Girls who like Boys who like Boys

Diamonds may be forever, but it turns out that a gay boy is actually a girl's best friend, according to a new book that is the first definitive guide to the "fag hag".

Now a new book chronicles the (mostly) ups and (occasional) downs of having a gay man as a girl's best friend. Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys -- true tales of love, lust and friendship between straight women and gay men was launched in New York last week with a rainbow of hysterical real life stories and a few predictably melodramatic tear-jerkers.

Robinovitz in her chapter Shop Girls, wrote that while her female friends are competitive when shopping and "secretly want your ass to look fat", her entourage of gay men makes her feel like "Marie Antoinette and her court" as they encourage her to buy extravagantly, telling her she looks divine, while "holding my handbags more gracefully than I do".

One of the book's editors, Melissa De La Cruz, said she sought to puncture the high-camp stereotype by telling how her gay male co-editor Tom Dolby was the rock-solid shoulder who was most there for her out of all her friends when she suffered a miscarriage and she and her husband were heartbroken. "He was a real man," she said.