The "Straight Hag"

This post was submitted by Miguel Baca, curious observer of realities within and without, happily married, and a new resident of Adams Morgan.

Historians to be will always look back fondly at the gay community for coining the brilliant term "fag hag". When I first heard the word it took me a while to understand the concept. Coming from a culture where segregation of all types is always practiced but not discussed or debated, I had a hard time realizing that the English language (a prodigy of rational thinking) needs to apprehend reality through words. Ironically though, this need has developed into a culture where words (and images) have not only apprehended reality but have taken it hostage. So what started as an insult for women who associate mostly (and sometimes exclusively) with gay men has become an innocuous adjective characterizing the search for safe and intimate relationships with men without sexual tension.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved to do things most other kids didn’t. Take my cousins Cesar and Guillermo, roughly my age and utterly frustrated because it was summertime, we had a football, and I would prefer to spend my time burying my nose in books I’d find in their father’s library room. I also loved listening to music most kids didn’t dig, talking to adults about history and literature, taking care of pigeons with broken wings (disturbingly enough for an 11 year old, I was absolutely convinced that my role was to accompany them while they died and then give them a dignified burial), creating elaborate modern dance choreographies in the comfort of my mom’s bathroom and listening to the maids for hours, in mesmerized silence, talking about the villages with no electricity they left behind when they moved to Lima.

Naturally, a little guy like that gravitated toward other freaks and misfits like him. Even though I also befriended jocks, class presidents, and other forms of overcompensating losers in high school, most of my friends were fun, kind, creative, and intellectually stimulating pot-heads. They were also mostly straight. We would spend endless hours discussing our passion for Herbert Marcuse’s writings, debating whether Fidel was good or bad for Cuba (we were split on that one…), criticizing Peru’s almost medieval class system, going to experimental plays in underground theaters or playing guitar and singing Morrissey and Cure songs out of tune. When I was around 16 and came out to my friends, most of them quietly asked some random questions while rolling a spliff ("So do you like me? … Why not?" or "Please don’t tell me that means you actually like Cher") and off we were to the beach. The friends I had so much in common with had only one concern: that I find a really cool guy to date (preferably Morrissey himself). Having not experienced major rejection from my group, it was not necessary for me to go out and meet new people to hang out with. My friends remained my friends and we remained sharing the experience of growing up and out together. And in the meantime, I became a straight hag.

Finding gay guys to date or befriend as a straight hag was not hard either. It actually happened in a much more organic and natural way because I got to meet men I had a lot in common with (such as Diego, a poet in the making or Juan Luis, an archaeology student I had the most fun with digging trenches in the outskirts of Lima). When I came to the US I realized that socialization in the gay world is a radically different process. Having been brought together by a false sense of "community", gay men in a club or a bar rarely have much in common other than engaging in buggery. By and large, friendships do not seem to have been built on the grounds of shared interests cultivated by a strong sense of individuality but rather on a vague and artificial definition of what it means to be gay that is imposed on people by the media and self-perpetuated by gay men. And because of that, interactions and conversations have to be kept at the lowest common denominator (presumably sex and guys, or sex with guys or any other combination of these words).

Last night, my friends and I went out to a gay bar. Maybe the environment is charged with sexual tension and makes it difficult for them to relax and be themselves. Or maybe the artificiality of the bonds becomes very evident in such circumstances. Perhaps there is a mandatory policy of checking your brain at the door before you walk in. But whatever the reasons behind it, it doesn’t seem to be an enjoyable experience for the majority of people in there. What made it more unpalatable was the fact that my friends and I had just spent the earlier hours of the evening at a house-warming party organized by a straight couple and their friends. The abundance of women was a refreshing change from the testosterone-ridden setting of most gay get-togethers. The realization that most people in that room had things in common other than their sexual orientation, let it be their intellectual interests, political preferences, artistic inclinations or simply a passion for poker, was absolutely invigorating. I mean, I have never been able to meet anybody at a gay bar who is a tech-wiz and is eager to discuss Russian literature (we agreed that you cannot really conclude that Anna Karenina is better than Crime and Punishment; they both illustrate different things and are brutally good at that). And as the straight hag that I am, I thrived interacting with guys I had more in common with than the fact that we want to fall in love with guys.

Ironically, being a straight hag has allowed me to get rid of labels and discover intimacy and acceptance in the most unexpected places.