You know, if this was just a collection of profiles based on research they did for episodes of their podcast, I would be much kinder to it. Not much, because it's still poorly written and poorly researched, but a little. Unfortunately, this book has decided it also wants to be a Book with a Thesis Statement, and my god it just fails miserably at that.

In the introduction the authors state that "white male homosexuality, as a political, identitarian, and emancipatory project, has failed", and by examining the Bad Gays of the title we can understand how and why. It then launches into a brief discussion of how the "Gays" part of the Bad Gays equation is a relatively recent concept, and how the authors intend to use it for their book. It does no such thing for what they mean by "Bad", and in that move, they forget to build half the foundation for the rest of their book. At no point do the authors decide if they want "bad" to mean "considered morally reprehensible today, but not so much at the time" or "considered bad at the time, but not so much today". It's from there that any argument they want to make starts to crumble, because if you never define what "Bad" means, you can just use it as an excuse to talk about any figure you find vaguely interesting.

This takes a weird turn with the chapter on Jack Saul, because I genuinely fail to see why he needed to be the "Bad Gay" central to this chapter. The authors clearly wanted to talk about homosexuality in Victorian England and how class relations and colonialism interfaced with those views, and I think the authors take the stance that buying and selling sex is immoral, which is fine, you can do that, but to then pick the working class prostitute from a colonized nation as your nominal "Bad Gay" of the chapter and not any of the upper-class clientele from the colonizing nation does not sit right with me! It's not like there was enough information on him to fill the chapter given how little he features in it! Why did we have to take the sex worker and place him in a row of names that includes several actual Nazis! For a book that's so eager to judge people from the past for holding some unexamined problematic biases and presenting itself as a much more enlightened and sophisticated perspective of things, the authors clearly have some massive unexamined biases themselves.

The chapters where the "Bad" and the "Gay" align best with the authors' modern day western understanding of these concepts are where the book is most effective. It is still light on the promised analysis (the Nazi chapter in particular really throws up its hands and the end and goes "what does this all mean? Who knows"), but at least this way the authors can effectively get to the interplay of colonialism, classism, racism, homophobia, and how the homosexuality of the profiled people interfaced with all of these attitudes. Had they just stuck to these figures they would have had a much better book at their hands. However, whenever the authors step outside of these boundaries, the book absolutely crumbles apart. You can kind of tell Mead and Mishima were crammed in there as the diversity hires, and while Mead still aligns enough with the ideas of the book and has decent enough sources on her for the authors to tell a coherent story, Mishima's chapter is a mess, as @shaddie's excellent review of this book points out much better than I ever could. (I will say though, I don't love the fact that the only figure in the book where the book doesn't constantly try to shove any opposite-sex relations to the background is also the only woman.)

But even if you get past all of these fundamental issues with the figure selection and the thin veneer of "analysis" plastered over the whole thing, the book is also just not written well. There are so many needlessly confusing run-on sentences and the book constant whiplashes between a more academic tone and more jokey quips about Grindr profiles, daddy tops and twink bottoms, and snide "whatever you say queen" off-hands. It's in these moments that it really betrays that it is based on a podcast, because you can just hear the one host who did the research telling the story to the other host who reacts in your head. A tried and proven concept for a podcast, but it doesn't work in a book where it's all coming from the same authorial voice who is trying to seem vaguely academic. The quality of the research they do seems very dependent on the amount of solid English-language sources they were able to find, which adds to the fact that the chapters on the more modern figures are more solid. However, some of their research is so poorly paraphrased or described that it almost runs into becoming a straight-up misrepresentation. The moment that really stood out to me was the following description of the atrocities committed in Congo in the Roger Casement chapter:

The white authorities began to worry that the ammunition supplied to Force Publique soldiers, imported at great expense, was being used for hunting. So they implemented a new system for ensuring labourers worked, and no ammunition was wasted; if the quota was not met, plantation managers were commanded to supply the severed hands of those punished for underproduction.

I have genuinely no idea how they managed to miss that the system that was in place to control the ammunition was "soldiers had to present a severed hand for every bullet they used" and they ended with this confusing mess. Also one read of the Wikipedia page would tell you that the system as they are describing it is being debated by modern historians as to whether it existed in that form to begin with. Again, for a book so concerned with judging people in the past for not having perfect politics to modern standards and being careless about the colonized people they were studying or writing about, the authors should have taken perhaps a better look at their own work.

And so, maybe this book is just the next entry into the failure of "white male homosexuality, as a political, identitarian, and emancipatory project". Not what the authors wanted it to be, but turns out, they too are not immune to being the Bad Gay.