Be sure to read “Bloodchild” and “The Faggots…” and try to read the other Butler stories, they are both wonderful.
Bloodchild (required) and Speech Sounds (recommended) and The Evening and the Morning and the Night (recommended) by Octavia Butler
The Faggots & their Friends between Revolutions (required) by Larry Mitchell & Ned Asta
From Hunter:
Hi all —
For Monday, you have in front of you an interesting text, Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions. Larry Mitchell was the founder of Calamus Books, a small queer press run out of Ithaca, NY, and was a queer author + theater-maker (he wrote what is considered to be the first novel about AIDS in 1982, The Terminal Bar) active in the late 1970s through the 1990s.
I’d like you to approach the text first by reading the last page (p. 113), an explanatory note of sorts. Then, read as much as you can — you can skip around, if you like, but try and read at least all of Part I (“The Way It Is”). If you can read the entire text, that’d be ideal — Part II (“The Energy of Oppression”) is really quite interesting — but read as much as you can, and think critically about the illustrations and how they work alongside the text.
While reading, it might be helpful to delineate between the various tribes (the “men,” the “faggots,” the “fairies,” the “queens,” the “women,” etc.) and to think about how these categorizations and communities function next to other tribes or species you’ve encountered in other texts (such as Bloodchild, Einstein Intersection, Star Trek, Aye and Gomorrah). Otherwise, approach the the text generously and inquisitively and see you on Monday!
Best,
Hunter