00:00:24.180And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.0.99
00:00:26.840so moira what what is our topic today today we are talking about fag hacks the ultimate ally0.87
00:00:35.240well so let's start with the obvious so this is a podcast about right-wing ideas and how they0.87
00:00:41.060continue to fuck up our lives so point of order actually uh two points of order first up is the0.98
00:00:47.460fag hag somehow secretly conservative and i never realized and also like is she still a thing yeah0.99
00:00:53.720So I sort of hadn't given quite as much thought to fag hags as you had before we started researching for this episode.0.96
00:01:00.680And 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 on to what's actually going on in these very close friendships between straight women and gay men.0.74
00:01:21.420And 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?0.91
00:01:34.860The fag hag is both a product of gender conservatism and something that is misunderstood and demonized by gender conservatism.0.96
00:01:45.700And I think to your point, like, does she still exist? I think the fag hag is a bit of a endangered animal. She's sort of receding because of historical conditions. And I think we can talk a little bit about what those are.0.99
00:01:58.660Yeah, yeah. So I think that's right. I think the fag hack 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.
00:02:15.900there's something in the natural order the quote-unquote natural order that gets upended
00:02:20.520in this kind of friendship and i think that's interesting right like a man and a woman who
00:02:24.420kind of hang out but don't have sex don't create a traditional family and so on and so on but i
00:02:29.280guess yeah i'm with you that like whether that means that she's a break from traditional
00:02:33.420heterosexuality or whether she isn't at least in certain version kind of a yassified version0.89
00:02:38.860of heterosexuality that's something that we'll need to talk about so mora already alluded to
00:02:43.080this but full disclosure i was at some point going to write and maybe i might still write a whole book
00:02:48.180about this figure so that means two things like i've i've thought about this quite a lot and what
00:02:53.620it also means is that like uh you know frank castanza during festivus i have a lot of opinions
00:02:58.800and you're all going to hear about him one thing in terms of housekeeping we should say is if you
00:03:03.700are enjoying this podcast we're still quite new and we really want more people to find us so if
00:03:08.360you wouldn't mind giving us a good rating uh wherever you get your podcasts and maybe writing
00:03:12.860a review. We definitely will read those and we'd be very excited to hear from you.
00:03:16.780Like, subscribe, tell all your friends, share it on social media. We want everybody
00:03:20.760who might like our show to be able to find it.
00:03:42.860It occurs to me that like, you know, there might be some listeners of the podcast who
00:03:46.680actually don't know us personally, and it might be worth pointing out biographically
00:04:08.480But, you know, I feel like the fag hag in particular is sort of contrasted with the1.00
00:04:12.680lesbian as as you know sort of two genres of women who both sort of fail at heterosexuality or who1.00
00:04:20.260don't do it correctly but they are not the same and they are sort of really walking down different0.92
00:04:25.240if parallel paths even though they sort of get like mentally categorized together in the
00:04:30.660conservative imagination but you know also as a you know a woman who failed at heterosexuality I
00:04:35.660kind of have a personal canon of women figures in my mind who are sort of not talented at or
00:04:45.420interested in the sort of traditional heterosexuality. And a lot of these are
00:04:49.100straight women who have had a lot of affinities for gay men or personal closeness with gay men
00:04:54.840throughout their lives or throughout their careers. And I'm looking at those figures and
00:04:58.420thinking a lot about, well, like what, what are they getting? What are, what are these relationships
00:05:02.100with gay men allow them to do the relationships with straight men don't but like maybe before we
00:05:08.300get too deep into the weeds we should define our terms a little bit because when we first started0.98
00:05:12.180talking about this episode i realized that like the semantics of like what counts as a fag hag0.78
00:05:17.340and what doesn't is actually pretty blurry to me like is she a beard is she in on the joke is the0.96
00:05:24.020joke at her expense is she seeking something sexual from these men she's close with is she not0.99
00:05:31.300so like what what is your definition of like what is the platonic ideal of a fag hag well so i think0.98
00:05:36.880i think what's so interesting about the term is that like the very existence of it sort of like
00:05:41.640has a bunch of presuppositions right and i think that figuring out what she's not is really really
00:05:47.600helpful right like so i think to me the platonic ideal is a straight woman who hangs out with gay
00:05:55.020men in gay male spaces let's say so it's not just someone who happens to have gay guy friends but
00:06:01.120Who goes into bars, who sort of partakes and goes on gay cruises or something like that, who partakes of sort of stereotypical aspects of gay male life.
00:06:11.240And 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 there was a time when, you know, people heard gay men and they pictured people with handlebar mustaches, you know, gyrating to disco, like on a pride float.
00:06:28.760And 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?
00:06:48.960she's aware she's with a gay man right she's not not you know liz taylor and sort of just
00:06:54.840genuinely unaware where he slips off to every night right which is historically like i think
00:06:59.280you mean liza minnelli not i could be wrong about the biography of liz taylor but liza minnelli is
00:07:04.480one of the paradigmatic fact or beards rather yeah exactly so you know i'm sorry i can't allow
00:07:10.380you to be smirch elizabeth taylor although she was i mean she was she did have a lot of very
00:07:15.400cool gay friends but like very cool gay friends yeah not married to them yes but in on the joke
00:07:20.080and liza minnelli was not was not exactly the other thing is that she's not there to pretend
00:07:25.280at heterosexuality i think right that obviously there's there's some gradation to that like there
00:07:30.200are spaces that were having a female companion for a gay man was very very helpful and in fact
00:07:36.460could be life-saving but i think the self-appellation sort of really came about when people did it kind
00:07:43.120for the hell of it. The other thing is a beard. You're trying to survive. You're trying to mime
00:07:48.020heterosexuality for others. Once you're just hanging out because it's fun, I think that's
00:07:53.880when the fag-hag dynamics start. We should talk about why we use maybe that word rather than1.00
00:08:00.700many others. There are a bunch of words for this phenomenon, and I should mention that.
00:08:04.240There's the dick widow, the homo honey, the fruit fly. There's even one attempt by an analyst in
00:08:11.540the early 70s to make the term homosexophilic woman happen. Happy to report he did not, in fact,
00:08:18.460make it happen. My favorite is fairy godmother. I like that one. Fairy godmother. Yeah, and that
00:08:23.640already sort of tells you a lot of things, right? There are a lot of family terms. You know, the
00:08:27.880German word for schwulmutti is also like a gay man's mother, right? The idea that this is best0.99
00:08:33.180metaphorized by another relationship, a familial relationship, is really, really important here.
00:08:38.600One thing I should also probably acknowledge.
00:08:40.240So a few years ago, I did an online survey about the term and how people thought about
00:09:06.060Like 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.0.97
00:09:15.840And I think that, you know, more so than being homophobic, it's sort of implicitly, I think, misogynistic, right?0.91
00:09:22.240Like 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.
00:09:28.980but like i was i kept while working on on my book about this my book manuscript about this i kept
00:09:34.740thinking about like where did they draw that that word from why was it hag that came to mind and one
00:09:39.480thing that kept sort of occurring to me was was that the hag was having a real moment in hollywood
00:09:44.900in the early to mid 60s right this this is the era of haxploitation i don't know if that rings a bell1.00
00:09:49.940for you right like where you got these vampy old aging actresses right the joan crawfords kind of
00:09:55.300like vamping it up like in southern gothic style kind of you know what is that hush hush sweet0.77
00:10:01.300charlotte or something like that i think another name for the genre is psycho bitty so like you
00:10:05.520know i think sunset boulevard right elderly actress freaks out on camera and i think that's
00:10:10.420part of what's what's here it's not the kind of designation that people would self-apply where i'm
00:10:14.520from you know but you know the fag hag it's interesting you bring up this genre of like
00:10:19.520the glamorous or like sort of fading glamour of a hollywood woman in the 1960s and 70s because0.99
00:10:26.640you know what the fag hag receives or part of what the fag hag receives by proximity to gay men1.00
00:10:31.600is a way to sort of claim an ironic distance from femininity like gay male femininity is a little1.00
00:10:37.680bit disavowed it's very self-aware it's knowing and it is you know that style that affect is taken
00:10:43.480very much from an earlier generation of Hollywood stars.
00:10:48.420And we talked about the Mae West version of camp
00:10:51.540that sort of emerged in the early part of the 20th century
00:11:33.540In my sort of use of the term, I'm usually thinking of like close one-on-one friendships,
00:11:39.960which are like very intimate sort of bounded in time right these are not frequently lifelong
00:11:47.220friendships these are closeness like intimacies that last for maybe a number of years although
00:11:52.140we can get into that and i also think that that like one-on-one nature is part of why they are so
00:11:56.840easily and frequently analogable to both heterosexual romance and like mother-son
00:12:03.100dynamics. What you don't see is really a dynamic in which a gay man is acting as a father figure
00:12:12.220to a straight woman. There's a little bit of infantilization of the gay men and a little bit0.99
00:12:18.060of sort of like desexualization and as such, like sort of premature aging of the straight woman0.97
00:12:22.540involved. Yeah. Just to underline what you just said, that's of course the tricky part, right?
00:12:27.460Like, is there something genuinely destabilizing to the way gender roles usually are distributed
00:12:32.380in society in this relationship or as the outside appellations very very frequently claim
00:12:38.440is this just a defective or let's put more neutrally a version of that relationship that
00:12:43.760sort of isn't actually as transcendent as it thinks right like you think you're transcending
00:12:48.220heterosexuality but you're falling into reproductive futurism you're falling into
00:12:52.460mommy-son relationships right like this is something that like in early discussions of
00:12:58.040the fact that in the 70s and 80s, especially in the psychological literature, is brought up again
00:13:03.260and again. We can talk about that in a second. But basically, these were largely therapists who
00:13:08.060were trying to figure out how to rid men of unwanted homosexual urges and desires.0.58
00:13:13.200So like a proto-conversion therapy or the origins of a conversion therapy kind of philosophy. Yeah.0.62
00:13:17.480This is often still before the DSM-IV removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses.0.91
00:13:22.560And so they're just trying to, quote unquote, cure this mental illness. And of course,0.91
00:13:26.440their prescriptions are always like, you got to get your mommy out of your life. And you also got
00:13:29.860to get your substitute mommy out of your life, which is the fag hack, basically.1.00
00:13:33.180Right. So there's a sense that in the fag hack relationship, both the gay man and the straight1.00
00:13:38.980women are sort of like delaying adulthood, right? Like the straight woman is not reaching sexual1.00
00:13:43.880maturity and accepting the limits of heterosexuality for herself. There's like often in a lot of0.86
00:13:50.280conservative approaches to the fag hack, there's an assertion that the straight woman is using0.98
00:13:55.460gay men as substitute romance because she like fears uh sexuality somehow and then in his turn0.99
00:14:03.320the gay man is remaining a child by retaining closeness to a mother and not having to like0.52
00:14:09.300reach into a masculine independence or later on i mean we'll talk about will and grace which is
00:14:14.480probably one of the longest running explorations of this dynamic that show is not saying oh will
00:14:19.820isn't able to embrace adulthood they are saying that to some extent but they're saying but the
00:14:25.440adulthood they're thinking is he's not ending up with a nice boy right they're saying you should
00:14:29.160just throw yourself into gay life you are withholding yourself from your community by0.76
00:14:33.940trying to play house with this girl you dated for one horrible month in college right that's the0.97
00:14:39.420story of will and grace so even as sort of the super heterosexualized or heterosexist version
00:14:44.980of this goes away this idea that somehow there's something off about the temporality of this
00:14:50.540relationship is really really important the prescription changes through time is what you're
00:14:54.080saying so if it goes from both of you need to the prescription from people like a psychiatrist for
00:14:59.260example goes from both of you need to reconcile yourselves into heterosexuality to this like
00:15:07.160prescription embodied by will and grace of both of you need to reconcile yourselves to relationships
00:15:11.640with men specifically yeah yeah well so one thing that that i really was impressed by sort of
00:15:17.360thinking about the fact and tracing her through kind of culture at large was that i think we've0.92
00:15:23.440been talking a lot about how the fag hag can upset sort of heteronormativity and how really0.94
00:15:27.700that relationship can be something that armistead maupin has famously called a logical family right0.98
00:15:31.960rather than a biological family it just it feels right rather than having a purpose or something
00:15:36.540like that what's interesting is the longer the figure is around and the more both gay men and
00:15:43.180women are able to combine a certain level of liberatedness with the maturity and maturation
00:15:49.500They could grow older in ways that felt safer than by themselves or in whatever associations0.73
00:15:55.620they chose that might have been possible 20 years ago.
00:15:58.520The FACAC easily becomes this kind of figure for another set of convention.
00:16:02.120And this is what the literary scholar Beth Freeman has called chrononormativity.
00:16:06.580So the sense that our lives form these ordered sequences or structures that time organizes
00:16:12.340our bodies and gives them secure meanings, right?
00:16:15.660There's a time to sow your wild oats and then there's a time to settle down, for instance,
00:16:19.100And I think it's such a simple point that we often don't dwell on it, but what behaviors, desires, and associations are deemed appropriate really varies with respect to gender, with race, and social class, but it also varies with age.
00:16:32.440We're living through a moment where being exposed to drag when you're, quote-unquote, too young is understood as early sexualization.
00:16:40.580We're also living through a moment where rapists are often excused as being, quote, just kids.0.51
00:16:44.780Right. 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 of the order of things.
00:16:56.160And I think the fag hag 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, visible and commented upon only once people leave college. It's like, that was for college, you know? Fag hag until graduation. Yeah, basically.1.00
00:17:20.500Yeah. 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 Dector, who want to encourage heterosexuality as a kind of maturity, a kind of taking on a responsibility.1.00
00:17:43.640and the fag hag and her and those friendships between gay men and straight women sort of stand0.98
00:17:49.560in opposition to that yeah exactly do you want to talk a little bit about how the fag hag has0.99
00:17:55.340been historically bounded right because we alluded to this but she's a product of very specific1.00
00:18:00.200cultural conditions that arose in the 20th century and are maybe starting to disappear now
00:18:05.440yeah the simple answer is we don't know when when either the practice started or when people
00:18:09.460started naming it maybe someone has done this and has found something i haven't been able to
00:18:13.420but there are some educated guesses we can make right like we can say for instance one of the0.93
00:18:19.160things that a fag hack is not is not a criminal meaning if hanging around gay men exposed you to0.93
00:18:24.180legal jeopardy like that's something much more serious than what you know the activity of being0.98
00:18:29.560a fag hack was all about right so decriminalization and kind of a sort of coming out of the gay0.92
00:18:35.260community was super important to this figure surely i'm guessing that like around hyper0.97
00:18:41.100privileged groups right like i don't know think of the like parisian expats or something like that
00:18:48.380i'm sure i was about to say expats in paris yeah there's a certain kinds of privileged bohemians
00:18:55.220who might be in context where they are able to be more out more open at different moments in history
00:19:02.720but there's also you know in the early 20th century there are relatively few dedicated
00:19:08.480public spaces for gay men and much more enforcement of anti-sodomy laws right so
00:19:15.200it's not like there's a ton of bars you can go hang out in that are operating legally and openly
00:19:21.220you know yeah and i mean the bars you would go to would be mob run and people would be like i
00:19:24.860really need you to go i don't think you should be here you're like no no no i understand what this
00:19:28.160is like that makes it worse get out you know you can't be a nice middle-class girl hanging out at0.77
00:19:33.220the at the gay bars exactly so like i mean like probably in evil and was set you know or like
00:19:37.820yeah, in Rive Gauche or something like that, we get this stuff, but it is much, much, it's really
00:19:42.720kind of a bohemian thing. And it really appears to have become kind of an undefiable trope much
00:19:47.800later on. One very early thing I noticed that it's not about the fag hack, it's about the missing0.92
00:19:53.380fag hack, is San Francisco Public Library has this amazing collection of the Mattachine Society0.97
00:19:58.960Archives, the earliest homophile organization in the United States that operated sort of0.85
00:20:04.320semi-publicly. And one thing they did was they sent out these mimeographed surveys of their
00:20:10.020members just to understand what, quote unquote, we are like. It's like an early attempt to be like,
00:20:13.640who likes what? Let's talk about this. And one of the interesting things about this survey is
00:20:18.060basically that they ask about women and your relationship to them, but they're asking about
00:20:23.780wives and that's it. The idea that you could cohabit with a woman just because, you could even
00:20:31.340have a beard is not really mentioned like there's the idea like oh this man is obviously married
00:20:35.600but like this is in the 1940s so they're so 1940s that they're like well surely if you
00:20:39.500if you're with a live with a woman and you must have put a ring on it like of course you thank0.99
00:20:43.160god and you know get your dick sucked but like in between in between like she'll obviously make0.99
00:20:47.900you dinner right like so it's like this very funny thing where like it's kind of telling that whoever0.99
00:20:51.900put together that survey like it didn't occur to them to be like well that's an interesting thing
00:20:55.600to ask about and part of it is because i think they couldn't imagine it part of it is probably
00:20:59.520that they wouldn't have cared if if that were the case right they're trying to measure how
00:21:03.580thoroughly closeted people are and they are not looking to these less formalized relationships
00:21:11.520it's like who do you hang out with and they're interested in themselves they're interested in0.96
00:21:15.020men they're just like who gives a shit why a woman hangs around us like right it also should0.99
00:21:19.680be said that the marasheen society was an all-male gay like call that homophile organization pre0.99
00:21:24.600stonewall it was actually caught they were communists for a while although i think they
00:21:28.360moved out of communism in the later 1950s. But they were pretty well organized. And then this
00:21:35.520coincided with the rise of one woman's group called the Daughters of Bilitis, but they were
00:21:40.920much smaller. But yeah, this was a self-regarding gay group that was not really interested in sort
00:21:46.280of these attachments or satellites of gay culture, partly because there just wasn't,
00:21:51.480seems like there probably was not enough of a visible gay culture for other people to attach0.87
00:21:55.900themselves too like you had to seek it out it was dangerous yeah it was hidden you had to know where1.00
00:22:01.520to go and so you had to know somebody who would tell you well the other thing though and that this
00:22:05.280survey kind of reveals and i don't know to what extent this is always true for the mattachine
00:22:08.940society i'd have to ask a specialist for that because there are people who've done really
00:22:12.000really good work on this but another thing that you notice in that survey is that like they ask
00:22:15.780about whether people would sleep with men of other races and by other races they mean not white right
00:22:19.920so basically their assumption was that this this survey was going out to white gay men and probably
00:22:25.880middle-class white gay men which is interesting right so like there is every chance that there
00:22:30.200were ethnically inflected racialized kind of queer underground societies and communities out there
00:22:38.420but they just didn't have them out of these societies to even ask the question right so
00:22:42.500who knows right i mean like i would imagine that cohabitation in working-class neighborhoods was0.96
00:22:48.120just a matter of necessity now if we would call that a fag hag relationship i don't know0.91
00:22:51.780but like it's very noticeable that like when the fact that becomes visible and that's not to say0.98
00:22:57.020that that's all she was but when she becomes visible she becomes visible as a kind of middle
00:23:01.960class phenomenon right because as you say if you can just receive friends at your country estate
00:23:08.000and no one asks any question like well then it's just not the same thing likewise if you just move
00:23:12.920in with a bunch of people because you can't make rent again it's not quite the same thing right
00:23:17.880Like Will and Grace, like part of the point is that they are both young urban professionals who could live alone, but don't, right?
00:23:28.120It's not to say, again, I want to be careful about this.
00:23:30.120I am not saying that the FACAC is a middle-class figure, but like people were able to point to her and say, oh, this is something new and unusual.
00:23:37.820Once there was a certain kind of middle-class stability, right?
00:23:41.240It's like this woman could choose to do something different, but she doesn't.1.00
00:23:45.260Right. The relationship became visible. And also, I think that this is, on a related note, like money 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.0.98
00:24:04.520I think that I would say yes and no right like on the one hand like I think in the imagination0.60
00:24:10.340popular imagination I think this is very much kind of a white middle class thing but then it's1.00
00:24:15.660also very noticeable like a lot of the fag hags around the factory for instance were African1.00
00:24:19.960American there's a kind of persistent figure of the Asian fag hag and then don't forget that like1.00
00:24:25.560the two groups that really are made fun of in Will and Grace it's like you know you have the1.00
00:24:29.780gays and you have the jews because grace is jewish in a way that seems to inflect her femininity0.63
00:24:34.660right she is like uncouth and unrefined in ways that read as non-waspy so i don't know i mean like
00:24:40.740there might be a kind of a covert racialization here too and i wouldn't want to say it's an
00:24:44.920absolutely you know unproblematically like i think i think race actually factors into it more than
00:24:49.860than one would think it does appear to be something that that is remarked on early non-white subcultures0.72
00:24:56.940That's really interesting because 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 it's sort of the stereotype of the fag hag advanced by conservatives is as somebody who has failed or fled traditional femininity.0.97
00:25:25.260but it might be somebody who doesn't have access to them and might seek to parody it, right? Which1.00
00:25:30.460I'm sure could be further inflected by things like Jewish identity or by racial marginalization.
00:25:37.560Well, and I mean, we'll talk about that a little bit later when we talk about Will and Grace in
00:25:41.000more detail. But of course, also, it's a woman who uses men in ways that men are used to using1.00
00:25:49.520women, right? So there is a kind of phallic femininity there that is often in the United0.98
00:25:54.080States racialized, right? A woman who exceeds the dictates of femininity that can be very much1.00
00:26:00.060a racialized body, right? Like the way African-American women are often portrayed,1.00
00:26:04.400for instance. And I think that that's a characterization that this is one of the
00:26:08.660really fascinating things where, as you say, conservative descriptions of this phenomenon
00:26:12.660sometimes can coincide with ones that are very much centered on and made for gay men, right?
00:26:19.880So there's this film, if people can find it, it's definitely worth checking out.
00:26:23.000I want to back us up a little bit because we're a little off track from the chronology.
00:26:29.280And so then the next thing, the next step, I think, is also that there's the ability to cohabit, which is not nothing.0.53
00:26:33.720That's not to say that every fat guy lives with gay men, but certainly the way to be able to sleep over in each other's apartment without it getting closed down as a potential brothel is pretty important.0.55
00:26:44.020Non-married people cannot cohabit or cannot even, in some cases, spend the night, depending on what the rules are.
00:26:52.100And then the other thing is that you need to have a concept of coming out. You 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. I think that's really, really key.0.95
00:27:10.340there's a great book that some people might know by christopher isherwood a single man which is
00:27:16.920also a beautiful movie of it if people want to see it have you have you read it have you seen it
00:27:20.200i read your description of the tom ford film and i was like this sounds gorgeous it sounds very
00:27:24.360luscious it's the guy who super gorgeous nicholas holt and colin firth i know and then who is the0.71
00:27:31.560who's the woman who plays her there are two women in this movie that are basically that function1.00
00:27:36.800as these kind of well that's the thing like are they fag hags we don't know right like it's kind1.00
00:27:41.860of still too early what they know or don't know when is the movie set 63 yeah 62 63 so this is1.00
00:27:48.280another historical condition for the fag hag is that women have to be able to earn a living1.00
00:27:53.660to support themselves exactly i think almost by definition is not married yeah yeah she is a1.00
00:27:58.780single straight woman who is financially independent or widow in the case of truman
00:28:04.160Capote. Right. Yeah. Or at least not dependent on a husband for her room and board. So she has
00:28:10.920more personal freedom to spend time with men who are not supporting her. So by 1963, that is
00:28:18.560becoming more possible. Yeah. So the book is basically about a single day in the life of a
00:28:24.600LA college professor, model clearly on Isherwood, who lives kind of where Isherwood lived. But
00:28:30.400unlike Isher Wood is sort of dealing with the death of his partner a few months prior, I believe.
00:28:36.120And you kind of get the sense as the book or as the film goes on, it's one of the most depressed
00:28:40.280things ever, but like it may well be his last day that we might be following his last day.
00:28:46.640And as part of this, so we follow him to what's clearly a Cal State campus where he teaches,
00:28:52.940we get to see him teach. And he then sort of keeps running into one of his students named
00:28:57.700kenny and then he also meets up with this woman who was a mutual friend of both his and of his
00:29:04.720dead partners they end up being kind of these two figures that are both sort of liminal but both0.97
00:29:09.400on the edge of being fag hags and one is is the character played by none other than julian moore0.98
00:29:14.340in the movie go big or go home right um that's she's a tricky one right like so she isn't she's1.00
00:29:19.860a always unhappily in love she's this kind of she's this big mess she gets drunk with him
00:29:24.960there's an amazing scene of colin firth and julian were just dancing to i forget which which
00:29:30.080song that is but it's like the one with the green onions is that what it's called you know anyway so
00:29:34.760the idea there is very much that she clearly has a thing for him and it's just been unrequited in
00:29:40.980the book there's even an intimation that she's slept with his partner so she is sort of all up0.78
00:29:45.960in their business in a way that feels very fag haggie but the book doesn't have a name for it0.97
00:29:50.580But 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.0.97
00:29:59.840Well, it's about both of these people's lives not having the shape that a life, quote unquote, property should have.0.63
00:30:06.720Now, I sure would a gay man is writing with extreme sensitivity there.0.70
00:30:10.560But, you know, in his mind, you know, George, the main character, should have grown old with his partner.
00:30:16.720But because of a car accident, he doesn't get to. Right.
00:30:19.640And 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 sort of bent out of shape, that are bent out of, that are out of joined in a certain way.
00:30:33.640And then what about Kenny, the student?
00:30:35.020Yeah. 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 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.
00:31:04.500the entire book george will obsess over the fact like what this means right because kenny's
00:31:10.420definitely sending out signals and definitely kind of or at least we're seeing all this through
00:31:15.000george's eyes maybe this is someone projecting hopelessly but like as it's being reported to us
00:31:20.700it's pretty clear that that kenny is vibing hard with george he's flirting with his professor yeah
00:31:26.800yeah while there's this woman right and like that's never quite asked but like but george
00:31:32.940is of course trying to figure out like oh okay who is she to you and he never asked like here
00:31:37.840are the options but like you can imagine the options the options are does she not know does
00:31:42.020she know and is okay with it or does she know and you're not even boyfriend and girlfriend right
00:31:48.240so it's really really interesting so the ford takes that over there's even the line where sort
00:31:53.000of we find out in the movie that kenny has slept with her once and george asks why only once and
00:31:59.780kenny says i didn't say only once i said once come on the last thing i want to talk about right
00:32:04.820now is lois and i think that that to me like this kind of dismissiveness is so so interesting because
00:32:09.820in some way he's saying look whatever it is it's immaterial she is immaterial but like it doesn't
00:32:14.660really clarify very much and the final thing i wanted to sort of briefly talk about is here's
00:32:19.960a description of the lois character in the screenplay by tom ford so kenny 20 is a third
00:32:26.440year student he has dark brown hair pale skin and piercing blue eyes kenny is not classically handsome0.67
00:32:31.280yet is attractive in a somewhat gangly way nois 20 is a stunning and very stylish blonde girl with0.96
00:32:36.600a bored beatnik feel to her manner like i think ford is sort of saying like this is a fag hack0.98
00:32:41.760she knows but i think it's also fascinating by the way that that knowingness goes along with i1.00
00:32:48.060hope people notice that with lois yamaguchi becoming a stunning blonde beatnik right like
00:32:52.860Like, there's a whitewashing that goes along with the fact that, like, Ford basically decides he has to provide an answer to this question.1.00
00:33:01.680And his implicit answer is she is some kind of faggot.1.00
00:33:04.620She's just kind of hanging out with him.1.00
00:33:06.080They probably just hooked up out of boredom and because they thought it was cool.
00:33:13.440They're both just like, this is their beatnik early 60s way, right?
00:33:17.020Whereas, like, that's not the sense we get from Isherwood.
00:33:19.260It's one possible reading, but Isherwood in 1963 can't really say.
00:33:23.720Right. I love the story of this film because there's two photos of the Fag Hack, right? Two portraits of the Fag Hack. There's the one with Dainty, who is cool. She is knowing. She is very importantly physically attractive and presumably desirable to straight men.0.98
00:33:39.420and then there is the version that is not cool she's tragic she's frustrated and disappointed0.99
00:33:46.340yeah she's usually depicted as unattractive in julianne moore's depiction i mean like imagine
00:33:53.100trying to make julianne more unattractive but they make her so no she's she's attractive but0.93
00:33:57.320but she's a little lived down she's she yeah she's off she's not embodying the version of1.00
00:34:03.980femininity that would be aspirational dignified and respectable to like a fashion designer
00:34:08.860director like tom ford yeah i'm trying to remember i mean like i haven't seen it in a while but i
00:34:13.840kind of feel like right the movie is lit within an inch of its life it's beautifully oh i'm sure
00:34:17.740it's gorgeous tom ford knows how to stage a fashion show and i think that you can really
00:34:22.040see her freckles and i think that's kind of a small but telling detail like she's just kind of
00:34:26.660aging she's ordinary it's a freckles are always a nod to ordinariness yeah yeah well or or that0.65
00:34:31.960she no longer tries to make herself attractive right like i think it also in the 1960s would1.00
00:34:35.780have probably meant not wearing makeup yeah like she's just like she's done prettying herself up1.00
00:34:40.380for the rest of the world she's just gonna be julianne moore and if she's drunk at 3 p.m then
00:34:44.380so be it like that is not like the triumphant version of women's aging where it's like i don't0.99
00:34:49.540care what you think anymore she still desires male attention and male companionship it's not this0.99
00:34:55.260like fuck you i'm not wearing makeup anymore it's i'm not wearing makeup anymore because i'm so0.99
00:34:59.040fucking tired right but still yearning for the disappointed hopes yeah and so i think that movie0.99
00:35:04.720and that the combination of movie and novel really gives you a pretty good idea of what's in play and0.83
00:35:09.360like how the pieces of the puzzle are already kind of in place but there is as of yet no language to
00:35:15.200really name what's going on there those are probably not an accident this is happening in
00:35:19.480la right that like you know this isn't this kind of feels like an urban phenomenon you know and
00:35:24.700You can sort of imagine how like this could become formalized and taxonomized even a few years after Isherwood wrote this novel.
00:35:32.640So like the movie was made in what, like 2014, 15?
00:35:39.200So early 21st century, looking at a moment in mid 20th century.0.60
00:35:42.360And what you're seeing at this historical moment, 1963, when Isherwood sets his book, is that gay men have accessed a kind of semi-visibility.0.70
00:36:01.880And straight women have accessed enough independence to be able to live these lives.0.59
00:36:07.820But as gay men and straight women are simultaneously becoming more liberated, maybe politically, economically, straight women are still under this psychic mandate to complete themselves through attachment to men.
00:36:19.960Yeah, 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, 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.
00:36:41.780partner must have been visiting his family or something like that when his car skids off the
00:36:46.100road and at the same time he's being told that he can't come to the funeral that it's not wanted
00:36:50.800and that only family is allowed right so like it's interesting right it's about it's not about
00:36:55.220empowerment it's not about like visibility it is about the lack of punitiveness george is no longer
00:37:01.840afraid of being arrested necessarily although he might well be but he thinks that the chance of
00:37:06.840that is low. But in terms of visibility, that's very, very little. And for all intents and purposes,
00:37:11.860he is still closeted. And that gives you kind of a sense of how important or how tricky the
00:37:17.280fag-hag relationship is while that's still the case. Well, I'm interested in this notion that,1.00
00:37:24.080this is something we talked about before we started recording, that marginality of gay men1.00
00:37:27.940is to some extent, or at least their distinctness, it's to some extent necessary for the fag-hag0.92
00:37:33.760friendship to exist like if the the more integrated gay people are the more like undistinct0.99
00:37:42.140and undifferentiated from the straight world they are the less sense the fag hag friendship makes0.99
00:37:47.540there's this film from 1971 um some of my best friends are yeah among the very first to kind of0.98
00:37:53.680center gay characters in their lives made clearly for and by gay men and in it ruma clannan blanche
00:37:59.980blanche from the golden girls from the golden girls blanche devereau herself plays this sort of0.99
00:38:04.420spiteful alcoholic blousy lady who's self-identifies as a fruit fly and she comes1.00
00:38:10.280into the this bar the blue jay bar in grange village and kind of just like spews kind of1.00
00:38:17.360curdled bomos i mean she's basically reading everyone she's she shows up there almost as a
00:38:22.060like a drag queen kind of insult comic and kind of mirrors their self-loathing right this is still0.73
00:38:27.120sort of the boys in the band kind of era of gay filmmaking where like everyone hates themselves0.90
00:38:31.460and like pride is nowhere to be seen she then basically blows up the entire evening by kind of
00:38:37.980pulling this weird prank slash not prank where she invites one of the men's mothers to the bar
00:38:44.160yeah it's very embittered it's very horrifying and it's very like it's like a psycho it's like
00:38:49.720psychological terrorism it's like yeah yeah and the funny thing is there right like while no one
00:38:55.680in the blue jay bars is having the best time and no one is like winning at life clearly the
00:39:01.380impression is of a place that has a certain stability even though it's a fairly marginal
00:39:05.680group of people she's the force of instability right she's the one who doesn't have to hide who
00:39:10.720she is but she's actually the force of instability and that to me is this really interesting thing
00:39:15.640that like whatever lois yamaguchi is or whatever julian moore is to george they're these stabilizing
00:39:22.220figures these anchors in the phallic order right basically like they they confirm these are men and
00:39:27.120you know you don't bother them or whatever whatever by 1971 you know blanche actually
00:39:32.180lita is the is the character's name i'll just call her blanche though because she'll always be
00:39:37.020you know it seems like these men have are sort of starting to figure out their lives if a word0.97
00:39:41.260for fucking lita is sort of like blowing in and fucking everything up for everyone right like0.97
00:39:45.340and and that is i think the idea that she's actually more unstable than the men she attaches0.99
00:39:49.620themselves to not in a mental sense but like just like her life is disordered more so than theirs
00:39:54.980they have a community they know who they are etc etc she has a much bigger identity crisis i think0.59
00:39:59.380that's the big shift from 63 to 71 that like you have a gay male community that knows what it is
00:40:05.220and then you have these marginal figures where no one can decide like are they cute are they demonic0.92
00:40:11.440are they positive are they negative are they a drag are they kind of cool are they a hoot or are
00:40:18.140they to be pitied, et cetera, et cetera. Like that's really, I think that's really the big
00:40:22.220shift there. And the more distinct and self-conscious the gay male community becomes,0.99
00:40:28.040the more the fag hag risks being an interloper or invader or a tourist or, you know, an unwelcome1.00
00:40:35.020figure. And maybe that's where the role of the maternal comes in, right? She sort of has to earn1.00
00:40:42.720her keep for this male companionship that she's seeking out.
00:40:48.140one thing we could mention given that you know this is a this is a podcast that kicked off with
00:41:09.420Midge Dector is of course that like you know this is also the period where Midge Dector you know
00:41:14.620friend of the pod really cues into this into this uh into this figure gets really interested in it0.79
00:41:21.420and is also the moment where she thinks where she sort of witnesses what she thinks is the gay
00:41:27.700community kind of turning in on itself turning into itself and kind of showing outward hostility
00:41:33.680towards anything that doesn't fit and so like you know in her own bizarre way so mitch dechter is
00:41:39.360watching all this happen on fire island is just hating every minute of it and it's just like
00:41:42.820spewing bile about it but in her own sort of cockeyed way maybe she's picking up on on this
00:41:49.720exact thing that like is a community that is starting to center a certain conception of
00:41:54.560masculinity and figures that no longer fit into it like are having a harder time right i'm glad
00:42:01.140you got to midge i was one of the reasons i wanted to do this episode with you was because
00:42:05.940in medge dechter's really epic account of gay life on fire island and commentary called the
00:42:11.800Boys on the Beach. It's a really homophobic screed that she's writing in 1980, as sort of the gay
00:42:19.100rights movement of the 1970s has like achieved some wins and this backlash is fermenting. And
00:42:24.880she's writing about her time vacationing on Fire Island in the 1960s with her family. And she has
00:42:30.540this amazing paragraph about the fag hag, which I'm just going to read here. They're female1.00
00:42:35.380companions, for they had a kind of platoon of female companions who specifically belonged to1.00
00:42:40.240them and decorated their bars and hangouts. The fag hags, of whom I have already spoken,1.00
00:42:45.260were elegant and mun-must also. They were, most of them, photographers' models, or young actresses,1.00
00:42:51.300or jet-setters dropping in on what once surmised was an accustomed way station on their international
00:42:56.380round of the good times and good places. They, too, were a living sneer at the straight men.
00:43:02.300For Dunup to be in every way enticing, they were essentially, and provocatively so,
00:43:06.600unavailable occasionally out of boredom or perhaps to avoid the trouble of refusal0.71
00:43:11.920one or another of them might surrender to the importuning of a straight man
00:43:16.060but if so there would be little triumph or pleasure in it for him a man might make love
00:43:21.500to them now and then but won't want to him if he attempted to touch them in any way or disarray
00:43:26.100their lacquered hair they were on hand everything about them announced not for the messiness of0.73
00:43:31.380heterosexual engagement but to decorate in cool serenity the homosexual scene and nothing added0.72
00:43:37.600more than they to the impression of a great deal of excess uncommitted discretionary cash i love
00:43:43.760this pretty good pretty good it's also very clearly articulating a different version of the
00:43:49.540fag hag than what we're getting from isherwood right it's maybe close to tom ford's lois yamaguchi
00:43:54.760cool beautiful aspirational specifically desired by straight men that is not the julianne maher0.92
00:44:01.400figure drunk and humiliating herself yeah with this like unreciprocated desire and it is not0.97
00:44:07.920the figure that i wanted to bring up from your lecture on fag hags it's hilton all it's not1.00
00:44:12.960grace of will and grace right who's like a little bit excessive in her femininity it is what minge1.00
00:44:19.880dector is talking about is sort of like pristine somebody who has not failed at heterosexuality so
00:44:25.400much as transcended it mitch dector is always on the hunt for people who think they're too good to0.99
00:44:29.840be straight like this is her like worst nightmare and this is how she identifies the fag hag right0.99
00:44:34.180as somebody who's rejecting heterosexuality that's not really what you get in depictions of the fag0.99
00:44:39.360hag by gay men so much it's interesting to me that this is a straight woman looking at other0.99
00:44:43.640straight women and assessing them as thinking they're better than her yeah and like what the0.99
00:44:50.000gay men present is sort of a more tragic figure i'm looking for the alls here oh he's talking0.62
00:44:55.680about uh dorothy dean this is hilton all's 1996 memoir the women and he's talking about dorothy0.95
00:45:02.980dean a socialite who hung out around the factory and he goes even among as theatrical a bunch as
00:45:10.000gathered around andy warhol dean seems to have stood out a star attraction among men who have0.99
00:45:14.560limited if any sexual response to her the fag hag all says prizes self-control but performs1.00
00:45:21.060outrageous acts gay men are her audience but they are also objects of her contempt for accepting0.99
00:45:26.700laughingly which she does not speak her fear of romantic intimacy yeah see that's really different0.85
00:45:32.260from what mitch dechter is looking at right that's somebody who's not coolly serene and sort of above
00:45:38.420of the thrashing of heterosexual desire.
00:45:40.940That is somebody who is seeking out attention,0.87
00:46:06.120These are both misogynists at all.0.96
00:46:08.140i should say um like neither one of these is a nice affirming or fair i think vision of these
00:46:15.580women but it does say it does show to me that like people are interpreting the fact hack based on
00:46:22.140their own positionality and based on their own relationships to heterosexuality yeah in each
00:46:29.240case though the fact is someone who makes choices where the natural quote-unquote thing would be to
00:46:35.360let yourself fall into something right he's a nice enough guy just go with him right like
00:46:39.720she is a self-fashioner she is someone who makes decisions in some way which is going to be
00:46:45.400different from the way will and grace function where in some way the show says look it's almost
00:46:49.500kind of taking the dector position and saying both of you need need to just get your hands dirty with
00:46:54.900real life because right now you're just living in eternal college but like and settle down with a
00:46:58.880nice boy as the end as as the like skinectady for for real yeah even though i think i think that you
00:47:04.300know in some way will and grace would have no problem if grace settled down with a girl but
00:47:07.460like it's just you know you got to settle down with someone like this it's very much a coupley
00:47:10.760show but of course it's the funny way in which we'll talk about this but like it's of course
00:47:14.840the way most sitcoms work the kind of stability they have their telos also would make the comedy
00:47:20.160not funny right like so the only reason the show can can continue is that they are in this delayed
00:47:25.620lessons and this arrested development right and the fact that that's both something to be sort
00:47:30.180of sneered at and it's really kind of fun to watch is something that you get in this too
00:47:35.260here's another Truman Capote's answered prayers where sort of an aging woman reflects about you
00:47:42.040know trying to find a suitable man as though there were any suitable extra men in New York0.99
00:47:47.100or London or Butte Montana if it comes to that they're all queer or ought to be that's what I1.00
00:47:52.480meant when I told Princess Margaret it was too bad she didn't like fags because it meant she would1.00
00:47:56.760have have a very lonely old age fags are the only people who are kind to worldly old women and i1.00
00:48:01.400adore them i always have but i really am not ready to become a full-time fags mole i'd rather go dyke1.00
00:48:07.320right so like the way she's like coolly surveying her options for retirement into kind of a new0.99
00:48:13.820form of femininity that is very much independent independent of where you are in life the fact that
00:48:18.940this feels chosen and frankly that it feels chosen for kind of transactional reasons is also really
00:48:24.300really interesting, right? That like the women of Fire Island likely, this is something that
00:48:28.460Mitch Dichter, I think kind of Biden doesn't really think of, but they have created for
00:48:31.780themselves a space where the threat of sexual violence from the men around them is pretty
00:48:36.060minimized. They've chosen that. They've built that cocoon around themselves. And the same is
00:48:40.520true here in the Capote text. These are the constrained choices that women make in order1.00
00:48:45.720to escape the omnipresent threat of violence and heterosexuality. What everyone sort of notices
00:48:50.760is the fact that someone is sort of setting up their lives and kind of using men in a way that0.97
00:48:56.760men are not usually used right the gay men become kind of a means to an end which is kind of you
00:49:04.640know your own biography in some way that to me seems really interesting yeah i think this might0.95
00:49:09.880be a good place to position maybe like more formally to like what do the hags get yeah yeah
00:49:15.680These 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?0.92
00:49:30.580And I sort of looked around at a few of my favorite fagags, which for me were like the two stereotypical ones or emblematic ones in my mind are Donna Tartt and Nan Golden.0.97
00:49:43.400Donna Tartt, the author of The Secret History, very famous, reclusive.1.00
00:49:48.000Who somehow picked up some gay men in Bennington, of all places.0.93
00:50:26.400There's this sort of anecdote about Donna Tartt, 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 Julianne Falls in that movie.
00:50:43.180And they were all sort of wearing these like ties and like Oxfords.
00:50:48.140Oh my God, that sounds so insufferable.1.00
00:50:49.840Slacks. I mean, it just sounds like the movie version of The Secret History that plays in my head, right?1.00
00:50:55.280And they did have a very charismatic gay Greek teacher at the time at Bennington.
00:51:01.280But she starts dating this guy who dresses like this.
00:51:05.120And suddenly she starts dressing like this.
00:51:07.000So I'm reading from a piece on this little bit of gossip by a New Republic writer named
00:51:13.900Joe Livingston, who goes, several old college peers recall Tartt dating a slightly older
00:52:59.720So this is a description of a straight woman sort of using gay men and proximity to gay
00:53:06.280men as a kind of like aspiration and as like a kind of ventriloquism.1.00
00:53:10.160And so you're saying that, you know, the fag hag departs from heterosexual convention1.00
00:53:15.760by treating men as like means to an end.1.00
00:53:19.020I'm not entirely sure that's actually outside traditional heterosexuality, right?0.77
00:53:24.160If you look at the way that women's lives have been constructed at the most oppressive and deterministic moments of patriarchy, men were women's only real way into the real world.0.87
00:53:36.680If you want to have access in public, you need to do it by proxy.0.89
00:53:42.680And men didn't need to do that, right?0.99
00:53:44.560So gay male life is a kind, it's a model of sexuality that for women of Tartt'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.0.96
00:54:05.180This is not how gay men describe gay male life.0.56
00:54:08.720They'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.
00:54:13.220But I think this is a perception of gay men's life that would be very tempting to straight women from a certain position, right?
00:54:20.180It'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?1.00
00:54:33.440This 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?1.00
00:54:43.220that she can always up back out of it.1.00
00:54:45.740But Dale, right, the Lita and some of my best friends are,0.91
00:54:49.400like, can return to the heterosexual island no problem.0.64
00:54:53.500The boys in the bar don't have that option, right?
00:54:56.440And in some way, like, I think we haven't talked about, like,
00:54:59.240the fact that there isn't really a male equivalent
01:06:45.160They're just refusing certain kinds of more anarchic things,
01:06:49.540more anarchic sort of life decisions.0.66
01:06:51.980There'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.0.64
01:07:04.180And 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.
01:07:21.620yeah this actually reminds me of the one time i got dragged to a circuit party on fire island oh0.78
01:07:26.080wow yeah i same um you know i was out there with like another gay woman a friend of mine who's like
01:07:31.960really into like electronic dance music and she's like my friend is deejaying you know it's our
01:07:38.400culture too and i was like no it's not um but like you know she felt very at home in a gay male space
01:07:44.880and i just sort of got dragged along and i've like never been so bored in my life um right but i could
01:07:50.060also like among all these, like more or less naked men who were there on like a very specific
01:07:55.880mission in which I could not help them, you know? Uh, but like, also I could tell,
01:07:59.980I was very aware that my presence was inhibiting some of the behavior. I thought about this a lot
01:08:06.540when we read the Mitch Dechter, I was like, I've been there girl. Yeah. You were, you were the
01:08:10.580cooler. Yeah. And I'm just sitting there on the couch with my little white wine, you know? And
01:08:16.260And it was, it was interesting to realize that I was the reason people were like reining it in a little bit.
01:08:21.340Yeah, yeah. I mean, the other person 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 fag hag 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?0.82
01:08:46.260And she describes herself as this kind of chaperone who drives herself home after basically her charge has gotten lucky at a club, right?
01:08:52.760And 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?
01:09:00.100And I'm going to quote from her autobiography.
01:09:04.020I went to the prom with you, buckled up your cummerbund, did the safety dance, right?
01:09:08.320She kind of tries out caring for another human being and plays sort of mommy through this figure.
01:09:14.660and at the same time is able to kind of find a real joy and real love in that.
01:09:19.700I think this vision of the like caretaking, you know, on the one hand, there's like a cynical,
01:09:24.880this is my cynical feminist take, which is just like, oh, great, you've just re-embodied
01:09:28.640the notion of the woman as a service provider, providing support to the actual action of life,
01:09:34.260which is all monopolized by men. But I also think you have to find a degree of admiration and,
01:09:42.020you know, love in what is being offered in this relationship, which is a kind of safety.
01:09:47.000And I don't think you need to ascribe as Will and Grace does, or as like conservative thinkers,0.92
01:09:52.420like Hilton Owls, or like really like right wing people tend to, to the safety of the fag0.99
01:09:56.900hack relationship. Like, I don't think you have to say that it's cowardice. I think you can say0.99
01:10:01.800that safety are the preconditions that allow like maybe a more authentic and mutual care to emerge.0.99
01:10:08.640And the person I'm thinking of as a real emblem of this kind of fag hag is Nan Golden.1.00
01:10:14.700Nan Golden is a very famous photographer and now a sort of anti-opiate activist who had kind of a really unimaginably brutal early life.1.00
01:10:26.840She was born to a middle class family that was like very sort of psychologically and emotionally unstable.
01:10:34.680And her sister committed suicide when she was 11.
01:10:40.560In 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.
01:10:57.400So she writes in her introduction to her famous photography book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
01:11:02.240This was 1965 when teenage suicide was a taboo subject.
01:11:06.020I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide.
01:11:11.100I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction.
01:11:14.940Because of the times of the early 60s, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control.
01:11:23.560By 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.
01:11:33.680and literally immediately after her suicide nan golden is brought into a sexual relationship by a
01:11:41.660much older male relative and it suggested that this man was also behaving the same way with her
01:11:48.080sister before her death i want to be really careful here because nan golden does not describe
01:11:53.500this as sexual abuse she describes it as a awakening of source and that's all i'm going
01:11:58.940to say there but you know this is somebody who had been uh made very aware through like brutal
01:12:05.680experience of what heterosexuality could do to women what it could mean what kind of risks they
01:12:11.960take embarking on it and then you know she goes to school and she meets another photographer named
01:12:16.840david armstrong a gay fellow student who eventually became a photographer too and was golden's closest
01:12:22.100male friend for decades this is from hilton all's piece on nan golden it was armstrong who re-christian
01:12:27.560Nancy Nan. The two were involved from the first in a kind of marriage blanc. They went to movies
01:12:32.380all the time, were fascinated by the women of Andy Warhol's factory and in love with 30 stars
01:12:36.580like Joan Crawford and Betty Davis. We were really radical little kids and we did cling to
01:12:41.280our friendship as an alternate family, Fletcher told me. Even at the time, we could have articulated
01:12:46.400that. And so, you know, when Nan Golden eventually moves to Boston and then New York and becomes
01:12:52.180involved in this circle of drag queens you know there's a lot of danger in it she's using drugs a0.97
01:12:59.760lot many of her friends died of overdoses and later of aids but she's also sort of shielded0.88
01:13:07.200from the brutality that is also awaiting women who might not fit you know we we've talked about0.99
01:13:14.780the fag hag like the julianne moore character in a single man as a figure of indignity but it's also0.98
01:13:19.800a figure of vulnerability, right? If you don't do womanhood right, the world can be very, very hard1.00
01:13:27.380on you. And gay men aren't hard on you in the same ways. Even though we've critiqued their0.91
01:13:34.300misogyny, they are a place where their marginalization might sort of rhyme with yours.0.71
01:13:41.340Their punishments might sometimes look like yours, and they are not likely to beat or rape you. They0.95
01:13:47.260provide something else. And I think, you know, it's worth looking at that, not just as a failure,
01:13:52.980but also as a kind of like admirable emotional resourcefulness that these people who are sort of
01:13:58.400put at the edges of society, men who are gay, women who aren't quite right at being straight.
01:14:04.400And they find each other and make connections that serve them.0.54
01:14:08.320Well, or women who sort of understand what the risks might be if they played along, right? I0.88
01:14:12.920I 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, you know, huge in Warhol's factory, appears in a bunch of his movies.0.94
01:14:23.960I think also good friends with James Baldwin and, you know, kind of this acid-tongued wit and, you know, 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,
01:14:42.020And Al's almost thinks like she's using it to position herself outside of her race too.
01:14:45.400It's like, it's a way of, to speak with Jose Esteban Munoz, to disidentify.
01:14:50.400It's a way to sort of say, I'm not going to be part of any group that would have someone
01:14:55.080I'm going to blaze the eccentric path.
01:14:56.820And then one other thing I think we might want to point out, because we talked now about
01:15:00.580like, you know, the Margaret Cho thing about like, you know, that there is a kind of a
01:15:04.380maternal, there's a kind of caring aspect to this relationship and people identify that.
01:15:08.320And then you mentioned, you know, these impossibly glamorous women, such as Dorothy Dean, such as the women that Mitch Dichter 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.
01:15:24.320But 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.
01:15:46.280and he basically says that you know gay men would prefer lesbian women for stigma evasion for the
01:15:52.780simple reason that quote in general the gay women were more attractive than the female heterosexuals
01:15:57.320in the community many of whom were unattractive in conventional terms or of middle-aged or both
01:16:02.740and basically that they had this kind of school marmish energy that as one of his interview
01:16:07.800subjects points out quote keeps the men from getting too carried away from camping and carrying
01:16:13.340on too much so she's like this ultimate wet blanket now why am i mentioning this again
01:16:18.080just to point out this is the exact same time as midge dechter finding these impossibly model-esque1.00
01:16:24.420too cool for heterosexuality ladies on fire island from which i deduce that people were projecting1.00
01:16:30.220all kinds of shit and generalizing all kinds of things from about these women who may just have1.00
01:16:34.980been pretty heterogeneous to begin with right yeah what we're coming back to again and again here is1.00
01:16:40.320There 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 schoolmarmish. 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.1.00
01:17:05.480And 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 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.
01:17:24.000But I can say this. 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.
01:17:47.940Several of them said these were the most enduring relationships they've made in their lives.
01:17:51.700I don't want to disclose anything that would be covered by research confidentiality, but
01:17:55.160just to point out that the cultural investment in this not being for the long haul is all
01:18:02.120the more noticeable if you talk to people who describe themselves this way and say,
01:18:06.440nope, we still talk on the phone all the time, going on a cruise next month or whatever,
01:18:10.960or like Brian nursed him on his deathbed or something like that.
01:18:13.880Like 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.
01:18:40.140Wait, Adrian, are you saying that all this cultural baggage around the fag hag was actually anxious projections about heterosexuality all along?0.99