Bad Gays

March 28, 2022
Novelist Lemmey (Unknown Language) and historian Miller (The New Queer Photography) take an intriguing if disjointed look at “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.” Their profile subjects include Roman emperor Hadrian, who may have sacrificed his lover Antinous’s life in order to prolong his reign, and Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who used his success as an openly gay politician to push an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda before his assassination by an environmental activist in 2002. Sixteenth-century Scottish monarch James VI and 18th-century Prussian ruler Frederick the Great also appear, as do Victorian male prostitute Jack Saul and 1960s British gangster Ronnie Kray. Though the authors make incisive points about “how white male homosexuality, as a political, identitarian, and emancipatory project, has failed,” the individual profiles don’t coalesce into a satisfying narrative, and the criticism of the cis, white, male perspective is belied by the fact the only two examples—American anthropologist Margaret Mead and Japanese writer Yukio Mishima—are neither male nor white. This thought-provoking survey doesn’t quite achieve its larger ambitions.

May 1, 2022
Every community or movement redefines itself as society and culture change over time. The LGBTQ community is no exception to this. It's helpful during such redefinitions to be aware of history to provide much-needed context to aid in clarity. This is Lemmey and Miller's premise here. They look at various gay, historical figures and not only examine their lives but examine the cultures in which they lived and functioned. Their subjects are all problematic from a modern perspective: tyrants (Hadrian), despots (James VI and I of England), Nazis (Ernst Rohm), megalomaniacs (J. Edgar Hoover), or just plain evil creeps (Roy Cohn). The purpose is not to excuse them but to understand them and their cultures, out of which the present day evolved. We see how same-sex relationships started as acceptable (within strict social-status rules), to being a sin, to being a crime, and how that shaped the lives and personalities of each era's "bad" gays. The historical perspective is fascinating, and the bits of salty gay humor sprinkled throughout liven the proceedings considerably.

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