Trish wore marabou mules from Frederick’s of Hollywood and carried a vintage hatbox instead of a regular purse. It had two pom-poms on the top and was a nightmare to get things in and out of but great for stashing a small bottle of gin. There was a gal called Irene, a hairdresser, who was the first person I knew to adopt a Louise Brooks–Anna Win-tour hairdo. She wore men’s silk pajamas (very Claudette Colbert), high, vintage, suede stilettos, and Chanel pearls. Paula collected important vintage. She owned an entire outfit—complete with turban and peacock feathers—by Paul Poiret. She could also do the fifties Dior New Look because she was thin. Chubby fag hags like Cherie and Yvonne did the Carmen–YSL–cigarette-girl thing with forgiving but tempestuous off-the-shoulder blouses and red, tiered taffeta skirts and fans.
When she roamed the earth, the fag hag was more than just a fashion poseur: She was formidable, especially after a few drinks.
My fag hags lived for champagne and cocktails. Don’t judge them. You too would rely on the tranquilizing effects of alcohol if you were young and excitable and libidinous and had to continually sublimate your sexual feelings for your constant and indifferent gay male companions.
Each of my fag hag friends had a special signature drink, usually something brightly colored and sickly. We’re talking drinks with fancy French names in lurid colors like parfait amour and crème de menthe. If, after a few drinks, a fag hag heard another fag hag ordering her signature drink, she would get irate: “Why do you have to order my drink? Get your own. Why don’t you have a pint of lager? You butch slag!”
After drinking too much, a fag hag would often vomit. This was not unusual, especially in 1970s England. The food was horrible and rotten, and everyone drank too much. Everyone was vomiting. Along with being the golden age of the fag hag, this was also the golden age of vomit.
I remember a fag hag called Lou. Lou modeled her look on Betty Page—very dominatrix—black bangs and a leopard trench like a fifties stripper. One night, in the back of a taxi, she vomited into her purse, which was a shame since it was a beautiful vintage purse. She had her reasons. She knew that if you threw up in a London taxi, you were immediately driven to the taxi depot and forced to hose and clean the cab for hours until it was spotless. Fag hags were good at weighing their options. Lou chose to ruin her purse over hours of scrubbing.
Like many fag hags, Lou was an anything-for-a-laugh show-off and a daredevil who loved a good practical joke. One night, after getting locked out of her flat in Kings Cross, she woke up a neighbor whom she knew had a set of ladders. Batting her eyelashes, she demanded that he climb up into her flat and then open her front door from the inside. Seeing an opportunity for a good chuckle, Lou added an extra zing to the escapade by directing her Good Samaritan to climb into the wrong flat, thereby scaring the hell out of a sleeping senior citizen. This was deemed to be very funny. Lou lay on the sidewalk and laughed and laughed till she vomited.
Lou once shagged my roommate—a cross-dressing cabaret artist—and left big passionate scratches down his back. This whole incident shocks me even to this very day. When he arrived home the next morning and showed me these marks of passion, I nearly dropped my cigarette holder. Some fag hags had a knack for getting gay boys, even nellie cross-dressers, to shag them. Alcohol seemed to play a big part in these dodgy couplings. Even allowing for the booze, I did not really understand this. I never shagged a fag hag or a female of any description. No amount of alcohol would have been enough. This probably puts me at the far end of the straight-fag continuum.
Nevertheless, I had some odd experiences with women. There was a boring girl in a duffle coat called Leslie who used to pounce on me and tell me she was madly in love with me and that she was ready to leave her boyfriend. She was a specific genre: a gal who, out of the blue, randomly fell in love with a gay man and pined for him and stalked him. I never thought of these girls as fag hags. I thought of them as idiots.
I found the situation with Leslie incomprehensible and sinister. Whenever she came barging into the flat where I was living, I would jump out the kitchen window and run off down the alleyway in my Bata platforms and Mr. Freedom oxford bag trousers, leaving my roommates to console her. I used to hide in the nearby cycle sheds for hours waiting for her to bugger off home. Looking back, I realize now that the cycle sheds were made of asbestos. If I ever develop some horrible lung disease, I shall hold her personally responsible.
One day, fashion changed and those vintage dresses and poodle hairdos and MGM fox furs started to look démodé. Trendy girls were dyeing their hair pink and shoving safety pins through their cheeks and walking down the Kings Road wearing trash bags and ripped stockings. In one fell swoop, punk killed everything that preceded it, including the fag hag.
For me, it happened one night at the aforementioned Sombrero. It was 1977, the peak of punk, the year of the queen’s Silver Jubilee. I was accompanied by several fags and a fag hag called Denise who was in full punk vinyl. Her hair looked like a tornado of bleached scrambled egg. It wasn’t really a beehive. It was more like an explosion in a mattress factory. She had made a dress out of Union Jack tourist shopping bags and Scotch tape. She wore ripped white fishnets and black-patent porno shoes from a sex shop in Soho. She looked brilliant.
The pissy Spanish bloke on the door took one look at Denise and told her to take a hike.
“You hate me because I’m a woman!” said the combative Denise, trying out some poorly rehearsed, unfamiliar feminist rhetoric. (We fags and fag hags were very apolitical. We never owned TVs or read newspapers.)
“I bet if I was a man you would let me in,” continued Denise.
“You’re not a woman. You’re not a man. You’re a mess!”
Denise grinned from ear to ear.
“Finally, a compliment!” she said, and we all about-turned and left, never to return.
We jumped on a bus bound for the West End, and headed straight to a fab new place that Denise had heard about called Louise’s where, thanks to the anarchy of punk, gay and straight and fat and thin and fem and butch had all started to mingle and merge. The punk movement was nothing if not inclusive: The only qualifications were the desire to get dressed up and to annoy people. We fags and fag hags were a shoo-in.
Overnight, the concept of the fag hag suddenly seemed as tired and dusty as a Judy Garland fan club membership card.
Will the fag hag ever come back?
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where her services will be required. The world has changed. Men, straight men, have become much less obnoxious over the last few years. Some are even a bit nelly. The whole metrosexual thing has improved conditions for straight gals and eliminated the need to go screeching around with a claque of ghettoized gay men. And gay men in big cities are no longer marginalized. Hanging out with gay boys is normal and easy and does not require the kind of full-time commitment made by the great fag hags of yore.
So what happened to all my old fag hags? The Lous and Denises and Gingers? Lots of them got married or shacked up and had kids. Yes, kids. What could be more fun than having a fun-loving fag hag for a mother?
The biggest concentration of surviving fag hags—in the world, bar none—is probably to be found in Florida.
Look at that overdressed broad over there, strutting down Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, wearing leopard mules and capri pants. She’s probably taking that scrawny poodle to the groomer. I bet you anything her best friend, Stephen, does her roots as a favor every other week, and her favorite Bowie album is still Hunky Dory.
THE COLLECTORS
K. M. Soehnlein
I had invited a handful of friends from Los Angeles—all gay men—to join me and my boyfriend, Kevin, for a weekend at my friend April’s home, a small ranch house overlooking the Pacific. April hadn’t previously met three of the four I’d invited, but she’d unhesitatingly agreed to host this reunion. We were a ragtag group. Jacob and Billy, in the early throes of romance, were positively moony over each other, almost to the exclusion
of everyone else. Andre, struggling to sell a gay-themed screenplay, was feeling battered by the Hollywood hustle. Roger, a gregarious poet whom I’d had a distant crush on years earlier, hadn’t previously met any of the others. Only April, happy to have a party delivered to her door, seemed to connect instantly with everyone.
I don’t remember who suggested the game—it might have been me, trying to break the ice—but April was immediately handing out paper and pens. The game’s premise: Describe your dream house. How many floors and rooms? What kind of front door? Is there landscaping? Everyone scribbled down answers before the key was revealed: Your house was your personality. The number of rooms showed how compartmentalized your identity was. The front door indicated how you greeted those who entered your life. The landscape illustrated the type of people you wanted to keep close. April’s dream house was one story and sprawling, with large common areas and plenty of guest rooms—a more spacious version of the house we were in. The front door had a top that swung open, so that even strangers could be greeted face-to-face. And the landscaping? April laughed as she read what she’d written: “Fruit trees! My dream house would be surrounded by every kind of fruit tree.”
We “fruit trees,” circled around her, roared our approval.
Recalling that party recently, Kevin suggested that April was a “collector” of gay men. Wasn’t it true that she had kept in touch with several of the guys she met that weekend? Hadn’t she once claimed that her idea of heaven was a place populated by gay men (along with her husband and daughter, she had hastened to add)?
The idea of being collected, I replied, left me with a certain queasiness, as if I were an insect pinned behind glass by Dr. Kinsey, put on display for further study. “Really?” Kevin asked, knowing what an exhibitionist I am. “You don’t like being on display?”
He reminded me of the artwork that April and her husband, Dean, have collected for years. They’ve made their home an eclectic grab bag containing everything from abstract landscapes to refashioned “found objects,” such as a fetching party dress built from Junior Mints boxes.
To be collected in this way is to be selected, appreciated, chosen. To be selected means you might truly be known.
We know so little about ourselves when we are young.
I met Paul, my first boyfriend, in college, and I followed him to Manhattan, where we fixed up a rental on the Lower East Side: sanding the floors smooth, installing bars on the windows. Together, we became politically active in the queer movement; we socialized and screwed around as a couple. As my early twenties passed by, I began feeling a discontentment so strong I couldn’t deny it, and so unfamiliar I couldn’t define it. I let myself fall in love with someone who lived far away, courting this new boy with lengthy love letters. Six years after Paul and I first slept together, I told him I wanted to break up.
Soon after, on the subway, I ran into an acquaintance who blanched when I told him of the impending split. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “You guys have been my model couple.”
My stomach clenched guiltily. I needed to get away from the relationship precisely because people like this fellow couldn’t differentiate me from Paul—not physically, but conceptually. Even close friends sometimes slipped and called one of us by the other’s name.
When I complained of this to my friend Maria, she shook her head firmly, her wavy, blonde-streaked mane shimmering in the light of an East Village café. Reaching out her hand, she assured me, “I’ve never had any problem knowing where Paul ends and you begin.”
“You haven’t?”
She smiled so endearingly I could only understand it as permission to shake off my guilt. Defining moments are rare, but this was one: I was being seen for who I was, apart from association with anyone else. I was being shown how to look at myself with the clarity of an outside eye.
I had known Maria since the summer of 1987, four years earlier, when I moved to New York. I first spotted her on a sweltering evening in an auditorium where she sat several rows ahead of me. We were there for a meeting of a recently formed activist group, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP had been gaining attention for street actions protesting the lack of government attention to the epidemic. On this night, the group was planning for the upcoming Gay Pride parade. Outraged by the Reagan administration’s call for mandatory HIV testing—a thinly veiled attempt to identify, isolate, even quarantine “AIDS victims”—ACT UP would roll out a flatbed truck bearing a barbed–wire–wrapped concentration camp overseen by an actor in a Reagan mask laughing diabolically. Guards in masks and yellow rubber gloves would march alongside, keeping watch over those who’d been rounded up.
The meeting’s facilitator called for volunteers. “We want as diverse a group as possible inside the camp,” he said, “to send the message that the virus does not discriminate.”
A few rows up, the petite woman with the humidity-rippled hair waved her hand. “You’re volunteering for the camp?” the facilitator asked.
“No,” she replied, “I want to be a guard.”
Maria was unlike anyone I’d ever met: an intellectual whose fashion sense included leather jackets and boutique dresses, cowboy boots and marabou mules. In 1987, her nose ring seemed exotic and vaguely sinister, but her sense of humor was all embracing; she regarded everything New York had to offer as material for a (usually comic) story. She was only a couple of years older than I but seemed to have lived twice as many adventures: a girlhood in Africa, a brief stint at a Swiss boarding school, a year spent in Italy after dropping out of N.Y.U. She’d completed her undergrad education at a Seven Sisters school, where she’d had a series of tumultuous affairs with women, fueled by equal parts feminist theory and sexual energy.
Walking down lower Broadway on one of the first days we hung out socially, Maria complained about the afternoon’s glaring sunshine. “It reminds me of L.A.,” she said. “I hate L.A.! Too much sunshine makes people complacent. Plus you have to wear sunglasses, and you can’t look people in the eye when you have something to say.” Her tough talk was infectious. I also hate L.A., I wanted to say, though I’d only been there briefly. And I hate sunshine, and sunglasses, and people who don’t look you in the eye! I wanted to dispel received information as mercilessly as she did—be it about the weather, or about politics.
Maria was the first person I told about the affair I’d started; now I was telling her about leaving Paul. “I can’t do this to him,” I moaned. “I’m ruining his life, and mine.”
She narrowed her gaze on me. “Karl,” she insisted, “you’re going to have many lovers in your life.”
Her words offered the balm of perspective: You’re not ruining your life, you’re renewing it. You’re reinventing yourself. I held those words close, a raft to keep me afloat through this sea change.
“Sweetheart, you’ll be okay,” she said.
“I don’t even know where I’ll live.”
“You can live with me. Patrick is leaving in a month.” Patrick was the latest in a line of gay roommates who’d rotated through Maria’s tenement apartment ever since she’d moved in, knocked down the interior walls and filled the place with books.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
She was.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
The idea of living with a woman was a great comfort to me. I’d grown up with sisters, and in college I had roomed with three different women, the most important of whom was Theresa.
I met her on the first day of freshman year, at a small private school in upstate New York. My roommate was an enthusiastic guy from Philadelphia named Chris, whose unfamiliar accent emphasized the o’s in home and phone until they seemed as round as doughnuts. With him was a girl from the same high school, another incoming frosh. She was dark-haired and cherub cheeked, just a breath under five feet tall, with dark, serious eyes that seemed unsure about this entire endeavor. I was used to befriending well-behaved, well-liked girls who carried sadness just below the surfa
ce. The girls I’d dated were like that, projecting happiness in order to maintain their high school social status, then letting down their guard with me, often while I gave them back rubs at parties. But this girl—she’d introduced herself as Terry—was offering no false cheer, as if she, and by extension we, understood that this was all just overwhelming.
Chris led us on an energetic campus tour that concluded at a high-rise dormitory called the Tower. He brought us to the top floor, where a restaurant was open to the public. Since the campus sat at the crest of a hill, this marked the highest spot in the county. We could see miles of lush green farmland and the spectacular, long, blue lake that stretched north from the valley below. Chris pointed out the sights, then turned to go. But Terry, with a small sigh, announced that she would stay.
I took a chance and added, “Me, too.”
Then it was just the two of us, side by side, looking at the haze-blurred horizon. “I’m not ready for college,” she said. “High school sucked, but you only get to do it once. There’s a lot I’d do differently. And now it’s over, and we’re on to college, and then that’s going to be over…”
“We haven’t even started,” I protested, arms flung wide.
“I hate saying good-bye,” she continued. “I hate it so much it can be hard to say hello.”
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 3