Lola Miesseroff was destined to join the struggle against “the old world.” Born in 1947 in Marseilles, her Russian-speaking émigré parents ran the local nudist colony, where men were allowed to be feminine, women masculine. Lola’s “degendered childhood” and libertarian upbringing put her on course to be a lifelong rebel. Coming of age during the wildnesses of “the long 1968,” her life has been a trip through experiments in communal living, free love, radical feminisms and oppositional communism. Her memoir Fag Hag chronicles that journey. She is a longtime proponent of sexual freedom and polyamorousness as a weapon integral to the revolutionary life.
Lola is the author of a striking nonsectarian oral history of the 1968 uprising in France: Voyage en outre-gauche: Paroles de francs-tireurs des années 68 (Paris: Libertalia, 2018) [Travels on the Outer Left: Irregulars of 1968 Speak]. Her emphasis there was on individuals with memories of that time around the country, not just in Paris.
In her most recent book, Davai! (Paris: Libertalia, 2022), Lola traces her descent from “a long line of Russian, Jewish, stateless and rebellious women.” As she notes, “Anyone not born a free woman can certainly become one, but it is much easier when the path has been laid down by your forebears.”
Over the years Lola Miesseroff has contributed widely to libertarian-communist publications as writer, editor and publisher.
Fag Hag
SKU: 9798887440101
Author: Lola Miesseroff • Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith • Afterword by Hélène Hazera
Series: PM Press
ISBN: 9798887440101
Published: 09/26/23
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Pages: 144
Subjects: Personal Memoir / Human Sexuality / LGBTQ+ Studies
Praise
“A breath of fresh air in a time when inquisitorial constraints seem to have the whip hand whichever way we turn…. Lola writes in the first person with a simplicity that makes you feel good.… Her message is healthy, invigorating—may it free us from the ambient Jesuitism.”
—Jean-Claude Leroy, Mediapart
“Lola lives revolt: anarchism, Situationist International, libertarian communism, ‘outer left’… action committees, Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front (FHAR), Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes), Les Gazolines…. Communal apartments, scandals, doing drugs (joints and acid—but no needles), dérives, living from odd jobs and expedients, drinking, making love/fucking (where was the dividing line?), networking, traveling to find friends and comrades (but no hippy trail to Kathmandu—that would be a copout), and ever ready for action but never lapsing into militantism (‘the highest stage of alienation’).”
—Gilles Dauvé, author of Your Place or Mine? A 21st Century Essay on (Same) Sex
“Now that everything is commercialized and our liberated zones have shriveled, this book of Lola’s is a precious collection of recipes for freedom, a fine guide to combining political activism with personal liberation.”
—Hélène Hazera, from the afterwordart
“In the summer of 2020 some twenty-five million people came out into the streets of the USA under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Could this unprecedented–and multicultural–display prefigure the transcendence of an identity politics which, for all its victories in the maistream, has plagued and scattered the universalizing radical energy of the “1960s”? Whatever the answer, Lola Miesseroff’s provocative book cannot fail to fuel this cardinal debate.”
—Dave Barbu
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