The Brooklyn Rail

To define myself as bisexual seems reductionist. I prefer to describe myself as polyamorous, with or without sexual relations, meaning that I refuse to distinguish between what is “sexual” and what is not.

Some childhoods predispose people in the most natural way to a lack of prejudice. Lola Miesseroff grew up in Marseille with a Russian Jewish mother, a social worker and later a typist, and a father of Armenian and Russian heritage who had a sandpaper-manufacturing business before working as an electrician. Her first nanny was a lion tamer. Her parents ran and lived at a naturist center where the most open sexual variety reigned and where the young Lola matured without complications. Men could be feminine, women masculine, and loving relationships developed free of any received rules or rigid moral codes. Were the great variation in humanity by which we are surrounded were stained by no form of exclusion, militating for one tendency against others would seem strange: it would make more sense to embrace none or all of those differences.

The goal of liberating the body may nevertheless run into unexpected obstacles. As Lola notes,

I must admit that the cult of sexual pleasure was not entirely positive for me. Paralyzed in a way by a parental sexual superego, by its injunction to taste the joys of the flesh, I wasted a ridiculously long time before sloughing off my virginity. This delay was reinforced by older friends telling me how “the first time is really important”: in short, you mustn't get it wrong.

As a young student she was introduced by a member of the naturist circle to mainly homosexual young men with whom she got on perfectly. It was one of them who said to her one day, “Some girls love sailors, some love soldiers, but you, my dear, are a real fag hag!” As Lola points out, “These days the word pédé [fag, approximately] seems to serve as an insult. At that time, however, the term was neutral, because homosexual, still less than a hundred years old, was marred by its unwelcome medical or legal connotation of ‘socialized sexual deviance.’”

Lola’s memoir escorts us through the mid-1960s in the company of young people passionately searching for authenticity and a salutary revolt powered by hearts beating and battle-ready. The stew of ideas and forms in which these inquisitive and adventurous souls dwelt melded the Beats, the Situationists, and the songs of Barbara. (Later Lola would find herself sharing a table in a night-time bar with Léo Ferré and the young Marie-Christine Diaz, Ferré's future wife.) To cap all this social effervescence, “May 68” would arrive right on time.

An anecdote among others gives us a glimpse of the post-1968 Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF), when our heroine and her friends attended a meeting of this exclusively female organization and sought to defend their group’s way of embracing men and women, hetero or homo, but their message fell on deaf ears. In 1971 they gravitated to the Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front (FHAR), founded notably by the writer Françoise d’Eaubonne. This was a time when the periodical Tout!, associated with the “Mao Spontex” tendency, published FHAR demands. Later, after 1981 and after multiple betrayals, Guy Hocquenghem would famously denounce revolutionaries who had moved swiftly from Mao jackets to memberships in the Rotary Club.

Back at the FHAR, a group known as Les Gazolines (1972–74) had split off. As Lola writes, “Within the FHAR we found our soul sisters in the shape of the Gazolines, an informal group of girls and queens; several of the latter transitioned later.” Among these was Hélène Hazera, later a well-known TV and film critic at the daily newspaper Libération before producing and hosting a show on France-Culture radio playing mainly Francophone and Arabic music. Hazera has provided her friend Lola’s memoir with an afterword.

Through the lens of a single trajectory—her own, of course—Lola Miesseroff's book is nothing less than a paean to freedom, openness and mutual respect: a breath of fresh air at a time when inquisitorial constraints seem to have taken over on all levels. Needless to say, the shrinking of desire and spontaneity is inevitably accompanied by the growth of terror and violence. In this age of generalized policing, the degree of power abuse and violent assaults can hardly be said to have lessened, while the publicity afforded them does nothing to enhance justice but tends rather, behind a façade of conformity, to broaden the realm of squalor, resentment and crime.

Reading Fag Hag also reminds us that living beyond the pale of bourgeois norms and the work world was once financially possible without too much sacrifice. Small casual jobs and a variety of hustles could support a decent life. Today, just like yesterday, of course, a belief in sharing and the refusal to save up for the future are the foundations of any sane existence.

My most cherished wish, however, is that any need to claim some particular sexual orientation should disappear. That we should simply love individuals in their difference. But this cannot happen without the abolition not only of the exploitation of labor, not just of the institutions of the couple, the family, and normal and normative sexuality, but also of everything else that in a general way steals and poisons our lives.

Lola Miesseroff's first book, Voyage en outre-gauche (Voyage through the Outer Left), as yet untranslated, gathered testimonials and memories of a good many veterans of May 1968. In this one, she writes in the first person with a simplicity and straightforwardness that warms the heart. Her message is salutary and invigorating. May it help rid us of the Jesuitism that surrounds us and for which it is a perfect antidote.