Not so much Bad Gays as Bad History

 So, while the end of November and all of December was rereads, I started off the New Year with a bit of non fiction courtesy of Goodreads.com's best of 2022 lists.

Unfortunately, the book that starts off 2022 is Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Which is not to say the book itself is bad, but it has some fairly major issues.More on that in a minute. 

The format is little mini-biographies of famous gay people who are considered bad using the authors' politics. 13 chapters, one lesbian, and a few chapters discussing 2 or more figures from the same period. 

Things get off to a bad start with the first biography, discussing Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antonius. Now, I can point to three different sources that give three different stories of how Antonius ended up taking a permanent bath in the Nile. To label Hadrian as a Bad Gay, they state as gospel that Antonius was sacrificed by Hadrian to preserve his youth. (Honestly, and this is my personal opinion, I'd guess the two had been drinking heavily and someone stumbled. I can't prove it, but no one else can disprove it either. Although the original version I heard was that Antonius drowned himself to keep from losing his looks.) 

At any rate, this is a springboard for their entire premise that Bad Gays are ones who are Imperialists, Colonizers, or support right wing ideology. Which, ok, I can sort of agree with that, but in a few chapters, the person they're supposedly discussing only shows up in a few sentences, while we get diatribes on how higher class gays could get away with buggery, while the proles would be imprisoned or executed. Which....sort of? Depends on who's running the moral panic in each age. And frankly, listing James VI and I, but not his descendants kind of misses some really bad gays. Not that Cromwell really won any awards....

Then there's the whole chapter on Weimar Republic gays, where they assert that the left wing had absolutely nothing to do with the problems in the republic. Um, yeah. 

While I understand that the authors are both European and likely Democratic Socialists, there's a hell of a lot of what reminded me of Adam's reaction to Fortean Magazine in Good Omens. Just assume the reader will swallow it whole without argument. 

I mean, I do agree with their more modern chapters discussing gays of privilege getting what they want then saying screw you to the lesser gays (this book is a great example of this ) however, idealism doesn't put food on the table. And you may bitch about capitalism (I think we all do), but short of going completely ascetic, there's no real way to survive without finding a way to exist in the system. (Seriously. The last chapter, dealing with Pim Fortuyn, spends a lot of time talking about how by letting the movement focus on things like marriage and joining the military really cut a lot of people out who were suffering from AIDS. While I can't speak to European laws, legal marriage here in the states is basically shorthand for bypassing a bunch of legal paperwork.) 

Oh and the whole Philip Johnson chapter. Yeah, based on what he did, he is a BAD GAY, but while they claim some of his badness is taking Modern Architecture from Utilitarian and Proletarian to something just for the elites, they don't blame him nearly enough for unleashing the abortion that is Modern architecture on an unsuspecting world.   

So, while they book did have some high points, (like T. E. Lawrence, who evidently spent much of his later years being a land bound Billy Budd), the cardinal sins of not exactly being profiles of the people they're discussing, never really proving their points, and inserting opinion as fact really makes me not want to recommend this book. Or if I did, suggest people dig through their bibliography and get a fuller story.