Bad Gays: A Homosexual History - Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller
Published in 2022 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
368 pages
ISBN: 978-1-83976-327-4
In their struggles for recognition and dignity, marginalized groups will often turn toward those invariable “saints” that define their identity for a sense of validity and solidarity. During the latter half of the 20th century, queer historians and scholars sought to create a narrative history of queerness to prove that, far from being an aberration from the supposed “norm,” queerness has always existed throughout history. By connecting queerness with a resistance to the status quo, these scholars sought to link sexual liberation with political and societal justice. This was incredibly important work, as queer people began to look to the merits of various historical figures for role models and validation of their life experiences, taking shelter from a society that would persistently marginalize and persecute them.
Yet, in constructing any kind of historical narrative, it is important to remember whose stories are highlighted and emphasized, often to the obfuscation and outright omission of others. Despite the intersectional foundations of queer liberation, much of popular queer activism and scholarship has historically been centered around the experiences and stories of gay white men. In their quest to construct a positive queer history to dispel the stigma of shame and fervently fight for acceptance through the acquisition of civil rights, many queer historians also sacrificed a level of complexity and context to their historical reconstructions. By assuming that queerness is inherently radical, these historians often reduced their subjects to their sexuality, glossing over the nuances and complexities that come with being a human being.
The LGBTQIA+ community, just like any other, has its fair share of rotten characters that often get sidelined in the reconstruction of queer history. We know that gay individuals were systemically targeted and horrifically killed in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. But what about the Nazis who were also gay? Queer individuals have indeed been at the forefront of radical politics, most often on the Left. But what about those gay men in the 20th century who were on the far right? What do these unsavory individuals tell us about the complexities of sexual identity and how it has been shaped in the modern era?
In their 2022 book, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, authors and podcasters Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller seek to complicate the overly-neat narrative of queer history that exclusively focuses on the heroes of queer history. Taking the reader through a dizzying history of gay figures from the reign of Roman emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century CE to the anti-Muslim rhetoric of late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, Lemmey and Miller illustrate how the construction of homosexuality as an identity has been a “history of failure.” By shifting our gaze toward the gay criminals, liars, frauds, and murderers throughout history, they argue, we can further interrogate the social construction of homosexual identity and its rootedness in historical contingency.
Overview:
Written as a chronological set of mini-biographies, Bad Gays chronicles the morally gray lives and exploits of gay individuals from Ancient Rome to the present day. This follows a similar format set out by the authors in their wildly popular podcast, also titled Bad Gays. Yet, this book pivots from the podcast by collecting these biographies and using them to make a sustained argument about the construction of gay identity throughout history.
By providing an alternative history of gay identity, Lemmey and Miller hope to challenge the contemporary view of queerness as a primary form of identity. Instead, they emphasize that this current liberal understanding of queerness is a relatively recent invention, specifically of the 19th century. While queerness is often seen as an identity that has been mostly charted along gendered relations, for most of history it was defined by one’s particular homosexual acts that could simultaneously coexist with heterosexual relationships in the public eye. Being gay was something a person simply did, not something a person was.
The formation of gay identity has historically been centered around the experiences of gay white men, which has served to exclude other forms of queer identity along intersectional lines. The authors illustrate how homosexual activity was policed as a form of political control, as well as how attitudes toward gay sex have constantly changed according to specific historical contexts. Through these fourteen biographies, Miller and Lemmey interrogate the connections between homosexuality, colonialism, fascism, misogyny, masculinity, capitalism, and the state apparatus.
As such, they build a case against the construction of homosexuality (particularly in its modern liberal, assimilationist form) as a politically cogent form of social identity. By examining how the “evil twinks” of history responded to the world around them in destructive ways, the authors hope to offer an alternative vision of a queer movement that decenters the experiences of gay white men and instead fosters solidarity and inclusivity across race, gender, and class.
Deeper Dive:
Stretching back in time to the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, the authors demonstrate how his acts of sodomy (especially with his beloved Antonius) derived from the Greek practice of pederasty, in which an older male would engage in sexual relationships with younger boys as a symbol of his power and dominance. Lemmey and Miller explore the attitudes toward sex and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, taking note of how, while gay men of the Victorian era often looked back toward this era in history for validation for their same-sex desires, the actual practice of sodomy in the ancient world cannot be directly coordinated to our modern conceptions of homosexual relationships. By showing how gay men in the Victorian era ignored Hadrian’s violence and abuse of power and connected themselves to a precedent within history, the authors complicate the often clean narrative threads that these historians have constructed about their shared pasts.
After spending time in the Roman palaces of Hadrian, the authors take the reader to Renaissance Florence and the writer Pietro Aretino. Pietro’s erotically charged satires and pornographic drawings were so salacious that his works were banned by the Catholic Church and widely condemned after his death. While Aretino was a self-proclaimed “sodomite,” this is not what made him “bad;” rather, he was also known to extort and blackmail other men who sought him out for advice. His works were reexamined in the Victorian era as examples of debauchery and licentiousness, and Aretino would have reveled in these titles with glee. The authors acknowledge that Arentino’s legacy is mixed, yet praise him as someone who “understood the hypocrises of the powerful and pious, and used those hypocrises against them to give himself the good life of friendship and partying he wanted” (54).
While the Italian Renaissance saw the recovery of -- and devouring obsession with -- ancient Greek texts, we can see that homosexual acts were slowly turning from sinful behavior to a punishable crime in the following era of King James VI/I, who is the subject of Chapter Three. In this section, the authors follow the life of James VI and I, making note of the close relationships that he held with male courtiers. The authors end up taking a nuanced, though markedly anti-Stuartist interpretation of James’s legacy, noting that while James possessed a relatively open attitude toward the men he loved, his inability to settle the religious divisions in England and his fervent belief in the divine right of kings led to the toxic combination of Protestantism, colonialism, white supremacy, and scientific rationalism that would see same-sex desire categorized as a both a crime and a disease in the following centuries.
This shift toward the criminalization and medicalization of homosexual behavior in the nineteenth century is further explored in Chapter Five, as the authors recount the sodomy trial of Irish Victorian sex worker Jack Saul. In the 1860s, the word “homosexual” was first coined in a German pamphlet, leading to a rapid flurry of supposed “sexologists” claiming to link homosexuality with social deviance and mental disorder. A panic swept over Victorian England as Parliament passed a new wave of anti-sodomy laws that affected both the center and periphery of its empire. During the Cleveland Street scandal, Jack Saul served as a witness in the libel trial against journalist Ernest Parke, where he described the world of underground prostitution in Victorian London and the involvement of the Earl of Euston at the discrete, high-class male brothel that served as the center of the scandal. Saul’s revelations shocked the audience, as he implicated several other high-ranking officials in English society and claimed that the police often turned a blind eye toward their behavior and much more. The judge, unsurprisingly, sided with the Earl of Euston, describing Saul as a “revolting creature” who could not be believed. This case revealed the stark class divisions that were arising in how homosexual activities were policed in the late 19th century, as working-class gay men were much more highly prosecuted than aristocratic men since their acts of gay sex were much more intimately tied to prostitution and criminality in the public imagination.
As homosexuality slowly became crystalized into a stable identity through the works of sexologists and psychologists, this caused historians and try to make sense of this demographic as a distinct group with a clear narrative history. Accordingly, the ancient Greeks were not the only historical actors to whom later gay activists would look for inspiration and validation. In Chapter Four, Lemmey and Miller turn toward the likely bisexual 18th-century king of Prussia, Frederick the Great. The authors are careful to keep our contemporary understandings of sexuality in check when examining figures from the past. They write, “It seems that Frederick’s homoerotic predilections, along with his love of gardening and music and literature, were actually understood as part of a ‘constant definition of Prussian masculine character’, and being a proper Prussian man ‘required a man to embody ‘sensitive’ traits that later generations would come to view as ‘effeminate’’.”
The historically contingent construction of identity is important to remember when examining how different political groups and historians valorized or minimized Frederick’s sexuality for their specific ends. For example, the Prussian nationalists of the late nineteenth century viewed Frederick’s potentially queer relationships, sensitive personal traits, and predilection toward French culture as an embarrassment, since homosexuality was increasingly being associated with deviance and criminality, and they needed him to be a hero that defended Tutonic glory. During the pre-war Weimar Republic, by contrast, Frederick was lauded by queer activists and historians in Germany for his hypermasculine image and ability to strongly govern as a homosexual man. Yet, as Miller and Lemmey argue, these historians also omitted Frederick’s more imperial and nationalistic policies, which earned him praise from Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi Party, who glorified Frederick as a model of strong nationalist leadership and militarist discipline while also lauding an emerging form of misogynistic homosexual masculinism.
Of course, gay men holding misogynist attitudes was certainly not a new invention. James VI and I, deeply obsessed with demonology and witchcraft after his fateful and stormy trip to Denmark, believed that women were inferior beings who were prone to witchcraft, leading to the accusation, arrests, and execution of primarily women in the North Berwick Trials of 1590-92. Likewise, Frederick the Great grossly neglected his wife, Elizabeth, often not visiting her for several years and slighting her (both monetarily and verbally)whenever he did visit, earning her the pity of the public and the disrespect of the nobility.
This connection between masculinity and homoeroticism is further solidified later in the Eighth Chapter, where the authors follow the multiple threads of homosexual communities in Weimar Berlin. Far from a continuous narrative of gay liberation and freedom, the authors emphasize:
There were multiple strands of the homosexual emancipation movement, with conflicting goals and ideas, vastly different political affiliations and understandings, and shared blind spots. The alternatingly fascist and left-expressionist ‘masculinist’ movement emphasized a culture and heroic model of hypermasculine homosexuality; it was culturally nationalist, anti-feminist, and often anti-Semitic. These were the Weimar gays most influenced by figures like Frederick the Great. (147)
Lemmey and Miller note the collation between “nationalist” and “manly” during this time, as male sexuality was associated with strength, power, and military might. By highlighting the contradictory attitudes toward homosexuality by the Nazis (as embodied in the life and execution of gay Nazi leader Ernst Röhm), the apolitical passivity of gay men like Friedrich Radszuweit who stood back as fascism took power in Germany, and the ambivalent, idealistic, and yet profoundly racial and Orientalist attitudes of gay liberationists such as Dr. Magnus Hirschfield, the authors paint a deeply complicated picture of queer Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century.
Just as Hirschfield, despite his anti-racist work, was invariably shaped by the conditions and context of German colonialism, Lemmey and Miller highlight the connection between Western queer figures and their colonial attitudes toward the “Other”. In the early twentieth century, gay historians and sexologists began to look to the periphery of their respective empires for positive precedents for their same-sex desires. Even if they had the best of intentions, figures such as Roger Casement (Chapter Six), T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) (Chapter Seven), and Margaret Mead (Chapter Nine) reified the fetishization of Black and Brown male sexuality, even as they attempted to fight against the larger injustices of the British and French empires. On the peripheries of the empire, Casement and Lawrence simultaneously found themselves as resistors and perpetrators of colonialism, as they often imported the violent tactics of repression that were utilized in the colonies back to the imperial core.
Margaret Mead, the only woman profiled in the book, was likewise influenced by colonialist ideology as she shaped the contemporary field of cultural anthropology. Joined by other ‘progressive’ thinkers and anthropologists from diverse backgrounds, Mead’s influential work Coming of Age in Samoa argued that the indigenous cultures of the Global South (particularly from South Pacific and Southeast Asia) were more sexually promiscuous--and thus more liberated in their sexuality--than the sexually repressed cultures of the Global North. She described Samoan youth as having experimental and open non-monogamous sexual relations with one another, including same-sex relationships. Thus, the argument goes, the activities of these indigenous communities are indicative of a purer, more primitive humanity, and thus queerness is a natural and even encouraged aspect of human sexuality that has been repressed by the Western world.
Mead’s work was highly influential in the field of cultural anthropology, though it was later criticized for exaggerating the extent to which Somoan youth experiment with sexuality, as well as romanticizing the cultures of indigenous Somoa and interpreting their culture through her ideological interpretation. Lemmey and Miller utilize Mead’s romanticization of Soamoan culture as a prominent example of how the Western gaze on the colonial Other reinforces colonial violence. They write, “Domestic rebels against bourgeois European sex-gender systems looked to colonial subjects, whose sex-gender systems were being burlesqued and misrepresented by western ethnographers as part of the project of colonization, for examples of how same-sex desire and eroticism had been integrated into community life” (172).
This Western gaze onto an exoticized other finds its most interesting expression in the authors’ chapter on Japanese author, bodybuilder, and nationalist militia leader Yukio Mishima. A fascinating, tragic, and wholly contradictory figure, Mishima was transfixed by both death and beauty, which was reflected in his obsession with bodybuilding, his writing, his sadomasochistic sexual proclivities, and his ultimate suicide after a failed coup attempt. Yishima was deeply influenced by European intellectual life, while also decrying its effect on traditional Japanese society, and in this tension, we see the deep contradictions that led Mishima toward his self-destructive end.
Finally, the authors allude to the connections between the varied acceptance or prohibition of homosexual behavior related to class distinctions. Generally speaking, elite gay men of higher socioeconomic status either outwardly weaponized homophobia and perpetuated queer panic to achieve their goals (such as J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn) or rode the coattails of the progress made by queer liberation movements to amass economic and political capital (Philip Johnson and Pim Fortuyn). While the AIDS epidemic briefly created solidarity between wealthy white gay men and working-class queer people, this was largely dissolved by the mid-90s, as queer organizations sought integration into the dominant order instead of emancipation from it. While elite white queer liberals fought for equal rights through respectability politics and assimilation into the social order, many other gay men such as Pim Fortuyn turned toward the right, using their queer identities to shield them from critique as they scapegoated immigrants and religious minorities, particularly Muslims. Here, instead of a shared queer identity across intersectional lines, we see the distinctions of class serving as a cleft dividing queer solitary.
Through these examples of “bad gays,” Lemmey and Miller complicate the typically linear, progressive viewpoint of queer history, showing us queer liberation is not permanent or inevitable, but rather must be continually struggled for against the forces of injustice and fascism that threaten it, even from within. By understanding the bad gays of history, we can more clearly articulate a queer movement that fights for the liberation of all peoples across intersectional lines of difference, especially race and class. When we understand how our construction of queer history has been used and misused for various ends, we can see how much of our contemporary struggles for equal rights are often premised on the assimilation of “good gays” into the capitalist social order. As such, since “the history of homosexuality is a long history of failure,” the authors argue that perhaps we need to look beyond homosexuality as a cogent political identity, as “maybe it is time that homosexuality itself dies, that we find new and more functional and more appropriate configurations for our politics and desires” (18). By attending to the nuances of their past instead of romanticizing it, queer individuals can work through the contradictions and limitations of contemporary queer politics and work toward a new horizon rooted in solidarity and justice.
Commendations:
Several aspects of this work are well worth commending. First of all, the authors are careful and nuanced in their biographies of their eponymous “bad gays.” Of course, there’s always the pertinent question of whether or not these complicated figures were truly “gay,” especially in our contemporary understanding of queerness, as many of these figures had intimate queer relationships long before the idea that sexuality could exist as a distinct and stable identity. In the reconstruction of queer history, there are two main approaches. On one hand, one could consider the lives and actions of historical actors that are considered “queer” in their particular historical context.
On the other hand, there are accounts of queer history that focus on characters that may not have been considered “queer” in the same way we do today, but whose lives nevertheless reflect contemporary experiences with queerness and can offer us a common experience with the past and unsettle modern constructs of queerness. In these readings, queerness works as a category of those who defy the cis-gendered, heteronormative standards of their particular society. Lemmey and Miller utilize both of these approaches in this work, which renders it a dynamic and immensely relevant read.
Lemmey and Miller’s thesis is a controversial, yet necessary one. Essentially, they are pushing back against the mainstream interpretations of queer history that sets an uncomplicated and linear trajectory for queer liberation led by purely heroic figures. It brilliantly shows how homosexuality has shifted according to social and material contexts, eventually crystalizing into the seemingly stable identity that we assume today. The authors purposefully disrupt this illusory sense of stability, showing how this identity has been built upon the same oppressive foundation of whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, and misogyny. Too often, queer liberation has been defined from an exclusively white male perspective, and the authors vividly illustrate how these gay men’s actions negatively affected other members of the queer and trans community. Being queer does not exclude one from the ability to harm others, especially when cis gay men have used their positions of privilege to oppress others in the LGBTQ+ community to elevate themselves and climb the social ladder through respectability politics and assimilation into the dominant social order.
Additionally, the structure and tone of this book delicately balance interdisciplinary scholarly rigor with open accessibility. Lemmey and Miller have put a tremendous amount of research into this volume while also injecting a fair dose of humor throughout the text, making it a relatively breezy and immensely enjoyable reading experience. While the humor doesn’t always land perfectly, it helps to lift the book from being a simple collection of biographies and adds a sprinkling of delightful playfulness to the narrative. Each chapter profiles a different “bad gay” of history, giving just enough context and history without becoming too long-winded or overly detailed, which makes this book easy to pick up for a chapter or two before putting it down and revisiting it later. While the scope of the book is immense, the authors do a brilliant job of making each chapter approachable and humorous while connecting them to their larger thesis of the “failure” of homosexuality. They do not mince words in condemning these villains’ actions, yet are gentle in placing their actions in historical context, making this a valuable addition and challenge to contemporary queer scholarship.
Finally, Bad Gays is exemplary in not only detailing the history of queer villains but also drawing parallels to contemporary examples. For example, Pim Fortym’s hateful rhetoric toward the Muslim community reminded me of disgraced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and his hackneyed, tired rhetoric toward black Americans. Lemmey and Miller’s account illustrates how wealthy white gay men are increasingly aligning themselves with nationalist and right-wing movements that dehumanize and scapegoat immigrants and Muslims.
These villainous figures are a timely reminder of how we selectively construct queer history, and who we include or exclude for our purposes. In revealing queer history as a human construction tainted by the inevitable handmaidens of capitalism (namely white supremacy, colonialism, and misogyny), the authors show how we can move beyond a gay politics that is defined by exclusivity and toward one that is emancipatory for all people. The authors continually point out the vital importance of solidarity across intersectional lines if we are to have hope of building a coalition capable of overcoming the crises we currently face.
Critique:
On the other hand, Bad Gays has a few slight weaknesses. First of all, some of the quips and entertaining language seem to be a bit forced and distract from the flow of the narrative. In attempting to balance accessibility with academic prose, Lemmey and Miller can occasionally dive deep into theory before quickly veering into a shallow punchline. This informality is reflective of their podcast but is more often than not a jarring juxtaposition seemingly employed only to make the more mundane history-centered sections more lively. These quips are not always seamlessly integrated into the text and therefore fail to enhance the work in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, this tends to make the tone of certain sections uneven and occasionally eye-rolling.
Relatedly, the massively wide scope of the book makes this book feel disjointed at times. The authors attempt to add the throughline of “the failure of homosexuality” throughout the book, but this thesis often gets lost throughout the chapters. While there is a thin connecting thread between the chapters, the authors’ focus on providing quick biographies of these figures often means that their provocative and ambitious thesis is not always fully supported by the evidence that they supply. While their ideas are certainly important to consider and think through and I wholly agree with their assertion that identity serves as a poor place to center a universal political project, they only briefly begin to approach an alternative way of constructing a queer history centered on intersectionality in their conclusion, leaving the reader to wonder how exactly that would be accomplished. This could have perhaps been remedied by focusing more on depth than breadth and by tying a smaller number of subjects into a more cohesive manner that supports their thesis.
Furthermore, some readers might be confused as to what exactly connects all of these baddies. In effect, I could understand someone not having an entirely clear idea of what the authors define as “bad.” To be fair, such moral judgments can often be subjective, but I think this criticism is a bit unfair. Essentially, what connects these figures is their support for imperialism, nationalism, fascism, or other forms of right-wing beliefs.
As many readers will undoubtedly notice, the selection of historical figures is overwhelmingly white and male. There is only one queer woman in the entire book (Margaret Mead), and likewise, one person of color (Yukio Mishima), although that becomes vague when assessing ancient historical figures who, until the mid-twentieth century, would not have been considered “white” (such as Hadrian and Pietro Aretino). Many might see this as a shortcoming of the book, and I can see their perspective. I likewise agree that it could have been interesting to have a wider array of perspectives from more women or trans-identifying individuals who have been less than morally upright to further complicate their thesis.
Yet, it is precisely because of this complication that I believe the authors made their choice. In the book, they are attempting to decenter whiteness as the standard for positive queer identity. As such, while making the book primarily about queer white men might seem to be centering whiteness, I can also see that this is a strategic move by the authors to emphasize how our understanding of queer identity has been often overly shaped by whiteness and ever-shifting understandings of masculinity. By showing these white cis men as morally compromised, the authors are purposefully, though selectively, drawing an implicit connection between mainstream queer acceptance and white supremacy.
Conclusion:
Overall, Bad Gays is an energetic and spirited call for us to rethink how we construct our identities and utilize them for various political ends. While they might fall a bit short in proving their provocative and bold thesis, Lemmey and Miller have written an inarguably entertaining work about some of the worst queer villains throughout history. Balancing a delightfully catty tone with academic rigor, Bad Gays serves as an important corrective to the overly-simplistic liberal narrative of queer history that we have constructed as it calls us to seek solidarity across intersectional lines of difference to build a movement capable of overcoming the crises we face.
By reveling in the contradictions and complexities of the gay villains of history, Lemmey and Miller have given us a scathing critique of complacent, liberal accounts of queer history, while also pointing toward a new, more inclusive, and radical political horizon. It brilliantly illustrates how we are just as much the products of history as we are the protagonists of it. As such, if you are interested in queer theory, politics, and historical criticism, this work serves as a fantastic and fascinating place to challenge our commonly-help assumptions of queer history. By showing the myriad ways we’ve failed in the past, the authors provide us a glimpse of a path forward to how we can succeed in building a movement based on radical solidarity and cooperation.