Fag Hag

"Some girls fancy sailors, others fancy soldiers. But you, my dear, are a fag hag!"

Lola Miesseroff's childhood certainly predisposed her to be a rebel.
She was born in Marseilles in 1947 to immigrant parents, her mother a
Russian-Jewish social worker, her father an Armenian-Russian with a
sandpaper-making workshop in sheds left behind by the Americans. The
family ran and lived in a nudist colony, a place where the men were
allowed to be feminine, the women masculine. Hers was what she calls a
"degendered" childhood: "I never suffered from identity problems. There
were two genocides in my background, one Jewish, the other Armenian, and
my education was Russophone, naturist and libertarian, not least with
respect to love and sex. In other words, we were marginal in every
possible way."

Lola’s picaresque memoir Fag Hag tracks her peregrinations
through what she calls the "Outer Left"—always deeply committed and
involved in women's liberation, sexual liberation, gay, and LBGTQ
liberation—yet always on the fringe of formal organizations (or driven
there) because of her belief that anarcho-communist revolution (not her
term) trumps all (inter)sectional struggles without reducing them. From
Marseilles to Avignon and Paris, Lola's trajectory epitomizes a far left
that opposed a spirit of provocation and raillery to the austerity of
many militant groupuscules and experimented enthusiastically with
communal and polysexual living.

"I have dredged my memory," Lola writes, "in the hope that revisiting
the past might help illuminate our present; if it doesn't, I shall have
failed. I want to contribute in some small measure to the struggles of
today by exposing the strengths and weaknesses of the struggles of the
past, and to contest fragmented identity politics in favor of
all-for-one-and-one-for-all. Which is my way of continuing to challenge
the power structure."