Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

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I hate books with misleading titles and 'Bad Gays' is a whopper of a misleading title. It is hard to understand why most of the individuals are here. Even the authors don't make attempts to define why most of those included are 'bad'. Clearly all of them are likely to found wanting by the standards of a coffee klatch of urban gays searching out each others failure to comply with whatever is deemed correct with the assiduousness of someone searching out lice. Under that sort of scrutiny none of them would pass as 'good'. They certainly wouldn't have the correct jargon when it came to framing their beliefs but are they bad? Why chose, from all the less than likeable choices who held the title Roman emperor, the figure of Hadrian as a bad gay? What of Heliogabalus? As an Irishman I found the inclusion of Roger Casement in this book offensive in almost unimaginable way. An antidote to assumptions that anyone oppressed must be the good guy. Catherine Fletcher, History Today, Books of the Year But we do not see those people as existing in a vacuum. We think that they are part of a spectrum that extends all the way into kinds of behavior viewpoints that are much more common and comfortable among gay men. Looking at those continuities is very important to us. In examining the lives of these notorious 'bad gays,' the authors examine the ways queerness has been perceived throughout history, and gives modern-day LGBTQ+ people an opportunity to see what the possibilities are going forward. (Also, everyone loves a villain origin story, so who can resist?!) David Vogel, Buzzfeed

Yes, it’s just that they’re…actual people. When it gets even worse than that is when we construct certain people as queer heroes—for example, Magnus Hirschfeld, the great hero of queer Berlin, who is, for very understandable reasons, constructed as a great national hero by a post-Second World War generation of German activists for gay liberation because he’s driven out of the country by the Nazis and he’s Jewish and a Social Democrat and he’s fighting on behalf of gay rights and justice through science. You can watch me review this book & all of the other 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards Winners here: https://youtu.be/fFKXJ1gsZA8Couch, Aaron (March 1, 2022). "Universal Pulls Russia Releases, Including Animated 'Bad Guys' and Michael Bay's 'Ambulance' ". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved March 3, 2022. Introduce your upper elementary reader to the baddest bunch of do-gooders in town — Mr. Wolf, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Snake, and Mr. Shark, the main characters in author and illustrator Aaron Blabey's The Bad Guys graphic novel series. I do not think, however, the book did a good enough job bringing each chapter into the whole. It felt really disconnected, and it didn't do enough to justify its focus on these bad white queers by tracing their ideas and contributions to culture and the conversation to our modern conceptions of queerness, in relation to women, those outside the gender binary, non-white and non-Western queers. There needed to be more connecting threads between chapters and to the point of the book as a whole. Overall, I enjoyed learning about the selected figures and found the commentary on the development of both our understanding and societal treatment of members of the LGBQIA+ community quite interesting. I do, however, believe that this book didn't quite live up to the premise nor its potential.

On an almost-warm evening in mid-May, I met Berlin-based Ben Miller at Romeo und Romeo in Schöneberg (his co-writer Huw Lemmey lives in Barcelona). Next to the rainbow awning and framed portraits of Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston, we chatted about the failure of homosexuality as an institution, the sinister side to Berlin’s so-called greatest queer hero, and the scariest gay living today: Pete Buttigieg. It’s our argument that something about the institution of homosexuality made gay liberation fail, and instead of that we got gay rights. a b c D'Alessandro, Anthony (October 7, 2019). "DreamWorks Animation & Universal To Release 'Spirit Riding Free' & 'The Bad Guys' In 2021". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on December 5, 2019 . Retrieved December 13, 2019. A principle of understanding our status as gay people both within our culture and within wider society is this: we are not just the protagonists, but also products of history." The above principle guides the work of authors and podcasters Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller in this new and wildly liberatory work of queer historiography which seeks to reveal new insights on LGBTQ history, sexuality, and identity through fourteen hitherto buried examples of homosexual evil and brutishness through the ages. Indeed, while "Be Gay, Do Crimes" may be a catchphrase easily uttered today on social media, there is a deeper relationship between queerness (which has been considered a form of villainy for a large part of history, and continues to be seen as such in several places), criminality, and political power. This book manages to systematically highlight these links while also challenging mainstream assumptions about structures of power and about sexual identity and deviance. White, James (March 11, 2018). "Writer Etan Cohen Bringing The Bad Guys To DreamWorks Animation". Empire. Archived from the original on December 14, 2019 . Retrieved December 13, 2019.

The authors cruise the wilder and darker side of queer history....Well-researched, humorous, they illustrate how the interpretation of homosexuality itself influenced history. E. B. Boatner, Lavender Magazine and this aside from describing the ascent of Robert Carr, a 'favourite' of James V's who amassed considerable influence: Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? The worst gays are the ones whose alliance with positions of structural power goes so far that it leads them to be literal Nazis. My three worst people in the book are Ernst Röhm, who Laurie Marhoefer provocatively claims is the world’s first openly gay politician. He’s the head of the Nazi SA and is murdered by Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives. My second worst gay is Roy Cohn, a lawyer who plays an active part in all the worst things happening in US politics from 1950 to 1980. And then my third worst gay is Pim Fortuyn, the father of the European New Right who dies in the Netherlands in 2002. These are the people I would say are the very worst in terms of actually ending up in these positions of huge power within far-right politics.