Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? by Jesse Bering

Author:Jesse Bering
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Studying the Elusive “Fag Hag”: Women Who Like Men Who Like Men

As a decades-long fan of The Golden Girls, I was saddened to learn of the death of Rue McClanahan in June 2010. In fact, I think I genuinely shed a palpable, detectable tear, which is something I can’t remember ever doing on the death of a celebrity, with the exception perhaps of Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty. It sounds rather homosexually clichéd, I know, but my partner, Juan, and I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of The Golden Girls every night before bed. And along with the other “girls,” as we call them, McClanahan’s character, Blanche Devereaux—the sassy southern belle with an insatiable appetite for rich cheesecake and rich men—has become something of an imaginary, smile-inducing friend in our home. Fortunately, Blanche’s carnal spirit is burned forever on our DVDs. Yes, I know, I’m so gay.

The news of McClanahan’s death inspired me to read more about her in real life—well, at least to expend enough finger energy to flitter over to her Wikipedia entry. I knew she’d been an outspoken advocate of gays and lesbians, as well as animals, but I didn’t realize that her support for the former went all the way back to 1971. Just two short years after the Stonewall riots, she costarred in a movie set in a Greenwich gay bar called Some of My Best Friends Are…, and she just so happened to play a “vicious fag hag.”

And then my mind switched gears, leaving the inimitable Rue and the issue of gay rights behind and instead focusing my attention on this term, fag hag. Now, I’ve never seen myself as a “fag”—although I’m sure many other people see me this way and unfortunately nothing more—but more important, I’ve certainly never regarded my many close female friends as “hags.” So I was curious to learn more about the unflattering stereotypes lying at the etymological root of this moniker, which describes straight women who tend to gravitate toward gay men. Enter the psychologist Nancy Bartlett and her colleagues, who published the first quantitative study of “fag hags” in the journal Body Image.

These researchers, too, found the term intriguing. There are plenty of other colorful expressions that capture this distinct demographic rather vividly, some less insultingly so than others, including:

• Fruit fly

• Queen bee

• Queer dear

• Fairy godmother

• Fag shagger

• Queen magnet

• Hag along

• Swish dish

• Faggotina

• Homo honey

• Fairy collector

• Fairy princess

• Fagnet

But it’s “fag hag” that resonates in the public consciousness. The researchers note that in both popular media and everyday expression, the term stirs up in most people’s minds the image of an unattractive, overweight, desperate woman who seeks out the company of gay men to compensate for her lack of romantic attention from straight guys. Sorting through anecdotes from previous research, television, and cheap romance novels, the authors find that other common stereotypes paint the fag hag as being notoriously camp, overly emotional, unstable, and craving attention (think Megan Mullally’s character Karen Walker from Will & Grace).

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