--- title: 'The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions' author: Ben type: quotes date: 2020-07-11T12:04:03+00:00 url: /quotes/the-faggots-their-friends-between-revolutions/ categories: - Uncategorised --- > 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. > 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 yuears 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. > 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 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. > 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…winning was like surviving, only better…getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution. > 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 luxuriate in variety. They often make fun of the faggots for their drab uniformity and their addiction to the men’s fashions. They queens display infinite weirdnesses 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. > 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. > 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 beter. 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 out subversion,” he chuckles as he eats a mushroom.

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> 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. >