Your own personal Army of Lovers is yours to decide.

In July I was sparked into a fever to commemorate the Army of Lovers. I started with a list of all the people who touched my sensual world and eclipsed my soul. I was inspired by American writer Larry Kramer who penned the saying, an army of lovers must not die. It was the title of his play he was writing before his death in 2020. I think about it a lot. The ‘Army of Lovers’ perhaps is a reference to Plato’s Symposium, in which the character Phaedrus uses the exact turn of phrase to refer to the Sacred Band of Thebes, an assembly consisting of pairs of male lovers that fought together as part of the Theban army. Rita Mae Brown speaks upon the army of lovers within her poem Sappho’s Reply, in this work Sappho speaks to the lesbians of the 20th century, she brings encouragement of survival “through thousands of years” assuring them that “an army of lovers shall not fail.” For Kramer, history is carrying the consequences and actions of lovers inside of you. Writing in 1981, The American People: A History, he reforms all of human history within his militant aesthetic vision, the founding fathers queening out and the Stone Age was a grand fantasia of titillation. Culture is a living organism that has the input of spoken and written history animating it, and if you can’t contribute by remembering it or commenting on it you let all the violence and plagues go on and all the love will be for naught. I see this Army of Lovers as a resistance against suppression of eroticism, leveraging a war against the Great Ugliness. In times when you feel the crushing unattractiveness of the world you have the glittering images to comfort. We are overexposed to visual stimulation, sometimes in life you have to fight for mediation, one cannot see Bjorn Andersen in Death in Venice and continue on with regular life.

Your own personal Army of Lovers is yours to decide. It does not need to be exclusively people living or dead, it can be objects, animals, songs, whatever that can stir this feeling of ecstasy in you. The process of recruiting your Army of Lovers is something that prompts one to dig around their inner world mapped by sensual images, pulling the cast of Cecil.B Demented out of the void by their polyester hair. Friends of mine who have taken on the drafting process come together to compare our infantry, I roll my eyes seeing every gay man in my life having John Waters and Madonna at the top of their list, I am no better.

An Army of Lovers Must Not Die