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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?Part-revisionist history, part-historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, Imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queers villains and evil twinks in history.
About the author
Huw Lemmey is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of three novels:
Unknown Language (2020),
Red Tory (2019), and
Chubz (2016). He has written for the
Guardian,
Frieze,
Flash Art,
Tribune,
The Architectural Review,
Art Monthly,
New Humanist, the
White Review, and
L’Uomo Vogue, amongst others. As an artist and filmmaker his work has been shown at the ICA, Lux Biennial of Moving Image, Mumok Vienna, Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art and the Design Museum, London.
Ben Miller is a writer and researcher living in Berlin, where he is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität. He has written for the
New York Times,
Literary Hub, the
Los Angeles Review of Books, and
Tin House, and is the author of
The New Queer Photography. He is a member of the board of the Schwules Museum, a queer museum and archive.
