Bad Gays Subverts Queer History

In the third century bc, the Roman nobility became increasingly Greek in their habits, a phenomenon known as “Hellenization,” and those with a particular taste for Greek culture were known as “philhellenic.” Under the rule of the emperor Nero, a notorious tyrant who, incidentally, was said to have twice been in a same-sex union, philhellenism became even more pronounced.

Yet there was also an ambivalence in this relationship. The Romans, after all, had conquered the Greeks, and to what extent could you truly want to replicate a loser’s culture? They filled their homes with Greek sculptures; but they were looted sculptures, their display as much a mark of subjugation as respect. When Greek-speaking Romans addressed the Senate, their words were translated into Latin, as much as a sign of inferiority as to help with comprehension. Even within the more Hellenistic aristocracy, there were significant figures who saw Greece as a moral threat, if not a military one. Cato the Elder was one such figure. Greece, Cato felt, was a degenerate and decadent culture and its adoption would bring trouble for the Romans, whom he saw as a people of noble simplicity and strength. Addressing his own child, he said, “I shall speak of those Greeks in a suitable place, son Marcus, telling what I learned at Athens, and what benefit it is to look into their books—not to master them. I shall prove them a most worthless and unteachable race. Believe that this is uttered by a prophet: whenever that folk impart its literature, it will corrupt everything.”

This Roman ambivalence, that the Greeks were both wise and decadent, worthy of study but worth being wary of, rang down through history and has had a significant impact on the history of homosexuality. As the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans was supposedly “rediscovered” by scholars in western Europe in the Renaissance, many adopted the same prejudices and intellectual arguments that were being fought almost two millennia earlier. Greek attitudes toward same-sex relationships were known about and were hard for good Christian academics to square with their otherwise fulsome admiration of the virtues of classical Greece. While most Victorian scholars were disgusted by the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks,” as the uptight Mr. Cornwallis refers to it in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, those who found their desires drifting in a similar direction found in Greek culture a heroic example that their sort had indeed always existed, and began mining Greek literature for heroes and storylines that might serve as a defense of the unspeakable vice. The works of Greeks like Plutarch and Plato were used to help imagine a positive model for male and female same-sex relationships, although neither the Greeks nor the Victorians had quite the same concept of the “homosexual” that we have today.

For the Greeks, the concept did not meaningfully exist at all; the social identities we today understand in the West as a gay man or a bisexual woman, for example, simply weren’t something that people recognized. Greece was not a single political entity with a set of laws and customs that everybody followed; different city-states developed different sexual cultures. Across Greece, sexual activity between men was common; the important prohibitions were focused not on gender but status (and hence age).

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes uses a myth to demonstrate the nature of love, explaining that lovers are the two reunited components of single souls split in two by Zeus. This myth of soulmates is not as structured around ideas of heterosexual compatibility as you might presume. Aristophanes explicitly mentions same-sex relationships, but the important qualification is that they are between men of different ages. For Aristophanes, if not necessarily for Plato, sex between men and boys was not merely tolerable, but noble in itself. Of such people, Aristophanes says that “while they are boys…they fall in love with men, they enjoy sex with men and they like to be embraced by men. These boys are the ones who are outstanding in their childhood and youth, because they’re inherently more manly than others. I know they sometimes get called immoral, but that’s wrong: their actions aren’t prompted by immorality but by courage, manliness, and masculinity. They incline toward their own characteristics in others.” Worryingly for us, he says such men go on to become politicians.

What is fundamental to understand, of course, is that this form of relationship is only seen as good and honorable between men and teenage boys, while sexual behavior between men of the same age was taboo. This is an inversion of our own social norms. Today the defining characteristic of such a relationship to observers would be the abusive power imbalance. In the same manner, in Greek society it would also be the age difference that would be regarded as the core characteristic of the relationship, although in a positive way, and not the gender roles.

This form of pederastic relationship was seen to have many qualities; in the Symposium, Phaedrus suggests that the loyalty between male lovers and their aversion to being shamed in front of each other by acts of cowardice offered them a unique advantage in organizing a society, claiming that “the best possible organization [for a] battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends…A handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world.” In fact, such a battalion did exist in the city-state of Thebes. The Sacred Band of Thebes was a military unit made up of 150 pairs of male lovers and was regarded as the most elite unit in the Theban army, its soldiers being of unusual bravery and moral character.

Still, the acceptance of a certain type of same-sex behavior is littered with qualifications concerning status. Often, sexual relationships between men involving anything up the bum were frowned upon, because anal sex is too close to penis-in-vagina sex. This would make the receptive partner in anal sex something like a woman or a prostitute, as classical scholar Kenneth Dover writes that in many circumstances “homosexual anal penetration [was] treated neither as an expression of love nor as a response to the stimulus of beauty, but as an aggressive act demonstrating the superiority of the active to the passive partner,” a drop in status too humiliating to be sanctioned.

To be the receptive partner in anal sex was regarded as being kinaidos, or effeminate: there’s no escaping it, bottom-shaming is as old as European civilization itself, baked into the deep misogyny of patriarchal societies. This prohibition on anal did not apply to men visiting male sex workers or men having sex with enslaved males, so long as the man of higher status was the one doing the penetrating—a good illustration of how, in Greek society, status was the key determinant of the nature of sexual activity.

The philhellenic Romans took up many of the same concepts and attitudes toward homosexuality, but with an important difference. While for the Greeks the pederastic relationship had a pedagogical and philosophical basis—to ensure the induction of noble males into the intellectual and political society they were to dominate—for the Romans the focus was instead on the sensual. Roman culture was openly celebratory of male dominance and power. There are no European cultures for whom the hard cock was such a symbol of worship; indeed the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, literally attended to the cult of Fascinus, a deity depicted as a disembodied erect penis, usually with wings. Their role was to tend to the holy fire at the center of Rome, from which any Roman citizen could light their own fire. As such, the fire symbolized the continuance of Rome and the integrity of the state. That a hard cock was one of the subjects of the Vestal’s adoration is no coincidence, as the integrity of the male body was a symbol of a free Roman’s political status. That’s because for a free man, a citizen of Rome, to be the penetrated partner in a same-sex act was, in some way, a violation of the integrity of his body. To be a free Roman meant your body could not be violated. In the words of historian Amy Richlin, “To be penetrated, for a Roman, was degrading both in a physical sense of invasion, rupture, and contamination, and in a class sense: the penetrated person’s body was likened to the body of a slave.” This emphasis on virility and conquest is slightly different to the Greeks’ obsession with pederasty and pedagogy, but to much the same ends.

When Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus accused his enemy and co-consul Julius Caesar of being “Queen of Bithynia,” the accusation was not that that Caesar was gay but that he had been fucked in his younger days by Nicomedes IV, the king of Bithynia. These accusations clearly stuck. Even in Caesar’s moment of triumph, having crushed the Gauls in the Gallic Wars, a popular rhyme in Rome began “Gallias Caesar subegit, Caesarem Nicomedes” (Caesar subjugated the Gauls, Nicomedes subjugated Caesar). As Richlin notes, it seems to be true what the senator Haterius said, that “unchastity [impudicitia: allowing anal penetration] is a source of accusation for a freeborn [male], a necessity for a slave, and a duty for a freed slave.”

Excerpt from Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Verso Books, 2022.

The Rules of Attraction :  Greek homosexuality and its influence on ancient Rome. By Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Lapham’s Quarterly, June 1, 2022. 

The story of the Kray twins is, like most British stories, one of class, and it begins in the grinding poverty of 1930s England, still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. They were born in 1933 in the heart of London’s East End, a historically impoverished neighbourhood still suffering from appalling deprivation.

The Kray family were part of the busy working-class, multi-ethnic culture. Their mother, whom they idolised throughout their lives, was descended from Irish and Jewish migrants. The twins were born in Stean Street, Haggerston, but by the time they were five or six she’d moved the family closer to her family in Bethnal Green. Their new home, at 178 Vallance Road, was only half an hour’s walk from their old home in Hoxton; the area would become the boy’s manor, their spiritual territory, for the rest of their lives.dc

Charles, their father, was frequently absent for much of their childhood; working in the ‘rag trade’, the second-hand clothes industry, he frequently travelled for long stretches buying up goods, and then, when the Second World War began in 1939, he was a deserter. Their mother Violet took on most of the responsibility of raising the children and running the home, and by all accounts regarded her sons as angels, despite Reggie later admitting that ‘we were wicked little bastards really’.

It is unsurprising that the lads turned to crime, given both the poverty of the area and the example they were set. Life in London, particularly in working-class and immigrant communities, was marked by the presence of organised crime gangs. They operated on various levels of sophistication, taking part in everything from pickpocketing rackets to gambling, extortion, prostitution, and blackmail. Fergus Linnane, in his history London’s Underworld, describes gangs arranged around both ethnic identities and local loyalties, and spread across most of the capital in the 1930s and ’40s. There were East End Jewish streets gangs like ‘The Yiddishers’, the Aldgate Mob, the Bessarabian Tigers, who often took part in street fights with fascist organisations. In Clerkenwell there was a mob led by the Italian Charles Sabini that ran lucrative protection rackets at racecourses, a territory they fought for against the McDonald brothers, who ran the Elephant and Castle Gang and who went into alliance with the Brummagems, a Birmingham gang. There were the Titanics in Hoxton, the Hoxton Mob, the Kings Cross Gang, the Odessians, the West End Boys, and the Whitechapel Mob: an endless array of gangland groups that emerged, some surviving longer than others, before being amalgamated, sup- pressed by police, or broken up by rivals.

Within working-class London in the interwar period, there was also an independent homosexual culture of sorts that was distinct from that of the guardsmen and middle-class johns of Hyde Park and St James’s Park, or the various more bourgeois gay scenes of Piccadilly, the Haymarket, and Soho. Pubs that were congregated around the docks and industrial areas often developed a distinct homosexual or queer clientele, including establishments like the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping and Charlie Brown’s on West India Dock Road, both little more than half an hour’s walk from the Kray’s manor. According to the noted historian of queer life in interwar London Matt Houlbrook, ‘Dock laborers, sailors from across the world, and families mingled freely with flamboyant local queans and slumming gentlemen in a protean milieu where queer men and casual homosexual encounters were an accepted part of everyday life.’

 

Given the twin temptations of gang warfare and illicit, criminal sex that existed right on Ronnie Kray’s own doorstep, it is perhaps surprising that the Kray twins’ first major clash with the law was not a result of either, but rather during their enlistment into the British army. From the end of the war until 1960, nearly all British men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one were required to serve in the armed forces for eighteen months, and then remain as reservists for a number of years afterwards. In 1952, the twins were called up. Their schooling had, says their biographer John Pearson, already been interrupted by the closure of schools during the Blitz, then by their evacuation with their mum, to Hadleigh in Suffolk. At fifteen they had left school altogether, trying to find odd jobs working with their grandfather on his rags stall, selling firewood, or working in the market, but their real passion was boxing, which they had took up in a local club when they were just twelve. Between their fists, pellet guns, and street fighting, they had been in and out of contact with the police, including getting probation for assault, but never any more serious punishments. When they turned up at the Tower of London, conscription papers in hand, in 1952, they were about to be prepared for a level of discipline they had hitherto never experienced. They did not fancy it much, and were leaving the barracks when a corporal demanded to know where they were going. ‘We’re off home to see our mum,’ they replied, and Ron knocked him out with a punch. After visiting Mum and then going out on the town, they were arrested the next day back at Vallance Road, where they were court-martialed and imprisoned for a week.  As soon as they were released from their cells, they went on the run. For the next two years they played a cat-and-mouse game with the army and police, finding support while on the run from friends and well-wishers within a community that had little time for the authorities.

After assaulting a police officer who came to nick them, they served a short period in Wormwood Scrubs jail, before being taken back to barracks and escaping again. Their time in the army was marked by an increasing level of violence and aggression. In Ron’s words, this was the point at which he ‘started to go a bit mad’. He regarded himself as having psychic powers, allowing him to read people’s auras to determine their motives. This, combined with his supposed shit list of enemies, must have been concerning for people; when he started to use the nickname ‘The Colonel’, everyone obliged him.

Upon their release, their criminal career really began. The Regal, a billiard hall on Eric Street in Mile End, had been experiencing a plague of nightly violence and vandalism, and the owner was at his wits’ end. The brothers made themselves available to take it over for a fiver a week; the day they took it over, the violence stopped. They turned its fortunes round, and the venue became popular with young people in the area. They began to establish a pattern: Reggie provided the brains, turning around the business, while Ronnie provided the brawn, in this instance fighting off the Maltese gangs attempting to shake the boys down for protection money. Reggie considered going straight, but for Ron, that was never an option.

Their gang began to grow, and with it, both their organisation and firepower became more serious. Ron became obsessed with weapons and firearms: beneath the floorboards of 178 Vallance Road was a veritable arsenal of weaponry, including a Mauser rifle and a Luger automatic, plus revolvers, knives, and even cavalry swords. Their protection racket was organised into two forms of payments. For smaller premises – pubs, shops, and the like – there was the ‘Nipping List’, whereby the gang was assured that if they ever needed to drop in for some goods, such as a crate or two of champagne, it would be given free of charge. Then there was the ‘Pension List’, where larger establishments like casinos or restaurants provided a regular fee for their premises to be ‘protected’ by the gang. If they refused to pay the fee, of course, they soon realised that it was necessary, as their venues were mysteriously visited by thugs, vandals, or arsonists.

Quickly, the gang started to get a serious reputation, demanding respect from all and sundry while ‘looking after their own’ who were ‘away’ in prison. Despite the fact they still lived with their mum, they were buying snappy new suits and getting home visits from the barber, a habit they picked up from watching US gangster movies. Ronnie was also gaining a reputation as a ‘hard man’. While there were guns in the London underworld, they were usually for threatening rather than firing, but Ronnie was known as a man prepared to use them, after shooting a boxer who threatened one of his protected businesses. The following year, Ronnie was involved in a gang fight with a group of rivals, the ‘Watney Streeters’, and one of them broke what was known as the ‘East End code of silence’ and shopped him; it was 1956 and he was back inside, sentenced to three years in Wandsworth Prison.

After two years in Wandsworth, where he continued his criminal activities, Ron was transferred to a lower security prison on the Isle of Wight. Despite its relative comfort, he hated it, and began to suffer again from increasingly severe mental health problems, including paranoid delusions, which he put down to being triggered by the death of his mother’s sister, Aunt Rose. He had been particularly close to her, admiring her anti-authoritarian attitude, and her death from leukaemia devastated him. He was transferred to Long Grove, a psychiatric hospital, and contrived with his brothers to escape from the institution, fearing he might be permanently incarcerated. After a few months he handed himself in, and, astonishingly, was allowed to simply serve the short remainder of his sentence before being released in 1959.

It was a fortuitous moment for the boys, to be released just as London was entering a decade in which society and culture would be radically transformed. They were twenty-seven, charming and handsome, feared and respected, rich enough to wear sharp suits and drive fancy cars, and they were looking to make a name for themselves.

While Ronnie was inside, Reggie had begun expanding the business empire with second-hand car dealerships, gambling dens, and a new club, the ‘Double R’, in tribute to his incarcerated brother.  With Ronnie out, they could do more, and in 1962 established the ‘Kentucky’ club in Mile End.

No sooner was Ronnie out of jail than Reggie was in, for a bungled attempt at extortion on behalf of a friend.  While he was locked up in 1960, Ronnie’s worst tendencies for mindless violence, self-aggrandisement, big spending, and alienating allies all ran wild. He became aware of the wealth of a notorious slum landlord, Peter Rachman, who had built up a property empire in Notting Hill by overcharging West Indian immigrants for substandard housing, enforced by rent collectors and thugs. He wanted a slice of the pie and approached Rachman at a club, driving him back to Vallance Road for a cup of tea and some ‘negotiations’. The negotiations were typical Ronnie: give me £5,000 right now (equivalent to over £100,000 today), or else. Rachman gave him £250 in cash, and cut him a cheque for another £1,000, but the cheque bounced. Fearful for his life, and aware that he didn’t want to open up a rolling financial obligation with Ronnie for ‘protection’, he cut him a deal, arranging for the twins to buy out a gambling club in swanky Knightsbridge in West London. They jumped at the chance, and soon were the proprietors of ‘Esmeralda’s Barn’, their very own West London casino. Although Ronnie proceeded to run the place into the ground, he revelled in the new-found status it bought him: he was no longer just an exotic sight for visitors to the East End, but a player in West End culture. He began hanging around with more and more important people. Ron particularly liked the powerful politicians, and the access to dinners at the House of Lords, private members clubs, and sex with young men that accompanied them.

His friendships amongst the rich and famous were starting  to pay off. In 1963 he was introduced by his friend, the Labour MP Tom Driberg (who, ever the adventurer, had turned up at the Kentucky for a drink), to the powerful bisexual Conservative peer Lord Boothby.  Boothby had been dating a young cat burglar from Shoreditch called Leslie Holt, whom he employed as his driver. Holt had a flat in an art deco apartment block in Stoke Newington called Cedra Court; his neighbours were the Kray twins, who each owned a place there.

Boothby wined and dined Ronnie in his West London clubs, such as White’s; in return, Ronnie organised ‘sex shows’ and orgies with young men in East London.Politicians were useful: they were some of the few in society who could put pressure on the police and prosecutors who were increasingly sniffing around the Kray’s empire. Driberg, and most likely Boothby too, were invited to parties at Cedra Court where, in the words of Francis Wheen, ‘rough but compliant East End lads were served like so many canapés’.

In July of 1964, the friendship hit a crisis. The Sunday Mirror published an exclusive, claiming that Scotland Yard had begun an investigation into the relationship between an unnamed peer and an underworld kingpin. Under the headline ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Inquiry’, it claimed to possess photographic evidence of a lord sat with a mobster who was running London’s largest protection racket. When a German magazine published Boothby and Kray’s names, Boothby called the Sunday Mirror’s bluff, outing himself in a letter to the Times as the subject around whom so many rumours had been flying. What’s more, he denied all charges, claiming he’d only met Kray three times on business matters.

With his high-powered lawyers behind him, the Mirror capitulated to Boothby, and settled with a huge fee and unreserved apology. The fact was that, although he and Kray were not lovers (they shared tastes in younger men instead), the allegations were largely true. Both Boothby and Driberg had intervened on behalf of the Krays behind the scenes in the past, and what’s more, there was a police investigation into the twins. The Sunday Mirror’s reporter had got his lead from his informants in Scotland Yard’s criminal investigation department, C11, that Cedra Court was under observation and an investigation into the Krays’ protection racketeering, fraud, and blackmail was underway.

Yet Driberg had persuaded the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, that Boothby had been libelled, and deserved his support. In reality, the calculation was political: it had barely been a year since the Profumo Affair, another sex scandal, had brought down the Conservative government and brought him to power. But their majority was slim, and another scandal, this time involving Driberg, would have been as damaging to him as the Tories. Driberg was such an inveterate and prolific cocksucker that any cub reporter would have been able to dig up a raft of men he had blown. Better for everyone, it was decided, if the papers, and the police, back away. As the Met Commissioner had lied and publicly denied there was any investigation into the twins, evidence gathered up to that point had to be discarded.

It was only ever going to be a temporary reprieve, however. Ronnie was becoming increasingly out of control. The twins were becoming increasingly concerned with the activities of their rivals, the Richardson Gang, who controlled territory in South London. At Christmas 1965, Ronnie heard that one of its members, George Cornell, a nasty piece of work who worked as a torturer for the gang, had called him a ‘fat poof’. Trouble was brewing, and in February of 1966 a gang war erupted. There was a series of tit-for-tat attacks, and Ronnie was in his element, coordinating his troops as ‘The Colonel’ he had always dreamed of being. In March, a Kray ally, although not a member of the gang, was killed in a mass shootout at a club in Catford. Major figures in the Richardson Gang had been shot, and the police had swooped down on it. It looked like victory for the twins was on hand as their main rivals went to ground.

The next day, however, Ronnie heard that Cornell was drinking in the Blind Beggar pub, on their turf. Ronnie holstered his Mauser pistol and got his driver to take him to the public house opposite Whitechapel Hospital. Entering the bar, Cornell was said to have greeted him by saying, ‘Well look who’s here.’ Ronnie put a bullet straight through his head, and left.

Of course, nobody saw anything, but after his brother Reggie went on to kill Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie the following year, the pressure was on. Police detective Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read had been foiled in his investigations once following the Boothby incident, but now he went after the twins with renewed vigour, and finally managed to track down the barmaid of the Blind Beggar. She was the crack in the East End code of silence; given a new identity, she testified against Ronnie, and alongside his brother he was sentenced to at least thirty years in prison in 1969.

Ronnie was eventually, after ten years in prison, moved to the high-security psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would live there for the rest of his life. He never denied his homosexuality, although sometimes qualified himself as a bisexual. For Ronnie, his homosexuality was a natural part of his personality, something he was born with, and as long as he retained his masculine virtues, he was fine with being seen as a homosexual. What he hated was being regarded as weak; ‘I’m a not a poof, I’m homosexual,’ he would claim, and loved to identify with icons of British imperialism, such as Lawrence of Arabia, in whom he saw a model of masculinity that accommodated violence and bravado as well as desire. Referring to the imperialist hero Gordon of Khartoum, he said, ‘Gordon was like me, homosexual, and he met his death like a man. When it’s time for me to go, I hope I do the same.’ He died in 1995, his ‘reputation’ seemingly intact: alongside Reggie, he remains something of a folk hero for many, and an unironic icon of masculinity for many young men.

Extract from Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Verso Books, 2022

The story of Ronnie Kray’s queer machismo. By Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Huck, June 10, 2022. 

Verso Books

Bad Gays Podcast

Bad Gays is a podcast series and book hosted and written by by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller about evil and complicated queers throughout history. Miller and Lemmey will be in conversation at Brighton’s Coast is Queer festival on Saturday 8 October. For PinkNews, they explain why the history of homosexuality is much more complex than we like to think.

When it comes LGBTQ+ political trailblazers, we are spoilt for choice.

There’s Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor who fought against homophobic discrimination in alliance with other marginalised people. Or there’s the queer Black feminist Angela Davis, a brilliant abolitionist activist and professor.

The internationally-minded might choose Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the former Icelandic prime minister and the world’s first openly gay head of government.

Yet the person who could be provocatively described as the world’s first openly homosexual politician was far from a hero. He was Ernst Röhm, an early member of the Nazi Party and the leader of Hitler’s brown-shirted, street-fighting fascist militia, the SA.

Proud of a social and sexual identity that rejected women as unsuitable partners for a masculinist warrior caste, either on the battlefield or in the bedroom, Röhm saw, as his biographer Eleanor Hancock has demonstrated, little contradiction between his political ideals and his same-sex desire. While that desire did not stop his ascent through the Nazi ranks, it did provide the pretext for his assassination in Hitler’s purge of the SA in 1934.

To our contemporary ears, such a life seems counterintuitive, even bizarre. While academic and activist conversations have long since moved on, most mainstream gay rights advocates – and most LGBTQ+ people – subscribe to the idea that homosexuals represent a stable and eternal minority, a minority that was eternally oppressed and then, in the 20th century, found its way to civil equality.

It’s a comforting fiction. Faced with discrimination and stereotyping, people classified as homosexual – the category has only existed since the mid-1860s – have excavated the past to find heroes and icons.

Yet an equally important historical and activist project (think theorist Michel Foucault, writer, sex worker, and labor activist Amber Hollibaugh, and the late and dearly departed activist historian Jeffrey Escoffier) has countered this search for heroes with an attempt to understand homosexuality as what it is: one specific and contingent structure for same-sex desire and love.

Like all good history, this approach is both more true and less boring. Gay and lesbian people aren’t “born this way” – a myth that understands homosexuality as, fundamentally, an affliction – and we don’t act in pre-set ways, heroic or abject, cowering or courageous. Our lives and stories are stranger and more powerful than that. But to tell that history, we need to discuss the bad gays like Ernst Röhm just as much as the good ones. We need to talk about gay villains.

After all, what is the story of Oscar Wilde, the literary star and aesthete whose trial and spectacular downfall gave the British public one of their first clear images of what an openly gay man was, without the complementary story of his impetuous young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, better known as Bosie? It was Bosie’s licentious, libertine lifestyle that first attracted Wilde to him, a lifestyle borne of his adherence to the idea of a new sexual type emerging in Europe at the time, the ‘uranian.’

The uranian, to simplify, was thought of as a third sex, a woman’s soul contained within a man’s body (or vice versa). Today few would regard this as the accurate description of a homosexual man or woman, yet these were the early roots of a self-consciously gay sexual identity – roots that demonstrate conclusively the ahistorical, cynical foolishness of present-day gays and lesbians who would abandon trans people based on the phobic lie that it is possible to separate the histories of same-sex love and of gender identity.

Uranians (unlike many other early proto-gay and proto-trans ways of being) emerged from a middle and upper-class, white European cultural milieu. The phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” was first coined in Bosie’s poetry, and Wilde’s fate was sealed by the conflict between Bosie’s ideals and those of his violent, aristocratic conservative father, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, whom Bosie encouraged Wilde to sue for libelling him as a sodomite.

The problem, of course, was that Wilde was a sodomite. A sentence of hard labour broke Wilde’s body, and Bosie’s callous cruelty broke his spirit, drawing to a premature end one of Ireland’s greatest literary talents.

Bosie moved on to a career peddling vile antisemitic conspiracy theories and died in the final days of World War II, unmourned. Yet his life is as illuminating, if not more so, of the formation of homosexual identity as Wilde’s.

Some bad gays’ lives were more complicated than pure evil. The Irish anti-colonial activist and journalist Roger Casement travelled through the Congo keeping two sets of diaries. The first set documented the atrocities he witnessed in what the historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja has demonstrated to have been near-genocidal, if very profitable, Belgian colonial rule.

In his second set of diaries, Casement documented each of his sexual encounters in the colonies, including precise annotations of each man’s anatomical attributes and how much he paid for the encounter.

These trips were taken on behalf of a British colonial regime that commissioned Casement’s reports in an attempt to falsely depict itself as a kinder, gentler colonizer. After Casement came to a deeper understanding of Britain’s own colonial violence and attempted to run guns to the Irish nationalist Easter Rising, the British authorities didn’t hesitate to turn on him: He was sentenced to death for treason.

A story like this, with its nearly infinite ethical complexities, can tell us so much more about race, power, empire and gay identity than simple sanitized stories about gay heroism.

Even LGBTQ+ people’s desire to look to the Classical past for heroes will often turn up morally complex figures, and figures whose sexualities do not correspond to homosexuality as we understand it to exist today.

 The Roman emperor Hadrian lived in a world whose sexual regime was governed by ideas about status and hierarchy in which same-sex contact was acceptable so long as the higher-status man penetrated the lower-status one.

Married to a woman, Sabina, for his whole adult life, he conducted a disastrous love affair with his younger friend Antinous which ended in Antinous’ possibly ritual drowning on a Nile river cruise, and subsequent deification. But this sexual regime had its own taboos and regulations: Julius Caesar was mocked not for engaging in same-sex activity, but for having sex with men of similar status, and more shameful, for having been the receptive partner.

A closer look at the nature of same-sex love in the society in which Hadrian lived complicates the idea of an unchanging thread of homosexuality that passes through history, sometimes suppressed and sometimes celebrated but always looking and feeling the same.

Remembering the bad gays of history in their full detail doesn’t redeem them, nor need it fuel popular bigotries and conspiracy theories.

While homophobes and transphobes demand we simplify our understanding of sexuality and gender down to a few inherited and uncritical assumptions, an LGBTQ+ movement based on justice and solidarity is surely strong enough to realise that human beings, in their loves, hatreds and desires are more complicated than that. Our rich, varied and sometimes horrible history certainly suggests so.

If we understand being gay as neither an affliction nor a blessing but simply a way of being that, like every other social institution, is shaped by the structures of race and class and gender, then all of us, gay and straight, can see the world more clearly – and fight for a better one. The villains of the past, strangely, might point the way to a just future.

We need to discuss ‘bad gays’ like Nazi monster Ernst Röhm just as much as the good ones. By Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller.  Pink News, October 6, 2022.

Authors Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller approach LGTBQ+ history from a unique angle on their "Bad Gays" podcast, which is, as the title suggests, not necessarily about the shining figures of virtue that we've all heard about, be they Enigma codebreaker (and victim of government persecution) Alan Turing or Harvey Milk, the martyr for freedom and equality whose message was all about giving hope to the next gay generation.

Lemmey and Miller focus instead on more complicated historical figures. In their recently-published book, also titled "Bad Gays," the two adopt fairly narrow criteria for which historical figures to include — with one exception, they are all gay men, for instance. Even so, they document a surprising breadth of badness that ranges from "somewhat naughty" to "downright evil," including no less a notorious figure than Ernst Röhm, the out Nazi who paid with his life when Hitler betrayed him (and a lot of others) on the "Night of Long Knives."

Röhm is an extreme example, along with Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover; most of the men the book talks about fall into a middle ground, from the paradoxical British and Scottish monarch (King James VI, who commissioned the version of the Bible that claims gay sex is an "abomination," but who had male lovers himself); to the blindly colonial (such as T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia), to those who were "bad" only because they defied the powers of their time. The book is a compendium of a much richer and fuller gay history than much of what we've seen before.

 And above telling us the stories of individual gay men throughout history, the book challenges our modern notions of homosexuality as an identity, making a compelling argument for how and why the "gay" of today is different from that of yesteryear, and how those conceptions are profoundly, inextricably bound up with colonialism, money, and class.

"Bad Gays" is an entertainingly erudite illumination of a history that bad straights like Ron DeSantis and his ilk will never allow to be taught in schools — which is why it's all but required reading for anyone who wants to be deeply informed about who we are and where we came from.

EDGE had the pleasure of chatting with Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller and learning about the strange and marvelous history of "Bad Gays."

EDGE: The book is based on your podcast. What was the seed of inspiration that led to the podcast?

Huw Lemmey: We had this idea for a podcast that came about through research for other things I was writing. These fascinating figures kept coming up who were gay men, and I realized that they weren't being thought about within the context of their sexuality, even though quite often their sexuality was quite influential on their lives. I was talking to Ben about it and saying, "Why is queer history so often given to us as a positive history of heroes, of reclaiming the stories?" Ben explained to me how early gay history emerged as a response to the stigmatization of gay people in order to say, "We aren't just these people living in the shadows. We actually come from this long line of influential, important people who've changed the world."

I said to Ben, "Well, I'd like to do a podcast where we discuss the anti-heroes or the villains, what stories their lives might tell us also about how homosexuality came to be, and hopefully it'll be entertaining along the way. Would you be interested in joining me?"

The book came out of the podcast because we kept having similar stories emerging, or stories that had similar contexts around race or similar issues. Probably the most important one of those is the relationship between homosexuality and colonialism. We were quite careful about selecting exactly who we were going to feature in the book, in order to tell the story that was a bit deeper, and that dealt with some of those issues in a way that hadn't really been dealt with before — not in a popular history book, at least.

Ben Miller: One of the great things about doing the show is the opportunity to every week go to some really different place. So, we'll go to 15th-century Japan, and then we'll go to Victorian London, and then we'll go to some eccentric British oil heir taking over an island in the Bahamas and ruling it with their life partner, who is a foot-tall leather doll named Lord Tod Wadley. I'm not making that up.

[Editor's Note: Indeed, he is not; The story of "Joe" Carstairs, who was seemingly either trans or non-binary, is recounted in the biography "The Queen of Whale Cay," by Kate Summerscale.]

The book format pushed us towards a more in-depth kind of storytelling. We wanted to have all of the different profiles in the book add up to a bigger and more comprehensive argument about how we think a more interesting, and a truer, conversation about queer history could look.

EDGE: You make the case that our current notions around how we think about homosexuality in general is deeply connected to forces in history like colonialism, capitalism, the exploitation of workers, and the manipulation of law and society by the ruling class. You must have taken note of how Singapore recently shed a holdover of British colonialism and decriminalized sex between men.

Huw Lemmey: I think I'm right in saying that the single the law in a Singaporean penal code is a direct copy and paste of the British colonial codes. It's quite interesting, doing some of this research. The law [against sex between men] in Jamaica and the law in Singapore are worded exactly the same. That's no coincidence.

EDGE: It seems from your argument that how we think about homosexuality today is a social construct resulting in large part from those historical forces. But at the very most elemental level, some people are sexually and romantically attracted to others of the same gender, and some people feel that their innate genders is different from what others assume it to be by looking at them — or they don't feel they fit into a binary model of gender at all.

Ben Miller: So here's where I'm going to step in and do some conceptual clarification. When we talk about our operating definitions of homosexuality and gender, and when we make an argument and show how they evolved, and what we think the problems with them are, and then [ask] what would happen if we abandoned it and did something else instead, we're also clear to say that we're standing on top of this identity. We are writing from within this identity. We are, you and I, both in this and implicated by it.

When we're saying that things are new, what we are not saying is that the impulses that those social institutions codify are new. They are not. When we talk about someone like Hadrian, we're talking about someone who clearly has both sexual and romantic attraction to other men. Same with Frederick the Great, same with a bunch of the other people that we talk about. But if you go into, "What does that actually mean to Hadrian, in Hadrian's time? What does the practice of sex between men look like?," it is not this idea we have now, where there is a stable minority of same-sex attracted men who are gender normative, and who, over the course of their life, may play both the penetrative and penetrated role. Instead, what you have is a situation where patriarchs of families are married to women, and also topping twinks. And now we don't call that being gay; we call that being in the Republican party. [Laughter]

Huw Lemmey: Today, how we organize those desires is like a social identity. In the last 50 or 60 years, you've seen a huge change from what "gay" would have meant, say, at the time of Stonewall, when there were people included within the umbrella of "gay" who today would be defined, and perhaps define themselves, into different identities. The reason why those people perhaps didn't feel included within [that umbrella identity] is partly down to the way it was formed in the first place.

EDGE: Your chapter on "The Bad Gays of the Weimar Republic" strikes disconcertingly familiar chords that resonate alarmingly with current affairs. Is there hope we might avoid repeating the way Weimar Germany collapsed into fascism?

Ben Miller: Yes, there is hope. And I think that's precisely because these forms are always changing, and because we are always faced with the task of making something from what we have been given; trying to make lives and make politics that are ethical, and that are up to the task of changing the world.

 EDGE: Do you foresee follow-up books? "Bad Lesbians," or maybe "Bad Gays, Part II?"

Ben Miller: I think we foresee a lot more of the show, and if people are interested in bad lesbians and [other] kinds of things, I really do recommend they [listen to] the show, because it's not just us talking. We invite a lot of people on to talk about folks they've researched, and that's a really great kind of bonus for people, that they don't only have to listen to our voices.

In terms of other books, we'd have to see. I think what made doing this book meaningful and important was that we thought that this was a story that we were both burning to tell, and we thought we could tell it well through this framework. Our thesis is about colonialism and capital and white male homosexual identity — the white gay man, how he happened, and why it was a mistake is our is our framing there. We would need to find another organizing principle that made sense for a second book for us. I do hope that more people start making popular media about queer history that is reflective of the smart and interesting conversations that people are having.

Podcasters Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller Want You To Know the 'Bad Gays'. By Kilian Melloy. EDGE, January 8, 2023. 

Along with the historic rate of youth LGBTQ+ identification—20.8 percent of Gen Z respondents answered a Gallup poll affirmatively last year—a remarkable feature of the contemporary sexual order is the ready availability of popular histories of queer activism. This arms present conflicts over gender and sexuality with a sense of how long the fight has been prepared for, and a lineage of dignified predecessors in struggle to join. But in this historical narrative, the reality of these ancestors as engaged political actors can be paradoxically easy to miss. Personal queer history is often confirmed but not challenged by historical queer persons, who can remain sealed behind this narrative even if they are still alive.

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller’s popular podcast and now book, Bad Gays, takes a slightly arch approach to deliver a corrective to the dominant narrative of heroic queers perfecting liberal society. In each of their carefully researched chapters, they adopt one or more of the titular “bad gays” as an opportunity for a complicated discussion of certain unsavory characters who nevertheless left decisive marks on the shape of contemporary sexual and gender identities, or whose experience provides a useful reference point against which to measure their change.

The “bad gay” is a venerable slur, gleefully deployed against Nazis or other figures of evil to distance their acts from implicitly straight innocence by the further charge of sexual deviance or, better, self-hatred. And in fact Ernst Röhm, J. Edgar Hoover, and Roy Cohn all make the appalling roster here, though Lemmey and Miller’s point is not to blame the 20th century on closet cases but to enrich queer politics with a supple enough historical sense to move inventively, without naturalizing the moral categories it wants to explode.

Advancing briskly from Hadrian to Lawrence of Arabia, and Yukio Mishima to Margaret Mead, their negative canon illuminates the long prehistory of the contradictory situation we all find ourselves in now, with a partially liberated sexual and gender order that preserves archaic violence alongside innovative forms of freedom. Recently, I corresponded with Lemmey and Miller to learn more about their approach to what they call “homosexual history.”

MAX FOX: One of the bolder premises in the book is your claim that the project of homosexuality was a failure. What do you mean by that?

BEN MILLER: The quote is that the book “investigates the failure of white male homosexuality as an identity and a political project.” White male homosexuality is one of the most successful political projects of the 20th century in terms of its ability to achieve civil rights and state recognition in record time. Huw and I are both white male homosexuals; we stand on top of that identity and are implicated in its successes, failures, exclusions, and the violence it’s done to others on its long march through the institutions. Our book is a counterhistory of that march through the institutions, one which focuses on the various poisons baked into the cake of that identitarian and political project from the beginning, by way of trying to dream a wilder, more inclusive, more powerful, more fun, and more interesting future for everyone.

 What are the poisons baked into the cake? Well, we identify some primary themes that run through the stories, all of which are common parlance in scholarly and activist communities but less well-known in queer public history. One is the degree to which the white gay man benefited from and evolved out of European colonization of the Global South—ideas about colonized people circulated in metropolitan capitals and served as the foundation for gay activists’ claims about themselves, their histories, and their identities.

Meanwhile, those gays were often complicit in the colonial project—some, like Cecil Rhodes, were leaders of that project—and too many white gay movements have ignored or actively oppressed queer-of-color organizing. Another is the white gay man’s rejection of femininity and gender nonconformity: In trying to be a “real man,” he’s often thrown allies under the bus. In telling these stories, we hope to give people tools with which to think critically about our past, understand how we are implicated in it, and dream the future forward.

MF: The gambit of thinking about “bad gays” is a way to move against a certain figure of the homosexual as an eternally and piously oppressed identity, which was central to bids for rights on the basis of its respectability. But in other ways, the bad figure seems to have been uncritically reactivated recently—it’s swirling around the panic over “grooming” and threatened to merge with the response to monkeypox. Does your historical investigation give you a better way of responding to this slur than respectability politics would?

HUW LEMMEY: I think orienting one’s sexual politics around an appeal to a third party is a strange compulsion that doesn’t really work for anyone. It’s a continuation of that same imperative that’s leveled upon the left in general to dilute its goals and ideas to appeal to a mythical “normal” voter: The costs outpace the rewards, simultaneously invalidating our own desires while casting the “norm” as natural. So in terms of gay politics, there may be ever more visibility for gay people, but the depth of that representation is shallow; the idea of what sexuality could mean, how it could challenge and strengthen us, is limited. At the same time, that limits our ability to fight back when the “norm” shifts against us. The response to monkeypox is a great example: When outbreaks started occurring in major European and US cities, it was gay men who were disproportionately affected. To me, that was unsurprising; although there are lots of ways to be gay, there is a different sex culture among many gay men in cities. Yet when those same groups started advocating for access to emergency health care and vaccines, in addition to the usual government foot-dragging and resistance, we also saw a pushback from other LGBTQ people claiming that targeting gay men for vaccine programs was “stigmatizing” homosexuality and would label monkeypox as a “gay plague.” There were even a large number of accusations that targeting a vulnerable demographic for increased health care was a rerun of the stigmatization we saw during the early AIDS crisis—a terrible misreading of history.

I think part of this problem emerges from the reluctance or inability to have honest and frank conversations between ourselves as gay people. Gay life has broken through into mainstream culture, but largely for a sympathetic straight audience, and discussions tend to be oriented outwards. As a result, there’s less space for us to talk between ourselves and represent ourselves to ourselves. So when we started Bad Gays, other gays were our audience. We wanted to have conversations that didn’t shy away from those complex conversations about the historical figures and identities that have shaped our contemporary identity. I think that’s an important political project; when other gays accuse us, as they have, of “airing our dirty linen in public,” I’m OK with that, because it means we’ve given up censoring our conversations for the sake of straight people.

MF: You argue against an idea of linear progression for thinking about this history, though this a cherished concept for people who want to warn against “going backwards.” What is a more useful way to think about this?

BM: History isn’t an arc that bends in any particular direction; it’s poems about ghosts, and sometimes they rhyme, but they don’t always make sense. Imagining gay history as a seamless evolution of ever-increasing rights and visibility is profoundly historically inaccurate, and also boring and reactionary. It led, for example, to the popularization of triumph narratives about civil rights achievements in the mid-2010s that helped continue demobilizing gay movements; now, only a few years later, new far-right moral panics about “groomers” and trans kids demonstrate how short-sighted that demobilization was. Once you realize the value of liberation can go up or down, you actually appreciate the strategic and ethical need to align the liberation of sexual and gender minorities with a universalist politics.

HL: I think it flatters everyone to suggest that we are smarter, kinder, and more just than those who came before us. Sadly, it isn’t true; history suggests that the gay identity is formed from a series of moral panics. These moral panics counterintuitively communicate to people the presence and availability of deviating from the restrictive norms and finding solidarity in gay life. It’s useful and important to be aware of the fact that those who tolerate you now, or even think of themselves as “allies,” may very well be complicit in the next reactionary wave. The emphasis must surely be on building a wider form of political solidarity to help as many of us as possible survive.

MF: I was struck by this question you pose in your introduction: “Why do configurations of identity and desire that seem to have expired continue to hold such power over so many people?” Do you think you’ve come to some understanding through writing this book?

BM: Michel Foucault was joking about the sexual liberation movements believing that “tomorrow, sex will be good again” in the 1970s! I think we get through it by going through it and actually addressing and engaging with it, not simply rejecting it.

HL: None of us are immune to the idea that things were simpler in the past, that we just missed a golden age. Not just the past—I think we also look sideways at how others organize their desire and wish we could have some of that. But I think, in terms of desire, there’s also a feeling that we want to better understand the modes of identity that we’ve inherited. My conclusion from writing the book is that much of the deep sexual anxiety we’re seeing in Europe and the US at the moment, from gay as well as straight people, comes from an epochal shift within our current sex-gender system that is very confusing for people who have come to think of their sexuality as a transhistorical truth, something unchanged through the centuries that has only, in the past century, been allowed to flower. That change looks like a threat, but history suggests it’s just the latest turn in an ever-shifting fluctuation of identities.

 MF: I’ve seen people argue that because the terms and categories change, the historical basis for a coalitional identity is a romantic fabrication. You say that coalition is the only thing that’s ever worked. Why is that?

BM: Well, lesbians were targeted by the Nazis, as were trans people, and Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson sure did think of themselves as women and as people whose social identities were profoundly shaped by gender transgression, even if they lived some of their lives at a moment when identity categories were sliced somewhat differently and a word like “gay” was more capacious than it is now. Post-Foucauldian gay and lesbian history has learned some of the wrong lessons: As Helmut Puff wrote a few years back, “A generation of researchers translated a somewhat paradoxical [argument], especially in the standard English translation, into a road map on how to do research on the history of homosexuality.” If our intervention into public history is to urge people to be more precise and specific and understand queer history in more complicated ways, then I think we’re also thumbing our nose a bit at certain strands of academic history that get bogged down in terminological debates that can often—as in the case of the gay men who object to the remembrance of the Nazi persecution of trans people and lesbians, or the gay men who insist that Marsha and Sylvia weren’t actually meaningfully trans––become reactionary.

MF: Does this history give us a way to think about the contemporary fascist mobilization around trans people, or does that come out of a different historical sequence?

BM: The history of fascist mobilization against trans people is extremely present in our book, most prominently in the chapter about Weimar history. For me it is impossible to look at the ways in which sex and gender deviance were constructed as threats to the nation and not see profoundly disturbing correspondences with today’s transphobic mobilizations. The cover of Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, with the little white girl’s reproductive organs obliterated by a black hole—what she calls “the transgender craze seducing our daughters”—could be a Nazi propaganda poster.

HL: History doesn’t repeat; it rhymes, to paraphrase Twain. The current moment of fascist mobilization is not the same as that in the ’30s, but there is plenty to learn from that period about the anxieties and hatreds that were fed, and fed upon, by the Nazis. Perhaps most important would be the anxieties around collapsing masculinity, blurring traditional gender roles, and the fear that the state is becoming weak. It’s telling that, despite the US spending more than the next eight largest countries combined on its own military, there is such a willing audience for the idea that LGBTQ people are weakening US defense that the traditional transphobic joke has as its punch line an attack helicopter; that upon the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was a sudden spike in conversations about the tolerance of LGBTQ people in Europe having strengthened Putin’s resolve; and so on. These fears of sexual and moral degradation, military and masculine weakness, and the penetrability of a nation’s sovereignty—all of them have precedent in interwar Europe, as do the hate campaigns that are springing from them.

In recent decades, the idea that homosexual tolerance, and indeed homosexuality, was the logical consequence of the Western liberal project has become commonplace, utilized to conscript gay rights into that project, to exclude LGBTQ Muslims, and to demonize brown people in general. Any gay person who has argued against Western interventionist policy, or for the rights of the Palestinian people, will recognize this—as well as the inevitable wide-eyed, salivating, and gleeful response from a straight person that “they’d throw you off the top of a building over there.” Not only has that project demonized others, but it has helped boost this nationalist obsession with sexual moral hygiene and the integrity of borders. These are chickens coming home to roost; history proves that even the most masculinist, fascist, flag-waving gays rarely survive what follows.

MF: The chapter on Weimar Germany is especially interesting, since that time and place loom so large in liberal minds as a figure of sexual liberation inviting reactionary backlash. This ends up agreeing with preserving an idea of sexual freedom as decadence. What would you say your investigation of the Weimar gays actually teaches us?

BM: Historian Laurie Marhoefer’s argument, [in Sex and the Weimar Republic] proposes that Weimar Berlin’s sexual liberation movement was much like the movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the English-speaking world: They both had multiple ideological and intellectual strands, were complex and often contradictory, and had central elements that were willing to accept a more “scientific” and progressive understanding of sexual and gender difference in exchange for sharpened penalties against people understood to be particularly deviant, like sex workers. This does not, of course, mean that Nazi backlash against gay and trans visibility wasn’t a huge part of their project of murder and repression. I think this way of looking at Weimar helps us get closer to an understanding of the similarities between that moment and our own.

MF: The current public understanding of homosexuality is one that you trace as emerging from a series of concessions to power, punctuated by moments of revolt and opportunities for alliance. What would you say that people interested in moving beyond this project should be looking for?

HL: Most fundamentally, that same-sex desire is not an identity category strong enough to ensure solidarity in and of itself, and that a wider coalition is necessary. At the same time, coalitions cannot demand that one party lives like the other party, or that one party bends to meet the demands of the other. We are all different people; our experiences even within that identity category vary vastly, inflected by our other identities. Lastly, that difference perseveres and survives.

BM: We end the book with a dance through some moments when queer people and movements approached, however fleetingly, a lived politics of alliance capable of making transformative change. Some of these moments––like the Combahee River Collective and its movement-defining statement––are well-known, others of them less so. One of my favorite stories in that conclusion comes from Allan Bérubé and Aaron Lecklider’s research into the pro-gay, anti-racist Communist Marine Cooks and Stewards union that worked on the Pacific Merchant Marine fleet in the 1930s. They had signs saying: “No Red-Baiting, No Race-Baiting, No Queen-Baiting.” Someone threatened to beat up a member for being a queen, and he beat him bloody with a soup ladle and said, essentially, that a union queen was willing to be mean to defend her comrades. We should all aspire to that.

MF: Your last profile is of Pim Fortuyn, who synthesizes some of the worst strains of masculinism with the liberal appeals to tolerance that preserve the idea of homosexuality as bad but whiteness as good because it can withstand it. You draw parallels with Milo Yiannopolous, Andrew Sullivan—maybe we would include Glenn Greenwald in a couple of years. Are gays like this the future, or can we defeat them?

 BM: This is the more pessimistic part of our conclusion: that the center-right acceptance of certain elements of the liberal rights consensus about gays and lesbians will lead to more Fortuyns and Sullivans. Indeed, to the extent that Sullivan helped theorize that rights consensus with his arguments for demobilization after AIDS and marriage equality as a dignifying signature issue, this was intentional. I think we can defeat them, but I also fear they will grow in number.

HL: While it was possible, even personally profitable, for certain types of gay men—especially men like us, white cis gay men—to adopt an approach that valorized marriage, the military, whiteness, and the nation-state a decade ago, it’s harder to valorize what comes next: not just the accusation of being groomers, of perversion and subversion, but also the implication among former allies that there’s at least some basis to those accusations; that there’s no smoke without fire; that you must admit this queer stuff has gone too far. To continue in alliance with that rhetoric takes a level of investment in the nation and the sex-gender system that I think most gay people just don’t have. At heart, they know who has their back in the fight.

 

Learning From the “Bad Gays” of History : A conversation with Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller about queer crooks, villains, and anti-heros, and what we might learn from the sinister side of gay politics. By Mad Fox. The Nation, October 26, 2022. 

Even before Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller met, they were on the same page. Both men have an abiding interest in queer history — Miller as an academic and Lemmey as a writer of essays and novels. But they found that the kinds of topics they wanted to talk about, the “beyond 101,” as Miller puts it now, often sounded intimidating to editors and other gatekeepers.

 “We kept being told, ‘There is no audience for this; people aren’t ready,’” Miller explained during a recent Zoom call. So when the pair were introduced by a mutual friend, they decided to go rogue and DIY a podcast called “Bad Gays,” aimed at discussing and dissecting the lives of “evil and complicated queer people in history” as a means of exploring modern queer identity. Neither had any audio experience, but that didn’t matter, they figured. Who was going to be listening, anyway?

 As it turned out, many, many people. In late May of this year, the podcast crossed the million-download mark, and Miller and Lemmey published a companion book of the same title. “Bad Gays: A Homosexual History” offers biographical sketches of 14 men, ranging from the Roman emperor Hadrian to J. Edgar Hoover; taken together they explain, as Miller puts it, “how the white gay man happened as an identity figure, and why that was a mistake, and what we should do instead.”

 Why did framing the podcast around, as you sometimes say, “queer villains” feel like the right project for you?

 Miller: The point of the show is to ask: What do we learn about ourselves by looking at the stories of people we are less comfortable identifying with? It’s not that we’re trying to make a line in the sand between bad gays and not-bad gays. But the more we make ourselves and our listeners uncomfortable, the better the work is.

 Lemmey: You immediately start from a position that recognizes complexity. A lot of the people we feature, there’s very few who are out-and-out terrible people. But because we started from this position, we can complicate the stories we want to tell about queerness.

 A thing that comes up a lot in both the book and the podcast is that sexuality isn’t an inherent identity category. The concept of homosexuality had to be invented, and it’s a relatively modern invention.

 Miller: Both heterosexuality and homosexuality, as we understand them, are this idea that you go out into the world in search of some kind of sexual and/or romantic partner, and that you engage with people in public and private places, and eventually some kind of couple-bond forms. [But] he whole idea of heterosexual dating is invented in the 1920s, when all of a sudden there’s a consumer market for young people. This stuff has a very specific history!

 Lemmey: It’s very easy to assume that, after a few generations, they are natural. That’s the main conversation of the book — to look for the historical basis, because within that historical basis there’s a challenge to the idea of these forms being natural. And if they aren’t natural then we can rethink what forms we might want.

 So you’re having conversations about people who wouldn’t have identified as gay or lesbian or queer. And we sometimes know something about their sex lives, but we don’t have much evidence. How do you talk around that in a show called “Bad Gays”?

 Lemmey: We’re constantly saying: This is our conclusion, but we’re showing our workings; you might come to a different conclusion. There’s the discussion of whether you can label someone who was born before the 1860s as a homosexual in the first place. What does that mean? King James — was he having sex with these men? He was clearly writing in this romantic form about them, but does that mean he was having sex with them? It’s an open discussion we have.

 Do you have any favorite stories in the book?

 Miller: There’s so much public conversation about the rise of the new right across the West. I think the fact that the person who led that was not only openly gay— Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, in 2002 — he was so gay that during the election campaign he gave a TV interview in which he talked about how good [semen] tastes.

 I think there is a tendency to equate queerness with radical ideas. But a big theme in the book is looking at how queer people have assimilated themselves into the dominant culture. Why was that important to you?

 Miller: Only by understanding how history works do we understand how to work within the world we’ve been given to change the world we’ve been given.

 Lemmey: The study of history in this way removes the figure of the queer person as inherently radical, and probably inherently nice, in some way — which is not just ahistorical but an observable falsehood to anyone who hangs out in a gay bar. It can be very helpful in undermining the use of homosexuality as a fig leaf to pinkwash reactionary political projects — and racist and colonialist political projects as well.

 It’s Pride Month. What’s your relationship to Pride as a phenomenon, historically and currently?

 Lemmey: I love and hate Pride. It can be a really amazing place to discover yourself inside your city. It’s become corporatized and now is a vehicle for some of the most reactionary forces — if you’ve been to Pride in London it’s, like, arms manufacturers and the police — but I think it’s a territory still worth struggling for.

 A lot of people say, “Oh, it’s just been turned into a party; it should be a protest.” I think from the earliest days it was both, and one of the things that’s amazing about it is that to party in that way, visibly on the streets, is itself a political action. The personal is political, to coin a phrase.

 The book is mostly focused on history, but you do promise to discuss what we should do next. What kinds of queer futures do you imagine?

 Miller: We talk about times and places when solidarity has broken out and think about what it would mean to do that in the present. There’s moments like the history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in the Pacific in the 1930s. The union was communist and explicitly anti-racist and explicitly pro-gay; their slogan was, “When they try to get one of us, they get all of us.” They also participated in some enormous general strikes in California in the 1930s that were a really important part of why the New Deal happened: fear of labor action like this one.

 Lemmey: One of the things I think the book brings out is that the value of your liberation can go down as well as up, so to speak. The story we have been told of the slow, gradual unfolding of rights in a Western democratic liberal framework is simply false. They can go backwards as quickly as they can go forward, so a politics that demands integration and doesn’t pay attention to those dangers is one that’s potentially lethal to all LGBTQ people, but especially trans people, and that’s what we’re going through in the current moment.

 By the same token, in what can seem like a dull, gray, repressive situation — a place like New York in the 1960s, where gay people had been struggling for generations — Stonewall can happen. A revolutionary change can emerge out of the night and sweep things into a new dimension.

 ‘Bad Gays’ and the two podcasters who love them. By Zan Romanoff. Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2022. 

Bad Gays, a podcast and now a book, argues for a complex and political approach to queer history; one that stretches beyond examples of past heroism that make us feel good about ourselves. In place of more straightforwardly inspiring icons like Alan Turing or Audre Lorde, the Bad Gays project concerns fascists, tyrants, criminals; the decadent, amoral and problematic. In this sense, it interrogates both what it means to be gay and what it means to be bad. Introduced by a mutual friend, hosts and co-authors Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey first met for a coffee in Barcelona in 2018 – an event that spiralled into a boozy, nine-hour discussion, during which the idea for the podcast was born.

 Since then the podcast has been downloaded nearly a million times and built up a dedicated audience, with the book adaptation published by Verso this month. Beginning with the Roman emperor Hadrian and ending in the early 21st century with far-right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, the book offers an expansive view of, in Lemmey’s words, “the creation of homosexuality as something that happened, rather than a natural state of being.” Throughout, Lemmey and Miller take a satisfyingly wide-lens approach, contextualising these personal narratives within changing patterns of politics, monarchism, religion, science, the economy, and imperialism.

 Miller and Lemmey both share an expertise and a certain sensibility but come at queer history from different, though complementary, backgrounds: Miller is an academic at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität, as well as being a prolific writer and a board member of Berlin’s Schules Museum (dedicated to gay history); while Lemmey is a novelist, artist and critic based in Barcelona, who has authored three novels: Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse (2016), Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell (2019) and Unknown Language (2020). He also writes a weekly essay series on Substack, utopian drivel. Here, Lemmey and Miller discuss masculinity, militarism, colonialism, the idea of ‘badness’, and more.

 James Greig: Alongside the more serious history, there’s a lot of humorous asides in the book. Why did you want to include that tone?

 Huw Lemmey: We wanted to approach it like the podcast, which is for queer people by queer people, and is engaged in queer humour. It’s also because so much of queer history is really funny. And I think there’s a historiographical aspect to it as well: as we discuss both in the book and on the show, it’s complicated to go back and say these historical figures were ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ because they existed before those terms and those concepts had been developed. But we do say that about them, because we show our workings and discuss the fact that it doesn’t necessarily make sense. But there’s something to be gained from having those conversations through our own lens and how it affects our lives today. Using humour is doing the same thing: rather than going back and saying, ‘Well, you can’t really say that James I was gay, blah, blah, blah’, which is perhaps what a traditional history book would do, we go back and say, ‘Well, he was really into young twinks.’ And we can recognise that today because we all know a guy who’s always fucking up his life the moment a hot 22-year-old appears.

 JG: One thing I found striking, particularly in the earlier sections, is how blase people in history often were about homosexuality. You get the impression that certain people had more sexual freedom in the 16th century or whenever than they would have done in the 1970s. In this sense, the book disrupts the idea that the progression of gay rights is this gradual, linear bend towards things getting better. Why did you want to problematise that idea?

 Ben Miller: Because it’s not true. There are two potential versions of who queer people are, and how we came to be, and one of them is really the accepted model in academic and activist circles. It says that sexuality, both homosexuality and heterosexuality, are institutions that have recent and social histories; they’re not eternal, and they don’t look the same way over time. So you can absolutely say that there’s such a thing as same-sex love and gender nonconformity in every recorded human situation, but the way that those things look, what they mean, how they operate socially, and how they relate to gender, race and class are all completely different. These things have just changed radically over time.

 The other way of thinking about it is to say that homosexuality is this eternal thing: we've always been here, we’ve always been oppressed and now we’re coming out and taking our rightful places. But it’s just not true. And in addition to being untrue – while its helpfulness in terms of fighting back against medicalisation or pathologization is clear – we think it’s also really politically limiting. It encourages a kind of single-issue politics in which homosexuality is seen as something separate from other forms of oppression. It also encourages you to think of homosexuality as an affliction, as something people can’t help, as opposed to thinking of it as a claim of rational, interesting and maybe good response to living in the world. Thinking about these ways of being as social, which means that they change and grow, is actually much more true. It’s also less boring, which are two good rules for history.

 HL: It also challenges the idea that liberation is a one-way street and this rights-based discourse which argues that once rights are given they can’t be taken away. History proves that to be completely false again and again and again. So we need to be on our guard.

 JG: Some of the people discussed in the book, such as Roger Casement [a diplomat who campaigned on behalf of colonised peoples, before being executed by the British state for treason] are very sympathetic. Why did you choose to include them in a book about ‘bad gays’?

 HL: Just as we try to complicate and show our working around what we mean by ‘gay’, we try do to the same thing around the idea of ‘bad’. What does it mean to be bad? If you read [diplomat and Irish nationalist] Roger Casement’s story now, he’s a sympathetic character who had a lot of foresight and did a lot of good things. But if you asked someone 100 years ago in Britain what they thought of him, he would have been the most disgusting traitor. And the concept of badness related to his sexuality was so important in the suppression of his legacy and the denial of him as a martyr to the Irish nationalist cause. So with a lot of these people, we are discussing the idea of ethics and badness and how it relates to their sexuality.

 Secondly, what gives the podcast the ability to ask interesting questions is its distance from the traditional gay history project, which is obviously not universal. There are lots of activists and academics who don’t engage in this project, especially these days. But the traditional project was about excavating the past for examples of how gay men had lived their lives in ways that weren’t sad, and abject, to look back and say, ‘we’re not monomaniacal perverts.’ Our project is to look at what’s interesting in the people who aren’t acclaimed as heroes.

 JG: One of the big themes of the book is the connection between homosexuality and militarism. What is the nature of that connection?

 BM: Well, there’s always been a strain of gay male thought that understands homosexuality, rather than being related to gender presentation or a ‘third sex’, is actually the most masculine thing you can possibly do – because you’re not polluting yourself with any women. And this is obviously an extraordinarily misogynistic idea, and in various moments in time, it’s been associated with antisemitism, although not always. So this is something that is apparent in lots of gay political and cultural movements. It doesn’t always end up being associated with formal far-right politics, but it does often enough that we thought it was worth talking about.

 So, for example, we discuss Ernst Röhm in the book, who was an openly gay Nazi who saw no conflict between his sexuality and his political views, because he completely rejected the feminine – both in the bedroom and on the battlefield. You can see a similar kind of understanding, in an earlier historical time, in the life of someone like Frederick the Great, who ended up being an influence on Ernst Röhm in really interesting ways. In the book, this idea evolved in lots of different ways, depending on the historical context.

 JG: How is colonialism bound up in the development of homosexuality? Why was that angle important to include?

 BM: For people in academic and activist conversations, this is an old story. And yet it is one that hasn’t really made it out into the way that people generally think about sexuality. But – and this is something that people like Ann Stoler talked a lot about – think about the profound and horrifying effects colonisation had, materially and culturally, both on the places that were colonised and on the colonising countries. Domestic Britain was heavily affected by the Empire, which is not to say that British people suffered to the same degree that people whose countries were invaded and occupied, but that imperialism changed so many different kinds of systems and relationships in all of these places. It would be weird if something as fundamental as sexuality wasn’t affected by that. The colonies provided a place where white people could search through the records of these supposedly primitive cultures that they were dominating in search of evidence for their own superiority, and as part of a project of classifying different kinds of people into ‘races’. And in both of those places, they would find evidence of same-sex behaviour, which was then was taken up by people being assigned to this category of ‘homosexual’ in the metropolis.

 And there’s also the fact that the colonies provided a space where white men could go and experience a sexual freedom that they couldn’t experience at home. The colonies are seen, in this kind of fucked up, racist Heart of Darkness way, as places where the normal rules don’t apply. So in French, doing it ‘colonial style’ becomes slang for sodomy, because so many French men were having these homosexual experiences with colonised men. This history then really affects so many things about how our sexuality evolves.

 Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller is published by Verso and is out now.

 Why We Need to Talk About the “Bad Gays” in History Too.  By James Greig. Another Magazine, June 10, 2022. 

When thinking of queer historical figures, certain people come to mind: activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; writers like Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and James Baldwin; artists and performers like Frieda Kahlo and Josephine Baker. But what about the queers from the wrong side of history? Why doesn’t the queer community claim them too? If sexuality is central to how we understand the lives and accomplishments of our beloved queer icons, why not the antiheroes as well?

 This is the question Bad Gays sets out to rectify. The book, based on Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller’s popular podcast of the same name, examines the lives of “bad gays” — a term that is a bit of a misnomer by design — by exploring how certain historical figures’ actions influenced those around them and how their actions, in turn, were influenced by their sexuality. By doing this, Lemmey and Miller subvert the typical way queer history and politics are usually talked about; this book is about villains, not heroes.

 To be clear, Lemmey and Miller do not excuse the actions of any of the people they profile in Bad Gays. Rather, they seek to place each person within their appropriate historical context to better understand queerness through a historical lens. To ignore the bad gays of history is to ignore a crucial part of the queer past, Lemmey and Miller argue. It risks romanticizing an idealized version of history and stunts the forward momentum of queer liberation. The present is built on the foundation of the past, after all, and we cannot move forward until we reckon with it. “‘Gay is good,’ went the old slogan, but it’s no good at all on its own,” they write.

 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.

 Bad Gays begins with Roman emperor Hadrian (11-138) and ends with right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (1948-2002). Although the book is broad in scope, covering nearly every corner of the globe, most biographies are of cis gay or bisexual men, except for one chapter about anthropologist Margaret Mead. This isn’t a criticism: Bad Gays does important work in exploring how the actions and behaviours of these people impacted individuals from marginalized communities and the broader queer community. The chapter on J. Edgar Hoover, for example, highlights Hoover’s role as an architect of the white supremacist surveillance state. As director of the FBI, Hoover placed prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance — a period of intense Black American intellectual and cultural revival after the First World War — under intense surveillance and later attempted to suppress the civil rights movement.

 The politics of power and privilege are frequent themes in Bad Gays. Profile after profile reveals how often these people opted to act in their interests — or against them entirely, in the case of Ernst Röhm — rather than in solidarity with the broader queer community. Röhm, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, was one of the co-founders of the Nazi’s infamous SA troops. The Nazis, along with being fascists and white supremacists, were also known for being violently homophobic.

 For Röhm, his politics and sexuality weren’t at odds; he saw hypermasculine gay men like himself as different from other, more feminine gay men. His masculinist homosexuality co-existed perfectly alongside his fascist ideology. Lemmey and Miller draw a link between this type of homosexuality to the contemporary “Masc 4 Masc” culture that exists on dating apps like Grindr. This doesn’t mean that these gay men are fascists, but it does exemplify how they privilege masculinity above femininity and androgyny.

 Bad Gays is full of similar stories about individuals with economic and political capital failing to use their power to further the cause of queer liberation. This is perhaps most clear in the section dedicated to the AIDS epidemic. As Lemmey and Miller explain, the introduction of AIDS treatment therapies in the late ’90s caused a massive schism in the American queer community. These therapies split the community in two: on one side, those who could afford treatment (largely wealthy white gay men and lesbians), and on the other, those who could not (namely, Black queer people and working-class people).

 For these white, wealthy gays and lesbians, the arrival of AIDS treatments meant queer solidarity had served its purpose, and they had no more use for it. Instead, they turned their backs on the rest of their community in lieu of pursuing assimilation into mainstream middle and upper-class society via marriage equality. Lemmey and Miller explain that these betrayals have crippled the queer liberation movement. They call for a better approach to queer liberation rooted in true solidarity.

 We do not get to choose who we are but we do get to choose how, and with whom, we dance: what queerness, what faggotry, what transness, what gender trouble and abolition will be for us and with us and to us. The past is still with us; the revolutions of the queer future beckon.

 – Bad Gays

 The argument for solidarity is the most compelling part of Bad Gays — a starting point that I wish was expounded on just a bit more so we could more clearly envision the alternative future Lemmey and Miller hint at. Bad Gays succeeds in radically rethinking queer history in an enticing, thought-provoking manner, but it much more than that. As Lemmey and Miller write in their introduction, Bad Gays is ultimately an act of love — most criticism is, after all — and this is made clear in how compellingly Lemmey and Miller write about their vision for the future. Ultimately, this book is a project of demystification and an act of love.

 “The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure – failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion,” they write. They are both unabashedly pro-revolution, anti-reform, and believe there is a better way forward. Understanding the history of failure — the failure of gayness as a political identity, the failure of queer solidarity, and the failure of queer liberation thus far — is crucial to paving the way to a better, brighter, freer future.

 

‘Bad Gays’ Radically Subverts Queer History. By Eleni Vlahiotis. Pop Matters, October 6,  2022

If you happen to take a stroll down the main thoroughfare of Hillcrest — San Diego’s historically gay neighborhood, where I currently live — you will likely come across some of the strangest public art you’ll ever see. Block after block, banners adorned with the faces of queer celebrities flutter from atop street lights. Below the smiling faces, printed on garishly colored backgrounds, are captions that the youths would describe as, well, cringe. “Proud Like Chaz,” as in Bono. “Sharp Like Anderson,” Cooper, that is. “Witty Like Neil,” “Fierce Like Janet,” “Fiery Like Laverne,” “Fun like Lily” (whom the sign tells us “has been involved in” several “gay-friendly film productions”). “Glam Like Liz” — Taylor, because I guess allies are welcome too. “Fab Like Elton,” on a plane of cheery purple. “Wild Like Gaga,” alongside a wildly outdated photograph of the singer, songwriter, and actress “known for her work related to LGBT rights.”

 You might wonder where these posters come from, and what exactly they’re for. The answer, apparently, is contained in the logo at their base. “Fabulous Hillcrest,” it reads in old-timey font, “Dine * Shop * Play.” It seems that some collection of local business owners has sprung for these posters, seeking to capitalize on the neighborhood’s gay history, draw in an affluent queer clientele, and get them to spend, dwell, and have a little fun. Merchants insinuating cruising and casual sex — how far we’ve come.

 This convergence of queerness and capitalism, accompanied by more than a whiff of desperation, might also lead one to notice a striking juxtaposition. The celebrities in the posters are grinning down not just at well-heeled gays on their way to Breakfast Bitch, Out of the Closet, and The Rail, but also at a significant unhoused population, doing their best to avoid the violence of the state. Like many California cities, San Diego is home to a great number of people lacking in stable shelter, and Hillcrest’s business district is one place where the unhoused are most visible. Alongside so many homeless people — who, according to a study from UCLA’s Williams Institute, among others, are disproportionately queer — the presence of the rich and famous (and fierce, fab, glam, etc.) makes for an especially jarring contrast. In the face of such an unconscionable level of poverty and suffering, the use of resources to memorialize the most privileged among us — and the positioning of these posters as themselves some sort of social good — is troubling and revealing.

 History has long been central to the fight for gay rights. In the early days of the liberatory movements that exploded after Stonewall — as queer people started to come out, to overcome shame, to fight for civil rights, to even fight the cops — many began looking back through history, seeking to find examples that proved that we have always been here. They seized on figures ranging from Oscar Wilde to Sappho, Abraham Lincoln to Leonardo da Vinci, to show that queerness was not some novel thing, that many of history’s heroes and innovators and pioneers had been queer, that they had a past of which they could be proud.

 “This was important work,” acknowledge Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller in their provocative new book, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, yet it was also, inevitably, reductive. Indeed, accepting queer people as full human beings also means accepting that many are and were flawed. Queers fought the Nazis, but what about the queers who were Nazis? Understandably, queer activists, ordinary queer people, and the capitalists of Hillcrest may not wish to lift up the queer frauds, queer criminals, queer murderers. “But is it not time we also look at those whom the early gay rights pioneers were less keen to claim as family, as one of us?” Lemmey and Miller ask. The “bad gays,” too, have always been here. And if the price of “acceptance” is a kind of social sainthood, an anodyne and sanitized and unthreatening model minority, perhaps that price has become too high to pay.

 To be sure, legions of homophobes have not hesitated to conflate all queer people with pedophiles or cannibals, with John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer and the like. But few people who are not expressly bigoted have systematically considered history’s queer villains and their enduring significance.

 Lemmey and Miller — both, like this reviewer, gay men — have set out to remedy this absence. To this end, they have written a book consisting of 14 chapters, each one profiling a “bad gay” or group of “bad gays,” from the Emperor Hadrian to J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, from King James of England to the Japanese writer, bodybuilder, and militia leader Yukio Mishima. The book covers individuals from ancient times as well as the recent past, including both the (in)famous and the unknown, although (for reasons that become plain) the focus remains on powerful white men in the Global North.

 “Bad gays,” the authors write in the book’s introduction, are “the gay people in history who do not flatter us, and whom we cannot make into heroes: the liars, the powerful, the criminal, and the successful.” This is a broad definition, perhaps too broad, and a necessarily subjective one, but a few pages later the authors offer a helpful clarification: many queers on the “bad” spectrum — encompassing everything from fascists to assimilationist gays who would leave their marginalized queer brethren behind as they easily climb the ladders of social and economic capital — “have wanted to position themselves as heirs to a secret or magical kingdom, as the inheritors of a chain 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.” Their book, then, is about the worst gays throughout history, but also about the worst uses of gay history, and the myriad ways that an uncritical celebration of “good” gays and “good” gayness can cause harm.

 Only by deconstructing the romanticized past, the authors conclude, can queer people in the present recognize the profound limitations baked into mainstream gay politics. Only then can we move beyond those limitations and toward the solidarity that makes liberation for all people possible.

 There remains, of course, the sticky matter of whether many of the powerful and evil and complicated individuals profiled in Bad Gays were, in any coherent sense, actually gay. Although it is clear that many had what we would today characterize as queer sex or queer intimate relationships, some did so long before the idea of a stable sexual identity existed. The inadequacy of the surviving historical record likewise makes it difficult to determine how, exactly, many of them would have identified (or, for that matter, the details of their sex lives). Yet as the authors point out, decades ago the term “gay” included anyone who lived beyond the heterosexual and cissexist norms of their society. It is, to some extent, still a useful blanket term. Lemmey and Miller have decided to use the term “gay” to put “today’s homosexuality under a microscope,” to determine “why it is troubled and incomplete, and why it failed to live up to its utopian promises of liberation.”

 Bad Gays is an estimable project, with a great title and a great premise and a highly readable, often rollicking, occasionally heartbreaking narrative. That, in some ways, it falls short of proving its broad thesis hardly matters in light of its many triumphs, perhaps most of all its relentless commitment to cutting through complacent liberal bromides about the arc of queer history. To ignore history’s “bad gays” risks doing as the Hillcrest business owners have done — celebrating an idealized vision of the queer past while ignoring a desperate queer present.

 For more than three years, Lemmey — a British novelist, artist, and critic living in Barcelona — and Miller — an American writer, researcher, and academic living in Berlin — have run a popular podcast called Bad Gays, and it is from the research for that project that they have produced their new book of the same name.

 I first stumbled across Bad Gays in the dark days of late 2020, when my husband sent me a link to “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs,” a delightful, erudite (and, sadly, now largely inactive) newsletter in which Lemmey was undertaking deep, deep dives into each episode of the sitcom Frasier, drawing on literature, theory, psychology, and much else. I tore through the newsletter’s archive and, after quickly exhausting its offerings, went looking for more of Lemmey’s work.

 Bad Gays is, as its log line attests, “a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.” Over dozens of episodes, its hosts have profiled a true murderer’s row of “bad gays” — from Andy Warhol to Andrew Sullivan, from Gertrude Stein to Pete Buttigieg — although Lemmey and Miller are judicious in assessing, at the end of each episode, whether their subject du jour was truly “bad” or truly “gay,” or whether (as is often the case) reality is much more complicated.

 Appropriately enough, the very first episode was an excavation of “the world’s first openly gay politician,” Nazi militia commander Ernst Röhm — a very bad gay if ever there was one. From there, the series jumps across time periods, although it has an understandable tendency to return to relatively recent history.

 Bad Gays is one of the rare podcasts that’s only gotten better over time. Its early episodes were interesting, if occasionally wooden, with Lemmey or Miller reading potted biographies to the other. As the podcast went on, though, the hosts began inviting on expert guests, providing more panoramic context, and taking on more and more ambitious subjects. Standout recent episodes include pirate queen Anne Bonny, which allowed its hosts to explore the queer history of piracy; opera queen Franco Zeffirelli, in which Miller brilliantly explicated the complex queerness of 20th-century opera; bank robber John Wojtowicz, which spun out into a stimulating survey of 1970s gay/trans politics; and a satisfyingly blistering two-part exposé of Cressida Dick, the first woman and first out queer person to serve as head of London’s police force.

 Lemmey and Miller are able hosts with distinctive narrative voices (voices that a loyal listener will have no trouble recognizing across the various chapters of the book Bad Gays). And their different national backgrounds allow them to choose subjects from both sides of the Atlantic. Yet their podcast’s greatest achievement — and one shared by the eponymous book — is its unembarrassed scholarliness. Lemmey and Miller are commendably upfront about the sources of their material, often discussing the benefits or drawbacks of this or that biographical tome. Many podcasts provide their sources in the show notes, but Lemmey and Miller discuss them in the body of each episode, laying bare the scholarly process and revealing that history is not some neutral recitation of facts but a series of arguments.

 The principal way that Bad Gays departs from its podcast predecessor is its own sustained historical argument. Almost every subject of the book was previously profiled in the podcast, but Lemmey and Miller have now turned to many of the figures’ roles in the construction of gay history — and, thus, gay identity.

 Their first chapter features the Emperor Hadrian and includes a good deal of information about the sex lives of ancient Greeks and Romans. When, in the Victorian Era, powerful European men began looking for “historical examples of their own same-sex desires,” they turned to the worlds of the Greeks and Romans, squinting to see “men who loved other men without shame, and who weren’t regarded by their peers as aberrant, diseased, and disgusting.” More recent examinations have shown that the truth of the matter was much thornier, Lemmey and Miller note. In particular, Hadrian’s “obsessive love for a much younger man” (reflecting the ancient idealization of pederasty) greatly “complicates the idea of an unchanging thread of homosexuality that passes through history […] of same-sex relationships that looked the same and felt the same.”

Nonetheless, the story of Hadrian also reveals the importance that power and wealth had in the story that gay men, especially, began to tell themselves about their past. A story that, not for nothing, ignored the violence of Hadrian’s rule, as well as the criticism he endured in his own time for having sex not merely with younger men but with men his own age too.

 From Hadrian, Lemmey and Miller turn to the Florentine writer Pietro Aretino, a Renaissance-era “sodomite who so revelled in sin that his very name became synonymous with good fucking.” His wildly popular homoerotic prose, soon translated into English, was banned by the Catholic Church and may well have influenced Shakespeare; his queer texts were condemned after his death but, ironically, ensured his work’s longevity, providing a licentious model for prudish Victorians to define morality against. He also exemplifies a moment in Italian history in which sodomy transformed from a sin into a crime yet remained (its practitioners encouraged by a rediscovery of ancient queer cultures) “part of the functioning social system.”

 As the centuries passed, the ancient Greeks and Romans were not the only cultures to which contemporary queers and questioners looked for models. Frederick the Great, 18th-century king of Prussia and the subject of the book’s fourth chapter, was celebrated as a hypermasculine model of male gayness by much of the early 20th-century German homosexual movement. Once again, this wholly ignored the difficulty of categorizing Frederick’s apparently “gay” relationships, the uniquely Prussian context for those relationships (which valorized “‘sensitive’ traits that later generations would come to view as ‘effeminate’”), as well as the violence and nationalism inherent in Frederick’s monarchic position (Hitler was a huge fan).

 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychiatrists and sexologists — “newly empowered with the method and the mission to peer into the souls of the masses and try to make them better and more productive workers,” as Lemmey and Miller dryly note — began looking to history to construct “a homosexual identity and subculture.” Queer sex was no longer just what you did in private (or, occasionally, in public); it was becoming part of a fixed, stable identity, with queers themselves part of an identifiable group.

 In the late 1860s, a limited-run German-language pamphlet coined the word “homosexual,” which a generation of “sexologists” soon seized upon, advancing startling (and, to modern eyes, often offensive, often bizarre) assertions about sexual variance and deviance. This research, as well as romanticized depictions of a classical queer past, influenced those that constructed a remarkably, albeit tenuously, liberated space within Weimar Germany. At the same time, though, English society was ramping up its anti-sodomy laws, criminalizing anal sex regardless of gender, as well as “everything that manifested desire between men,” and importing this repression all across its vast empire. A series of sodomy trials — including one involving Jack Saul, an Irish immigrant, sex worker, and subject of the book’s fifth chapter — awakened much of the public to the menace of gay sex, while, conversely, providing a model (in Oscar Wilde) for future gay men to idealize.

 Many sexologists, as well as powerful queer men, began turning to the empire’s holdings to try to understand their own urges. The diplomats Roger Casement and T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), both subjects of chapters in Bad Gays, exemplify the repression inherent in colonialism (even when the colonial officers themselves mean well). Casement and Lawrence fought heroically against the cruelties of empire even as both denigrated and fetishized Black and brown men, contributing to broader modes of marginalization. Meanwhile, Casement’s and Lawrence’s diplomatic colleagues justified the violence of colonialism by claiming that they simply had to stop dark-skinned men from committing acts of sexual immorality; these colonial administrators then exported the tactics and technologies of repression, introduced in the colonies, back to the Global North. A generation later, Margaret Mead — subject of the book’s ninth chapter — and other anthropologists (many of them “pioneering women, queers, Jews, and people of colour,” the authors note) would use exoticized portrayals of people in the Global South to convince the Global North that queerness was natural, even universal. This work, while influencing almost every progressive social movement in the Global North, nonetheless justified condescension and bigotry and even violence enacted against those living elsewhere.

 The decades that followed continued the complex and unsatisfying narrative of progress and backlash, with fleeting moments of solidarity and crushing unintended consequences. “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,” Lemmey and Miller write. “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.”

 In the United States, the homophile movement began bubbling up in the early 1950s, setting the stage for the explosion of gay lib in the ’60s and ’70s. At the same, though, federal administrators — led by “bad gays” J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn — made life miserable for thousands of queers, ironically using tactics like rumor, gossip, and guilt by association that would eventually lead to their own respective outings. Elite white queers — including Hoover, Cohn, and the Nazi-sympathetic modernist architect Philip Johnson, subject of the book’s 12th chapter — were mostly able to avoid such horrifying consequences, with Johnson ultimately capitalizing on the progress made by more marginalized queers after Stonewall to enjoy an increasingly out lifestyle in his later decades.

 The AIDS epidemic led to a short-lived coalition between elite white gays and poorer queers of color, but the advent of effective medications in the mid-1990s mostly destroyed this seeming solidarity, as the most prominent gays, lesbians, and queer organizations turned toward an integrationist politics focused on enabling access to respectability and its attendant power, security and generational wealth. While gay liberationists had fought against the draft and inveighed against the misogyny of marriage, gay rights groups fought for the right to marry and to fight in the military. A number of gay men — including Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, subject of the book’s last chapter — even became avatars of far-right, fascist-friendly politics, using their gayness as a shield against criticism as they promoted the war machine and accused migrants, especially Muslims, of intolerance. “I don’t hate Arabs,” Fortuyn — promoter of avowedly Islamophobic policies — quipped to the press. “I even sleep with them.”

 “The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure,” Lemmey and Miller write in the book’s conclusion. While some queers — mostly white, gay, cisgender men living in the Global North — have won rights and even power, more marginalized queers — immigrants, people of color, transgender and nonbinary people, intersex people, those in the Global South, above all the poor — have largely been excluded from the fruits of the fight for “gay rights.” Due, in part, to the foundational premise that equal rights for queer people must depend on our status as “good gays” — as loyal political subjects of a capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white-supremacist, settler-colonial state — the gays with power have almost invariably let down those with less economic, cultural, or political capital. “Maybe,” the authors muse, “it is time that homosexuality itself dies, that we find new and more functional and more appropriate configurations for our politics and desires.”

 It is an arresting thesis, especially as it implicitly takes to task many pioneering 20th-century queer historians who scoured the archive for traces of an identifiable minoritarian group that persisted across time and space. From a distance of decades, it is perhaps too easy to dismiss the importance of that work in giving lonely, scared people — coming of age without many, if any, role models — a sense of themselves. Yet in their herculean efforts to construct such “usable” histories, these historians — and the activists who seized upon their work — may have sacrificed nuance, complexity, and context.

 Even further, their historical claims “were perfectly fitted to advancing what we might call the mainline liberal position for gay acceptance in the later twentieth century,” as the historian Jules Joanne Gleeson argued in a recent essay. Accept us because we are just like you, went the message. Give us rights because all we want, all “we” have ever wanted — in every time and place in which we have ever lived — is tolerance and the chance to lead “normal” lives. To more radical queers, Gleeson noted, this work too often looked like “urbane wealthy homosexual guys turning their gaze across historical sources to find experiences that match their own.”

 Because Bad Gays (like its podcast forebear) is far more concerned with biography than with consistent argumentation, its assertion that homosexuality itself be jettisoned in favor of “something else, something better, instead,” mostly stops at the level of provocative suggestion. The book is more a series of essays than a laser-focused monograph, and as a result the reader is largely left wondering what this “something else, something better” might be. In the book’s conclusion, the authors write movingly, albeit quite briefly, about “alliance and solidarity that offer us alternative futures, should we wish to dream them forward,” from the antiracist, pro-queer union organizing of 1930s California, to the multiracial, working-class street kids, drag queens, trans women, and sex workers that rioted against state violence across 20th-century America, to the lesbians and gays that supported striking miners in Thatcher’s Britain. Yet this is just a glimpse of a better world.

 Nonetheless, as a bold and eminently readable counterhistory of homosexuality, Bad Gays is a triumph. To their credit, Lemmey and Miller have not lost the podcaster’s informality. One early sentence begins: “The twink theft of the perpetually horny Hadrian did not go unanswered…” Meanwhile, two different subjects (Casement and Cohn) are each labeled “a size queen.”

 Even more significantly, Lemmey and Miller have brilliantly revealed the human construction of queer history. The historical narratives that we have received, far from an impersonal list of names and dates and fights, were chosen by individuals with agendas, flaws, and imperfect sources. Indeed, the authors note, only after J. Edgar Hoover’s death did an unlikely source — his friend Ethel Merman — publicly confirm the rumors of his queerness, leading to an outpouring of more colorful stories of the FBI director cavorting at orgies, in full drag. Only in the 1990s did an unlikely find in the garbage room of a building in Vancouver provide scholars with the records to adequately reconstruct Weimar queer liberationist Magnus Hirschfeld’s extraordinary activism. Only in 2018 did a biographer reveal the extent of Philip Johnson’s fascist collaboration.

 In providing a pantheon of antiheroes, in reveling in complexity and contradiction, and in doing so for a popular audience, Lemmey and Miller have constructed their own narrative of queer history, one in which the “bad gays” take center stage. Their construction is, like all histories, selective, but it is a fresh and fascinating one at that.

 

What History’s “Bad Gays” Can Tell Us About the Queer Past and Present. By Scott W. Stern. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 3, 2022. 

The reclamation of badness by and for marginalised people is something of a zeitgeisty topic in pop culture and popular history. From the ongoing popular trope of the messy young woman to queer serial killers, we’re being told (reassured?) more than ever before that it’s Not Just Straight White Men. These representations are often attached to a political or moral motivation, warning of the dangers of viewing such groups as monolithic, or seeing them as inherently good because of their marginalised status. Even the most violent, taboo examples are backed up with underlying righteousness, or imagined vengeance against the oppressor.
 
Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey’s Bad Gays project shares some crossover with this phenomenon but takes a less straightforward standpoint – and is all the more complex and perhaps more radical for it. First as a podcast and now as a spin-off book, Bad Gays builds an alternative ‘homosexual history’ from the life stories of troubled and troublesome queers, all the while digging deep into the meanings behind badness, homosexuality and how historically we have understood the intersection of the two.
 
Through the 14 biographies collected here, Miller and Lemmey examine the crossovers between homosexuality and colonialism, question who has been left out of LGBTQ+ movements and histories, and ultimately build a bold case for the ‘failure of homosexuality’ – at least in its assimilationist, respectable form.
 
Stigma and privilege
 
In the book’s introduction, homosexuality is proposed as inherently ‘bad’ due to its emergence arising from criminalisation, which in itself was the result of a centuries-long moral panic over working-class behaviour, and later colonialism.
 
Miller and Lemmey demonstrate how throughout western history, the policing of sodomy has been used as a convenient political tool, resulting in both public stigma and control of private behaviour through the law. Although attitudes towards gay sex – and indeed what is understood as ‘gay sex’ – have waxed and waned throughout history, homosexuality as a social identity was perhaps doomed from the start.
 
Since the emergence of the homosexual identity in the late 19th century, it has largely been characterised in relation to gender markers – but this hasn’t always been the case. Until relatively recently, gay sex was something one did, not necessarily something one was, and was often tolerated in tandem with more public-facing hetero sex and relationships.
 
For the Roman emperor Hadrian, the first bad gay profiled here, sodomy was a reflection of his status and power, based on the Greek custom of pederasty, ‘the ancient equivalent of a daddy top and twink bottom’. This connection has lineage in the chapter on Weimar Berlin, where homosexuals in the Nazi party thrive on the ‘powerful collective association between male sexual and male military power’, and in Ronnie Kray’s London, where ‘power was not just an aphrodisiac, but a shield’.
 
There are many allusions to the difference in attitudes to and from homosexuals of different class backgrounds. As it remains, class privilege is shown as an overriding force standing in the way of queer solidarity. In a frankly savage chapter, American modernist architect Philip Johnson is depicted trying to retrospectively connect his interest in the Nazis to his homosexuality, when in reality his right-wing views reflected his loyalty to the upper classes – and the white supremacist, antisemitic attitudes that his generational wealth protected.
 
Queerness and the other
 
The prevalence of misogynist attitudes is a common uniting theme. This occurs on an individual level, in the repeating figure of the neglected wife – such as the Prussian queen Elizabeth, left to rot in a faraway palace as her husband Frederick the Great commissioned architectural follies and fucked his way around 18th-century Brandenburg. On a larger scale, James VI and I’s belief that women were inferior to men stoked his obsession with witchcraft, leading to the death of thousands in the North Berwick witch trials of 1590.
 
Colonialism is another major theme, with Miller and Lemmey convincingly portraying the complex, multi-faceted links between western queerness and the colonial ‘other’. The criminalisation, study and fetishisation of nonwestern sexualities are explored via Hadrian, Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement, intriguingly linking the latter’s diaries of sexual exploration to the contemporary utopian possibilities of cruising.
 
In a chapter on 20th-century anthropologist Margaret Mead, the limits of the western gaze and its reinforcement of the colonial project is made clear: ‘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 colonisation, for examples of how same-sex desire and eroticism had been integrated into community life.’ Not even the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld is off-limits, as his late ethnographic study of gender and sexuality in Asia is contextualised within the German colonialist project.
 
The flipside of this gaze towards the exoticised other appears in the chapter on Yukio Mishima, which is contextualised within a history of same-gender attraction in Japan – a legacy pummelled by Hirschfeld’s acolytes in Weimar Germany to inform their own sexual identifies. This European sexology was in turn familiar to the teenage Mishima, one of the most fascinating and contradictory figures in 20th-century literature.
 
A highly-anticipated subject of the Bad Gays project since its inception, Mishima is treated with a complex portrait, linking his sexuality with his twin desires for death and beauty, via his obsessions with sadomasochism, bodybuilding, St Sebastian, and – ultimately – extreme nationalism. As in Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic, Lemmey and Miller allude to both the grandiose and pathetic extremes of Mishima’s life, which culminated in ritual suicide after a bungled military coup.
 
Revolutionary solidarity
 
Bad Gays is provocative and challenging, with a nuanced approach to its often-contradictory subjects. It remains largely engaging and readable thanks to the balance between densely researched prose and humour.
 
Like the podcast, the book can get bogged down in its more academic sections, reiterating arguments, following essay formatting conventions (‘in this chapter we will discuss…’) and densely packing dates and names as proof of research to the detriment of the reader. The prose shines – thankfully in the majority of the book – when it retains the lightly catty attitude of the podcast.
 
True to their word, Lemmey and Miller make a number of cunning connections between their historical subjects and contemporary queer life, revealing their ongoing legacy – from racist masc-for-masc Grindr culture to the exclusion of sex workers that continues in assimilationist ‘liberation’ movements today. They also end by listing just a few examples of what queers can achieve when we stop viewing our issues in isolation and stand in solidarity with other movements.
 
The book’s authors – two critical but ultimately utopian queens – insist that the book’s anti-reform, pro-revolution stance comes from a place of love, and it does, because love itself is not without criticism. ‘The answer is not to simply stan our heroes and shush up about their flaws and faults,’ they argue in the conclusion. “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.’
 
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History – review. By Claire Biddles. Red Pepper, June 30, 2022.