[16] Ibid: 56
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