Bad Gays

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, grew out of their popular podcast of the same name. Rather than the usual parade of gay icons and pioneers, the book turns to history's "bad gays" — figures whose sexuality and misdeeds have been glossed over or forgotten — from Emperor Hadrian and anthropologist Margaret Mead to Lawrence of Arabia, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn and gangster Ronnie Kray.

Across essays spanning centuries, the authors trace how the very idea of "homosexuality" emerged in the nineteenth century and became entangled with some of the twentieth century's defining conflicts, from the collapse of Weimar Germany to Cold War-era McCarthyism. In telling these more uncomfortable stories, they follow how the figure of the respectable white gay man was constructed — and how it failed.

Part revisionist history, part biography, the book is written with a wry, irreverent humor that critics have called both "catty" and "an act of love." It argues for a queer politics built less on sanitized heroes than on an honest reckoning with power, complicity and a stranger, more solidaristic future.