An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail

by Hélène Giannecchini, Anna Moschovakis (Translator)

After she encounters a poem about love and friendship etched on the Homomonument in Amsterdam, Hélène Giannecchini is moved to attempt to do justice to a form of relation often subordinated to romance. A friendship is a filiation we choose, one that can reconfigure our understanding of co-existence. It holds love, laughter, dissent and solidarity; it can be a site of political struggle, of reinvention and rest. Thinking back to her own unconventional family formation, she sets out to piece together an alternative genealogy of lives excluded from normative discourses, whose traces may only remain in memory and archival fragments. In searching and sensitive prose, Giannecchini sifts the past to bring marginal existences into communion with each other, preserved through loving acts of witness and made full of meaning by friendship's generative force. Roving from Saint-Just's revolutionary ideal of amity to Donna Gottschalk's photography documenting radical lesbian organizing in 1960s and '70s New York, interspersed with unpublished images acquired magpie-like through chance and circumstance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail forms a slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century, and a moving testament to the liberatory power of friendship.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Memoir

204 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2026

Reviews

[lena casanoves giol · Rating 5 out of 5]

el llibre que m'he comprat i llegit a parís 🩷 m'ha agradat moltíssim, sort sempre de les amigues i d'agafar-nos les mans a tot arreu

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the book launch for the English translation with Fitzcarraldo Editions, Hélène Giannecchini told the audience: "In France, we only got non-fiction a few years ago. Before that, we only had essays and novels." This is a work of creative non-fiction, or autotheory to be more specific, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson's Argonauts. Giannecchini considers how queer people may put friendship at the center of their existence and contemplates how queerness allows people to think more creatively about their relationships with others and to reconsider how they build their lives.

Giannecchini desires to live among her friends, to build a life of them, and goes searching for a queer past where she can locate the genealogies of these desires. Towards the beginning of the book she writes "Friendship saves us, it is a founding principle, a fortification. It does not dwindle with the years, it is an alternative to the so-called biological family, a categorically different bond; it is a political force." An Army of Lovers falls within the tradition of "chosen family" or "families by choice," a term that comes from thee anthropologist Kath Weston when when she studied gay communities in San Francisco.

For queer people, friendship has a complicated history. For decades, queer people in the archives have had their love affairs and deep intimacies reduced to just being friends or the euphemistic "roommates." So to find actual, platonic queer friendship in the archive is an entirely new task, one that takes Giannechini to archives across France and the United States. She learns about the AIDS crisis and how lesbians helped gay men through ACT UP and end of life care, as well as the history of queer architecture: remaking homes in order to live among friends and in community.

Foregrounding friends, a different type of kinship, also disrupts the biological nuclear family which is an organism that privatizes relationships and ultimately benefits capitalism. Giannecchini considers abandoning the family entirely, writing "we don't change structures, they change us." However, at other points she contemplates marrying close friends in order to gain legal protections for this special type of relationship that does not exist without a marriage contract. Giannecchini is also frustrated by the limitations that language imposes on friendship. There are so few words to describe the complications of interpersonal relationships: merely lovers or friends will not do. The most compelling argument about language that is made is when Giannecchini suggests comradeship as a term through which to build new communities: "comradeship is precious because it momentarily suspends the notion of identity as the sole defining factor of a person." Comradeship recognizes a shared struggle, it represents a relationship where two people see their liberation as deeply interconnected.

Finally, there are many moments of brilliance when Giannecchini discusses the archive and how the archive acts upon researchers. She writes "Literature must not treat the archive as a reserve of lives at its disposal, but must collaborate with it instead." Indeed, I imagine the lives I uncover in these hallowed spaces to not merely be mechanisms by which to structure an argument and complete a thesis, but co-collaborators in my research endeavor. We owe something to the people we study; they are not merely stories for us to take.

Such a wonderful book, I think everyone should read it.

[Sam James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will always treasure this book - an alternative telling of queer history through found artefacts, diaries, stories and interviews. Giannecchini brings queer ancestors to life so vividly, reminding us we should never forget those who came before us.

[kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah this was excellent

[Eolann · Rating 3 out of 5]

A free ranging collection of essays, with Giannecchini thinking in various ways about ideas of queer community and friendship; at times drawing on examples from her own life, at other times on examples and precedents she has searched out in her readings and research looking for potential models. A few of these essays are a little dry and academic, but some are very moving, in particular one where Giannecchini travels over from France to America to meet Donna Gottschalk, a half forgotten photographer who's photos from her youth in the 60s and 70s have recently been rediscovered; it was at an exibiton of these photos where Giannecchini had written the exibition text that I found this book.

[Valena Hemprich · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a heartfelt anthem to friendship and the diverse reality of relationships. It explores stories of relationships we may call familial that refer not to the biological understanding of family but the concept of a chosen family. It does so from an LGBTQ perspective by mainly writing from and on lesbian and trans-gender experiences.
The writing is beautiful and let’s one immerse in the different stories of individuals that are portrayed throughout the book.
I can only recommend reading it!

[Sarah Foulc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Exactly what I needed. Have been exploring the borderlands of these concepts within my own life. So many of my friends are queer and so am I and yet, mainly due to having been sort of isolated from making children in my early twenties in a heterosexual nuclear unit, I have never been that close to any queer community. I’ve visited, experienced the togetherness too. I’ve always experienced my relational life as fluctuating, nuanced, unencumbered by the need to label or define. I love reading anything I can about this topic and this book was an excellent exploration of this.

[Renee Chang · Rating 4 out of 5]

a collection of essays about the power of queer memory and forgotten histories; stories of queer lives, loves, friendships, kinships, sometimes imaginatively reconstructed from a single photograph; fiction as a means of restoring voices to the silenced, the marginalised and forgotten; about what it means to work with archives, not merely using them as sources of material to extract but collaborating with them. i liked the metaphor of a tailor making clothes from the measurements of an absent body.

[Jean device · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kinship > family

[Ε Mant · Rating 5 out of 5]

VITAL

[Zahra · Rating 4 out of 5]

<3 queer history <3 queer resilience <3 my queer community

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8

[leukonoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

super pomysł, ale można byłoby zatrzeć misyjny sznyt i wrzucić więcej praktyki