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The name "fag hag" is given to straight women who form their strongest attachments with gay men. Although the exact nature of these attachments is elusive, reports of how the term is used indicate that it includes women who seek romantic and sexual affiliations with gay men.2 Fag hag is hardly a dignified name, evoking as it does the plaintive characters of a French farce who find themselves trapped in an absurd round of misdirected affections. Fag hags seem to take female supplementarity to its grotesque limits by appending themselves to men who by definition, that is, by some definitions of gay identity, can have no use for them. Situated on the margins of an already marginalized group, fag hags have failed to attain even a discursive visibility, meriting only one entry in the Oxford English Dictionary-and that referring to the now obsolete sense of a female chain smoker. Though salient enough as a social type to be something more than a temporary aberration to which all women might be prone, fag hags lack that specificity of identity and distinctive set of focused oppressions that would make the fag hag into a social species.
Yet the fact that we cannot make sense of the fag hag's affective proclivities in terms of existing categories of sexual identity suggests that the fag hag deserves more serious attention. This essay addresses the fag hag as a compelling border figure that traverses and thus calls into question fundamental categories of identity. If, for example, fag hags are straight in the sense that they desire members of the opposite sex, to what extent does heterosexuality depend upon the consummation as well as the experience of desire? What does it mean for the heterosexual desires of women to be trained on gay men rather than straight men-what is it about a gay sexual orientation that could arouse a heterosexual response? To what extent is sexual identity defined, changed or expanded not merely by the gender of the people we desire, but by the gender and sexuality of the people we attract? If straight women can be attracted to gay men, is the opposite also true? Fag hags challenge by their very existence the substance and stability of our sexual orientations, an...