Jack and Leila are part of a group of activists in Berlin who are strongly committed to the pro-Palestinian movement. As the space for protest narrows, they face surveillance, censorship, police violence and are threatened with deportation. In this climate, they are working on a stage performance based on Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a queer utopian manifesto in the form of a fable. As rehearsals progress, the text from the seventies increasingly blurs with their own reality.
“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.
The faggots knew the first. Faggot ass-kicking is a time-honored sport of the men. But the faggots did not know the second. They had never thought about winning before. They did not even know what winning meant. So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better. As the strong women explained winning, the faggots where surprised and then excited. The faggots knew about surviving for they always had and this was going to be plain better. That made asskicking different. Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.”
Larry Mitchell / The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
“The faggots have the routines of community and the rhythms of the streets to live by: visiting, lunches at small cafes, late day tea, walks, accidental encounters, organizing, issuing manifestoes, putting on plays, changing lovers, shifting alliances and living arrangements and gossip, endless gossip. They share shifting notions about the men and power and how to take it away from them. They find routines in their collective lives and turn them into rituals. They created the ritual of the brief encounter, the ritual of dying love, and the ritual of outrageousness. They live in a world invisible to the men.”
Larry Mitchell / The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
