Bad Gays: A Homosexual History - Harvard Book Store

Contents:

• IN ‘BAD GAYS,’ HISTORIL FIGUR ARE PRODUCTS OF THEIR TIM
• BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY
• BAD GAYS: BEN MILLER ON QUEER HISTORY’S GREATT ANTAGONISTS

IN ‘BAD GAYS,’ HISTORIL FIGUR ARE PRODUCTS OF THEIR TIM

They suggt an answer “Bad Gays, ” a ntextual history based on the popular podst of the same name, about “the gay people history who do not flatter , and whom we nnot make to hero: the liars, the powerful, the crimal, and the succsful. ”At a time when a nservative Supreme Court is signalg s willgns to revis qutns of privacy and self-termatn long nsired settled, and the rights of LGBTQ people to live their liv eely rema an open bate, a book tellg the stori of some of the worst gays history might seem ill-timed.

“The history of homosexualy is a long history of failure, ” they wre.

BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY

”The tle “Bad Gays” is a b of a misnomer, however. The are the stori of gay and queer people who did terrible thgs and held terrible views, but the bulk of the histori are ls about “evil” gays and more about gays who reacted to the world around them, sometim shockg ways, sometim stctive ways, but que often the only ways that ma sense to them, given the tim.

BAD GAYS: BEN MILLER ON QUEER HISTORY’S GREATT ANTAGONISTS

This approach is pecially helpful amg the liv and choic of people like Frerick the Great and notor Italian Renaissance satirist and blackmailer Pietro Areto, well before the ia of gayns as an inty existed.

Context is provid for choic and actns, but the thors take every one of their subjects to task for their racism, misogyny, genocidal actns, predatory natur and all-around bad behavr if not bad book is at s most bg when assailg a bad gay person’s athetic choic. Roy Cohn’s ho are scribed as beg “well-stocked wh young, blon men draped over the furnure or the pool, ” and there is an acid asi about the archect Philip Johnson’s mil tast: “like so many [slur for gay men] before him, he was ptivated by the mic of Wagner.