When the writer Larry Mitchell showed his friend Ned Asta his latest manuscript in 1976, it didn’t take long for her to question Mitchell’s hopes for publishing it as a children’s book. The two had been living blissfully in a queer commune near Ithaca, N.Y., for some years, but outside reality was still something to consider. As Mitchell shopped it around (now with Asta’s whimsical illustrations), even his hopes of it being released by small gay presses were dashed.
A year later, Mitchell decided to self-publish “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions”: part fairy tale, part radical manifesto, entirely unequaled.
This week Asta held back joyful tears after seeing how their book’s blend of playfulness and politics works as a music theater piece at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. (Mitchell died in 2012.)
A collaboration between the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman, the operatic ensemble piece is having its North American premiere — the latest stop on the cult classic’s idiosyncratic journey to some kind of mainstream.
It’s one that had mostly stalled for decades, after the book went out of print. Though Mitchell eventually left the upstate commune, Lavender Hill, Asta remained, working (as she still does) at nearby Moosewood, one of the country’s oldest vegetarian restaurants.
“When it first came out, there was some excitement because of the title, so we’d come down to do signings at the old Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street,” Asta said on a video call. “But up here, there was no interest. I even let go of it. I thought, ‘Oh well, that was a nice experience — I drew this book.’”
But throughout the decades, the book quietly developed a mythical status within queer artist and activist circles, who kept the utopian story alive with bootleg copies. Its loose narrative follows a group of marginalized people whose communal living clashes against the powerful capitalist patriarchy.
Bits of the book’s recurring segments — “Faggot” and “Women Wisdom” — are sprinkled throughout, such as: “We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ’cause nobody else is goin’ do it.”
The book was reprinted in 2019, to celebrate the Stonewall Uprising’s 50th anniversary, but six years earlier, Venables received a PDF from friends in San Francisco and it immediately resonated with him.
“One of the conceptual ideas we had quite early on was to try to throw as many genres in there as we could,” Venables said in an interview last week. He and Huffman had previously worked on experimental opera pieces — “4.48 Psychosis,” about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenagers who died in a standoff with the police — but wanted to appeal to a broader audience by taking this work in a more music theater direction. “It was important for us to try to embody the book’s principles in the way that we make it.”
Nearly 100 instruments are used to interpret Venables’s score, which Huffman compared to a jazz chart because it has room for improvisation, and includes baroque and romantic classical music, bossa nova, techno, and folk.
Some instruments worked their way in throughout the casting process, like when the performer Joy Smith auditioned over Zoom with a harp. In all, 15 performers — many of whom have been with the work since its 2023 premiere in Manchester, England — sing, dance and play several instruments, as well as give and receive music directions onstage.
“Our primary goal was this sense of fluidity similar to what the book is talking about in terms of identity, like the way that the queers pass in the men’s world or the way that we code switch when we’re with different people,” Venables said. “In a musical sense, it feels like putting on different costumes to tell different stories.”
The look of the show (costumes are by Theo Clinkard and the set is by Rosie Elnile) is mostly collected from thrift stores, to reflect what Huffman called the book’s “spirit of abundance all around us,” and his staging similarly resulted from cast improvisations. Its presentational scenes see the cast, as more or less themselves, enact the book’s myth of its title figures, who are represented as stock types for different identities.
“Whereas most origin myths represent sexual minorities as a derivation of the norm, or an aberration, Mitchell’s text does the opposite,” Huffman said in an interview. “He says that the faggots and their friends is the natural state, and talks about this infection of the mind that happened when the men became greedy and started fighting each other. That has a lot of contemporary resonances, when you see minorities being blamed for society’s ills.”
That alternative creation story is what Huffman thinks has made the book a cult hit, even if its title and nontraditional format might have kept it off shop windows. Asta echoed these two points, and she credits the artist-activist Morgan Bassichis (“Can I Be Frank?”), whose introduction for the 2019 reissue outlines the book’s history, with helping to make it more accessible.
Still, the book had been edging toward a comeback, which Asta said began in earnest with the 2013 release of a short documentary on Lavender Hill, funded partly by Cornell University. Bassichis mounted their own musical adaptation at the New Museum in 2017, and later helped the historian Jeffry Iovannone in his quest to admit the commune into the National Register of Historic Places, which it entered earlier this year.
Asta, who served as grand marshal for this year’s Ithaca’s Pride festivities, said she now receives photos of tattoos that fans get of her Aubrey Beardsley-inspired illustrations. She lives down the road from Lavender Hill, and is optimistic about Venables and Huffman’s show.
“I think it’s so celebratory,” she said. “ There’s 15 people involved. That’s a lot of people. We had about a dozen of us living together for 16 years, but nobody ever had the energy to do a play.”
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