Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

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.

Huw Lemmey is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of three novels: Unknown Language (2020), Red Tory (2019), and Chubz (2016). He has written for the Guardian, Frieze, Flash Art, Tribune, The Architectural Review, Art Monthly, New Humanist, the White Review, and L’Uomo Vogue, amongst others. As an artist and filmmaker his work has been shown at the ICA, Lux Biennial of Moving Image, Mumok Vienna, Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art and the Design Museum, London.

Ben Miller is a writer and researcher living in Berlin where he has just begun a Doctoral Fellowship at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has taught on queer history, literature, and visual cultures at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and The New Centre for Research & Practice. He has written for New York Times, Slate, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Jacobin. His fiction has been published in SAND, Apogee Journal and Tin House. He is the author of The New Queer Photography (2020).