An army of lovers cannot.., p.1
An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail, page 1
‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is a florilegium of countersexual kinmaking, survival strategy, lesbian comradeship, dinner parties full of queer ancestors, fugitive photography, transfeminist acting-up, insurrectionary eroticism and pieces of anonymous queer archival ephemera from many lands, brought alive with the help of critical fabulation. The domination of the couple-form over human life can and must be brought to an end, and Giannecchini deftly points to all the places where it is already dead (or perhaps always was). At the heart of this beautiful book lies a deceptively incendiary critique of capitalist society. It asks a direly urgent question: can humanity rise to the challenge of the term “friend”? If not, how do we propose to live together?’
— Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
‘We could be friends, we could be lovers, we could be comrades. Queer people are specialists in the art of chosen families because we have to be. Giannecchini’s book is not just about such bonds, it’s made by making them. In a world intent on crushing us all into isolated particles, this is an essential guide for everyone in how to glue together a fuller and deeper life.’
— McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death
‘At once a memoir and a sociology of friendship, kin, and chosen family, An Army of Lovers is lucid, impassioned and reasoned to a fault. Alternating between intimate, personal narratives and research-based models of kinship, Hélène Giannecchini reflects on their myriad permutations and outcomes, and provides us with an urgent, amorous manual for living.’
— Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards
‘What a stunning, deep book! Giannecchini has dug down to the marrow, to find the sparkling cells that queer people through the ages have always made – the lights we’ve used to find each other. I am so relieved that this book found me, because life without books like these, as without friends, is lonely. Giannecchini’s work is to listen hard, to the voices of our queer elders, and to the signals from her own heart, and to share her findings with the world – we are all richer for her work. The writing shines; it is always brief, but never fast. Always thoughtful, but never heavy. I couldn’t stop reading, and I want to start again immediately.’
— Adam Zmith, author of Solemates
‘As someone who has long struggled with conventional ideas of family and marriage, I felt relieved and hopeful reading this searching text. Hélène Giannecchini swings open the doors to a great hall of kinship, camaraderie, companionship and neighbourliness. She writes with love and optimism and a desire that we may all become part of communities in which we endeavour, as friends, to hold one another up. This came at a difficult moment in my own life, a period shaped by the death of my father, and I am grateful to have been able to read it.’
— Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light
‘A tender treatise on the importance of queer friendship that offers alternative modes of being to resist the dual forces of capitalism and the heteropatriarchy, this book extends hope and solidarity through its considered, thoughtful prose. Through narrative intervention, both fictional and factual, Hélène Giannecchini illuminates the role archival work such as this can play in shaping queer life into a more optimistic future while acknowledging all that we owe to our past.’
— Elizabeth Lovatt, author of Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line
AN ARMY OF LOVERS
CANNOT FAIL
HÉLÈNE GIANNECCHINI
Translated by
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
MAKE AN EFFORT TO REMEMBER
AN EXCESSIVE DESIRE FOR FRIENDSHIP
IN THE SILENCES OF THE IMAGE
SHE WHO SAYS SHE DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FRIENDSHIP SHALL BE BANISHED
DEVIATING
THE NEWLYWEDS
THREE
OUR INHERITANCE WAS LEFT TO US BY NO TESTAMENT
1987
THE FAMILY WE CHOOSE
DONNA
PRACTICES
AN ASK
BREAK-UPS
WE ARE NOT ACCIDENTAL
MINNIE AND GLORIA
HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER?
AN ARMY OF LOVERS CANNOT FAIL
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
ILLUSTRATIONS
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
MAKE AN EFFORT TO REMEMBER
There is a part of my history that I was never told. We don’t explain to children what we have not ourselves lived, we don’t prepare them for what they might become, but which we did not. My parents spoke to me of their lives, of their love affairs – how they’d begun and how they ended – of their friendships, of their convictions, of their doubts, even of their failures; they described the settings of their childhoods, recalled the professions of this or that relative and the countries where those who came before me had once lived. Of course, they must have kept some details to themselves, but no question I asked went unanswered. And still, I maintain: a part of my history was left unspoken.
Knowing my own family was never enough for me. I had a need for other affiliations, to expand and augment the primary ones: affiliations that had nothing to do with blood. I sought out people who, before my time, had built their lives around shared hopes and desires. I know how much I owe them, that they made my life possible. How to characterize this history I am pursuing: feminist, marginal, queer? Perhaps. It is a political history, a history of struggle and of friendship, of ‘minor’ attachments that are not inscribed in the archive, that disappear when those who embodied them disappear. It is a story that is still being written, still being reconstructed from often fragile traces, and must extricate itself from silence and from shame. I need it; without it, solitude takes hold.
For a long time, I believed I did not exist. Had I been looking for them, I would have discovered books, allies and witnesses, but no one set me on their track. This was as true of my family as it was of my school: in neither space was there talk of Magnus Hirschfeld or Sojourner Truth, of the suffragettes or Stonewall. It wasn’t until I fell in love, at nineteen, that a girl with round glasses and cropped hair explained to me that the Pride march where we had just spent the day dancing and chanting was a tribute to riots sparked in 1969 by trans women in a New York City bar – the Stonewall Inn – to resist police violence.
It was this same young woman who, in her subsidized university residence, handed me my first Monique Wittig book; it was she who introduced me to Judith Butler and explained that gender and sex were distinct concepts, and constructed. These ideas were such fuel for desire, they justified and grounded it so completely, even now I can’t disentangle them. I remember how, lying beside her in her twin bed, I felt intimidated and dominated by the unfamiliar names and her expression – so serious – as she pronounced them, by her blonde curls and revelatory ideas, by the desire that coursed through me and by these books I had never heard of, though they spoke to my experience. With her, I came to understand that our lives take on meaning through becoming linked to the lives of others. And that these others had, first, to be found.
Our relationship didn’t last, but what she gave me I have never lost. From then on, I understood how many words had gone missing, that some stories almost always remain untold. I understood that history is written in the voice of the majority, and for the majority’s sake. I went searching for my history so I could offer it to myself. It was Monique Wittig who set me on the path, she who had made that appearance in my first lover’s student bedroom: ‘You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.’* Simply to point to a missing history was not enough, was tantamount to defeat. At least this was how I understood Wittig’s words. If silence did not suit me, it was my responsibility to break it. Words were missing, yes, but facts and lives – these existed in abundance, waiting to be seen and spoken. So I listened to Wittig, I made an effort to remember, to seek out what I had not been given. And, when the sources contained too many gaps, when I was not able to fill in the blanks, I continued to follow her injunction: I invented. After all, family stories earn their name well: they are fictions in which we choose to believe. They are subjective and constructed, and that is what can make them beautiful. And relative. This simple fact gives us the right to invent alternate versions; if it’s all just stories, I’ll write the one that fits.
This form of memory that blends fact and fiction is, for me, a necessity. While deprived of a past, I am fragile, full of doubt. When Wittig’s amazons make the effort to remember themselves, ‘[t]hey speak together of the threat they have constituted towards authority’, they remind themselves of their strength and that ‘[t]heir conjoint power has menaced hierarchies systems of government authorities.’ To cut us off from the power of our history allows for our power to be minimized; the stories of marginalized groups are suppressed because they contain subversive possibilities.
So I created another family for myself to add to the one I had, a family of a different sort, expansive and political, a family that reminded me of how menacing and powerful we are. I chose all of its members. I was the one who composed my lineage, the past did not impose itself on the present as it normally does. I travelled to meet my elders, to listen to them, to consult their images and visit their archives. I returned from these trips with a little more of a past, and with a new sense of depth to my life. Much of the time this new amplitude propels me forward; sometimes it weighs me down. What I have accumulated is threaded through with power and joy, but also with profound violence. There are nights when I am depleted by all that I take in, all that I struggle to absorb, by these lives so burdened by norms they sometimes break.
I remember the last transatlantic flight I took, loaded up with the most precious of cargoes. The cabin lights went out, engulfing us in night. The plane shuddered with turbulence from the moment of take-off, and I fought against my fear. My seatmate, a woman of about fifty in a turquoise sweatsuit, was sleeping deeply with a mask over her eyes, and I glanced at her periodically to reassure myself: if there were any real danger, she could not be so relaxed. I tried not to move, to accept the roiling and the anxiety, the vague desire to vomit. I shut my eyes, summoned comforting images and let them parade behind my lids: rolling around with a friend in the snow; a brick row house in Brooklyn; mountains and an old house nestled in a valley; a T-shirt being removed to reveal a tattoo I touch lightly with my hand. I had unfolded the fleece blanket provided by the airline in order to disguise the backpack that, instead of being stowed under the seat in front, remained in my lap. I tried to visualize its contents. Whenever I thought we were about to fall, I clutched the pack a little tighter. It was this cargo that prevented the plane from taking a nose-dive and vanishing, of that I am certain. I couldn’t die on my way home from the United States with hundreds of the photographer Donna Gottschalk’s negatives in my possession: entire lives, traces of a history that unfolded before my birth and in a different country, but that I was sure was somehow also mine. She had made me swear to keep the package on my person – Keep it always with you – and I held to my word. Donna was only a year older than my mother, I often think. They were girls at the same time, in the 1950s, one in New York City, the other in Marseille. They embodied the two parallel affiliations that frame my life. Donna is an alternate version of my mother; I could have been raised by a lesbian photographer born in New York City. Why not?
Donna Gottschalk photographed the people she loved, with whom she shared her life: working-class lesbians, trans people, labourers, people living in the margins. She has said that she photographs the people no one looks at, those who are forgotten. As I feel the sharp corners of the archive boxes press into my stomach, I tell myself that if I am inventing new family narratives of my own, there’s no reason not to connect them with those of others.
* Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (1969; tr. David Le Vay, 1971)
AN EXCESSIVE DESIRE FOR FRIENDSHIP
We’re walking side by side, pressed tightly together. The cold coming up the canals is hard to bear and we are desperate to find shelter; any café will do. We speed up our pace, and then Noée freezes. We turn to find out what’s happened. She raises her eyes to meet ours: ‘There’s been another massacre in the US, a new one, in a gay club in Colorado Springs. It’s a nightmare.’ We gather around her in the cold and read the article together, all leaning over her phone screen. It’s the same story, repeated once again: a killer enters a club with an assault rifle and a pistol, he opens fire after a drag show. It takes a few seconds for the crowd to understand what’s happening. The music continues for a minute before giving way to screams and panic. Bullets fly, some people try to flee or to hide, others call the police: ‘Help, he’s shooting us, someone fucking help!’ At last the shooter is subdued. Ambulances screech up and cast their blue light on the building’s facade. Five are reported dead, eighteen injured.
There are four of us, in the freezing cold which we no longer feel, overcome by a mixture of anger, pain and fear that we know all too well. ‘What do we do?’ Andrea asks. We decide to head towards the Homomonument. On our way we gather flowers, and other offerings. Just as the day begins to fade, we arrive at a bridge of pink granite that juts out over the water, and place our improvised bouquet among the candles and the messages smudged by rain. It’s the first time we have had a place to gather in commemoration of our unknown dead, to give them something to show that their lives counted and that they are mourned.
The Homomonument is the first memorial in the world erected in memory of people who have been persecuted and oppressed for their homosexuality. It was consecrated in the year of my birth, 1987. The monument is composed of three triangular platforms of pink granite, ten metres to a side, which together form a larger triangle around the canal. Each of the smaller platforms is architecturally unique: the first is embedded in the pavement, the second juts out over the water and is accessed by descending four steps – this was the one where we left our flowers – and the last is, by contrast, slightly elevated. I am generally indifferent to this type of architecture, to its purpose of embedding a moment of history into a cityscape. I pass by many of these monuments without noticing them or, when they are spectacular, they can give me a kind of nausea: a hole in the urban fabric, a site of suspension that forces memory to stumble and somehow, paradoxically, gives shape to our forgetting. But this one moves me, perhaps because it is addressed to me, or because on that particular day I understood its function. Collective grief is so often experienced in solitude, I felt relieved to have, for once, a place to go.
After depositing our flowers, we each take some time alone. I decide to walk around the edges of the monument. I notice that depending on where I position myself, I am walking either on a giant version of the Nazis’ mark for homosexuals, or on a symbol for gay liberation. Everything depends on your orientation. Pointed down, it’s a sign of death; pointed up, an emblem of struggle as imagined by the artists and AIDS activists of Gran Fury, to whom we owe this act of reclamation that has since become commonplace in civil rights movements. The upturned triangle challenges meaning itself, by reappropriating a sign of desecration, an insult; by upending shamefulness and infamy, and putting power in their place.
The cold makes me cry. I tighten my scarf and take a few minutes to observe the city enveloped by fog, the canal lined with houses, the hurried people, the trams that come and go. As I continue my tour around the monument, I look down and notice a large V beneath my feet. I move slightly and read Vriendschap in gleaming letters set into the ground. I am standing, literally, on a sentence. I take out my phone to type into my Dutch-French translation app, and call to my friends. Noée joins me in a few strides; Andrea, engrossed by some explanatory sign, signals to us to hold on; Inès arrives next to me and crouches down to touch the sentence with her fingertips. I tilt my phone’s screen towards her and show her the translation. We are standing on these words: ‘Possessed by an excessive desire for friendship’.
We had arrived in Amsterdam the day before, excited at the prospect of a week among friends. The flat we rented was on the top floor of a narrow building; with this as our base, the whole city would be ours. Beneath our windows, the Homomonument that we hadn’t known existed inscribed the shape of a pink triangle on the city. We had planned nothing in advance, we wanted only to wander the neighbourhoods, linger in the museums, drink a beer at the legendary Café’t Mandje, with its formidable proprietor Bet van Beeren, a lesbian who dressed like a sailor and was known for cutting off her customers’ ties when they misbehaved. A feeling of joy filled me as soon as I settled into the train car next to my three friends. They surprised me and they made me laugh, my thinking became clearer upon contact with theirs and I was overcome by a mixture of admiration and tenderness whenever I looked at them.
So when I discovered the sentence embedded in the ground, I told myself that it was intended for us, that the excessive desire for friendship was our own.
Inès, Noée and I decide to walk the perimeter of the platform, but together this time, following the metal line that connects the triangle’s three points. Noée slips her arm beneath mine to warm up. We read the plaques and learn that the triangles represent, respectively, the past, present and future. The triangle of the past is the one inscribed with the sentence ‘An excessive desire for friendship’; it points towards the Anne Frank house a few metres away. The triangle for the present is the one that juts out over the water and speaks of the disappeared, that reminds us to never forget and asks that we remain ‘constantly vigilant’, according to its brief inscription. How could we be anything but? The massacre in Colorado is a timely reminder. As I write this, a gay Black man dancing at a petrol station in the US is stabbed in the heart. Every other day, people are beaten up at night, attacked in the parks, harassed in the streets. In 2025 a record number of laws against trans rights were introduced in the US: 122, as opposed to 26 in 2022. Then there are the homophobic and misogynistic projects of Meloni’s neofascist Italy. My body, and my friends’ bodies, are increasingly under threat. The third triangle, symbolizing the future, is a raised promontory about a metre above the others. I step onto it; my friends join me and we hold onto each other, together on the vertex of the future. I can’t say what will happen next and I am not particularly optimistic, but I want to believe that this triangle is inviting us to prepare ourselves; it’s as much training ground as outpost, a position from which to work out our tactics and lines of defence.
