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Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

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Bad Gays succeeds in its goals in every way, offering an infuriating, thoughtful, deliciously judgmental history of the very worst we had to offer. Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez, Washington Post You can watch me talk about all the books I read in February as I set up my reading journal here: https://youtu.be/NY7bgSmoggM I've seen a lot of criticism about there not being representation of non-white folks or those who identify as something other than male in this book, but these criticisms miss the point, or at least don't take their criticisms the right point. The book isn't aiming to explore marginalized gays, but the bad gays who were front and center of culture, politics, and the sciences, those who wrote the narrative. So of course there won't be many marginalized bad gays in here, because their voices weren't shaping the dominant culture. Those would be the white, male ones (for the most part; there is one woman in here, Margaret Mead, and one Japanese man, Yukio Mishimi). For a book about "bad gays" (and there are no shortage of them around!) there sure were a lot of gays who are either ambiguously bad and only bad read in very modern light. The author basically suggests every queer in history who wasn't radically anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, and fully intersectional was "bad." I'm not sure I agree.

All those things together form our dissatisfaction with homosexuality, but when we say that, we don’t mean being a faggot. Because I’m a faggot. I mean homosexuality as it is currently institutionalised. As a social-historical institution. Have you ever heard the term Killer Fruit? It’s a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. ” — Truman Capote,

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I also think about, to move closer to here in Berlin, this moment in the 1980s when Audre Lorde, as a guest professor at the Free University, works with a generation of afro-German activists, many of whom are queer, and starts to articulate a politics of solidarity in this moment of profound change in Germany. That’s where we can start to think about what functional queer politics might be. I only found out about this title because it popped up on my newsfeed. It is certainly not the kind of book I would stumble upon in my local vanilla bookstore, so thanks to my Goodreads friends for their consistent forays into the weird and wonderful!

Kroll, Justin (March 9, 2018). "Etan Cohen and DreamWorks Animation Developing 'Bad Guys' Film Adaptation (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Archived from the original on December 20, 2019 . Retrieved December 13, 2019. A principle of understanding our status as gay people both within our culture and within wider society is this: we are not just the protagonists, but also products of history." The above principle guides the work of authors and podcasters Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller in this new and wildly liberatory work of queer historiography which seeks to reveal new insights on LGBTQ history, sexuality, and identity through fourteen hitherto buried examples of homosexual evil and brutishness through the ages. Indeed, while "Be Gay, Do Crimes" may be a catchphrase easily uttered today on social media, there is a deeper relationship between queerness (which has been considered a form of villainy for a large part of history, and continues to be seen as such in several places), criminality, and political power. This book manages to systematically highlight these links while also challenging mainstream assumptions about structures of power and about sexual identity and deviance.Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller's book "Bad Gays: A Homosexual History" explores the lives of fourteen bad gays, from the Hellenistic emperor Hadrian to the Far Right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. In the book, gay people from history who do not appeal to us or who we cannot elevate to heroic status are discussed. It examines the definitions of badness, and homosexuality, and how historically we have understood the connection between the two while creating an alternative "homosexual history" from the lives of difficult and troublesome queers. I am aware that this book is based on a popular podcast, but therein lies its greatest weakness. The individual chapters are entertaining enough, if not offering anything new that even a casual student of gay history is likely to not already know. The heart of the book is in the above statement, and the authors seem to do a lot of unsuccessful shoehorning to come up with a unifying hypothesis. I think that the darkest and most depraved form of consumption of heroic narrative comes from the elision of human complexity. All that being said, Bad Gays also suffers from several limitations. The most glaringly obvious is focus on white and hegemonic male homosexuality: of the dozen baddies whose dastardly acts have been profiled here, only one concerns a woman (the anthropologist Margaret Mead), with the only non-white subject being the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Surely, this reduces the project's ability to generalise and speak of homosexual villainy on more universaling terms (nevermind that this, too, would be problematic, especially since this is a history measuring a broad social impulse from the top down). Lemmey and Miller gratifyingly believe in the intelligence of their readers. They don’t shy away from academic language and concepts, which bogs the book down in some places with an over-abundance of dry, rapid-fire facts and dates. Despite this, Bad Gays remains largely readable thanks to the tongue-in-cheek queer humor and comedic asides peppered throughout. This doesn’t lessen the severity of its content, as Lemmey and Miller never lose sight of who they are profiling. From colonizers to racists to fascists, not a single individual is let off the hook for problematic — or downright harmful— behaviour. Every person explored is held to account for their actions in a satisfying way.

In examining the lives of these notorious 'bad gays,' the authors examine the ways queerness has been perceived throughout history, and gives modern-day LGBTQ+ people an opportunity to see what the possibilities are going forward. (Also, everyone loves a villain origin story, so who can resist?!) David Vogel, Buzzfeed Mr. Snake – A Eastern brown snake, who works on stealth tactics of the team. Being very self-centered and shady, he often diverts from the Good Guys Club's goals of being good by doing whatever he wants, and most of the time can't stay away from doing misdeeds, but he can be selfless when he wants to. During the second arc of the book, he is possessed by an otherworldly entity and becomes the antagonist known as "The Dark Lord of Serpents".Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Further, even the earliest examples in the book make clear that the criminalisation, accusation, and persecution of homosexuals was not an ab initio attitude but a tool that developed, historically, as above all a means of consolidating political power: it allowed the elimination of otherwise formidable political rivals, facilitated the enclosure of land, and has been central to major historical conflicts, from the ruptures of the Weimar Republic and the Red-baiting terror in Cold War America to the wider projects of colonialism and anti-immigrant sentiments in an ostensibly post-colonial world. 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.

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