I once knew a fag hag called Ginger. One day she lost her mind and stuffed her fur coat in the oven. Then she turned the oven on high. It smelled horrible. The fur coat was destroyed, but Ginger wasn’t. She eventually recovered.
Fag hags in 1970s London were resilient. They were young and silly and often drunk, just like us fags.
I consider myself fortunate to have been born a happy-go-lucky card-carrying fag. If, for whatever reason, I were to have been denied this privilege, then I would have settled for being the next best thing: a fag hag.
Maxine, Eve, Pamela, Jeanine, Hattie! Where are you now? Where are the great fag hags of yore? And why did they disappear? Like 8-track cassettes and princess phones and Idi Amin, the fag hag, as I knew her, is a thing of the past. She’s an obsolete concept. An extinct species. She’s very last century, dahling! Haggus fagulous ceased roaming the earth about a quarter of a century ago. The 1970s was, in fact, the golden age of the fag hag. I know whereof I speak. I was fag to many a hag.
It all made perfect sense at the time. The smartest, most sensible thing you could do back then, if you were a single working-class girl, was to get a job in a fag-rich environment, be it a hair salon or a department store. Then, with the encouragement and support of your new coterie of fags, you could henna your hair, buy a few Bowie and T. Rex albums and an electric blue jumpsuit, and become a raging, screaming, eyebrow plucking, feather boa totin’, fishnet lovin’, cocktail quaffing, cigarette holder manipulatin’ fag hag.
Fag hags emerged from the working classes. Upper-class gals never became fag hags. Why would they? Their idyllic lives were a montage of privilege, country houses, tweed skirts, hunt balls, and dinner parties with Clarinda and Arabella and Sebastian. No such guaranteed delights awaited a working-class gal—a Sharon, a Sheila, or a Shirley. If she didn’t watch out, she could easily find herself pulling entrails out of chickens’ bums in a factory for the rest of her life. To avoid this fate, Sharon or Sheila or Shirley had to do something drastic.
Becoming a fag hag was something you did if life handed you a second-class ticket and you had a deep-seated, unshakeable feeling that this was the wrong ticket and that you might be a lot more comfy if you were able to sneak into that tarted-up, squishy, velvet-draped first-class carriage. For a girl with delusions and a bit of imagination, becoming a fag hag was the only way to go. Instead of a nylon chicken-gutting uniform, you could wear a cape made of jet-black, glazed cock-feathers with a spot-veiling fascinator covering your eyes, like Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, and you could stare at the world with an amused, heavy-lidded, irony-drenched gaze.
Life as a fag hag was camp and fizzy and fun. You could jump on the sequined coattails of gay boys, gay boys who could cross socioeconomic boundaries. We gay boys could take you places or at least make you feel that you might stand a chance in hell of going places! Even if we were standing still, hanging out with us fun-loving perfumed nellies was so much more appealing than dealing with smelly beer-drinking straight blokes—the ones we gay boys often had our eyes on—who just wanted to beat each other up and whose idea of a romantic night out was to shag Shirley, Sheila, or Sharon up against a wall behind the pub.
We 1970s gay boys were insanely more fun to be around, and unlike uncouth straight boys, we got invited to things. We knew about things. We knew about people, people like Yma Sumac and Yves Saint Laurent and La Lupe and Kiki de Montparnasse and the Marchesa Casati and Nancy Cunard, the rebel aristo who had a penchant for black men and wore hundreds of ivory bracelets right up to her armpits. We were common and lowborn but we had a natural instinct for ferreting out fabulous historical tidbits and eccentric personalities from our culture. We smoked colored cocktail cigarettes and found humor in everything and wore outré outfits and did whatever the fuck we wanted to. If skinhead gangs chased us and called us “bloody poofs,” we jumped on buses that were going in the wrong direction to get away and then giggled about it.
The fag hag took her cue from the fag: Armed with her faggotry, she side-stepped the grim demands of adult life. She found a way to feel very grown-up and glamorous—her look was often a pastiche of Hollywood grown-up glamour—while simultaneously prolonging the innocence of childhood dress-up.
The fag hags that I knew were all flashy dressers. Jerry Hall, Bianca Jagger, Tina Chow, Paloma Picasso, Loulou de la Falaise, Zandra Rhodes, Marisa Berenson, The Pointer Sisters, Angie Bowie, Amanda Lear, these were the idols and role models for my fag hags. It is possible that there were dowdy, frumpy fag hags with Iris Murdoch–bowl haircuts and flannel skirts and thick underwear and crummy eyewear, but I seriously doubt it. To be a fag hag in seventies London was to wear cat-eye glasses and be in a perpetual state of readiness to be discovered and shot for the cover of the next Roxy Music album. To be a fag hag meant you were out twirling a feather boa, on display, every night of the week.
We—me and my fags and fag hags—hung out at gay pubs like the Vauxhall Tavern and The Black Cap and small groovy clubs like The Masquerade and Chaguaramas. Our fave was a tatty club with a light-up dance floor on Kensington High Street called The Sombrero. It was piss elegant and posey, which perfectly matched the mood of fashion at the time—very art deco, if you know what I mean. When the massive Biba store—one of the largest employers of fag hags in British history—opened across the street, The Sombrero was packed with boys with pomaded hair and Bakelite bracelets and girls in suede platforms and smoky eyes and, for the thinner fag hag, leopard-print belts that were about a foot wide. Fags and fag hags believed in the transformative power of accessories.
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.