A long age 



NOTHING CAN DEFEAT THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH:
The fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer. The earth, scarred and gouged and stripped and bombed, will deny life to the men in order to stop the men. The fairies have left the men’s reality in order to destroy it by making a new one.
(Mitchell, 1977, 53). 



The late great Black feminist poet and educator Lucille Clifton once wrote that “we cannot create what we cannot imagine”.¹ In the context of the ongoing and imminent climate crisis, the ability to imagine and create different worlds and futures is incredibly powerful.² In this article, I will look at two literary texts that reimagine the idea of the Anthropocene and societal collapse. Both texts argue that societal collapse is necessary; that an ending is needed to create something new. The first is Larry Mitchell’s 1977 queer manifesto and fable, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. The Faggots is set in Ramrod, a post-apocalyptic empire on the verge of collapse. It is a story about what it means to survive, to resist, to live in communities of collective care, to feel pleasure without freedom, and to celebrate interconnectedness. The second is Tracy K Smith’s An Old Story, a 2018 poem that wonders: what if societal collapse is not as scary as it sounds but instead is generative? What possibilities open up because of a world ending? Both of these texts challenge the white Euro-Western narrative of  climate crisis as an imminent crisis and instead argue that there have already been many apocalypses in the past and people are surviving, and not surviving, apocalypse in the present. I argue this is a queering of the dominant narrative that offers the gift of imagination. Here I am using Eve Sedgwick’s definition of queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, and dissonances.”³ These texts queer the dominant narrative of the imminent climate apocalypse by centering communities that have already survived the apocalypse and instead wonder, what new world can we build?

Positionality
Inspired by the work of feminists like Donna Haraway (1988), I begin this paper by situating the positionality and perspectives of Larry Mitchell, Tracy K. Smith, and myself. As Haraway (1988) argues, all knowledge is shaped by the positionality of the author, and naming that positionality is critical in deconstructing the idea of objectivity and neutral truth. Larry Mitchell was a white, gay man from Indiana who moved to New York City in the 1960s where he was a professor, writer, publisher and activist up until his death in 2012. Mitchell is best known for his novel The Terminal Bar (1982) which was the first novel published that addressed queer life and HIV/AIDS in the United States.⁴ The Faggots was Mitchell’s first book.

Tracy K. Smith is a Black woman from northern California and a contemporary poet, memorist, editor and translator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 book Life on Mars. She is currently a professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard University. An Old Story is a poem from her book Wade in the Water. Wade in the Water is a poignant reflection on U.S. national identity, slavery, and the continuous violence experienced by Black Americans, particularly Black women.⁵

I am a white, middle-class, cisgender, queer, Jewish woman originally from the United States and now living in Canada. I live on the stolen lands of the Massachusetts and Kanyen'kehà:ka Nation, in nation-states built by the forced labor of enslaved Africans and maintained by systematic anti-Black racism. As an American citizen and Canadian resident, my tax dollars are funding crises across the globe, including the ongoing genocide of Gaza, which the Israeli Zionist propaganda claims is being enacted to protect Jews. I feel the contradiction and complexity of having survived the end of the world and having the end of the world enacted in my name. 

The Anthropocene Narrative and the Fear of Collapse
In 2002, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen proposed that the current geological epoch should be known as the Anthropocene because human activity (mainly carbon dioxide emissions) is the most significant force affecting the global climate.⁶ Since 2002, many scholars have critiqued the Anthropocene narrative as overly centering the human as a species that “ascends to power over the rest of the Earth system.”⁷ Black feminist organizer and scholar Robyn Maynard (2022) critiques even this question of humanity by asking, who is included in the category of “human”? Maynard (2022) argues that “the human” has never been a politically neutral category and that this anthropocentric framing of the climate crisis purposefully obstructs the gendered, racialized, and class systems that are creating the crisis (p. 17). After all, the Euro-Western image of the apocalypse (no clean drinking water, a destroyed, inhospitable climate, mass displacement, and death) is the current reality for many, particularly Black and Indigenous communities.⁸ Therefore, the anxieties felt by many white people in North America and Europe – the uncertainty of whether there will be a future – is irrelevant to many communities who are, and have been, living through the apocalypse for centuries.⁹ This is not to argue that the climate crisis is not happening or to say that action is not needed (both are unequivocally true), but rather to queer the narrative and instead of focusing on the unknown of collapse, start to imagine what collapse can create. In the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2022), a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician, and organizer, “Our [Black and Indigenous] communities are already post-apocalyptic experts and can best imagine worlds beyond our current realities” (p. 44).

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
The faggots and their friends have survived two revolutions already: they are no stranger to change. In the second revolution, the men without color won and they took control over Ramrod, an ever expanding empire teetering on the verge of collapse. The leader is the paranoid and vicious patriarch, Warren-And-His-Fuckpole. Ramrod is known for its violence, poverty, chaos, and militarism. However, the faggots and their friends – the women who love women, the queens, the faeries – survive in the devastated city by relying on each other. They travel to the gardens of the faeries to dance under the moon, kiss and touch, and live off “tasty orgasm juice” when they have nothing else.¹⁰ The faggots and the friends live communally and refuse the rules and oppression of the men, even the identity categories of “the faggots” and “their friends,” those are the categories of the men. Rather, they are identified by who they are aligned with, either the oppressors or the oppressed (Bassichis, 2019). Mitchell’s parting wisdom to the reader is that the third revolution will only emerge when the faggots and their friends cease to be the faggots and their friends.¹¹ He argues that “the men need the faggots and their friends in order to know who they are not.”¹² But the faggots and their friends are learning how to not need the men at all, and once that happens we will win the third revolution and true liberation will be achieved.

An Old Story
In An Old Story, a society is on the verge of collapse and the people are terrified. The earth as we know it is destroyed, and human’s worst instincts have taken over. Then a calm seems to settle over the land, almost as if this destruction was a cleansing. The systems that were built on oppression have not survived but something old, something that has been hiding for a long time, is waking up. In its absence comes  a return of song, creativity, and imagination that tells the animals that it is safe to come out of hiding. In the destruction of one world, there is hope for the building of a new one.

As Robyn Maynard (2022) wrote, “All world endings are not tragic. In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of the world need to end” (p. 24). American society, like the society in An Old Story, is built on oppression and the constant endings of worlds because of anti-Black racism, imperialism, and settler colonialism.¹³ This becomes very apparent in some responses to the climate crisis, especially those that emphasize technological solutions. The rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles that are being marketed as our salvation from fossil fuels require cobalt, a toxic metal that is used in almost all lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. The Democratic Republic of Congo has more cobalt reserves than anywhere else in the world. Therefore, because of the increased interest in sustainable energy sources, mining has increased, not only destroying the environment and polluting the water but also forcing many Congolese people to work in deplorable conditions with high risk of injury and illness from cobalt exposure.¹⁴ I bring up this example to illustrate that we cannot simply adapt the oppressive systems that are causing the climate crisis; we must deconstruct them.

We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine
I argue that the work of Larry Mitchell and Tracy K. Smith is a queering of the dominant climate crisis narrative because they dare to imagine new worlds. To queer something is to look for what is missing, for what communities, stories, and realities the dominant narratives are attempting to erase.¹⁵ Instead of giving into the very real fear that the fires will continue to spread, the seas will continue to rise and the catastrophic consequences of this, Mitchell and Smith argue that we already have all the tools to fight the climate crisis and rebuild the world. We have the resources, we just need to redistribute them. Mitchell and Smith’s work is a warning that campaigns like the pivot to sustainable energy are a distraction and that the real solution is to radically reinvent society. The Faggots and An Old Story offer the gift of imagination and a reminder that the current societal structure is not the only option. As Black abolitionist, scholar, and poet Fred Moten wrote, radical reinvention would mean “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”¹⁶ The role of art and the artist is essential in this founding process because through art and literature, new realities are imagined. A world based on the values of sharing and abundance, not private ownership and scarcity, is first imagined through art and then materialized through collective action. An Old Story reminds us that history is not confined to the past but instead informs every aspect of the present and warns of the dangers of losing our history. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a piece of that history: since 1977 the book has been passed around radical queer communities, offering a reminder of what world we are fighting to end, what world we are fighting to create, and the ancestors who have come before us.



Endnotes

1. Amy Stolls and Jessica Flynn, The Clifton House: A Labour of Love and Legacy, National Endowment for the Arts, 2020, July 30. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2020/clifton-house-labor-love-and-legacy
2. After Oil Collective.  Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. Edited by Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies (1-22). Routledge. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.4324/9780203202210 
4. Brim, Matt. “Larry Mitchell, novelist,” January 19, 2018. https://freequeercuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2018/01/19/larry-mitchell-novelist-of-the-dispossessed/
5. Adrianna Smith. “What Tracy K. Smith Sees in America.” The Atlantic, June 9, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/06/tracy-k-smith-wade-in-the-water/562022/
6. Paul Crutzen. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415, 23 (2002). https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.1038/415023a
7. Andreas Malm & Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 62-69. (2014) https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.1177/2053019613516291
8. Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022.
9. Stephanie LeMenager. “Love and Theft; or, Provincializing the Anthropocene.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 136 (1), 102-109. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812920000127 
10. Larry Mitchell. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. Nightboat Books, 1977, 110.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022.
    
14. Terry Gross. (2023, February 1). How ‘modern-day slavery’ in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies (1-22). Routledge. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.4324/9780203202210 
    
16. Bassichis, M. (2019). “Introduction.” In L. Mitchell. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (pp. xiii-xxvii). Nightboat Books. 
    

Bibliography

Barney, D., & Vemuri, A. (2022). Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. University of Minnesota Press.

Bassichis, M. (2019). “Introduction.” In L. Mitchell. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (pp. xiii-xxvii). Nightboat Books.

Brim, M. (2018, January 19). Larry Mitchell, novelist. Free Queer Cuny: An Open Pedagogy Project. https://freequeercuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2018/01/19/larry-mitchell-novelist-of-the-dispossessed/

Haraway, D. (1988). “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.

Gross, T. (2023, February 1). How ‘modern-day slavery’ in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara

Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1993). “Queer and Now.” Tendencies (1-22). Routledge. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.4324/9780203202210

LeMenager, S. (2021). “Love and Theft; or, Provincializing the Anthropocene.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 136 (1), 102-109. https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812920000127 

Malm, A., & Hornborg, A. (2014). “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 62-69. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.1177/2053019613516291

Maynard, R. & Betasamosake Simpson, L. (2022). Rehearsals for Living. Alfred A. Knopf Canada.

Mitchell, L. (1977). The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. Nightboat Books. 

Smith, A. (2018, June 9). “What Tracy K. Smith Sees in America.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/06/tracy-k-smith-wade-in-the-water/562022/

Smith, T. (2018). “An Old Story.” Wade in the Water. Penguin Books Limited. 

Stolls, A., & Flynn, J. (2020, July 30). The Clifton House: A Labour of Love and Legacy. National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2020/clifton-house-labor-love-and-legacy