An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail

A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance,  An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.

Hélène Giannecchini is a writer, curator and lecturer on history and contemporary art theory at the University of Lille. She is the author of  Une image peut-être vraie (2014, published in English as  Alix Cléo Roubaud: A Portrait In Fragments, tr. Thea Petrou),  Voir de ses propres yeux (2020) and  An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail (2024), all published in France by Éditions du Seuil. Her current research focusses on the visual history of gender minority groups in the latter half of the twentieth century.