This book feels like the result of wondering "what if we took the Hamilton concept of retelling American history via hip-hop/rap but used it to actually tell Black American stories instead of the white Founding Fathers" - and Bob the Drag Queen, I absolutely love this for you and how this novel turned out!

My fiance (who listened to about the first hour of the audiobook with me in the car) couldn't get over the "self-insert fanfic" concept of it, and I admit in the beginning that I struggled with that too. At some point, I even wondered if it was maybe disrespectful to Harriet Tubman 😅 But as I got near the end of Part 1, I really grew to appreciate the angle of speaking "directly" with these figures via fiction. Instead of a stiff biography and facts out of a textbook, we're able to experience essentially a direct oral history of Black American generational trauma  - like we're hearing it from an uncle, a cousin, a grandmother. It took a while for this to click for me, and only because reading Part 1 brought back memories of listening to Korean grandmothers/grandfathers talk about the Korean War and Japanese colonization (hence my forum post!). I'm not sure that certain audiences (particularly a white audience or those not interested in musical theatre) would appreciate this book if they can't catch onto that.

I listened to the audiobook and really enjoyed it! I chose to listen to it mainly because people have mentioned that it includes two songs at the end, but they were included at the VERY end of the audiobook even after the author's acknowledgements and weren't incorporated into the story itself. You could probably get the same effect by listening to the songs online (in better audio quality 😅) after reading the book. That said, I think Bob's narration really brought out the comedy in certain parts, and there were one or two singing moments that really shone through! Very happy to start off Pride Month with this book :)

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?

Rating: 1.25 of 5 / Advanced Reader Copy received from NetGalley ⭐️

DNF @ 45%

Book summary

lowkey i couldn’t even tell you. they have to get a treasure from somewhere but i truly have no grasp of why this was a plot point :/

Criticism

it seems like this book wanted to subvert the typical tropes, as this is a fairytale retelling, and while i 1) am neutral to fairy tales 2) don’t care about retellings and 3) am no longer in the YA demographic, i know i’m 100% not the audience for this book but i can still appreciate a good book if it’s good

that being said, pham relied too heavily on these tropes existing in this fantasy world and the characters being self-aware that they fit these exact tropes—i don’t know if pham intended to break the fourth wall on this or if it just came to be a theme within the chapters

Amelia: Even in fairy tales, princesses merely existed in stories that others wanted to tell.

Corin: […] this is how fairy tales were supposed to end.

i’m sure if i made it to the end, the tropes would be somewhat subverted but how they get there is confusing in tone

also the way i cannot get a grip on any solid description—there’s no real direction, no physical location to hold on to. i get that the fluidity of movement in the dream realm is supposed to represent this fairytale fantasy but i couldn’t get my foothold to sink deep enough to understandably consume what in the world was even happening and why the characters were expressing these emotions. i would say the book lacked spatial awareness but i can’t even tell if that’s what i mean in regards to how nondescript the “world building” is with a few purple proses to decorate the edges so it doesn’t seem like anything is lacking.

even while i describe certain parts as nondescript, i still feel like every other second, the writing brought something up to make sure i knew what Big Feelings were happening in the moment, even if we don’t have to reach that conclusion yet if that makes sense? it was like i’m driving down a long stretch of road and every 2 miles there’s a sign that says “gas station to your left” except there’s no left? the road is straight and the sign keeps appearing on the road in the next 2 miles “gas station to your left” BABY THERE IS NO LEFT?? STOP THREATENING ME !!

Underdevelopment

aside from the world building being all over the place and not concrete enough, the characters were not that interesting to me from the beginning. they are immediately depressed and unshakeable when we meet them so it seemed to drag during their separate chapters before they met up with each other

the titular character and her love interest have so little chemistry, if one of them became a pet, neither of them would care to adopt 😭 like it’s sad brah lmfao i came for the sapphic romance but all i got was a depression mug

and i love a good story that involves very broken, imperfect, and suffering characters, but i don’t feel like there was an opportunity to really dive into their mental health. and from what i’ve read from spoiler reviews, it seems it doesn’t really have good progress on that front in the end anyway…

malicine had a few good moments with their pov chapters and then they seemed to disappear into the background, forgotten and unrelated to the plot until called upon by either main characters. they could’ve been the cuntiest if they had an ounce of description given to them, but even their appearance in the story didn’t move me

especially corin’s sister elly who felt very one-dimensional—it seemed she was just there to give corin a reason to feel any type of emotion, carefree and simple-minded because of course her big sister has to handle all of the emotional responsibility of the world’s cruelty right

Ending Thoughts

all in all, i really wanted to like this book. i enjoy some of pham’s content though i am not a regular patron of it on social media or youtube, but i was excited for her to be telling a story of her own bc i think she’s funny and cool

i will say i would still tune in for pham’s second or third book. i think there is potential there, and if she can fine tune her skills then she could tell a great story, hopefully one that doesn’t rely on an existing story to carry the weight of it

the one thing i regret was not reading this sooner bc now i have no choice but to DNF during AAPI month or pride month and i am deeply sorry for that i have failed both my communities 😔