In Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller investigate “the evolution and failure of white male homosexuality” as both an “identity and a political project” (5), by telling the (his)stories of fourteen bad gays from Hellenistic emperor Hadrian to Far Right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Drawing materials in part from their long-running podcast, Lemmey and Miller engage in a process of recontextualization as opposed to one of queer hagiography, or even of recovery to fill the historical record. By orienting their stories around the creation of the “homosexual” as a contingent identity, Lemmey and Miller productively reframe these queer figures as both products of and participants in the continuous project of Western empire. Rather than telling stories of queer history, Bad Gays tells stories of queers in history—sometimes for the better, but as one anticipates from the title, mostly for the worse.
Primarily aimed toward a...
