Larry Mitchell > Quotes

“The faggots have accepted all that they know and see as the way things are and so can no longer be shocked. The men live in the fantasy that everyone is like them and are so constantly shocked.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Let's drink to the old faggots who were there and helped make this happen just by being there.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men believe that activity results from frustration and frustration results from never being able to get what you want. The perpetual out-of-reach. The men frantically scurry about with great schemes and much noise to try and reach the out-of-reach. Each tries to be the first or richest or strongest or most potent. Each compares himself to the others and each is always inadequate; less than first, not yet rich enough, or strong enough, or potent enough.
None of this leads to happiness, but then the men do not look approvingly at happiness. None of this leads to contentment but then the men care nothing for contentment. They fill their heads with inflated notions of total control and empire and strength and sexual conquest. They fill their bodies with meat and drugs and dirty air. And they rush about in a frenzy making messes and ugliness and fear everywhere.
And when they tire they sit with each other and lament and blabber how little they are appreciated and how hard they try and how nothing ever works out quite as they plan.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Even weak links in the chain are links in the chain.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“It's been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH.
The fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer. The earth, scarred and gouged and stripped and bombed, will deny life to the men in order to stop the men. The fairies have left the men's reality in order to destroy it by making a new one.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Friendship was not an idea or a status you took for granted, but something you did, over and over:”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“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—”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“There still exists a faint memory of the past when the faggots and their friends were free. The memory lives in the faggots' bones. The memory appears at night when the bones are quietest. In darkness the faggots remember that once they lived in harmony with each other and their world.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Warren wants to know who the leader of the faggots is so he can rationalize with him. But the faggots have no leader. They have only dead heroes.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“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 Between Revolutions

“The Queens are poor and raunchy.
They live on what others no longer want.
They have no power.
They have no social place.
They almost have no allies.
All this makes them angry and amused.
It makes then restless and out of place.
It makes them high-spirited and disruptive.
They know it takes all kinds to make the revolutions.
Others do now know this yet.
The Queens are out and are not coming back. They wait for the others to join them.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The queens luxuriate in variety. They often make fun of the faggots for their drab uniformity and their addiction to the men's fashions. The 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.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“But the men's viciousness will grow as their panic increases. They carry with them the knowledge always that there are enemies. And even when the men have trouble seeing the enemies clearly, they do not stop punishing.”
― Larry Mitchell

“The faggots have no leader. They have only dead heroes.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“In the winter the fairies live in long, log houses. They learned how to build the long, log houses from the gentle people who once lived on the land. The gentle people are now gone from the land.
The men, believing that gentleness would disappear when the gentle people vanished, slaughtered them.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“into games of chase and grab and hoard and expand and protect.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“This constant deception does not make the queer men respect the men less. It does make them view the men differently.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“My political development, from militant anti-war activity to left-wing gay liberation had convinced me that we could not continue the endless, tedious struggle against the militarists or the patriarchy unless we had our own culture and community to nurture us, teach us and take care of us.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men want everyone to remember and commemorate only their moments of victory and plentitude. The men hope that only they have such moments. So history becomes a chronicle of wars and brutality and state splendor. Art attempts to transform men’s brutishness into men’s benevolence. The faggots know better. They know that one man’s victory means the defeat of others and that some men’s plentitude means that others go hungry. The faggots refuse to celebrate the men’s lies.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men believe that the brutality of the public arts is reality. The faggots along with the women know better and so have turned their prodigious talents to the cultivation of the domestic arts and the domestic arts flourish. The faggots do not lust after power. The men feel secure only when they are distant from the people and making decisions for everyone. The men care less what they decide than that they alone can decide. The men never ask the people what they want. They decide what they want to decide. And then they force others to follow their orders. The men hoard power and use it coninuously to make sure that they still possess it. The men hoard power and use it brutally to demonstrate that they are the men.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Once the faggots were overtaken by a new mysterious weak feeling. They could hardly leave their houses”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men care less what they decide than that they alone can decide. The men never ask the people what they want. They decide what they want to decide. And then they force others to follow their orders. The men hoard power and use it coninuously to make sure that they still possess it. The men hoard power and use it brutally to demonstrate that they are the men.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Lavender Hill opted for delight over dogma.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“and self.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men believe that the brutality of the public arts is reality. The faggots along with the women know better and so have turned their prodigious talents to the cultivation of the domestic arts and the domestic arts flourish.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“The men live in the fantasy that everyone is like them and so are constantly shocked.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“that superficiality, style, messiness, and play are not bad things, they are transformative ways of being.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“For them, style is the path into the unique self and so to transcendence. They long for everyone to reveal themselves wherever they are.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions

“This world is inhabited by a mythic cosmology of revolutionary protagonists—the faggots, the queens, the women who love women, the queer men, the faeries, the strong women—and, of course, their opponents, the men.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions