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?

Flyaway excels at atmosphere, it spends a lot of time developing a world that feels extremely grounded and material even with such a poetic and fairytale style of prose. This is a setting that is pretty familiar to me, I live in the same city as Jennings and I’ve spent a lot of time in rural Queensland towns growing up, so I don’t know how well this feeling comes across to non-Australians, but it felt very eerie to me, like I was in a place that was familiar but just slightly out of step of reality. Everything was wrong in a subtle, under the surface way and it was delicious.

If I have one complaint, I think the book would have been served well by being a bit longer. It introduces a lot of really cool ideas, but we don’t sit with any of them long enough to feel really satisfied with what they mean in the story, a lot was left vague. (Some meta knowledge I have of the author, since I go to a lot of her writing workshops, she has a whole process for what to do to make a book shorter or longer, so there’s a chance that the length and the vagueness was entirely intentional, to better serve the fairytale theming. It was just something I personally didn’t vibe with. It’s not a total deal-breaker, but with how short the book was I think I just wanted something more to chew on.)