Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

By Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

These “very funny-deep dives into the lives of the most dastardly queer people in history” offer a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond identity (Vogue).

What can we learn from the homosexual villains, failures, and baddies of our past?

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the 19th century, one central to major historical events.

Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839763304

Reviews for Bad Gays

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the most revered traditions of LGBT culture is the recitation of the stories of our illustrious predecessors. If great men and women like Sappho, Oscar Wilde, Billie Holiday and Alexander the Great fell in love with people of their own gender, that surely gives me a strong moral argument to confront homophobes with ... doesn't it? Almost every book on queer history has some version of this catalogue of Good Gays in it, and a few — like the embarrassing Homosexuals in History by A.L. Rowse — make it their sole raison d'être.There are some major weaknesses in this approach, attractive though it might seem, as you will realise if anyone has ever pointed out to you that Hitler was a vegetarian(*). Not only is it tricky to equate modern identities with the usually-undocumented sexual preferences of people who lived long ago, but celebrity doesn't necessarily guarantee an exemplary life...In this spin-off from their successful podcast, Lemmey and Miller take us through the lives of a number of famous queer figures from the past who are anything but role-models. Ruthless dictators like Hadrian, J Edgar Hoover and Frederick the Great, underworld figures like Jack Saul, Pietro Aretino and Ronnie Kray, far-right sympathisers like Ernst Röhm, Yukio Mishima, Philip Johnson and Pim Fortuyn, facilitators of colonialism like T E Lawrence, or people like Roger Casement who combined exemplary (at least in hindsight) public lives with exploitative sexual adventures in private. Obviously, it's fun to have the inversion of the usual pious histories (they deliberately pick quite a few figures who appeared in lists of "good gays" in the past), and Lemmey and Miller insert a few suitably camp and often very funny snarky comments as they go along. The section on "The bad gays of Weimar Berlin" — Miller's own field of historical research — was especially interesting. But the real point is a bit more sophisticated than that. They want to highlight the way that the "gay movement", whatever good intentions it may start with, always seems to wind up campaigning to make the world safe for wealthy white men who want the freedom to have sex with whomever they choose. "Queer sensibility" shows a disturbing tendency to veer off into a love of order, discipline, and blond boys in tight uniforms, whilst solidarity with women, people of colour, and the working classes goes out of the window. A more interesting book than I was expecting. Marred by some small editing slip-ups and the clichéd use of Fraktur on the cover, but solidly referenced and with a good bibliography and index. Some illustrations wouldn't have hurt, although we all know how to use Google, I suppose. ---(*) He wasn't, but this particular canard never goes away