By Anna Blaedel
part 1: About a month ago, I found myself stretched out on a concrete floor, eyes closed, surrounded by three dear friends, who were also stretched out on a concrete floor, in an otherwise empty room. One was visiting from far away, and we were all sharing stories of life’s twists and turns over a year that has held, for us each and all, plenty of beauty, and no shortage of rupture and pain. We know each other deeply, intimately, differently–our relationships spanning decades. Among the four of us, over the years, our relationships have been patterned as classmates and collaborators, lovers and partners, roommates and housemates. We have held each other through heartbreak, and broken each others’ hearts, and been part of healing what’s broken. We’ve moved across many miles multiple times to be with each other, and sustained our relationships while living worlds apart. We’ve shared rent, and covered bills, and let money flow from where it’s accumulated to where it’s needed. We have accompanied each other through disorienting diagnoses, and grief that is not possibly survivable, until it somehow, somehow, is. Our relationships are not recognized by any state or institution; our love and care for each other defies language. We are friends. We are in friendship. These dear, queer friends have saved my life more times and in more ways that I can name; I have been part of saving theirs, too.
We were stretched on the concrete floor of a new workspace–one that holds sacred possibility and dream–that has come into being through the best and worst of times, and in the worst and best of ways. A space made possible through friendship; a space for friendship to bloom. We hadn’t even planned to visit the space, but now we were consecrating it, with laughter and tears. One of us, who spent too many recent years not singing, but is coming back gloriously into song, played a song by Beautiful Chorus: “I release all things that no longer serve me. I release all things that no longer work for me.” Stretched out on the concrete floor to listen, one by one we began humming, then singing softly, growing in volume–releasing, witnessing, finding our way. I haven’t felt the power of prayer like that, in a long time. A beautiful chorus, indeed.
part 2: The day my youngest nibling came home from the hospital, fresh into the world, I cradled him in my arms and whispered prayers of love and gratitude and dream for his just-beginning life. I also read him a story, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Do you know this story? Written by Larry Mitchell and illustrated by Ned Asta in 1977, it was out of print until 2019. Originally written as a children’s book, it is an origin story of queer life, tracing the pleasures and possibilities kindled by queer kinship and creative survival–by friendship. Morgan Bassichis calls it “part-fable, part-manifesto,” and “something between a prayer book and a dream journal, dirty as hell, waiting to be passed around among friends.”
“It’s been a long time since the last revolution, and the faggots and their friends are still not free,” the fable-manifesto begins. In this story, the empire of Ramrod–“known to its neighbors for the fierceness of its weapons,” as well as “the elaborateness of its violence and its eagerness to use it”–is unraveling. “Violence has been seen in its every conceivable form. The domination of other living things has become total and so boring.” The faggots–Heavenly Blue, Hollyhock, Pintree, Lilac, Moonbeam, and Loose Tomato–love and fight and fuck and heal together. They offer wisdom for living in threshold times when the world is falling apart and we are between revolutions and everything seems to be coming undone, and we need each other more than ever.
The faggots’ friends–”women who love women, fairies, queens, queer men, strong women, faggatinas and dykalets”–know “it takes all kinds to make the revolution.” Sharing categories of identity or biology are not required for solidarity or kinship; collective care and collective resistance against domination and brutalizing violence are. One’s role in revolution is determined by “one’s allegiance to either the oppressed or the oppressor.” Morgan Bassichis writes, “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.” A moral of the story, one I whispered to my new little nibling, is that while not everyone is lucky enough to grow up to be a faggot, everyone can become a faggot’s good friend.
part 3: Earlier this month, enfleshed shared the news that we need the help of our friends. Recent disappointments in grant funding, along with a sustained commitment to do things differently, queerly–to resist working in ways that reinforce capitalism and competition, center profit, or compromise our values for financial security–mean we are on the brink of having to shift away from salaried staff, significantly reducing the scope and capacity of enfleshed offerings. (You can make a contribution here.)
Everything of deep value comes into being through sacred labor, love, imagination, and dream–sustaining what matters in this world is a collective effort. enfleshed has always scraped by with very few financial resources, and a whole lot of heart. During this Pride month, we’ve emphasized four threads of collective liberation that we will keep weaving, in and with our friends, whatever our organizational future: decolonizing our lives, hearts, movements, and theologies; rooting in coalitional activism, knowing it takes all kinds to make a revolution; refusing to assimilate into dominance through respectability, or individualistic identity politics; practicing chosen family, creating strange kinships, celebrating queer friendships.
A poem of Andrea Gibson’s has circulated through enfleshed’s offerings over the years; it is part of my/our scriptural canon–”Angels of the Get-Through.” It is a love poem, in honor of friendship. It includes the lines: “All living is storm chasing. Every good heart has lost its roof…Best friend, this is what we do. We gather each other up. We say, the cup is half yours and half mine. We say alone is the last place you will ever be.” Like all things of deep value, it is up to us–collectively, ongoingly–to enflesh this reality into being. Salvation is a practice of gathering each other up, sharing what we have, singing healing into the world, loving each other into life, finding our friends so that whatever storm we are facing, we do not do so alone. May it be so, Happy Pride, in friendship, with love, and amen.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.