Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men. Cherished by many over the four decades since its publication, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions offers a trenchant critique of capitalism, assimilation, and patriarchy that is deeply relevant today.

    

    This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, unabashed eroticism; at the same time it is a work of integral imagination, steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet's heritage and imbued with an intuitive sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions, high style, and musical form.

    Among the most important works ever to address the relationship between homosexuality, homophobia and capitalism, Mieli's essay continues to pose a radical challenge to today's dominant queer theory and politics. With extraordinary prescience, Mieli exposes the efficiency with which capitalism co-opts 'perversions' which are then 'sold both wholesale and retail'. In his view the liberation of homosexual desire requires the emancipation of sexuality from both patriarchal sex roles and capital.Drawing heavily upon Marx and psychoanalysis to arrive at a dazzlingly original vision, Towards a Gay Communism is a hitherto neglected classic that will be essential reading for all who seek to understand the true meaning of sexual liberation under capitalism today.

    This new edition reproduces the look and feel of the original volume, which reconfigured into a book format the 24 text-embedded images of Fischer's 1977 photographic series Gay Semiotics. The photographs in Gay Semiotics present the codes of sexual orientation and identification Fischer saw in San Francisco's Castro and Haight Ashbury districts, ranging from such sexual signifiers as handkerchiefs and keys to depictions of the gay fashion "types" of that era--from "basic gay" to "hippie" and "jock." Gay Semiotics also features Fischer's critical essay, which is marked by the same wry, anthropological tone found in the image/text configurations. Fischer's book circulated widely, finding a worldwide audience in both the gay and conceptual art communities. Fischer's insistence on the visual equivalence of word and image is a hallmark of the loose photography and language group that included Fischer, Lutz Bacher, Lew Thomas and others working in the San Francisco Bay Area. First published as an artist's book in 1978 by NFS Press, at a time when gay people had been forced to both evaluate and defend their lifestyles, Gay Semiotics earned substantial critical and public recognition. Thirty-seven years later, the book remains a proactive statement from a voice within the gay community from a moment in history just before the devastation wrought by AIDS. Hal Fischer (born 1950) grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. He arrived in San Francisco in 1975 to pursue an MA in photography at San Francisco State. Through his work as an art reviewer and photographer, he soon became embedded in the Bay Area's artistic and intellectual scene. He continues to live and work in San Francisco.