Lives of the Treacherous
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            Lemmey and Miller’s argument is that we can learn as much from the gays who failed us as from the ones we honor as our heroes. But there is a further method to their badness: homosexuality itself, they contend, is a failure both “as an identity and as a political project.” While they concede this may sound extreme, they point out that, once the dust has settled, mainstream LGBT liberationist projects have often left the marginalized—people of color, gender nonconformists, the nonbinary—behind. A history of homosexuality must include our collective failure to “understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion.”

            It’s a provocative argument, one they put forth in a way that’s both thorough and entertaining. Why, they ask, have so many historical gays close to power gone so wrong? As they put it, “When a gay man becomes a fascist, how does his homosexuality affect his attraction to the politics of venerating the state as though it were a go-go boy dancing on a box?” Questions about power, corruption, and repression make up the bulk of this book, which is a who’s who of queer nasties through history. Some of the subjects are obvious—J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, for example—but I was less familiar with the antics of Victorian sex worker Jack Saul. Their conclusions about how Margaret Mead’s sexuality informed her research are worth reading. The final chapter, on Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who embraced Islamophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric before being murdered in 2002, is the most captivating entry in the book, given its relevance to our current political malaise.

            With each chapter standing on its own—presumably an artifact of the book’s origin as a podcast—an overarching argument can seem elusive. But that could also be seen as a virtue, as it allows for a more casual style of reading. The writing style is conversational, so it can seem like chatting with an enthusiastic academic who’s equally comfortable analyzing Virginia Woolf or passing celebrity gossip. I was horrified at some revelations and laughed out loud at others.

            It’s impossible to be comprehensive in a book such as this, but some of the omissions were surprising. I wondered why there was no chapter on Leopold and Loeb, the child-murdering duo who killed a fourteen-year-old boy and almost got the death penalty (but were spared when their attorney, Clarence Darrow, introduced Freudian experts who shifted the blame to their upbringing). But this is a minor complaint. Bad Gays is a memorable book, one that I’m still pondering months after finishing it. Lemmey and Miller have reminded us of how incomplete and arbitrary our history can be.