Fag hag

A straight woman who loves the company of gay men and counts many of us among her closest friends; once an insult, now often said with affection.

A fag hag is a straight woman who loves the company of gay men and has plenty of us as friends. She is the one at the gay bar on a Saturday night, the plus-one at every Pride, the woman who knows the words to every Kylie song and the name of your ex. The phrase sounds nasty, and it was, but many women now say it about themselves with a grin.

It is not the same as a beard, who pretends to be a gay man's girlfriend: the fag hag pretends nothing, and everybody knows exactly what is going on.

Where it comes from

The phrase rhymes fag with hag, an old insult for an unattractive older woman, and it was made to wound both parties at once. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it in a 1958 novel as "Hag Mag the Fag Bag", and in its usual form by 1963, when a woman was dismissed as "a fag hag with a sag". A 1965 glossary of gay terms defined it plainly as "a nonhomosexual female who likes consorting with homosexuals". In older use it could also mean a straight woman married to a gay man, which takes us back toward the beard.

The idea behind the insult was that no woman would spend time with gay men unless she could not get a straight one. That was always nonsense, and the women who loved us through the bad decades, often caring for friends with AIDS when their families would not, proved it.

Reclaimed, mostly

Like a lot of words in this dictionary, fag hag has been taken back. Plenty of women call themselves fag hags with pride, and plenty of gay men use it with affection for their best friend. Not everyone likes it: as far back as 2000 a writer in The Independent called it "demeaning and insulting to heterosexual women who have homosexual male friends". It still contains a slur, and it lands very differently from a stranger than from your best friend.

Variants and close relatives

• Fruit fly: the gentler, sillier version, from fruit.
• Fag moll: an older variant from the 1960s.
• Fag stag: the straight man who hangs out with gay men, a rarer but growing species.

Related terms