“Some girls love sailors, some love soldiers, but you, my dear, are a real fag hag!”

Lola Miesseroff’s childhood certainly predisposed her to be a rebel. She was born in 1947 to immigrant parents, and 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” childhood.

Lola’s picaresque memoir Fag Hag tracks her peregrinations through what she calls the “outer left” from Marseille to Avignon and Paris—always deeply committed and involved in women’s liberation, sexual liberation, and LBGTQ liberation yet always on the fringe of formal organizations. This outer left embraced with enthusiasm experimentation with polysexuality, living communally, and organizing public demonstrations.

“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.’”