AKA William

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Way back in October, when AKA William was just a little gayby site (I had been in beta-beta-beta mode for a week), I wrote a post called “Musto And A Musty Topic“ in response to a column by Michael Musto about the new “fag hag.”

At the time, I wrote this:

It’s like, are there really fag hags out there? Still? Are there young ones out there? I would totally buy lonely and lost 48-year-old fag hags who have been fag-hagging it up since the 1980s and don’t really know what’s modern these days, but new fag hags? As in youthful? In a post-Hillary world, shouldn’t fags hags be an endangered species?

About thirty-eight seconds after I published the post, Michael Musto wrote to me, saying, “‘Are they really new fag hags?’ you ask. Are you out of your mind? I go out every SINGLE night to Pieces, Beige, Barracuda, Therapy, Hiro, Mr. Black, and on and on and on…and there are TONS of them!!!!!”

I was so scared! I’ve been a fan of Musto’s for ages, and here he was yelling at me and my gayby gay site!

But, now, here we are ten months later, and it looks like I was on to something. Salon’s Thomas Rogers has written a piece called “Ladies: I’m not your gay boyfriend.” In it, he writes:

Nowadays, when a grown woman describes herself as a “fag hag,” it feels like she’s throwing around a designer label or telling me she knows a celebrity – a kind of social conspicuous consumption. Worse, it’s a designer label that’s faded from fashion — like a Juicy-brand velour sweat suit. In the past decade, gay men have become less defined and ghettoized by our sexuality than ever before, making terms like “fag hag” feel as retrograde as, well, “Will & Grace.”

I’m checking my email now . . . .