LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
I have to admit, I’m not sure what exactly inspired me to order Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. I would like to say it’s because I’ve come to appreciate complicated historical figures who can’t fit neatly into the “hero” category (and, indeed, might be better classed as “villains”). Teaching the U.S. history survey to college freshmen over and over again, semester after semester, tends to make one think about whose stories we decide to remember and tell. But maybe it’s not as deep as that. I know I’ve come into personal contact with enough “bad gays” in the past year that perhaps I’d just like to know what makes some of them tick. Let’s just go with the first one, though. Either way, Huw Lemmey’s and Ben Miller’s book showcasing some of the more detestable (or, erm, nuanced) queer figures throughout history is one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.
Based on the podcast of the same name, Bad Gays brands itself as “an unconventional history of homosexuality,” and it certainly delivers in that regard. Much has been written on the tireless homophile activists, the gay liberationists, and the heroes of the AIDS crisis. But what about the people we’d rather not acknowledge as some of “our own”? Sure, we love our Frank Kameny and Marsha P. Johnson, but who will write about Andrew Sullivan and Milo Yiannopoulos? (Ew, I just threw up in my mouth a little.) While the book doesn’t get that recent, Lemmey and Miller take on some of the notable queer “villains” of the past with brutal, refreshing honesty—combined with a hilarious wit that makes the whole thing feel less like a history book and more like a tea sesh. As one of my students once pointed out, history is basically just us gossiping about dead people anyway, and this book definitely captures that spirit. From the book blurb:
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?
Part-revisionist history, part-historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, Imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.
Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queers villains and evil twinks in history.
Bad Gays actually begins with the above-mentioned case of Oscar Wilde and Bosie. This is perhaps one of the best examples of selective historical memory that they could have chosen, since most people with a passing knowledge of queer history could tell you something about Oscar Wilde, but I’m willing to bet many of those same people don’t know much at all about his problematic lover. Lord Alfred Douglas, popularly known as “Bosie,” was arguably the reason for Wilde’s destruction. After falling into a passionate relationship with the younger man, it was a clash with Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, that led to Wilde’s famous trial and imprisonment. After Wilde’s death, Bosie went on to be an almost cartoonishly terrible person, veering toward anti-Semitism and dabbling in far-right politics. He died in obscurity, with only two attendees at his funeral. History, in turn, also forgot about him.
Bosie became a footnote in the story: an embodiment of “evil twink energy,” a poisoned apple whose path through life left a wake of destruction that led to the great hero’s downfall. Yet Bosie—the man, his desires, his attitudes, and his foibles—was just as integral to the eruption of homosexuality into the public sphere as was Wilde. Bosie set the trial in motion. Indeed, it was actually Bosie, and not Wilde, who had coined the term “the love that dare not speak its name” in one of his poems. No less than Wilde, Bosie shaped and was shaped by the sexual attitudes and cultures of his time, and Bosie’s later life of far-right political involvement is just as unpleasant and illuminating as his years with Oscar.
The question of why we remember the Oscar Wildes but not the Bosies is essentially the central question tying this book together.
For years, gay people have remembered Oscar as one of their own, but neglected Bosie as someone who has anything to tell us about how homosexuality came to be. Why do we choose to remember the witty and glamorous Wilde, and to forget the Machiavellian, anti-Semitic, and louche Bosie? And more crucially, why do we assume that Wilde’s life and attitudes shaped the track record of the project of homosexuality better than Bosie’s? Bosie was hardly the first gay to become obsessed with far-right and racist politics, or to confuse liberation with the freedom to live out his own desires and elevated class status.
Of course, I completely understand why this kind of book hasn’t really been “done” before. It is only within recent memory that the LGBTQ movement secured some of the most basic—conservative, even—rights, from open military service to marriage equality. That movement was one that centered “love is love” and gay respectability above all else. But, as we all know, we are living at a time when even those most basic of rights are under increasing attack and threat of demolition. Lemmey and Miller choose to take a different tack in this new era, rejecting the concept of queer respectability entirely and acknowledging—perhaps even embracing—the warts, the ugliness, the complication and maddening nuance.
One of their central arguments, bound to rankle many, is that homosexuality has “failed.” They further explain what they mean by this:
The failure...of mainstream, actually existing white male homosexuality to enact liberation and its embrace instead of full integration into the burning house of the couple-form, the family unit, and what we might hopefully call late-stage capitalism is real, and it is arranged on three primary axes: first, its separation from and fear of gender non-conformity; second, its simultaneous appropriation of the bodies and sexualities of racialized people and denial of those people’s full humanity, political participation, and equality; and third, its incessant focus on the bourgeois project of “sexuality” itself.
[...]
[W]orking-class people, colonized people, and people of colour have consistently lived, fought for, manifested, and expressed forms of social and sexual expression that have challenged both social prejudice towards sexual and gender minorities and the bourgeois politics of the gay elite. These challenges have often been bitterly resisted by that elite in their time, while still—owing to their embrace of mass politics and disruptive organizing—having far-reaching effects in our queer lives. Often, after the fact, the queer elite will belatedly acknowledge these people, movements, moments, and struggles in an attempt to incorporate them into the dominant story of what it means to be gay or lesbian or trans, as though the working-class gays and sex workers, drag queens, and trans women of colour at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village threw bricks at cops in order to win marriage equality for the gay and lesbian donor class.
I know this is not the most uncontroversial take on mainstream LGBTQ activism, and I suspect that it has already turned some people off. To those individuals, I would urge you to give the book a chance. Even if you take some issue with the authors’ analysis that they present in the introduction, you will still likely learn a great deal from this book. What follows the introduction is a series of chapters that are connected, yes, but could just as well be standalone essays on historical figures. You can take or leave their introductory analysis and still enjoy reading about Hadrian or Frederick the Great or J. Edgar Hoover or Roy Cohn, among others. The one thing all of the chosen historical characters have in common is that we queer people don’t typically think of any of them as “one of us.” Lemmey and Miller force us to question why that is, and to consider adding them to the LGBTQ historical narrative.
Now, I’m sure many are wondering whether or not it is appropriate to even consider Hadrian or Frederick the Great “queer.” I will admit that I wondered that myself. The authors have considered this question, as well (indeed, they include a very concise and well-written history of the social construction of homosexuality in the introduction), and explain their reasoning as follows:
It can be difficult...to find the right terminology to discuss people who might fit into such a category today, when such ideas and identities did not exist in their society. Can you call someone like James VI and I, a man who almost certainly had sex with other men, a homosexual, when that identity did not even exist as a concept at the time? When he was ruling England and Scotland, and beginning his campaigns of colonization in Ireland and America, nobody thought who they fucked had anything to do with who they were. So what does it mean to call James, or the Emperor Hadrian, or any number of nefarious nellies from history, “gay”?
We have decided to use that present-day term as a way of putting today’s homosexuality under a microscope and figuring out why it is troubled and incomplete, and why it failed to live up to its utopian promises of liberation. By discussing these people and their shared behaviours in relation to each other, we can begin to draw out characteristics and stories that might shed a light on how a contemporary gay identity came to exist—from ideas of what it means to be “a man,” to how same-sex desire has influenced major historical events, to how the dreaded heterosexuals came to exist, to understand themselves as opposed to queers, and to fear, police, and repress us. Our subjects may not have held a “gay identity, but their lives can tell us so much about why we do.
The authors argue, in fact, that the binary way in which we tend to think about homosexuality in contemporary times is as problematic as it is limiting. Refusing to shy away from the controversial, they end the introduction by openly wondering if homosexuality itself needs to die.
Ultimately, this book is a project of demystification and an act of love. “Gay is good,” went the old slogan, but it’s no good at all on its own. As you will see, many of the queers with the very worst political goals have wanted to position themselves as heirs to a secret or magical kingdom, as the sons of a long line of heroes. The process of making the movement and the identity has often involved reifying, recreating, and worshipping power and evil in their most brute forms. Maybe it is time that homosexuality itself dies, that we find new and more functional and more appropriate configurations for our politics and desires. Or maybe being queer is just as transitory and incomplete as anything else. Maybe all of us are lost and scared, subject to forces beyond our control, and trying to figure out how to configure our unruly desires and our politics into an ethical way of being in the world.
If there is anything of homosexuality to be saved, it is its reconstruction of the concept of the family. Not born into fixed kin, we get to choose ours. This can be a project of socialization but also of politicization, of understanding to which kind of political “we” we wish to belong. Understanding how we became a “we” in the first place—and interrogating the extent to which that “we” even makes sense, given how different “we” have been from one another and how terribly “we” have often been treated by one another—might help more of us choose better. Then the real work begins.
As I said, whether you wholly agree with the authors’ analysis of homosexuality or not, the chapters that follow are well worth reading. Aside from J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, I knew next to nothing about many of the other historical figures—I was surprised that a few of them even ended up in a queer history book! The chapters are well researched and written in an engaging and often hilarious way that makes you want to keep turning those pages. Seriously, this was one of the funnest reads I’ve had in a long time. And since each chapter can basically serve as a standalone essay, you can pick it up and put it down whenever, read the chapters out of order, etc. The full list of “bad gays,” in case you’re wondering, is as follows:
1. Hadrian
2. Pietro Aretino
3. James VI and I
4. Frederick the Great
5. Jack Saul
6. Roger Casement
7. Lawrence of Arabia
8. The Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin
9. Margaret Mead
10. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn
11. Yukio Mishima
12. Philip Johnson
13. Ronnie Kray
14. Pim Fortuyn
Speaking for myself, Bad Gays has certainly challenged and broadened my way of thinking about LGBTQ history. I didn’t necessarily agree with how the authors framed some things, but the central thrust of the book nevertheless resonated with me. I cut my political, activist teeth when the gay movement was working to enact marriage equality, and I’m quite sure you can go through my past diaries and find themes of gay respectability without even digging very far. Even today, as we face a backlash against LGBTQ rights and as trans people, in particular, are in the crosshairs, liberals here and elsewhere often fall back on those familiar respectability arguments. While I know it comes from a goodhearted place, I can’t help but sometimes feel as though these arguments tie human rights to “good behavior.” Not all queer people are good. We have our Peter Thiels and our Caitlyn Jenners. As detestable as they may be to us, they have their place in our larger historical narrative, too. Bad Gays is not a book that celebrates these figures, but it’s also not a book that shies away from them.
Whatever one might think of the authors’ thoughts on the mainstream LGBTQ movement, I think they leave us with some wise words in their short conclusion:
Certain narratives within liberal gay circles like to paint the gay rights enjoyed in some Western countries not just as the inevitable product of the Western nation-state, a slow forward march towards rights and justice, but also as permanent, intractable, the end-point of progress. But the history of bad gays complicates that; our history is full of failed attempts at liberation, at new boundaries rolled back in public book burnings, of the ever-present threat of state suppression and social stigma. The value of your liberation may go down as well as up.
Where some might see the wide-ranging acceptance that some forms of homosexuality now enjoy in some places as a result of increased liberalism bringing more people into the social contract of the state, we see, instead, the fruits of hundreds of political, social, and cultural movements making homosexuality visible; making alliances with other political and social identities; and broadening contact between political struggles. As Roderick Ferguson argues in One-Dimensional Queer, it was in these alliances that the parts of gay liberation worth saving originated, and it is to these alliances that any queer politics worth its salt must now turn.
I think you’ll find Bad Gays to be a rewarding read, if you decide to pick it up. As for myself, now that I’m done with the book, I think it’s time to check out the podcast.
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