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.

Starting Death Note for the first time and from volume one alone, it is easy to see what makes the manga so beloved even twenty years later. The cat and mouse hijinks are just that good.

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.

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.

There is definitely a good book here about the relationship throughout history between queerness and fascism, class, and intersectionality. A selective reading of just those relevant chapters paints a very interesting picture and introduces a lot of thinking points to take away about respectability politics and assimilation in our current right wing zeitgeist.

But then this whole “bad gay” schtick that it’s trying to adhere to completely undermines those points. It’s never really made clear what they define as a “bad” gay, and their examples range from literal Nazis to messy renaissance gossipmongers. With each chapter focusing in on one or a few individuals, if that person doesn’t have any direct or indirect relevance to the development of fascism in Europe, it forgoes any attempt at analysis in favour of a wikipedia level biography ending in ‘anyway that was that guy’ and moving on without any conclusion or integration into the ongoing themes of the book. I’ve seen some comments mention that it’s poorly researched and a lot of the details are wrong, and while I didn’t notice anything specifically (I’m only surface level familiar with a few of these figures) it would not surprise me, there were a lot of times where the authors glazed over something that could do with more examination. It loses a lot of credibility in its laziness about figures it doesn’t really care about.

Tonally it’s a little weird. It’s mostly pretty dry with some added bitchy gay asides, which I didn’t mind at first. It felt like I was watching to a Youtube video essay or perhaps a powerpoint presentation from my friends, and I was listening to the audiobook so it suited that vibe well. But that tone was pretty inconsistent. At some point they stopped including the asides, which I didn’t notice until the authors suddenly remembered they were meant to make this thing funny and would add one in. After long sections without jokes it was always jarring, and felt inappropriate in a way that it wouldn’t if it had just stuck with the tone the whole time (my bitchy gay friends at powerpoint night would NEVER do me like that). By the end of the book they just stopped doing jokes altogether, which probably would have been the better choice to go with from the beginning. Because it really seems like they wanted to write about the history of queerness and fascism and they wanted to be serious about it, and it’s only this tongue in cheek title and premise that forces them at gunpoint to throw in a ‘whatever you say queen’ every now and then, and the jokes are never funny enough to justify their existence.

Also, completely random nitpick. Did anyone else notice the authors making up nouns? Like they’d make up a noun form, usually ending in -tion, when a noun already exists in a different form that would mean the same thing. I should have written them down when I noticed them, but there had to be at least four.

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.

around the 50% mark i started to wonder: if these are the Bad Gays, who are the Good Gays?

i feel as if the introduction and conclusion of this book was ripped and pasted in its entirety from a better, more interesting book. (nonetheless i do think the writers thought they were writing that book, and the occasional glimmers of that book are why this is a 2 star and not a 1 star review.) the introduction makes some interesting promises: pitting oscar wilde, the legendary pioneer, against his selfish miscreant lover who ruined his life, and arguing that both of these figures should be accepted as important parts of queer history. if this is the framing we’ve chosen then it’s clear: wilde is the Good Gay, and bosie is the Bad Gay. (never mind that wilde engaged in plenty of activities, like sex tourism, that the writers condemn in other chapters: it works well enough as an idea)

but aside from a couple of moments and well-chosen profiles (i particularly liked the chapter on j. edgar hoover and roy cohn), the writers are far more interested in paying lip service to this idea than actually excavating and assessing the legacies of problematic queer figures. instead they choose to retread histories that are already celebrated - james i and vi, frederick the great, t.e. lawrence - and attempt to examine their legacies and their contributions to the capitalist and imperialist constructions of power. one has to wonder why oscar wilde doesn’t make an independent appearance given his own legacy is much murkier than the introduction suggests. so, okay, the Bad Gays can sometimes overlap with the Good Gays. that’s fine. that makes sense. i guess “Powerful (often White, often Wealthy, often Male) Gays Who Exploited Others In Their Own Identity Formation” doesn’t make for as snappy of a title.

except no, that also doesn’t seem to be what the book is trying to say because we move at around the 50% mark from discussing bad people who happened to be gay and into discussing Bad Gays as a complete proper noun: gays who are bad, in large part, because they affected other gays, or because their identity was tied up in the exploitation and harm of others, or because they used their identity to legitimise their hatred. essentially their badness is inherently connected with their gayness. but then if that’s the case, why spend so much time on satirists and pornographers? why devote a chapter to ronnie kray, a man who had very little impact on wider culture in comparison to some of the other people being discussed? that’s not to mention the extremely tenuous links this book creates, jumping from idea to idea without much analysis or evaluation. (one line that stood out to me: ““Blind to the meaning of the enormous economic and racial privilege of her upbringing”, hardly developed, left to just sit there in a wider paragraph and as a moral condemnation. like oh okay. cool. do we have a source for that?)

but okay. so we’re talking about gays whose identity is founded on a basis of exploitation. sure, fair enough. i guess it makes sense why our profiles are so limited to white male figures. but then why throw in additional chapters on margaret mead and yukio mishima? why spend a chunk of this book largely about western capitalism and imperialism explaining the history of homosexuality in japan (in a hugely reductive way which serves to re-print the mythology that the writers love to condemn, that the “third world” was totally cool and fine with gays until the nasty westerners took over).

that’s not even getting into how shoddily written it is. (i almost rage-quit the book at this line: “It was that November, during the revolt, that Lawrence experienced one of his only confirmable sexual experiences […] It is difficult to make sense of the truth of this encounter” is it confirmable or not? why are we contradicting ourselves on the exact same page? as someone who is pretty familiar with t.e. lawrence i’m reasonably sure the writers meant to say that he experienced one of the only sexual experiences the celibate and potentially asexual lawrence would admit to, but if i didn’t know anything about him i’d be baffled! this doesn’t make sense! who edited this!)

it’s also not getting into how poorly researched it is. most chapters have about the depth you could get from wikipedia (and i would know, because i matched a lot of the information in the book to things i already knew. from wikipedia.) other people on this app have noted disparities in the research that are incredibly easy to notice if you’re familiar with the periods or figures being written about. many sources with questionable authorship and authority are used uncritically. (while the book regularly notes that anthropologists like margaret mead and researchers like roger casement used questionable sources to make sweeping judgements, it’s hard to take that seriously when the sources being used here are just as questionable and presented without comment.)

one of the most egregious failures to me is the chapter on yukio mishima, where the writers quote from his 1949 novel confessions of a mask to describe mishima’s early sexual awakenings. confessions contains undeniably autobiographical information, but it is still a novel: and even if you want to accept its details as fact, it feels like a wild misstep to include it in a non-fiction book without stating that these sources come from a fictionalised novel. later in the chapter, the writers make the curious choice of focusing on forbidden colors and, in more depth (including quoting from it), kyoko’s house. both of these are pretty minor works and the latter was never published in english: the quotes from the novel and the descriptions of its plot come from the biography by john nathan. given that you can find (the very homoerotic) the sailor who fell from grace in a lovely vintage classics collectors edition at most waterstones, the choice to use kyoko’s house feels a bit strange until you realise that the writers of this book have, most likely, not read any of mishima’s oeuvre other than confessions, and are working off of third hand information from one singular source. (it’s also one of the three novels that are adapted into paul schrader’s 1985 film mishima: a life in four chapters. coincidence? doubtful! of course, schrader commissioned his own translation of kyoko’s house in order to adapt it, which shows much more artistic and journalistic integrity than this chapter does.) and then this line:

The potency of his prose surely emerges from the fact that these are Mishima’s words ventriloquized.

first of all, you aren’t reading his prose. you’re reading a translation by a biographer. second of all….no? if you’re going to make the incredibly reductive claim that an author’s work consists entirely of their own words and ideas through fictional mouthpieces, you need to source that! once again going back to the writers jumping from idea to idea, making sweeping judgements and conclusions that don’t actually seem to be backed up in anything.

all of this may seem like nitpicking but really, i’m just showing the most egregious failures i noticed from the chapter i had the most prior information about. if i knew more primary information about the other figures in this book im sure i could make just as nitpicky notes on all the other chapters. unquestionably, i think if a nonfiction book falls apart the second you have more information than a wikipedia page, it has likely failed in its approach. and what an approach it is.

so again, the same question: if there are Bad Gays, surely there must be Good Gays? so who are they?

and really i can only conclude that the Good Gays are supposed to be us. the reader: or at least the book’s assumed and intended reader, which is to say white, educated, male, gay, out. (the jokes aimed directly at the reader made that pretty clear: one that stood out to me was “whose worship of masculine vitality might remind you of some Grindr profiles you’ve seen – maybe your own”, a line written about none other than nazi politician ernst röhm. sidenote: is this where james somerton got his half-remembered anecdotes about nazi fitness culture?) in order to cast judgement on a figure as a Bad Gay one must assume that the reader and writer are expected to be Good Gays: modern, liberal, flirts with leftist theory without much regard for praxis. happy to drop names like marsha p. johnson and james baldwin into conversation but with very little desire to take their ideas further. we’re too contemporary and too aware of right and wrong to have any alignment with these Bad Gays, outside of snide jokes about their sexual proclivities. (my dear friend SmallDesires posited that this might be a holdover from the book’s beginning as a podcast: likely true! i didn’t think it worked!)

it’s an insufferable and arrogant kind of approach that in my opinion can also be exceptionally harmful. we, the Good Gays, don’t have the same racist and colonial biases or the same fetishes for what we view as subaltern. we, the Good Gays, understand our identity and are flexible in its application. (other reviewers have noted this book’s propensity for bisexual and asexual erasure: a real Bad Gay bias seeping through.) we, the Good Gays, are happy to resist homophobia through solidarity. (i got a bit of a laugh when the writers state, re: the assassination of pim fortuyn, that “nonviolent activism might have” “effectively [combat] his politics”, in a book that pays lip service to civil activists, like james baldwin and audre lorde, who did not advocate for the effectiveness of nonviolent activism! truly a book by and for white men.) we, the Good Gays, criticise our heroes.

and really i became incredibly and irrevocably irritated with this book at the line:

This is rhetoric that should be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the mainstream respectability politics of gay rights movements. While a more developed analysis of sexuality (like the one we are proposing in this book) reveals otherwise, this line has always been popular for several reasons.

the utter gall of claiming your work is a “more developed analysis of sexuality” while continuing to uphold your own version of respectability and identity politics! the arrogance of stating your work is “more developed” while you retell wikipedia articles in clunky, confusing, often entirely contradictory prose. the idea that half-formed profiles with downright bad sources make up much of anything: this hardly works as an entertaining bit of pop history, much less an “analysis of sexuality”. not even touching on the fact that nothing proposed in the book is really radical or new, and instead feels half-baked, a misremembered definition of intersectionality repackaged for white gay men.

idk, maybe next time just stick with hosting your podcast?

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.