Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

 

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller was a brutal read, covering thirteen gay men and one lesbian who either led unexemplary lives, or, as was most often the case, committed some “dastardly deeds” which were swept under the rug of pink history. The authors state:

“Bad Gays is a book about such characters, a book about 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.”

I found the title to be misleading. I was expecting the book to be full of chapters dedicated to people the likes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but he wasn’t mentioned in the book, even in passing. The authors did cover J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, the only two people I knew before I picked up this book who were both “dastardly” and queer. The others, ranging from Hadrian, Frederick the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Mead, Yukio Mishima, Philip Johnson, Ronnie Kray and Pim Fortuyn (whom I had just read about in Why the Dutch Are Different) were names I was already familiar with. I didn’t know, though, that some of them were queer (like Kray and Johnson) and I certainly didn’t know that the latter was an American Nazi, fascist and racist.

Lemmey and Miller however could not capture my interest, even in reporting about the notorious sexual Black Diaries of Roger Casement. Their biographies were bogged down with too much unnecessary detail which I felt only served to pad the pages. I started this book with a feeling that I would like it, as the introduction certainly captured my interest, but I was immediately overcome by a sense of dread once I started the first chapter on Hadrian. As I read each chapter, I hoped that I would see the end each time I turned the page. The authors were occasionally catty and dropped enough F-bombs to keep the work from being a genuine academic read. However it was page after page of minutiae which did not enhance my perception of the subjects as being bad gays. I just wanted to end the book and shove it across the table.

The conclusion contains this paragraph:

“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. It is also a history of dead ends; of movements like the Uranians or the masculinists, trying to find new ways to express same-sex desire. It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.”

Thankfully Lemmey and Miller did not include the alphabetical mouthful, the password that never ends, the one that usually starts with LGBTQ+. Perhaps they didn’t include it because it isn’t a word. The authors ended their evolution of shifting language with the preferred queer. I am sure that the tongue-tripping initialism will fall out of favour within a decade, as I cannot imagine LGBTTIQQ2SA+ ever catching on. How can it? It is a ridiculous term that fails in its attempt to be all-inclusive.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue