Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

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We did a special episode about him in the primaries and my friend who was a guest, the beloved, departed Berlin institution, Mac Folkes, said that Mayor Pete reminded him of the clubs in Chelsea in the 90s when the New Clone was born and all of a sudden all these men were dancing in a circle with their backs to everyone else. The first half of the book was better than the second one, and I enjoyed some chapters way more than others. I will say it is fairly graphic, and incredibly shocking, and I am glad it’s being brought more so to light.

My only quibble is that the authors' intersectional leftwing politics are globbed in throughout the book in a manner that will convince nobody on the right of anything (as it presumes they are malevolent rather than misguided) and even comes across as tedious cant to leftists (like me) who largely agree with them. I don't know whether people didn't read the introduction of the book before they wrote their review but some of the things that people are saying are making me mad. In the film, he is a guinea pig and famous genius who supposedly "stops wars, feeds the hungry, and saved countless pandas". The Los Angeles Review of Books "Fascinating—and very funny—deep dives into the lives of the most dastardly queer people in history. You can use the 'online add' option in your account menu to add the Bad Guys books to your reading shelf.Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. The authors are so busy obsessing over Mead's personal life that they have missed the most significantly 'anti-gay' theme in Mead's writings but then it is clear that the author didn't even read a Wikipedia article worth of information about Mead's anthropological work. That rather than there being fixed physical and mental which were determined by what 'race' you were it was your environment which was the major influence on physical and mental development so they changed with each generation. All this aside however, Bad Gays can surely boast being one of the most original queer history books of recent years, and something that is sure to garner much conversation and debate. With a title like ‘Bad Gays’, you’d expect a juicy rundown of a rogues’ gallery of horrible people who just happened to be gay.

Most importantly, I thought it excellent the way the authors chose to directly address the historic suffering caused by white (usually male) queers against more marginalised queer people in society. You use Bad Gays to describe the antagonists of queer history left out from narratives which focus on heroes. Wolf while secretly replacing his source of power (a heart-shaped meteorite) with a fixture resembling it, destroying the power to blow up his mansion and is finally arrested after being framed as The Crimson Paw when taking the Zumpango Diamond. The overall mission of the book, aside from exploring these rejected gays, is purportedly to trace the evolution of our modern conception of what it means to be gay or queer through the lens of these "bad gays," many of whom were white and inextricably part of the patriarchal white supremacist systems that birthed our modern culture.

The answer, though, is not to simply stan our heroes and shush up about their flaws and faults; rather, it’s to understand how people have made and been made by history, how and why they have failed, and how and why we might succeed. But to honour the importance of their political work is to talk about the ways that their personal lives and lived lives were messy.

Their project abandons the typical reverence for martyrs in the gay liberation imagination, focusing instead on figures of dark queerness, from serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan to Prince Eulenberg, homosexual scandal-maker at the German Imperial Court, and Friedrich Radszuweit, the gay Weimar publisher who collaborated with the Nazis. The podcast has some genuinely left-of-field choices, such as Morrissey, Cecil Rhodes, Benjamin Britten and Cressida Dick. It's simply a gimmick used to sell books and push an agenda--filtering the stories of a few unknown or long-forgotten people through the lens of the modern LGBT movement. Tracing all these historical trysts with power also allows us to bear witness to our notions of homosexuality and queerness being products of historical shifts and change; fluid, contingent identities, "developed through a slow accrual of meaning over the centuries" that are not fixed today and have never been, and may well be due for redesign and redefinition in our current moment. All those things together form our dissatisfaction with homosexuality, but when we say that, we don’t mean being a faggot.Whereas the worst kind of good gay is a Mayor Pete type, a boring, racist, McKensie nightmare in ugly khaki pants, in alittle house with the picket fence, the Golden retriever, the husband and the absolute trail of bodies in his wake.