Episode 4: Fag Hag with Moira and Adrian

Adrian, are you saying that all this cultural baggage around the fag hag was actually anxious projections about heterosexuality all along?

I'm Adrienne Daub.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

So, Moira, what is our topic topic today?

Today we are talking about fag hags, the ultimate ally.

Well, so let's start with the obvious.

So this is a podcast about right-wing ideas and how they continue to fuck up our lives.

So point of order.

Actually, two points of order.

First off, is the fag hag somehow secretly conservative and I never realized?

And also, like, is she still a thing?

Yeah, so I sort of hadn't given quite as much thought to fag hags as you had before we started researching for this episode.

And what I came to really appreciate was how profoundly our reception of the fag hag and her sort of place in the culture is shaped by really conservative understandings about sex and gender that maybe don't entirely map onto what's actually going on in these very close friendships between straight women and gay men.

And I also realized that, you know, the way that these friendships function is sort of shaped by a lot of cultural conditions that I'm not sure would, you know, exist in the feminist utopia we're all striving for, right?

The fag hag is both a product of gender conservatism and something that is misunderstood and demonized by gender conservatism.

And I think to your point, like, does she still exist?

I think the fag hag is a bit of an endangered animal.

She's sort of receding because of historical conditions.

And I think we can talk a little bit about what those are.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think that's right.

I think the fag hag herself, on the one hand, she's clearly a figure that disrupts traditional kinship structures, upends gendered expectations, and is clearly a product of the sexual revolution to some extent.

And so, you know, a bunch of things that conservatives tend to hate and or mischaracterize.

There's something in the natural order, the quote-unquote natural order that gets upended in this kind of friendship.

And I think that's interesting, right?

Like...

a man and a woman who kind of hang out but don't have sex, don't create a traditional family and so on and so on.

But I guess, yeah, I'm with you that like, whether that means that she's a break from traditional heterosexuality or whether she isn't, at least in certain version, kind of a Yassified version of heterosexuality, that's something that we'll need to talk about.

So Maura already alluded to this, but full disclosure, I was at some point going to write, and maybe I might still write a whole book about this figure.

So that means two things.

Like I've, I've thought about this quite a lot.

And what it also means is that, like, you know, Frank Costanza during Festivus, I have a lot of opinions and you're all going to hear about them.

One thing, in terms of housekeeping, we should say, is if you are enjoying this podcast, we're still quite new and we really want more people to find us.

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Like, subscribe, tell all your friends, share it on social media.

We want everybody who might like our show to be able to find it.

It occurs to me that, like, you know, there might be some listeners of the podcast who actually don't know us personally.

And it might be worth pointing out biographically that, you know, I am a gay woman.

I have never been

a thag hag.

I know, shocked.

Adrian, who just had brunch with me and my wife a couple days ago, is like clutching his pearls.

I had known.

But you know, it's not really a say something lesbianic.

But, you know, I feel like the fag hag in particular is sort of contrasted with the lesbian as, you know, sort of two genres of women who both sort of fail at heterosexuality or who don't do it correctly, but they are not the same.

And they are sort of really walking down different, if parallel paths, even though they sort of get like mentally categorized together in the conservative imagination.

But you know, also as a, you know, a woman who failed at heterosexuality, I kind of have a personal canon of women figures in my mind who are sort of not talented at or interested in the sort of traditional heterosexuality.

And a lot of these are straight women who have had a lot of affinities for gay men or personal closeness with gay men throughout their lives or throughout their careers.

And I'm looking at those figures and thinking a lot about, well, like, what are they getting?

What are these relationships with gay men allow them to do?

The relationships with straight men don't.

But, like, maybe before we get too deep into the weeds, we should define our terms a little bit.

Because when we first started talking about this episode, I realized that like the semantics of like what counts as a fag hag and what doesn't is actually pretty blurry to me.

Like, is she a beard?

Is she in on the joke?

Is the joke at her expense?

Is she seeking something sexual from these men she's close with?

Is she not?

So like, what is your definition of like, what is the platonic ideal of a fag hag?

Well, so I think, I think what's so interesting about the term is that like the very existence of it sort of like has a bunch of presuppositions, right?

And I think that figuring out what she's not is really, really helpful, right?

Like, so I think to me, the platonic ideal is a straight woman who hangs out with gay men in gay male spaces, let's say.

So it's not just someone who happens to have gay guy friends, but who goes into bars, who sort of partakes in the goes on gay cruises or something like that, who partakes of sort of stereotypical aspects of gay male life.

And I think people can already kind of hear why this might be a life form that has become a little less common, because it's just like, you know, there was a time when, you know, people heard gay men and they pictured people with handlebar moustaches, you know, gyrating to disco like on a pride float.

And that's like one version of male homosexuality today, but it's certainly not the predominant one.

It's one that we sort of understand as being historically particularly conditioned.

But that is to me sort of the fag hag.

And I think you're already pointing to the fact that like, you know, if you see someone walking down the street and you think that person is someone's fag hag, right?

Like there's a bunch of things I think you're assuming is true of her, right?

She's aware she's with a gay man, right?

She's not, you know, Liz Taylor and sort of just genuinely unaware where he slips off to every night, right?

Which is historically like the...

I think you mean Liza Mannelli, not Liz Taylor.

I could be wrong about the biography of Liz Taylor, but Liza Mannelli is one of the paradigmatic facts.

Exactly.

I'm sorry, I can't allow you to besmirch Elizabeth Taylor.

Although she was, I mean, she was, she did have a lot of very cool gay friends, but like

not married to them, yes.

But in on the joke, and Liza Mannelli was not.

Exactly.

The other thing is that she's not there to pretend at heterosexuality, I think, right?

That obviously there's some gradation to that.

Like there are spaces that where having a female companion for a gay man was very, very helpful and in fact could be life-saving.

But I think the self-appellation sort of really came about when people did it kind of for the hell of it, right?

So the other thing is a beard, right?

You're trying to survive.

You're trying to mime heterosexuality for others.

Once you're just kind of hanging out because it's fun, right?

I think that's when the fag hag dynamics sort of start.

And we should talk about why we use maybe that word rather than many others.

There are a bunch of words for this phenomenon, and I should mention that.

There's, you know, the dick widow, the homo honey,

right, the fruit fly.

There's even one attempt by an analyst in the early 70s to make the term homosexophilic woman happen.

Happy to report it he did not, in fact, make it happen.

My favorite is fairy godmother.

I like that one.

Fairy godmother.

Yeah, and that already sort of tells you a lot of things, right?

There are a lot of family terms.

You know, the German word for schmuhlmuti is also like a gay man's mother, right?

The idea that this is best metaphorized by another relationship, a familial relationship, is really, really important here.

One thing I should also probably acknowledge, so a few years ago, I did an online survey about the term and how people thought about it, and I got about a thousand responses.

Some of the data was really fascinating, but the most fascinating thing was maybe that a bunch of people got offended by my use of the term.

So first of all sorry, like we're going to use that word today.

But at the same time, I think it's interesting.

I don't think that people got mad for no reason because the term certainly feels meaner, let's say, than fruit fly, right?

Like there's something about it that, you know, I mean, for one thing, it has the word fag in it, which, you know, I don't like using in isolation either.

But hag ain't great either.

And I think that...

you know, more so than being homophobic.

It's sort of implicitly, I think, misogynistic, right?

Like for a long time, I tried to figure out like, you know, we don't know who first applied this moniker to like a lady who was sort of hanging around the gay club.

But like, I was, I kept while working on my book about this, my book manuscript about this, I kept thinking about like, where did they draw that word from?

Why was it hag that came to mind?

And one thing that kept sort of occurring to me was that the hag was having a real moment in Hollywood in the early to mid-60s, right?

This, this is the era of hag exploitation.

I don't know if that rings a bell for you, right?

Like, where you got these vampy old aging actresses, right?

The Joan Crawfords, kind of like vamping it up, like in southern Gothic style, kind of, you know, or is that hush hush sweet charlotte or something like that i think another name for the genre is psychobiddy so like you know i think sunset boulevard right elderly actress freaks out on camera and i think that's part of what's what's here it's not the kind of designation that people would self-apply where i'm from you know but you know the fag hag it's interesting you bring up this genre of like the glamorous or like sort of fading glamour of a hollywood woman in the 1960s and 70s because you know what the fag hag receives or part of what the fag hag receives by proximity to gay men, is a way to sort of claim an ironic distance from femininity.

Like gay male femininity is a little bit disavowed, it's very self-aware, it's knowing, and it is, you know, that style, that affect is taken very much from an earlier generation of Hollywood stars.

And we talked about the May West version of camp that sort of emerged in the early part of the 20th century on our episode with Merve M.

Ray.

And that's sort of a gleefully parodic, self-consciously insincere version of femininity that gay men have that allows them, along with simply being male, to embody femininity in a way that's like a little bit safer, that doesn't sort of necessarily imply a acceptance of their inferiority, right?

And that's something I think a lot of straight women use proximity to gay men to access.

But you know, like, let's just go back to our like definition, right?

Because we have women who are straight or something like straight in close proximity to men who are gay.

In my

sort of use of the term, I'm usually thinking of like close one-on-one friendships, which are like very intimate,

sort of bounded in time, right?

These are not frequently lifelong friendships.

These are closeness, like intimacies that last for maybe a number of years, although we can get into that.

And I also think that that like one-on-one nature is part of why they are so easily and frequently analogable to both heterosexual romance and like mother-son dynamics.

What you don't see is

really a dynamic in which a gay man is acting as a father figure

to a straight woman.

There's a little bit of infantilization of the gay men and a little bit of sort of like desexation and as such like sort of premature aging of the straight woman involved.

Yeah.

Just to underline what you just said, that's of course the tricky part, right?

Like is there something genuinely destabilizing to the way gender roles usually are distributed in society in this relationship?

Or as the outside appellations very, very frequently claim, is this just a defective or let's put more neutrally, a version of that relationship that sort of isn't actually as transcendent as it thinks, right?

Like, you think you're transcending heterosexuality, but you're falling into reproductive futurism.

You're falling into mommy-son relationships, right?

Like, and this is something that like in early discussions of the fact in the 70s and 80s, especially in sort of psychological literature is brought up again and again we can talk about that in a second but basically these were largely therapists who were trying to figure out how to rid men of unwanted homosexual urges and desires so like a proto-conversion therapy or the organs of a conversion therapy kind of philosophy yeah this is often instilled before the dsm4 removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses and so they're just trying to quote unquote cure this mental illness and of course their prescriptions are always like got to get your mommy out of your life and you also got to get your substitute mommy out of your life, which is a fag hag, basically.

Right.

So there's a sense that in the fag hag relationship, both the gay man and the straight women are sort of like delaying adulthood, right?

Like the straight woman is not reaching sexual maturity and accepting the limits of heterosexuality for herself.

There's like often in a lot of conservative approaches to the fag hag, there's an assertion that the straight woman is using gay men as substitute romance because she like fears sexuality somehow.

And then in his turn, the gay man is remaining a child by retaining closeness to a mother and not having to like reach into a masculine independence.

Or later on, I mean, we'll talk about Will and Grace, which is probably one of the longest running explorations of this dynamic.

That show is not saying, oh, Will isn't able to embrace adulthood.

They are saying that to some extent, but they're saying, but the adulthood they're thinking is he's not ending up with a nice boy, right?

They're saying, you should just throw yourself into gay life.

You are withholding yourself from your community by trying to play house with this girl you dated for one horrible month in college, right?

That's the story of Will and Grace.

So, even as sort of the super heterosexualized or heterosexist version of this goes away, this idea that somehow there's something off about the temporality of this relationship is really, really important.

The prescription changes through time, is what you're saying.

So, if it goes from both of you need to, the prescription from people like a psychiatrist, for example, goes from both of you need to reconcile yourselves into heterosexuality to this like prescription embodied by will and grace of both of you need to reconcile yourselves to relationships with men specifically yeah yeah well so one thing that that i really was impressed by sort of thinking about the fag hag and and tracing her through kind of culture at large was that i think we've been talking a lot about how the fag hag can upset sort of heteronormativity and how really that relationship can be something that armisted maupin has famously called a logical family, right, rather than a biological family.

It feels right rather than having a purpose or something like that.

What's interesting is the longer the figure is around and the more both gay men and women are able to combine a certain level of liberatedness with a maturity and maturation, right?

Like they could grow older in ways that felt safer than by themselves or in whatever associations they chose than might have been possible 20 years ago.

The FACHAC easily becomes this kind of figure for another set of convention.

And this is what the literary scholar Beth Freeman has called chrononormativity.

So the sense that our lives form these ordered sequences or structures that time organizes our bodies and gives them secure meanings, right?

There's a time to sow your wild oats and then there's a time to settle down, for instance, right?

And I think it's such a simple point that we often don't dwell on it, but what behaviors, desires, and associations are kind of deemed appropriate really varies with respect to gender, with race and social class, but it also varies with age, right?

We're living through a moment where being exposed to drag when you're quote unquote too young, right, is like understood as early sexualization.

We're also living through a moment where rapists are often excused as being, quote, just kids, right?

So where we locate people along an age continuum is super significant and it's super contested, but it's also something that people have, think they have this innate sense about the order of things.

And I think the fact that it kind of upsets chrononormativity.

She delays things that people think shouldn't be delayed anymore.

She doesn't take the steps at the moment when they quote unquote feel appropriate, right?

Which is partly why a lot of these relationships start in college, but become noticeable and visible and commented upon only once people leave college.

It's like, that was for college, you know?

Fag hag until graduation.

Yeah, basically.

Yeah, so the fag hag is a figure of extended adolescence, right?

Or prolonged adolescence and delayed adulthood, which I think makes her

very important for the kind of Freudian conservatives that we talked about, like Midge Decter, who want to encourage heterosexuality as a kind of maturity, a kind of taking on of responsibility.

And the fag hag and those friendships between gay men and straight women sort of stand in opposition to that.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you want to talk?

a little bit about how the fag hag has been historically bounded, right?

Because we alluded to this, but she's a product of very specific cultural conditions that arose in the 20th century and are maybe starting to disappear now.

Yeah.

The simple answer is we don't know when either the practice started or when people started naming it.

Maybe someone has done this and has found something I haven't been able to.

But there are some educated guesses we can make, right?

Like we can say, for instance, one of the things that a fag hag is not is not a criminal, meaning if hanging around gay men exposed you to legal jeopardy, like that's something much more serious than what the activity of being a fag hag was all about right so decriminalization and kind of a sort of coming out of the gay community was super important to this figure

surely i'm guessing that like around hyper-privileged groups right like i don't know think of the like parisian expats or something like that i'm sure i was about to say expats in paris yeah there's a certain kinds of privileged bohemians who might be in contexts where they are able

to be more out, more open at different moments in history.

But there's also, you know, in the early 20th century, there are relatively few dedicated public spaces for gay men and much more

enforcement of anti-sodomy laws, right?

So

it's not like there's a ton of bars you can go hang out in that are operating legally and openly, you know?

Yeah, and I mean, the bars you would go to would be mob run and people would be like, I really need you to go.

I don't think you should be here.

And you're like, no, no, no, I understand what this is.

Like, that makes it worse.

Get out.

You know, you can't be a nice middle-class girl hanging out at the gay bar.

Exactly.

So, like, I mean, like, probably in Evelyn Waugh's set, you know, or like, yeah, in Riv Gauche or something like that, we get this stuff.

But it is much, much, it's really kind of a bohemian thing.

And it really appears to have become kind of an identifiable trope much later on.

One very early thing I noticed that it's not about the fag hack, but it's about the missing fag hag is San Francisco Public Library has this amazing collection of the Madachine Society archives, the earliest homophile organization in the United States that operated sort of semi-publicly.

And one thing they did was they sent out these mimeographed surveys of their members just to understand what, quote-unquote, we are like.

It's like an early attempt to be like, who likes what?

Let's talk about this, right?

And one of the interesting things about this survey is basically that they ask about women and your relationship to them, but they're asking about wives.

And that's it.

Like the idea that you could cohabit with a woman just cuz, right?

Or that you could even have a beard is not really mentioned.

Like there's the idea, like, oh, this man is obviously married, but like, this is in the 1940s.

So they're so 1940s that they're like, well, surely if you, if you're with a, you live with a woman and you must have put a ring on it, like, of course, you then go out and get your dick sucked.

But like in between, in between, like, she will obviously make you dinner, right?

Like, so it's like this very funny thing where like, it's kind of telling that whoever put together that survey, like it didn't occur to them to be like, well, that's an interesting thing to ask about.

And part of it is because I think they couldn't imagine it.

And part of it is probably that they wouldn't have cared if that were the case.

Right.

They're trying to measure how thoroughly closeted people are.

And they are not looking to these less formalized relationships of like, who do you hang out with?

And they're interested in themselves.

They're interested in men.

They're just like, who gives a shit why a woman hangs around us?

Right.

It also should be said that the Madashin Society was an all-male, gay, like called it homophile organization, pre-stonewall.

It was actually cop, they were communists for a while, although I think they moved out of communism in the later 1950s, but they were pretty well organized.

And then this coincided with the rise of one woman's group called the Daughters of Belitus, but they were much smaller.

But yeah, this was a self-regarding gay group that was not really interested in sort of these attachments or satellites of gay culture, partly because there just wasn't.

It seems like there probably was not enough of a visible gay culture for other people to attach themselves to.

Like you had to seek it out.

It was dangerous.

It was hidden, you had to know where to go, and so you had to know somebody who would tell you.

Well, the other thing, though, and that this survey kind of reveals, and I don't know to what extent this is always true for the Maddasheen Society, I'd have to ask a specialist for that because there are people who've done really, really good work on this.

But another thing that you notice in that survey is that, like, they ask about whether people would sleep with men of other races, and by other races, they mean not white, right?

So, basically, their assumption was that this survey was going out to white gay men and probably middle-class white gay men, which is interesting, right?

So, like, there is every chance that there were ethnically inflected, racialized, kind of queer underground societies and communities out there, but they just didn't have a matter of societies to even ask the question, right?

So who knows, right?

I mean, like, I would imagine that cohabitation in working class neighborhoods was just a matter of necessity.

Now, if we would call that a faghag relationship, I don't know, but like, it's very noticeable that like when the faghag becomes visible, and that's not to say that that's all she was, but when she becomes visible, she becomes visible as a kind of middle-class phenomenon, right?

Because, as you say, if you can just receive friends at your country estate and no one asks any question, like, well, then it's just not the same thing.

Likewise, if you just move in with a bunch of people because you can't make rent, again, it's not quite the same thing, right?

Like, Will and Grace, like, part of the point is that they are both young urban professionals who could live alone but don't, right?

So I think that that is key here, too.

It's not to say, again, I want to be careful about this.

I am not saying that the fag hag is a middle-class figure, but like people were able to point to her and say, oh, this is something new and unusual.

Once there was a certain kind of middle-class stability, right?

It's like this woman could choose to do something different,

but she doesn't.

Right.

The relationship became visible.

And also, I think that this is on a related note, like many of the most stereotypical or famous fag hag relationships we have are between two white people, right?

There's

a limiting of the visibility and perhaps of the imagination around these kinds of closenesses.

I think that I would say yes and no, right?

Like on the one hand, like I think in the imagination, popular imagination, I think this is very much kind of a white middle class thing.

But then it's also very noticeable, like a lot of the fag hags around the factory, for instance, were African-American.

There's a kind of persistent figure of the Asian fag hag.

And then don't forget that like the two groups that really are made fun of in Will and Grace, it's like, you know, you have the gays and you have the Jews, because Grace is Jewish in a way that seems to inflect her femininity, right?

She is like uncouth and unrefined in ways that read as non-waspy.

So, I don't know.

I mean, like, there might be a kind of a covert racialization here, too.

And I wouldn't want to say it's an absolutely, you know, unproblematically, like, I think, I think race actually factors into it more than one would think.

It does appear to be something that is remarked on early in non-white subcultures.

That's really interesting because, you know, part of what has always struck me as kind of cool about fag hags is precisely their uncouthness that many of them have.

Their

differential, exaggerated, self-aware kinds of femininity, which, you know, it's sort of the stereotype of the fag hag advanced by conservatives is as somebody who has failed or fled traditional femininity, but it might be somebody who doesn't have access to them and might seek to parody it, right?

Which I'm sure could be further inflected by things like Jewish identity or by like racial marginalization.

Well, and I mean, we'll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about Will and Grace in more detail, but like, of course, also it's a woman who uses men in ways that men are used to using women, right?

So there is a kind of phallic femininity there that is often in the United States racialized, right?

A woman who exceeds the dictates of femininity that can be very much a racialized body right like the way african-american women are often portrayed for instance and i think that that's a characterization that this is one of the really fascinating things where as you say conservative descriptions of this phenomenon sometimes can coincide with ones that are very much centered on and made for gay men right so there's this film if people can find it it's definitely worth checking out i want to back us up a little bit because we're a little off track from the chronology well yeah so okay that's true let's let's back up and so then the next thing the next step, I think is also that there's the ability to co-habit, which is not nothing.

That's not to say that every fat guy lives with gay men, but certainly the way, like to be able to sleep over in each other's apartment without it getting closed down as a potential brothel is pretty important.

Like non-married people cannot co-habit or cannot even in some cases spend the night, right?

Like depending on what the rules are.

And then the other thing is that like you need to have a concept of coming out.

You have a have to have a concept of outness, openly lived homosexuality.

So you can say, this person is not this man's dupe.

This person is not his beard.

She is his hag, right?

I think that's really, really key.

There's a great book that some people might know by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, which is also a beautiful movie of it, if people want to see it.

Have you read it?

Have you seen it?

I read your description of the Tom Ford film, and I was like, this sounds gorgeous.

It sounds very luscious.

It's the guy who super gorgeous.

Nicholas Holt and Colin Firth.

I know.

and then who is the who's the woman who plays her there are two women in this movie that are basically that function as these kind of well that's the thing like are they fag hags we don't know right like it's kind of still too early what they know or don't know it when is the movie set 63 yeah 62 63.

so this is another historical condition for the fag hag is that women have to be able to earn a living to support themselves.

A fag hag, I think almost by definition is not married.

Yeah.

She is a single street woman who is financially independent.

Or widow in the case of Truman Capote.

Right.

Yeah.

Or at least not dependent on a husband for her room and board.

So she has more personal freedom to spend time with men who are not supporting her.

So by 1963, that is becoming more possible.

Yeah.

So the book is basically about a single day in the life of a LA college professor model Teleon Isherwood, who lives kind of where Isherwood lived, but unlike Isherwood, is sort of dealing with the death of his partner a few months prior, I believe.

And you kind of get the sense as the book or as the film goes on, it's one of the most depressed

things ever, but like it may well be his last day that we might be following his last day.

And as part of this, so we follow him to what's clearly a Cal State campus where he teaches.

We get to see him teach, and he then sort of keeps running into one of his students named Kenny.

And then he also meets up up with this woman who was a mutual friend of both his and of his dead partners.

They end up being kind of these two figures that are both sort of liminal, but both sort of on the edge of being fag hags.

And one is

the character played by none other than Julianne Moore in the movie, Go Big or Go Home, right?

So that's, she's a tricky one, right?

Like, so she isn't, she's always unhappily in love.

She's this kind of, she's this big mess.

She gets drunk with him.

There's an amazing scene of Colin Firth and Julianne Woore just dancing to, I forget which, which which song that is, but it's like the one with the green onions, is that what it's called?

Anyway, so the idea there is very much that she clearly has a thing for him and it's just been unrequited.

In the book, there's even an intimation that she slept with his partner.

So she is sort of all up in their business in a way that feels very fag haggy, but the book doesn't have a name for it.

But it's tragic and it's about an unreturned desire and her sort of frustrations and inability to get into heterosexuality in the way that she aspires to.

Well, it's about both of these people's lives not having the shape that a life, quote unquote, properly should have.

Now, I sure would, a gay man is writing with extreme sensitivity there, but

in his mind,

George, the main character, should have grown old with his partner, but because of a car accident, he doesn't get to, right?

And similarly with her, like...

In a perfect world, maybe she would have ended up with someone, but it just sort of never happened.

And so that's there too, that like these people are both living lives that are are sort of bent out of shape, that are bent out of, that are out of joint in a certain way.

And then what about Kenny, the student?

Yeah.

So, right, and then there's this student, Kenny, played by Nicholas Holt, the amazing Nicholas Holt in the movie, who is around this woman when we first meet him.

And that's something that Ford like does beautifully and that Isherwood also gives us a lot of time with.

And it's really interesting.

Maybe I'll read to you the passage.

This is where race and sexuality sort of coincide.

So he says, Lois Yamaguchi sits beside Kenny because she is his girlfriend.

At least they're nearly always together.

Right.

And I think that's such an interesting bit.

The entire book, George will obsess over the fact, like, what this means, right?

Because Kenny's definitely sending out signals and definitely kind of, or at least we're seeing all this through George's eyes.

Maybe this is someone projecting hopelessly, but like.

As it's being reported to us, it's pretty clear that Kenny is vibing hard with George.

He's flirting with his professor, yeah.

Yeah.

While there's this woman, right?

And like, that's never quite asked, but like, but George is, of course, trying to figure out, like, okay, okay, who is she to you?

And he never asks, like, here are the options, but like, you can imagine the options.

The options are, does she not know?

Does she know and is okay with it?

Or does she know and you're not even boyfriend and girlfriend, right?

So it's really, really interesting.

So Ford takes that over.

There's even a line where sort of we find out in the movie that Kenny has slept with her once.

And George asks, why only once?

And Kenny says, I didn't say only once.

I said once.

Come on.

The last thing I want to talk about right now is Lois.

And I think that to me, like this kind of dismissiveness is so, so interesting.

Cause in some way he's saying, look, whatever it is, it's immaterial.

She is immaterial.

But like, it doesn't really clarify very much.

And then the final thing I wanted to sort of briefly talk about is here's a description of the Lois character in the screenplay by Tom Ford.

So Kenny, 20, is a third year student.

He has dark brown hair, pale skin, and piercing blue eyes.

Kenny is not classically handsome, yet is attractive in a somewhat gangly way.

Lois, 20, is a stunning and very stylish blonde girl with a bored beatnik feel to her manner.

Like, I think Ford is sort of saying, like, this is a fag hack.

She knows.

But I think it's also fascinating by the way that that knowingness.

goes along with, I hope people notice that, with Lois Yamaguchi becoming a stunning blonde beatnik, right?

Like,

there's a whitewashing that goes along with the fact that like Ford is basically decides he has to provide an answer to this question.

And his implicit answer is she is some kind of fag hack.

She's just kind of hanging out with him.

They probably just hooked up out of boredom and because they thought it was cool.

She is not his dupe.

She's not his beard.

They're both just like, this is their beatmake early 60s way, right?

Whereas like that's not the sense we get from Isherwood.

It's one possible reading, but Isherwood in 1963 can't really say.

Right.

There's this, I love the story of this film because there's two photos of the fag hack, right?

Two, two portraits of the fat hack.

There's the one with dignity who is cool.

She is knowing.

She is very importantly physically attractive and presumably desirable to straight men.

And then there is the version that is not cool.

She's tragic.

She's frustrated and disappointed.

She's usually depicted as unattractive in Julianne Moore's depiction.

I mean, like, I imagine trying to make Julianne Moore unattractive, but they make her.

Oh, no, she's attractive, but she's a little lived down.

She's, she, yeah, she's she's off.

She's not embodying the version of femininity that would be aspirational, dignified, and respectable to like a fashion designer or a director like Tom Ford.

Yeah, I'm trying to remember.

I mean, like, I haven't seen it in a while, but I kind of feel like, right, the movie is lit within an inch of its life.

It's just beautifully lit.

Oh, I'm sure it's gorgeous.

Tom Ford knows how to stage a fashion show.

And I think that you can really see her freckles.

And I think that's kind of a small but telling detail.

Like she's just kind of aging.

She's ordinary.

Freckles are always a nod to ordinariness.

yeah yeah well or or or that she no longer tries to make herself attractive right like i think it also in the 1960s would have probably meant not wearing makeup yeah like she's she's just like she's done prettying herself up for the rest of the world she's just gonna be julianne moore and if she's drunk at 3 p.m then so be it like that is not like the triumphant version of women's aging where it's like i don't care what you think anymore she still desires male attention and male companionship it's not this like fuck you i'm not wearing makeup anymore it's i'm not wearing makeup anymore because i'm so fucking tired right?

But still yearning for the disappointed hopes.

Yeah.

And so I think that movie and that the combination of movie and novel really gives you a pretty good idea of what's in play and like how the pieces of the puzzle are already kind of in place.

But there is, as of yet, no language to really name what's going on there.

It's also probably not an accident this is happening in LA, right?

That like, you know, this isn't, this kind of feels like an urban phenomenon, you know, and you can sort of imagine how like this could become formalized and taxonomized even a a few years after Isherwood wrote this novel.

So like the movie was made in what like 2014, 15?

2009.

Okay, 2009.

So early 21st century, looking at a moment in mid-20th century.

And what you're seeing at this historical moment in 1963 when Isherwood sets his book is that gay men have accessed a kind of semi-visibility.

Yeah.

Right.

It's pre-stonewall, but they're not married.

They're not rigidly closeted the way they might have been in the Maddochean society's 1940s right and straight women have accessed enough independence to be able to live these lives but as gay men and straight women are simultaneously becoming more liberated maybe politically economically straight women are still under this psychic mandate to like complete themselves through you know attachment to men yeah although i should say that i mean isherwood is very clear and so is ford to his credit that george is not liberated as a gay man right like there is there you know he has homophobic neighbors This is kind of a content warning for anyone who wants to check out the movie, but like, there's an absolutely heartbreaking scene where you get a flashback of George being told that his partner has died by a family member of his partner.

Partner must have been visiting his family or something like that when his car skids off the road.

And at the same time, he's being told that he can't come to the funeral, that it's not wanted, and that only family is allowed, right?

So, like, it's interesting, right?

It's about, it's not about empowerment, it's not about like visibility, it is about

the lack of punitiveness george is no longer afraid of being arrested necessarily although he might well be but he thinks that the chance of that is low but in terms of visibility there's very very little and for all intents and purposes he is still closeted and that gives you kind of a sense of how important

or how tricky the fag hag relationship is while that's still the case well i'm interested in this notion that

this is something we talked about before we started recording that like marginality of gay men is to some extent or at least their distinctness is to some extent necessary for the fag hag friendship to exist like if the the more integrated gay people are the more like undistinct and undifferentiated from the straight world they are the less sense the fag hag friendship makes there's this film from 1971 um some of my best friends are that's sort of among the very first to kind of center gay characters in their lives made clearly for and by gay men and in it rue mclannon blanch blanche from the golden girls from the golden girls blanche devereaux herself plays this sort of spiteful alcoholic blousy lady who's self-identifies as a fruit fly and she comes into the this bar the blue jay bar in grenad village and kind of just like spews kind of curdled bonbos i mean she's basically reading everyone she's she shows up there almost as a like a drag queen kind of insult comic and kind of mirrors their self-loathing right this is still sort of the boys in the band kind of era of gay filmmaking filmmaking where like everyone hates themselves and like pride is nowhere to be seen she then basically blows up the entire evening by kind of pulling this weird prank slash not prank where she invites one of the men's mothers to the bar yeah it's very embittered it's very horrifying and it's very like it's like a psycho it's like psychological terrorism it's like yeah yeah and the funny thing is there right like while no one in the blue j bars is having the best time and no one is like winning at life, clearly.

The impression is of a place that has a certain stability, even though it's a fairly marginal group of people.

She is the force of instability, right?

She's the one who doesn't have to hide who she is, but she's actually the force of instability.

And that to me is this really interesting thing that like whatever Lois Yamaguchi is or whatever Julian Moore is to George, they're these stabilizing figures, these anchors in the phallic order, right?

Basically, like they confirm these are men and you know, you don't bother them or whatever, whatever.

By 1971, you know, Blanche, actually, Lita is the case, is the character's name.

We'll just call her Blanche still, because she'll always be Blanche.

You know, it seems like these men are sort of starting to figure out their lives.

They have a word for fucking Lita sort of like blowing in and fucking everything up for everyone, right?

Like, and that is, I think, the idea that she's actually more unstable than the men she attaches themselves to, not in a mental sense, but like, just like her life is disordered more so than theirs.

They have a community, they know who they are, et cetera, et cetera.

She has a much bigger identity crisis.

I think that's the big shift from 63 to 71.

That like you have a gay male community that knows what it is, and then you have these marginal figures where no one can decide.

Like, are they cute?

Are they demonic?

Are they positive?

Are they negative?

Are they a drag?

Are they kind of cool?

Are they a hoot or are they to be pitied, et cetera, et cetera?

Like, that's really, I think that's really the big shift there.

And the more distinct and self-conscious the gay male community becomes, the more the fag hag risks being an interloper or invader or a tourist or, you know, an unwelcome figure.

And maybe that's where the role of the maternal comes in, right?

She sort of has to earn her keep for this male companionship that she's seeking out.

One thing we could mention, given that, you know, this is a podcast that kicked off with Midge Dector, is of course that, like, you know, this is also the period where Midge Dector, you know, friend of the pod,

really cues into this, into this,

into this figure, gets really interested in it, and is also the moment where she thinks, or she sort of witnesses what she thinks is the gay community kind of turning in on itself, turning into itself, and kind of showing outward hostility towards anything that doesn't fit.

And so like, you know, in her own bizarre way, so Midge Dector is watching all this happen on Fire Island is just hating every minute of it and it's just like spewing bile about it.

But in her own sort of cockeyed way, maybe she's picking up on this exact thing that like this is a community that is starting to center a certain conception of masculinity and figures that no longer fit into it like are having a harder time.

Right.

I'm glad you got to Midge.

She was one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode with you was because in Midge Dector's really epic account of gay life on Fire Island and commentary called The Boys on the Beach, it's a really homophobic screed that she's writing in 1980 as sort of the gay rights movement of the 1970s has like achieved some wins and this backlash is fermenting.

And she's writing about her time vacationing on Fire Island in the 1960s with her family.

and she has this amazing paragraph about the fag hag, which I'm just going to read here.

Their female companions, for they had a kind of platoon of female companions who specifically belonged to them and decorated their bars and hangouts, the fag hags of whom I have already spoken, were elegant and mun-musked also.

They were, most of them, photographers models, or young actresses, or jet-setters dropping in on what one surmised was an accustomed way station on their international round of the good times and good places.

They, too, were a living sneer at the straight men.

For done up to be in every way enticing, they were essentially, and provocatively so, unavailable.

Occasionally, out of boredom, or perhaps to avoid the trouble of refusal, one or another of them might surrender to the importuning of a straight man.

But if so, there would be little triumph or pleasure in it for him.

A man might make love to them now and then, but woe unto him if he attempted to touch them in any way or disarray their lacquered hair.

They were on hand, everything about them announced, not for the messiness of heterosexual engagement, but to decorate in cool serenity the homosexual scene.

And nothing added more than they to the impression of a great deal of excess, uncommitted, discretionary cash.

I love this.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

It's also very clearly articulating a different version.

of the fag hag than what we're getting from Isherwood, right?

It's maybe close to Tom Ford's Lois Yamaguchi.

Cool, beautiful, aspirational, specifically desired by straight men.

That is not the Julianne Maher figure, drunk and humiliating herself

with this like unreciprocated desire.

And it is not the figure that I wanted to bring up from your lecture on fag hags.

It's Hilton all, it's not Grace of Will and Grace, right?

Who's like a little bit excessive in her femininity.

It is what Midge Dector is talking about is sort of like...

pristine, somebody who has not failed at heterosexuality so much as transcended it.

Midge Dector is always on the hunt for people who think they're too good to be straight.

Like, this is her like worst nightmare.

And this is how she identifies the fag hag, right?

As somebody who's rejecting heterosexuality.

That's not really what you get in depictions of the fag hag by gay men so much.

It's interesting to me that this is a straight woman looking at other straight women and assessing them as thinking they're better than her.

Yeah.

And like what the gay men present is sort of a more tragic figure.

I'm looking for the alls here.

Oh, he's talking about Dorothy Dean.

This is Hilton Ahl's 1996 memoir, The Women, and he's talking about Dorothy Dean, a socialite who hung out around the factory.

And he goes, Even among as theatrical a bunch as those gathered around Andy Warhol, Dean seems to have stood out, a star attraction among men who have limited, if any, sexual response to her.

The fag hag, all says, prizes self-control, but performs outrageous acts.

Gay men are her audience, but they are also objects of her contempt for accepting, laughingly, what she does not speak, her fear of romantic intimacy.

See, that's really different from what Midge Dector is looking at, right?

That's somebody who's not coolly serene and sort of above the thrashing of heterosexual desire.

That is somebody who's seeking out attention, who's a little bit hysterical, and who can't get into heterosexuality, right?

So, like, there's two visions of the fag hags.

The straight conservative Midge Dector is seeing her as somebody who's rejecting heterosexuality, who's too good for it.

And this gay man, Hilton Ahls, is seeing her as somebody sort of like desperate and inadequate for heterosexuality, which is why she's hanging out supposedly with all these gay men.

These are both misogynists,

I should say.

Like neither one of these is a nice, affirming or fair, I think, vision of these women.

But it does say, it does show to me that like people are interpreting the fag hag based on their own positionality

and based on their own relationships to heterosexuality.

Yeah.

In each case, though, the Fag Hag is someone who makes choices where the natural quote-unquote thing would be to let yourself fall into something, right?

He's a nice enough guy, just go with him, right?

Like, she is a self-fashioner.

She is someone who makes decisions in some way, which is going to be different from the way Will and Grace function, where in some way the show says, look, it's almost kind of taking the Dector position and saying, both of you need to just get your hands dirty with real life because right now you're just living in internal college.

And settle down with a nice boy as the act, as as the like skin entity for for a real life yeah even though i think i think that you know in some way will and grace would have no problem if grace settled down with a girl but like it's just you know you got to settle down with someone like this it's very much a couple y show but of course it's the funny way in which we'll talk about this but like it's of course the way most sitcoms work the kind of stability they have their telos also would make the comedy not funny right like so the only reason the show can can continue is that they are in this delayed lessons and this arrested development right and the fact that that's both something to be sort of sneered at and that's really kind of fun to watch is something that you get in this too.

Here's another, Truman Capote's answered, prayers, where sort of an aging woman reflects about, you know, trying to find a suitable man, as though there were any suitable extra men in New York or London or Butte, Montana, if it comes to that.

They're all queer.

or ought to be.

That's what I meant when I told Princess Margaret it was too bad she didn't like fags because it meant she would have a very lonely old age.

Fags are the only people who are kind to worldly old women and I adore them.

I always have, but I really am not ready to become a full-time fags mole.

I'd rather go dyke, right?

So like the way she's like coolly surveying her options for retirement into kind of a new form of femininity, that is very much

independent of where you are in life.

The fact that this feels chosen.

And frankly, that it feels chosen for kind of transactional reasons is also really, really interesting, right?

That like the women of Fire Island likely, this is something that Mitch Dictor, I think, kind of Biden doesn't really think of, but they have created for themselves a space where the threat of sexual violence from the men around them is pretty minimized.

They've chosen that, they've built that cocoon around themselves.

And the same is true here in the Capote text.

These are the constrained choices that women make in order to escape the omnipresent threat of violence and heterosexuality.

What everyone sort of notices is the fact that someone is sort of setting up their lives and kind of using men in a way that men are not usually used, right?

The gay men become kind of a means to an end, which is kind of, you know, your own biography in some way.

That to me seems really interesting.

Yeah, I think this might be a good place to position, maybe like more formally, to like, what do the hags get out of

these relationships?

Like, what does a straight woman, usually young,

in the most visible and like sort of stereotypical instance, like a middle-class white, young, straight woman, single, independent, what does she get out of this closeness with gay men?

And I sort of looked around at a few of my favorite fag hags,

which for me were like the two stereotypical ones or emblematic ones in my mind are Donna Tarte and Nan Golden.

Donna Tart, the author of The Secret History,

very famous, reclusive.

Who somehow picked up some gay men in Bennington of all places?

I know, God.

Is nothing sacred anymore?

But you know, there was a gays at Bennington.

It's very idyllic.

It's very isolated.

There's not much to do.

But she was at Bennington in 19, like, I think she was famous in the class of 1986.

Yeah.

Along with her close friend, famous gay conservative Brad Easton Ellis, who we should probably do an episode

about at some point.

Future Friend of the Pod.

And also Jonathan Letham.

There's a wonderful podcast about that.

Really?

About their years at Bennington.

Yeah.

Once Upon Time at Bennington College.

Yeah.

There's this sort of anecdote about Donna Tarte, who she started, a lot of the guys at Bennington in the 80s, apparently like the BBC's version of Brideshed Revisited had just come out and everybody was dressing like Julian Falls in that movie.

And they were all sort of wearing these like ties and like Oxfords.

That all sounds so insufficient.

Slex.

I mean, it just sounds like.

the movie version of the secret history that plays in my head, right?

And they did have very charismatic, gay Greek teacher at the time at bennington but she starts dating this guy who dresses like this and suddenly she starts dressing like this so i'm reading from a piece on this little bit of gossip by a new republic writer named joe livingston who goes several old college peers recall tart dating a slightly older student named paul mcgull

mcloyne mcloyne paul mclin that is the most irish name paul mcloyne one of the many bennington denizens of this era who affected a faux oxonian style All of a sudden, Donna became a small version of Paul, dressing in a blue blazer, a club tie, khakis, hair in this funky asexual bob.

Another friend, Todd O'Neill, recalls, describing a style that remains Tarte's signature.

A source identified as student X then weighs in to say that, quote, people were saying these weird things about her.

She somehow liked to have sex like a young boy.

I don't know what that means.

She wrote in her diary at the time that Tarte was, quote, a girl who looks a little like a boy, whose sexuality seems to be that she wants to be treated like a homosexual man.

Page six found these details scandalous enough to describe, quote, an allegedly gender-bending relationship with her male muse.

But it's hard to know what to make of these comments.

There's no such thing as having sex like a young boy, nor is it clear what student X means by treated like a gay man.

It's their very vagueness that makes these claims sound suspiciously like speculation by some people who didn't get whatever was going on.

But the podcast host pauses the trail, describing a letter to Jonathan Laysom from Tarte, dated January 24, 1983 in which she says Tarte recalls a museum guard at a gallery muttering more faggots as she and Paul walked into the room she was dressed in pants and a loose sweater the podcast host notes and the interlude pleased Paul to no end The podcast interprets the Tarte McLoyne romance as a fantasy mutual or so it would seem that they were two boys in a romantic and sexual relationship suggesting that they were a straight couple that perhaps gets a little jolt out of masquerading as a gay couple.

So this is a description of a straight woman sort of using gay men and proximity to gay men as a kind of like aspiration and as like a kind of ventroloquism.

And so you're saying that, you know, the fag hag departs from heterosexual convention by treating men as like means to an end.

I'm not entirely sure that's actually outside traditional heterosexuality, right?

When do you like, if you look at the way that women's lives have been constructed at the most like oppressive and deterministic moments of patriarchy, men were women's only real way into the real world.

Like, if you want to have access in public, you need to do it by proxy.

So, you need a husband or a son.

And men didn't need to do that, right?

So, gay male life is a kind, it's a model of sexuality that for women of Tarte's generation or before might have seemed like, you know, this is kind of the only way in which two socially complete adults who both have like legitimacy in the public sphere can actually fuck each other, like as equals.

This is not how gay men describe gay male life.

They're like, why it's actually rife with inequality.

And there's all this kind of gender.

And I have a lot of notes about it.

But I think this is a perception of gay men's life that would be very tempting to straight women from a certain position, right?

It's like, wouldn't it be nice to be freed of the constraints of femininity, of heterosexual inequality, and to sort of pass as

a gay man in my sex life or a man of some kind.

This is, of course, where I think one of the big knocks of the fag hag from gay men comes from, which is that she's a tourist, right?

That she can always up back out of it, but they'll, right?

The leader in some of my best friends are, like, can return to the heterosexual island, no problem.

The boys in the bar don't have that option, right?

And in some way, like, I think we haven't talked about like the fact that there isn't really a male equivalent who hangs around lesbian women, but the lesbian figure of this would be sort of the lug, right?

It would be someone who kind of experiments and then abandons people for the safer shoals of heterosexuality.

Right, the lesbian resentment of the bisexual identified woman who's going to go and marry a man.

And Tarte, I think, takes it as far as you can, in the sense that she's actually banging them, but like it is, or possibly, or at least visiting museums, which feels pretty committed to a bit.

I mean,

it's more boring than

you have this sense that this is something that you can do for a few years, and there's a privilege in that.

And that when you abandon that, the people you're using will still be in the same predicament they were in before.

You won't be.

You can opt out at any moment.

So this charge of tourism, I think, is

really key here.

And I think is where a lot of this resentment comes from.

I mean, in great credit to Donna Tark, she still wears the outfits.

This is still the her signature look.

So, you know, she never got rid of the club ties.

But I do think, you know, there was something that kept ringing in my mind as I researched about fag hags was this position of both straight women and gay men as sort of both in and out of gender hierarchy, right?

Like gay men are men and they don't have access to heterosexual hegemony, right?

But they do have access to maleness and will sometimes trade in misogyny in attempts to preserve male dignity and privileges.

And straight women are women and are subject to misogyny that shapes and like can at times define and curtail their lives.

But they also have this access to the heterosexual world that they could always disappear to.

It reminded me a little bit of that bell hooks line, which I'm going to read.

about white women and black men.

Oh, right.

White women and black men have it both ways.

Yes.

Yeah, they can act as oppressor or or be oppressed.

Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women.

White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people.

To a lesser degree and in something of a lower key, this is like the same kind of similarity of straight women and gay men's social positions.

There's this like simultaneity of the moral authority of a gendered oppression and the social power of access to gendered hegemony.

And that makes these friendships possible, right?

It makes them close enough.

Like this is part of the reason why there is no similar phenomenon of straight men who hang out around gay women.

The gulf is not as big between gay men and straight women as it would be otherwise.

But it's also what makes these friendships unstable.

So you talk about like chrononormativity and like being a fag hag is something and or hanging out with fag hags as something that gay men and straight women will necessarily sort of of age out of.

But I also think there's this sort of like seeds of its own destruction in these friendships where the positioning where each one has the possibility to betray the other.

Like when Kenny says, the last thing I want to talk about right now is Lois, that's dismissive misogyny.

And he's he's being a little mean about her, you know, and because he's saying, yeah, and I mean, that's his way of saying, I want to fuck you.

Right.

No, it's the precondition, right?

Like, exactly.

Like, his misogyny is the come hither to his professor, right?

Like, that's the interesting thing.

It has a sexual end, but here's the thing.

I'm not that convinced that it's a substantively different comment in terms of its gender positioning as two straight men being like, ah, the old ball and chain, right?

It's just like male bonding over the dismissiveness of women, either in the straight men's case as about like shoring up their access and their masculinity and their solidarity.

And in the gay men's case, it's doing that also with the end of hoping to fuck.

You know, it's.

Right.

I mean, like, we bond, we bond of our love of Wendy Williams and then we like hook up in the bathroom.

Like, yeah, like, it's like,

absolutely.

That sounds so quaint.

You make it sound so nice.

And poor Wendy Williams.

And like you say, like, straight woman can also go back to the boyfriend she's inevitably going to get or to, you know, the straight women she's also had these series of intimate friendships with and can also say, like, well, well, you know, him, he's, you know, whatever homosexual trope.

He's somehow less serious and real than us because he's gay and not reconciled to the more real straight life.

And this is like, this potential for cruelty is almost built in to this closeness.

And it's like sort of the tragedy of it.

And that's why I didn't realize until researching this episode how much of a sense of betrayal.

and like suspicion around fag hags a lot of like gay men have.

It's like, oh, you've all been hurt by this in a way that I didn't totally appreciate.

Not you personally.

I don't know anything about it.

I mean, I have Adrian's history with close female friends, but like, I'm like, it's a, it's a genre of like emotional baggage that a lot of gay men have that I didn't know about.

I mean, do I have straight female friends who I only hear from when they've broken up with a boyfriend?

Oh, yeah.

Let's put it that way.

You notice the pattern after a few times and it keeps going and you're like,

I'm going to be your shoulder to cry on, but I'm kind of resentful of it.

Got to be honest.

You know, because I know I'm not going to hear from you when you, when the next, you know, hinge date goes okay.

You become aware, keenly aware in that moment of being used.

I mean, I think that that maybe might be the moment to talk, turn a little bit towards Will and Grace, because not only is it probably the most sustained, as I said, exploration of this relationship, but it does it twice, which is really interesting, right?

Like the show centers on Will and Grace, who are kind of the emotional, who play out the emotional stakes that you're talking about, right?

Like he's a gay lawyer and she's a designer who definitely could afford to live by themselves, but but don't out of codependency.

And they used to date in college very briefly, and they are each other's emotional support network.

And that's sometimes lovely.

And sometimes the show says very clearly, they are each other's personified refusal to grow up.

And then you have the second main relationship that between Karen and Jack, which is basically what you're describing.

These two people are fully acknowledging from moment one of their relationship.

We watch them meet on the show, that they're just going to use each other.

Jack keeps stealing from her, keeps having her finance.

She's married rich.

She is married to a man we never meet and just spends his money and spends it largely on Jack.

And he basically is just like scamming her.

And meanwhile, she uses him to kind of amuse herself because she's bored with her husband.

She's bored with her life as a socialite.

We should say that Karen is played by Megan Malali just absolutely perfectly, very campy, over-the-top, vulgar,

funny, and yeah, very good at playing somebody who's like sort of self-consciously cruel and exploitative and out to get fulfillment of their craft's desires.

Yeah.

In a way, you almost can't be mad at her, right?

Like she's, she's absolutely, she's so cynical and so open about it that basically this is what you're getting.

And the same is sort of true of Jack, that basically he's this flipperty jippid that like basically cannot but kind of always blather out that he's an angle, that he's just abusing you, et cetera, et cetera, including sexually, right?

Like Karen turns out not to have, well, she turns out to to have many sexual appetites but she doesn't seem to ever act on them and Jack's just kind of a floozy and the idea is that these are people are users and and that's okay and that's that's sort of what their relationship is yeah it's it's lower stakes it's not like they're malignant or evil they're kind of silly in their selfishness yeah yeah although the show really i mean you know i think the show by and large is aged okay in certain parts but like they objectify each other in ways that i don't think you'd write into a show today right Like

just constant comments about her boobs and her butt.

And like, you know, it's very interesting.

And I like the way the show kind of contains the two kind of truths of this relationship.

On the one hand, that it is this really interesting way, this very modern way in which you can order the time of your life differently.

You can think about maturation and the role of community in that.

maturation process differently.

And that it's also about like

being your shallowest, meanest self and just kind of using other people for the kinds of pleasures you wouldn't normally admit to, right?

Like, and I think that it's a really interesting show for that, for our topic.

Yeah, it's, they're not aspirational.

The show does not depict them as good people or well-ordered people,

but it does sort of

indulge in the fun of their sort of more honest appetites, I guess.

One group that often comes in as kind of, you know, sometimes you have to have the straight man in the show who just kind of calls everyone back to order.

There are a couple of groups that do that, but in the beginning of the show, it's very frequently a straight couple that Will and Grace happen to be friends with, I think, from college.

Later, it becomes sort of there's an older gay couple that they're sort of friends with.

But by and large, it's lesbians who, because they have biological clocks in the world of the show, basically come in and call both of these groups out on their bullshit.

And are like, isn't it kind of time you did something else with your lives, right?

Like, I think that's, that's a very funny thing that, like, in some way, they have to be sort of the scolds, but also therefore are sort of positioned as maybe the most mature people in that entire, the show's entire universe.

Yeah, lesbians always get to ruin the fun.

It's interesting that they are sort of the, there's always a lesbian is sort of like the shadow of the fag hag.

Like, if the frat fag hag is somebody who has rejected heterosexuality and sort of failed at femininity in this way that is frivolous and like takes her out of maturity.

The lesbian is always like the somber one who has embraced responsibility.

Yeah, always here to kill joy.

That's my real lot in life.

I mean, you know, I think,

yeah, I mean, it's obviously like it's a trope that I don't love.

No, but I think it's funny.

I mean, you have to be able to laugh at this stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it always reminds me of like, there's this, there's an SNL skit from a few years ago where there was some kind of show about Fire Island and they made like imagined like garden oh and then there was like the lesbian part of fire island where everybody's just having a dinner party and falling asleep by nine and like crying uh

during transcendentation and like talking about the miracles of home water birth uh you know

oh there's one very funny line i remember from will and grace where there are so that will and grace sort of get into a fight over like one of the things is like these people do have substantial disposable income which kind of allows them to explore sort of how privilege works for upper-middle-class system-white men and women in the 90s.

And there's one where basically they're fighting over an apartment with a pair of lesbian realtors.

And it's this very funny 1990s kind of reference where basically they're trying to threaten Will and Grace, and they say something like, It's a beautiful building you got here.

It would be a shame of

something moved in downstairs, like a needle exchange or a Bennigan's.

And I just think

the whole joke of like the fear of normalcy that like nothing is worse than like uncoolness or nothing

urban property values more than like right so like the normalcy that lesbians embody is not kind of stodgy normalcy that's Bennigans right they're gonna use that as a threat they're not normies they're just refusing certain kinds of more anarchic things uh more anarchic sort of life decisions there's a way that like the lesbian embodiment of maturity is an extension of like the heterosexual paradigm of like hyper competent hyper-responsible women paired with sort of like eternally childish men.

And there's something of that.

I was surprised to read in your notes on fag hags.

Like also in a little bit of the fag hag relationship, you cite one gay man talking about how the presence of these older women or like unattractive women or just women like sort of help people tone it down.

Yeah.

This actually reminds me of the one time I got dragged to a circuit party on Fire Island.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Same thing.

You know, I was out there with like another gay woman, a friend of mine who's like really into like electronic dance music.

And she's like, my friend is DJing.

You know, it's our culture too.

And I was like, no, it's not.

But like, you know, she felt very at home in a gay male space.

And I just sort of got dragged along.

And I've like never been so bored in my life.

Right.

But I could also, like, among all these like more or less naked men who were there on like a very specific mission in which I could not help them, you know?

But like, also, I could tell, I was very aware that my presence was inhibiting

some of the behavior.

I thought about this a lot when we read The Mitch Dector.

I was like, I've been there, girl.

Yeah, you were the cooler, basically.

Yeah, and I'm just sitting there on the couch with my little white wine, you know, and it was, it was interesting to realize that I was the reason people were like reigning it in a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the other person that we haven't sort of talked about, because she's not, you know, kind of a strictly speaking literary figure, but in the late 90s, who kind of really sort of sings the praises of this relationship and does kind of think that there is this kind of affirmative quality to the FAGHAG relationship, is Margaret Cho, the comedian, who is very much, thinks that in some way that people get into these kind of relationships for kind of nakedly selfish reasons, but she thinks it transcends that, right?

And she describes herself as this kind of chaperone who drives herself home after basically her charge has gotten lucky at a club, right?

And basically, you know, she thinks of herself as, exactly as you're saying, like the support that keeps things from going too far out of control, right?

And I'm going to quote from her autobiography.

We were there from the beginning.

I went to the prom with you, buckled up your cumberbund, did the safety dance, right?

She kind of tries out caring for another human being and plays sort of mommy through this figure.

And at the same time, is able to kind of find a real joy and real love in that.

I think this vision of the like caretaking, you know, on the one hand, there's like a cynical,

this is my cynical feminist take, which is just like, oh, great, you've just re-embodied the notion of the woman as a service provider, providing support to the actual action of life, which is all monopolized by men.

But I also think you have to find a degree of admiration and, you know, love in what is being offered in this relationship, which is a kind of safety.

And I don't think you need to ascribe as Will and Grace does, or as like conservative thinkers, like Hilton Als, or like really like right-wing people tend to, to the safety of the FAGHAC relationship.

Like, I don't think you have to say that it's cowardice.

I think you can say that safety are the preconditions that allow, like, maybe a more authentic mutual care to emerge.

And the person I'm thinking of as a real emblem of this kind of fag hag is Nan Golden.

Nan Golden is a very famous photographer and now a sort of anti-opiate activist who had kind of a really unimaginably brutal early life.

She was born to a middle-class family that was like very sort of psychologically and emotionally unstable.

And her sister committed suicide when she was 11.

Her sister was 18.

In the wake of her sister's suicide, she writes about sort of becoming aware of the dangers that women face trying to be authentic or full persons in a heterosexual world.

So she writes in their introduction to her famous photography book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

This was 1965 when teenage suicide was a taboo subject.

I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide.

I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction.

Because of the times, the early 60s, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control.

By the time she was 18, she saw that her only way out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C.

It was an act of immense will.

And literally immediately after her suicide, Nan Golden is brought into a sexual relationship by a much older male relative.

And it's suggested that this man was also behaving the same way with her sister before her death.

I want to be really careful here because Nan Golden does not describe this as sexual abuse.

She describes it as an awakening of source.

And that's all I'm going to say there.

But, you know, this is somebody who had been

made very aware through like brutal experience of what heterosexuality could do to women, what it can mean, what kind of risks they take embarking on it.

And then, you know, she goes to school and she meets another photographer named David Armstrong, a gay fellow student who eventually became a photographer too, and was Golden's closest male friend for decades.

This is from Pilt Nah's piece on Nan Golden.

It was Armstrong who rechristened Nancy Nan.

The two were involved from the first in a kind of marriage blanc.

They went to movies all the time, were fascinated by the women of Andy Warhol's factory, and in love with 30 stars like Joan Crawford and Betty Davis.

We were really radical little kids, and we did cling to our friendship as an alternate family, Fletcher told me.

Even at the time, we could have articulated that.

And so, you know, when Nan Golden eventually moves to Boston and then New York and becomes involved in this circle of drag queens, you know, there's a lot of danger in it.

She's using drugs a lot.

Many of her friends died of overdoses and later of AIDS, but she's also sort of shielded from the brutality that is also awaiting women who might not fit.

You know, we've talked about the fag hag, like the Julianne Moore character in a single man as a figure of indignity, but it's also a figure of like vulnerability, right?

If you don't do womanhood right,

the world can be very, very hard on you.

And gay men aren't hard on you in the same ways.

Even though, you know, we've critiqued their misogyny, they are a place where, you know, their marginalization might sort of rhyme with yours.

Their punishments might sometimes look like yours.

And they are not likely to beat or rape you.

They provide something else.

And I think, you know, it's worth looking at that not just as a failure, but also as a kind of like admirable emotional resourcefulness that these people who are sort of put at the edges of society, men who are gay, women who aren't quite right at being straight,

and they find each other and make connections that serve them.

Well, or women who sort of understand what the risks might be if they played along, right?

I mean, I think here, like Hilton also in the book, The Women, one of the subjects of the book is the African-American socialite Dorothy Dean, who was huge in Warhol's Factory, appears in a bunch of his movies.

I think also good friends with James Baldwin and

kind of this acid-tongued wit and died quite early, but has this sort of, I think, very early on, uses her association with gay men to kind of position herself safely out of, outside of, I mean, she, I mean, Alzhe almost thinks like she's using it to position herself outside of her race, too.

It's like it's a way of, to speak with Jose Esteban Muñoz, to disidentify.

It's a way to sort of say, I'm not going to be part of any group that would have someone like me for a member.

I'm going to blaze the eccentric path.

And then one other thing I think we might want to point out, because we were talked now about like, you know, the Margaret Cho thing about like, you know, that there is a kind of a maternal, there's a kind of caring aspect to this relationship and people identify that.

And then you mentioned, you know, these impossibly glamorous.

women, such as Dorothy Dean, such as the woman that Mitch Dector is upset by on Fire Island.

The Fire Island essay, we could never figure out when exactly it's about.

It appears to be about the late 60s, early 70s.

But here is a quote from a book by Martin Levine, Gay Men, the Sociology of Male Homosexuality.

This comes out in 1979, but he had done the studies that it's based on in 1968 to 73.

So basically, the same years that Midge starts grumbling about her neighbors on the beach, he's looking at the gay community.

And he basically says that, you know, gay men, quote, prefer lesbian women for stigma evasion for the simple reason that, quote, in general, the gay women were more attractive than the female heterosexuals in the community, many of whom were unattractive in conventional terms or of middle-aged or both.

And basically that they had this kind of school marmish energy that, as one of his interview subjects points out, quote, keeps the men from getting too carried away from camping and carrying on too much.

So she's like this ultimate wet blanket.

Now, why am I mentioning this again?

Just to point out, this is the exact same time.

as Midge Dector finding these impossibly model-esque, too cool for heterosexuality ladies on Fire Island, from which I deduce that people were projecting all kinds of shit and generalizing all kinds of things about these women who may just have been pretty heterogeneous to begin with, right?

What we're coming back to again and again here is there were probably plenty of ways for women to be fag hags, but there was a desperate attempt to make them all mean this one thing.

Oh, they're too school marmish.

Oh, they're too cool.

Oh, they're too attractive.

Oh, they're too unattractive.

Oh, they're really gay.

Oh, they're not really gay, right?

Like, who cares?

Like, it's ultimately, like, it's very noticeable how society is trying to rein in the meaning of this practice precisely because it might not carry any one of those meanings.

And just to add to that, so as part of my book project that is still on hold, I did a bunch of interviews with women who identified as fag hags and who were all for some reason in their 70s.

And I can't say much about that.

Eventually, I'm hopefully going to be able to publish this, but it's covered by an internal review board, so I can't really say very much.

But I can say this.

You know, we've said several times now that there is a tendency to assume that these are fleeting, that these are tragic relationships, that they are not long for this world.

I think that's absolutely right.

That's part of the way we conceive of these relationships.

Well, it ain't what I found in talking to them.

They were largely still friends with the men that they were friends with 40 years ago.

Several of them said these were the most enduring relationships they've made in their lives.

I don't want to disclose anything that would be covered by research confidentiality, but just to point out that, like, the cultural investment in this not being for the long haul is all the more noticeable if you talk to people who describe themselves this way and say, nope,

still, we still talk on the phone all the time, going on a cruise next month or whatever.

Or like, or I nursed him on his deathbed or something like that, right?

Like, it's really, really interesting to think about our investments, especially if we come face to face with people who have lived this life and who describe something totally different.

And to me, that need to rein it in semiotically to sort of say like, this is what it must be about, this is what it must mean, this is what it must signify, is all the more interesting when you see how messy and how heterogeneous these relationships really appear to be.

Wait, Adrian, are you saying that all this cultural baggage around the fag hag was actually anxious projections about heterosexuality all along?

I mean,

am I?

And then we pull the mask off of the Scooby-Doo villain at the end.

They would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for these meddling hags.

I think let's end it there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

This was great.

In Bed with a Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.