Long before the term "fag hag" existed, straight women and gay men have been pairing off due to their mutual interest in one thing: dudes.

When my grandma was growing up in New York state during the depression, I'm sure she never called herself a fag hag. Instead, she probably just thought of her friend Marshall, a flamboyant interior designer, as a kindred spirit. The most vivid memories I have of my grandmother was her uncanny ability to recite poetry that she and Marshall had memorized together over sixty years ago. They remained friends well into their 70s and died within only a couple months of each other. When my mom was in high school, she used to attend school dances with the effeminate drum major of the school's marching band. He died of AIDS about eight years ago. When I asked her once if she'd ever heard of the term fag hag, and explained that it meant a woman with lots of gay male friends, she replied: "In my day, that was just called being naïve."

And I guess you can say I was pretty naïve before I started spending more time with Scott* during my senior year of high school. We had known each other for years since we played the same instruments in band (clarinets) but we became closer when our other friendships broke down. We had numerous shared obsessions: that hot French horn player, the musical Rent, The B-52's, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, and a mutual disdain for gym class, which he even managed to make fun for me. When I made him count my timed sit-ups, he was sensitive enough to tell the teacher quietly so nobody would hear my pathetic number. He helped me take out my anger on my ex-friend by nailing the shit out of her with a badminton birdie. When he wasn't doing that, he was creating awesome mix tapes.

But the one thing that Scott provided that I needed the most, was an escape from the smothering goody-two-shoes environment that my former group of friends relished. Scott smoked -- and not just cigarettes. He committed three taboos that my old friends scorned: being gay, smoking cigarettes and smoking weed (and perhaps, even, drank an occasional beer). Hanging out with him made me feel cooler, wiser, more enlightened, however short-lived. When I went to college and suffered through an awful case of homesickness, his advice and support made me feel braver. Now that I'm through with college, my relationship with him is the rare high school friendship that remains unchanged.

My only question then is: what have I done for him? I've never partied as hard as his other friends, my own sexual preference certainly isn't breaking any small-town waves, and I rarely had the witty quips he seemed to have in spades. In a larger sense, what do the fags get out of the fag hag relationship, and are they looking for specific qualities in their hags? Is there a certain fag hag personality type that makes them more prone to these friendships? I sought the counsel of hags and homos alike to answer these questions and more, in the other battle of the sexes.

First, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't the only other woman that worried that her friendships with gay men might be a little one-sided. After taking a quick inventory of the girls I knew, I found out I wasn't alone. Right away I noticed that women's comfort level with gay men is a mitigating factor in the relationships. "It's never a question of 'does he really mean it or is he just saying it because he wants to get in my pants' -- some people say men and women can never really just be friends, but with gay men it could never be anything else," says my friend Amanda. Melissa Walker agrees, adding "Gay men still offer a MALE perspective. They might be gay, but they're still men, mentally and anatomically. Fag hags have a high comfort level with safe flirtation. Sometimes it can even go as far as kissing (at least in college), but it's always safe with gay friends -- but still semi-exciting. Again, they're still men!"

So now that we've determined why women love their gay men, what makes one woman more likely to participate in these friendships than another woman? Melissa thinks it has to do with a woman's success with straight men. "Most of my friends who are REALLY into the fag hag thing are women who haven't had many relationships of their own. Fag hagdom is a way to live vicariously in a "safe" relationship with men." For other women, fag haggery is a foreign concept. "I've actually never been a fag hag and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why," says Lindsay Robertson. "I think it's because I've been in a relationship for ten years. From my experience (also totally backed up on TV shows), most fag hag relationships exist between two chronically single people. I think fag hag relationships are usually based on commisseration about how men suck, etc. I've never had a need for that, since when my man sucked he sucked in ways not fathomable to a person who has never been in a really long term relationship."

In order to find out how accurate my friends' perceptions were, I went straight to the source, and posed these questions to gay men.

Not surprisingly, gay men appreciate straight women for the same reasons we love them: it's a friendship guaranteed to not result in awkwardness. Or as Scott explained it to me, "A girl is a friend that the gay guy can count on not getting a crush on, which is all too common when a gay guy and a straight guy become friends -- the gay guy gets a thing for the straight guy and the one-sided attraction thing rarely works, since most straight men feel a lot of awkwardness or insecurity when this happens, rather than just feeling flattered."

On the same note, writer and blogger Choire Sicha explains why he relates to women. "I have a strong aversion to needy women -- and a great love of tough women. I relate to women because I'm uncomfortable being a man. So now classic fag hags look to me like they just fell through a trap door from the 80s. Like, don't start off our relationship by pulling that wounded, adoring, self-hating girl shit with me. It's repellent," says Choire. "But I think gay men are just as afraid of and uncomfortable with straight men as many women, particularly the women who dabble in fag haggery. And so gay men deny themselves relationships with men and also avoid any critical thinking of what their manhood might mean or how it might operate -- skating through on fear and denial."

The lack of sexual tension likewise encourages other friendships to flourish -- straight women/straight women, hetero men/hetero men, hetero men/lesbians. And yet, the relationship between straight women and gay men gets special names like "fag hag," "fruit flies," or "queen bees," and wield enough novelty to be captured in shows like "Will and Grace" and "Sex and the City." Hetero women wear their fag hag label with pride -- being a fag hag is somehow a signifier of being hip or progressive.

"Now -- cultural gay identity is really widespread now, to straight men and women and even some gay people," says Sicha. "There's a classically gay frankness about sex, about affection, and a style of bitchery or honesty, depending on your perspective, that crossed over from the gay world. Now non-gay people who live in this world have greater, more understanding relationships with gays who live in that world. Does that make sense? By coming under the gay umbrella, the straight women get entree to intimacy with gays."

So everyone is a winner in fag hag friendships. Except for the straight men. And if you can't find a gay man of your own, all you have to do is turn on your TV these days.

"But I tell you -- I just want to kick that Grace Adler," says Sicha. "Such foul narcissism. Of course it's a contest of odiousness between her and Will Truman. Yeesh. I'll be happy when Megan Mullally gets her own show and I don't have to look at those two anymore. Heh: have to. Like anyone makes me Tivo that shit."

*Name has been changed.