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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" "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."
144 pages, Paperback
Published September 26, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 5, 2024
picked up at a small book store in Barcelona…Very Nice
March 25, 2025
i bought this book cause it was small and easily fit in my bag. it's title and salacious cover were big pluses. the content, i later found out, is it's best part. i am amused every time i pick it up, though i often struggle to explain to others what the hell it is i am reading.
havnt finished yet
havnt finished yet
December 19, 2025
Disjointed, but delightfully queer.
February 10, 2024
FAG HAG
By Lola Miesseroff
Afterword by Hélène Hazera
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
PM Press 2023
Review by John Galbraith Simmons
In the 1960s a small number among the young and alienated in France set in motion a revolt that took aim at political and cultural life in ways that set the stage for a permanent, ongoing critique of everyday life. Sex and sexuality, in this ambitious endeavor, constituted a central theater of engagement that has never since gone dark. As a testament to its early days Fag Hag, Lola Miesseroff’s lively and intriguing memoir, is as cool, collected and trenchant a guide as we’re likely to get.
Born shortly after World War II to Russian emigrants who settled in Marseilles, Lola grew up in a small world marked by far left-wing politics that made her readily receptive to a milieu that sang odes to free love. Her parents were radicals with an anarchist bent; both nudists, they established a naturist camp in the late 1940s and constituted a “tribe” that included all sexual shades and colors. Such that in childhood, as Lola writes simply, “I formed no notion of ‘sexual orientation.’”
Thus “de-gendered” but endowed with acute intelligence and a strident personality, she arrived at the university in Aix-en-Provence in 1965 on the cusp of the sexual revolution. It was soon to be a moment of inflection for political engagement by students amid gathering opposition to France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the bankruptcy of Gaullist politics, and the dead weight of the French communist party. The nationwide uprisings of 1968 would not be far behind.
Lola, who is also author of an oral history Voyage en outre-gauche : Paroles de francs-tireurs des années 68 of the ultra-left in France during the 1960s, recounts her involvement in a blend of anarcho-politics and nonconformist activism, avant-garde Situationism and crazy lifestyle experiments. Her own brand of pansexuality did not involve existential agony or soul-searching; rather, she was naturally extravagant and writes that “I seemed to be a magnet to men-loving men.” Hence her memoir’s title. But she loved women as well as men. One of them, Hélène Hazera, provides a post-face and describes Fag Hag a “precious collection of recipes for freedom, a fine guide to combining political activism with personal liberation.”
An accurate assessment, for Fag Hag provides engaging brief portraits and snapshots of the left-of-left side of everyday life in the late 1960s. After leaving the university, Lola became part of a little demimonde “rife with pédés and gouines” and she paints memorable and often sensitive portraits, albeit brief, of the characters in her entourage. She doesn’t flinch, either, from detailing the dangers of gay cruising at the time or some of the sordid and painful stories that went with it.
As for herself, Lola developed a personal style replete with big hats, fishnet gloves, and a pre-Goth chalk-white complexion blessed with a fur muff in winter. She readily became part of the counterculture that emerged in France. Her comrades were anarchists or libertarian communists, often influenced by the politics of Situationism. In activist battles Lola and her friends contested at every turn the frequently bourgeois roots of left-wing currents, including the advent of second wave feminism and reappearance of older-fashioned Marxist politics, tinged if not infused by dyed-in-the-wool Stalinism. Noting the fashionable surge of Maoist politics in the late 1960s, one of Lola’s most charming anecdotes recalls her friends the Gazolines, a tiny group dedicated to far-left mayhem. This agglomeration of queens and transvestites showed up at the funeral of Pierre Overney, a murdered militant whose proletarian hero status enabled Maoists to fundraise gangbusters off his tragic death. As thousands attended his funeral (including Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault), the Gazolines joined the funeral cortege as obstreperous weepers, gay and loud, winding their way to Père Lachaise cemetery.
Told with gusto and steeped in revolt, Fag Hag with its tales of general subversion serves up multiple antidotes to the conformist currents that underlie today’s fragmented identity politics and threaten the very spirit of rebellion that’s essential to any hope of revolutionary transformation in the name of human freedom.
Translated with pure brio by Donald-Nicholson Smith.
By Lola Miesseroff
Afterword by Hélène Hazera
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
PM Press 2023
Review by John Galbraith Simmons
In the 1960s a small number among the young and alienated in France set in motion a revolt that took aim at political and cultural life in ways that set the stage for a permanent, ongoing critique of everyday life. Sex and sexuality, in this ambitious endeavor, constituted a central theater of engagement that has never since gone dark. As a testament to its early days Fag Hag, Lola Miesseroff’s lively and intriguing memoir, is as cool, collected and trenchant a guide as we’re likely to get.
Born shortly after World War II to Russian emigrants who settled in Marseilles, Lola grew up in a small world marked by far left-wing politics that made her readily receptive to a milieu that sang odes to free love. Her parents were radicals with an anarchist bent; both nudists, they established a naturist camp in the late 1940s and constituted a “tribe” that included all sexual shades and colors. Such that in childhood, as Lola writes simply, “I formed no notion of ‘sexual orientation.’”
Thus “de-gendered” but endowed with acute intelligence and a strident personality, she arrived at the university in Aix-en-Provence in 1965 on the cusp of the sexual revolution. It was soon to be a moment of inflection for political engagement by students amid gathering opposition to France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the bankruptcy of Gaullist politics, and the dead weight of the French communist party. The nationwide uprisings of 1968 would not be far behind.
Lola, who is also author of an oral history Voyage en outre-gauche : Paroles de francs-tireurs des années 68 of the ultra-left in France during the 1960s, recounts her involvement in a blend of anarcho-politics and nonconformist activism, avant-garde Situationism and crazy lifestyle experiments. Her own brand of pansexuality did not involve existential agony or soul-searching; rather, she was naturally extravagant and writes that “I seemed to be a magnet to men-loving men.” Hence her memoir’s title. But she loved women as well as men. One of them, Hélène Hazera, provides a post-face and describes Fag Hag a “precious collection of recipes for freedom, a fine guide to combining political activism with personal liberation.”
An accurate assessment, for Fag Hag provides engaging brief portraits and snapshots of the left-of-left side of everyday life in the late 1960s. After leaving the university, Lola became part of a little demimonde “rife with pédés and gouines” and she paints memorable and often sensitive portraits, albeit brief, of the characters in her entourage. She doesn’t flinch, either, from detailing the dangers of gay cruising at the time or some of the sordid and painful stories that went with it.
As for herself, Lola developed a personal style replete with big hats, fishnet gloves, and a pre-Goth chalk-white complexion blessed with a fur muff in winter. She readily became part of the counterculture that emerged in France. Her comrades were anarchists or libertarian communists, often influenced by the politics of Situationism. In activist battles Lola and her friends contested at every turn the frequently bourgeois roots of left-wing currents, including the advent of second wave feminism and reappearance of older-fashioned Marxist politics, tinged if not infused by dyed-in-the-wool Stalinism. Noting the fashionable surge of Maoist politics in the late 1960s, one of Lola’s most charming anecdotes recalls her friends the Gazolines, a tiny group dedicated to far-left mayhem. This agglomeration of queens and transvestites showed up at the funeral of Pierre Overney, a murdered militant whose proletarian hero status enabled Maoists to fundraise gangbusters off his tragic death. As thousands attended his funeral (including Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault), the Gazolines joined the funeral cortege as obstreperous weepers, gay and loud, winding their way to Père Lachaise cemetery.
Told with gusto and steeped in revolt, Fag Hag with its tales of general subversion serves up multiple antidotes to the conformist currents that underlie today’s fragmented identity politics and threaten the very spirit of rebellion that’s essential to any hope of revolutionary transformation in the name of human freedom.
Translated with pure brio by Donald-Nicholson Smith.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews