Larry Mitchell Residence/Calamus Books Headquarters - 323 N Geneva St.

The transitional Queen Anne-Colonial Revival house located at 323 North Geneva Street in downtown Ithaca was owned by gay novelist and publisher Larry Mitchell from 1977 to 1983.

In 1972 Mitchell purchased a plot of land in Caroline, New York, where members of the Staten Island collective camped over the summer. By 1973, the group, then known as the lesbian and gay commune Lavender Hill, jointly purchased 80 acres of land in the hamlet of West Danby, near Ithaca, and built a house. Gay and lesbian communes, according to historian Stephen Vider, “were formed as a way to solve the isolation and loneliness many gay people experienced in 1970s America.” Mitchell lived summers at the Lavender Hill property from 1973 until 1983, and other Lavender Hill members wintered with him on North Geneva Street. As a novelist, he became known for his unsentimental depictions of underground queer life in New York City’s Lower East Side and East Village.

His first and most successful book, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, is largely based on his experiences at Lavender Hill. Part gay liberation fable, part radical manifesto, The Faggots “tells the story of a brutal empire in decline, where faggots, fairies, women, and dykes aim to survive, dance, create art, and have sex under the tyrannical rule of men.” The manuscript was originally conceived as a children’s book. As fellow Lavender Hill member Ned Asta, the books’ illustrator, recounts:

"Living with Larry and knowing Larry, he was always writing in composition books by long hand. Originally, it had all these funny names. He thought it was a kids’ book and then he showed me what you would call a script, I guess, of the book. I said, 'Larry, this is not a kids’ book at all.' He said, 'Yeah, I know, it’s my philosophy.' "

When no publishers, gay or otherwise, accepted the manuscript, Mitchell founded his own press, Calamus Books, which he initially ran out of several spare bedrooms in his 323 North Geneva Street residence. The North Geneva house is also where Ned Asta created the book’s illustrations in a second floor front room with a bay window that looked out onto the street. She remembers being influenced by the wallpaper, navy blue with intricate white teardrop designs she mirrored in her drawings.

Lavender Hill member Mitchell Karp describes the commune and its influence on The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions like this:

"I think what Lavender Hill held out was a vision of possibility. Almost utopian… I remember dancing naked in the rain in the summer. And being naked at the pond with hundreds of people. And a potluck, and thinking everything in my life since, it’s informed by that period. My then roommate, or landlady, Heather Dunbar, who I was staying with when she described Lavender Hill to me, she said, “These are people who live out in the country who turn rags into jewels and adorn themselves. And when they take to the dance floor, they create a sense of community that entices, that everyone wants to embrace and be part of.” Lavender Hill turned birthdays into festivals. We decorated cakes with flowers, and would turn the mundane into the extraordinary. Nobody epitomized that more than Ned. Ned would create sculptures in the woods that were delightful, artistic, creative visualizations that you would just stumble upon and think, “I've been visited by fairies.” All of the above made Ned the ideal person for Larry to ask to illustrate his book. She lived those characters, intuitively understood them, and did such a superb job bringing [them] to life visually."

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions went through three printings and sold ten thousand copies. In the early 1980s, Mitchell relocated Calamus Books to New York City where he ran the press out of his apartment on 2nd Avenue. He also co-founded Gay Presses of New York, an affiliated collective of small gay publishers that included Calamus Books, Sea Horse Press, and the JH Press. As the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic destroyed his readership and his eyesight deteriorated, Mitchell stopped writing in 1993, and the distributor of Calamus Books went bankrupt. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 26, 2012, at his residence at 410 North Cayuga Street in Ithaca. His papers, housed in Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection, are filled with letters from indebted readers of The Faggots, which, according to queer studies scholar Matt Brim, “secured Mitchell’s reputation as a champion of radical queer life and politics.”

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