As a decades-long fan of The Golden Girls, I was saddened by the death of Rue McClanahan last year. In fact, I think I genuinely shed a palpable, detectable tear, which is something I can't remember ever doing on the death of a celebrity, with the exception perhaps of Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty.

It sounds rather homosexually cliché, I know, but my partner, Juan, and I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of The Golden Girls every night before bed. And along with the other "girls," as we call them, Rue's character Blanche Devereaux—the libidinous southern belle with an insatiable appetite for rich cheesecake and rich men—has become something of an imaginary, smile-inducing friend in our home.

Fortunately, Blanche's carnal spirit is burned forever on our DVDs. But the news of McClanahan's death inspired me to read more about her in real life. I knew she'd been an outspoken advocate of gays and lesbians, as well as animals, but I didn't realize that her support for the former went all the way back to 1971. Just a few short years after the Stonewall Riots, she co-starred in a movie set in a Greenwich gay bar called "Some of My Best Friends Are.." as a "vicious fag hag".

So what is it about this term, "fag hag"? Now I've never seen myself as a "fag"—although I'm sure many other people do see me this way and unfortunately nothing more—but more importantly I've certainly never regarded my many close female friends as "hags." So I was curious to learn more about the unflattering stereotypes lying at the etymological root of this moniker, which describes straight women who tend to gravitate toward gay men. Enter Mount Saint Vincent University psychologist Nancy Bartlett and her colleagues, who recently published the first quantitative study of fag hags in the journal Body Image.

These researchers, too, found the term "fag hag" intriguing. There are plenty of other colorful expressions that capture this distinct demographic rather vividly, some less insultingly so than others, including ::

• Fruit fly
• Queen bee
• Queer dear
• Fairy godmother
• Fag shagger
• Queen magnet
• Hag along
• Swish dish
• Faggotina
• Homo honey
• Fairy collector
• Fairy princess
• Fagnet
•  
• What's especially fascinating is the authors' observation that this social category of women who like men who like men may be "cross-culturally robust." The French have soeurettes ("Little Sisters"), the Germans,  Schwulen-Muttis ("Gay Moms"), and the Mexicans, joteras ("jota" is commonly used for "fag"). In Japan, these women are called okoge, translated literally as "the burnt rice that sticks to the bottom of the pot."

But it's "fag hag" that resonates in the public consciousness. The researchers note that both in popular media and everyday expression, the term conjures up the image of an unattractive, overweight, desperate woman who seeks out the company of gay men to compensate for her lack of romantic attention from straight guys. The authors find that other common stereotypes paint the fag hag as being notoriously camp, overly emotional, unstable and as craving attention (e.g., Megan Mullally's character Karen Walker from Will & Grace).

The comedienne Margaret Cho, a well-known and self-proclaimed fag hag, states :: 

The gay man in your life is not concerned with your youth and beauty. He wants to know your soul. He loves you for your courage and intellect. Whether you are lovely or plain, you are beautiful to him for these qualities—and many more.

As "the gay man" in many women's lives, I'm not sure Cho's got it entirely right about us—she seems to be idealizing gay men—there are plenty of superficial gay men out there. But what Bartlett and her co-authors were especially interested in with their 2009 study was if there's any truth to the negative stereotypes surrounding fag hags.

So, they invited 154 heterosexual women of all ages, education, and relationship status to participate in an Internet-based survey on fag-haggery (my term, not theirs). Each woman was asked to provide certain quantifiable information that would allow the authors to test several key hypotheses about the myth of the fag hag. First, women simply gave the total numbers of gay male, straight male and female friends they had and rate their degree of "closeness". 

Next, the women completed a commonly used instrument called the Body Esteem Scale (BES), a 24-item questionnaire measuring a woman's self-perceived sexual attractiveness and her weight concerns. Finally, each of the participants provided information about their romantic history over the past two years, including whether they'd been the "dumper" or the "dumpee" in recent failed relationships.

The results were analyzed to test the common assumption that women befriend gay men because they have poor body esteem and feel unattractive to straight men. If this were true, the authors reason, then there should be a meaningful statistical association between a woman's number of gay male friends and her body esteem and relationship success—in other words, the more pathetic a woman's romantic life and the more she sees herself as being undesirable to straight men, the more she should seek out gay men as friends.

But the data revealed otherwise. In fact, with this sample at least, there was absolutely no link between a woman's relationship status, the number of times she'd been on the receiving end of a breakup, or her body esteem and the number of gay male friends in her life.

But there were also some unexpected findings in this study ::

The more gay male friends that a woman had, the more sexually attractive she found herself.

Perhaps being around gay men offers these women some relief from the constant sexual overtures of straight men. Perhaps a woman's body esteem is enhanced the more that she's around flattering gay men. On the other hand, the longer that a woman has been friends with her closest gay male friend, the lower her perceived sexual attractiveness. On interpreting this unexpected finding, the authors suggest that this may actually reflect some core, but nuanced truth of the "fag hag" stereotype :: "Perhaps women who perceive themselves as less sexually attractive develop closer relationships with gay men."

Debunking common assumptions in science is nothing new, and that goes for the myth of the fag hag too.

To my own favorite fairy princess, Ginger :: This one's for you. I love you. 

About the author: Jesse Bering Jesse is the Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture and a Reader in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. A research psychologist by training, he writes the popular weekly column "Bering in Mind," a featured blog for the Scientific American website. Learn more about Jesse. Image © iStockphoto.com/Galina Barskaya