Join us at City of Sanctuary to explore An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail with the author Hélène Giannecchini and Jake Hall, described as 'a moving, alternative genealogy of
queer life that celebrates friendship’s political and emancipatory dimension and a galvanizing manifesto for a new understanding of love.'
After she encounters a poem about love and friendship etched on the Homomonument in Amsterdam, Hélène
Giannecchini is moved to attempt to do justice to a form of relation often subordinated to romance. A friendship is a filiation we choose, one that can reconfigure our
understanding of co-existence. It holds love, laughter, dissent and solidarity; it can be a site of political struggle, of reinvention and rest. Thinking back to her own unconventional family formation, she sets out to piece together an alternative genealogy of lives excluded from normative discourses, whose traces may only remain in memory and archival fragments. In searching and sensitive prose, Giannecchini sifts the past to bring marginal existences into communion with each other, preserved through loving acts of witness and made full of meaning by friendship’s generative force. Roving from Saint-Just’s revolutionary ideal of amity to Donna Gottschalk’s photography documenting radical lesbian
organizing in 1960s and ’70s New York, interspersed with unpublished images acquired magpie-like through chance and circumstance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail forms a
slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century, and a moving testament to the liberatory power of friendship.
Hélène Giannecchini was born in 1987. She holds a PhD in literature and specializes in the relationship between text and image. She teaches contemporary art theory at the
École européenne supérieure de l’image (EESI) in Poitiers-Angoulême. She was previously a resident at the Villa Médicis (2018–2019), and is the author of Alix Cléo Roubaud:
A Portrait in Fragments (2014) and Voir de ses propres yeux [Seeing With Your Own Eyes] (2020).
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist, public speaker, and the author of two books: The Art of Drag, published by NoBrow Press in 2020, and Shoulder to Shoulder, published by Trapeze in 2024, and shortlisted for the 2025 Bread and Roses Prize.
Jake has written extensively on queer culture, drag history and pop culture, and they’re also a qualified youth worker with experience working with marginalised young people. They live in Sheffield with their partner and their charismatic cat, Big Liz.