An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail by Hélène Giannecchini is, among other things, a book about what happens when a life has not been properly recorded. Through a collection of archived photographs, transcribed conversations and personal testimony, Giannecchini traces a genealogy of queer lives that extends beyond historical events and into the ordinary: friendships, lovers, homes, illness, grief, parties, the people who stayed and the people who disappeared. In doing so, she gives shape to a history that has too often been left in fragments. This is not simply an attempt to recover the past, but to ask what counts as history in the first place, and who gets to decide. Giannecchini understands that she is also writing from a position of privilege: as a French woman born into a generation that came after the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis (1981 to 2000), she has access to forms of freedom that many of the people whose lives she records had to fight, suffer and die for. Her project therefore depends not on appropriating those histories, but on listening to the people who lived them; to those who survived while burying their friends, lovers and families. The result is both history and testament: a record built not only from events, but from the relationships that made those lives possible.

It is from this understanding, from her own personal experience, that she also guides us through the possibilities of reinventing family, of positioning friendship at the centre, because the reality is that family is the state; the state is heteronormative, and this, by definition, leaves LGBTQIA+ people out. It means that, as it is also quoted in the book: ‘The family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister’ (Bersani, 1987). I love my dog, but this is pretty much the truth, even in shows that have become ‘modernised’ with time, like Gilmore Girls, which in the second run decided to openly say one of the characters was a homosexual instead of just filling his behaviour with stereotypes. Rarely does a show put the family at the centre, and this one is a non-heterosexual family. Luckily, there are exceptions, but in mass media I invite you to find more than five, so that you have to use both hands to count. This is not to say this book invites you to end the family; that is far from the author’s concern. The problem is that the concept of family is exclusionary; it doesn’t work well enough, and it only works because, by definition, it leaves people out. You know who your family is because you know who does not belong, who joins, who leaves. These lines are also barriers and frontiers, ours vs them.

To distrust the family strikes me as a fundamentally sane reflex, or rather an insistence that we never stop questioning what hides within. The family carries within, in other terms. ‘You get from family to patriarchy in a single second,’ Noée says emphatically, ‘a single second ’. The order of nations depends on the order of families because, at base, they are one and the same. Only the scale changes. Etymology tells us as much: the word ‘nation’ comes from the verb ‘to be born’ in Latin (nasci) and first was used to designate individuals born at the same time and in the same place: a litter. The family is a miniature form of the nation, and Noèe is right: one leads to the other in the blink of an eye.¹

This book is then a masterful essay in more than one way: first, it reads like a conversation with a friend; second, it offers questions and some answers, as all great essays do, but it also questions its own assumptions: how do we even redefine the concept of family? What does it even mean? Is it possible? Giannecchini answers: it passes through friendship; it is in the chosen knit that we find a new form of relation; it is when we show up because we have a bond with the person, not because it is Christmas. The reality is that queer people are not protected in the state family; their possessions pass to people who might exclude them. Friends do not have the right to visit whenever they want at hospitals; people might end up buried next to people who kicked them out of their houses, and, as exemplified by the many stories that we get to read about HIV/AIDS deaths, friends might be denied the possibility of attending wakes and funerals.

Friendship can become the only possibility to find what the state and, by extension, the family denies, not because those who create families and enjoy them are doing anything wrong, but because those spaces, as I have said before, are exclusionary by definition. Friendship allows us new forms of expression, and it always adds; it is not just a pastime, it is a full-time commitment, and it is about seeing the other not because we have to, but because we choose.

Friendship is a revolutionary force, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s granted no place in official registries. Friendship protects me; it magnifies my powers of action, my desire and my intelligence; it allows me to never completely close the door on possibility; it restores liberty to love. To minimise friendship, to relegate it to childhood (which we also underestimate), to construct institutions where it has no place, to confine it to leisure, all this has a function. Friendship is political; it gives us the desire to invent other ways of being; it does not pacify.²

Friendship is to me the highest of relations; friends are the family I chose, for lack of a better word, because, as Giannecchini also says: “Language can be impoverished at times, reflecting what society offers us. We try adding adjectives like ‘chosen’ or ‘queer’ before the word ‘family’ as a way of appropriating it, but maybe it simply isn’t for us.”³ I recognise myself in the instinct to borrow the word, but I also recognise the problem. Why should friendship have to become a kind of family before we can grant it seriousness, permanence or political value? Perhaps the task is not to make friendship resemble family, but to expand our language enough to recognise friendship on its own terms. If we can do that, we might also begin to imagine relationships that do not have to fit neatly into the categories we have inherited.

What An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail ultimately asks is not simply who belongs to a family, but who gets to decide what a relationship is worth. The lives Giannecchini records remind us that friendship has never been merely what happens in the time left over from family, work or romance. For many queer people, friendship has been a way of surviving, caring, mourning and imagining a future when the institutions around them offered little protection. To recognise that is to recognise friendship as something more than intimacy: it is a political relationship, a form of solidarity and a way of making a life. Perhaps this is what it means to write a history differently; not only to recover the people who were erased, but to recover the relationships that made their lives possible. An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is therefore a book about queer history, but also about the vocabulary we use to understand one another. It asks us to look again at the relationships we have been taught to consider secondary, and to imagine what might happen if we stopped treating friendship as an alternative to family and began to understand it as a form of life in its own right.