《 “You are accustomed to thinking of fairy tales as make-believe.” [...] “But they have only ever been mirrors.” 》

💔 women need peace, for f*ck sake!

have to admit i’m not loving this…the figures themselves are interesting and there are occasionally some great ideas about the intersectionality of homosexuality with class, masculinity, power, deviance that get to the surface but the overarching point of this book is such a reductive piece of pop history. i’m yet to understand what lemmey and miller would define as “bad” and i barely understand what they define as “gays”

My feelings so far is that while the content itself is interesting and I feel like I'm learning something, it's constantly falling a little short of drawing a satisfying conclusion. Like it feels like we're getting somewhere, we're gathering the context through explaining the times and the cultural attitudes and the important players, everything is laid out so a point can be made, and then the chapter just ends. I'm enjoying it but the flimsiness of every observation is going to start getting frustrating soon 😭

The greeks invented being gay but the medicis invented gay4pay 🙂‍↕️

just wanted to point out that the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial roman biographies that the authors use as a source, is a pretty debatable source when looking at its reliability, and that in general ancient biographies have to be handled with care, because the goal of the ancient biography was different than what it is now (they often had very moralistic goals, e.g. Suetonius, and often invent information to further their ideological aims). i’m not saying that you can't use them as historical sources, as we often don’t have any other options, and they still can contain accurate information, but a roman emperor’s sexuality/sexual practices (and gender identity) is exactly the sort of thing ancient biographers, who didn’t like said emperor, would have created stories about to ruin his reputation or spread gossip about. especially the Historia Augusta is debatable, since it was written near the end of the fourth century, so 100-150 years after the facts recorded in it, and the author pretends to be writing as multiple people, though there is only one author for all the biographies. some academics have deemed Hadrian's biography to be one of the more reliable ones, though. we do know that the author used some historical sources, like Marius Maximus, but it's best to stay skeptical. it's basically as if you used Bad Gays as the definitive historical source for someone's biography: sure, most things might be true, but be careful! i kind of want to assume that the authors have engaged carefully with this source, but i'm not super sure, since their handling of other elements has seemed a bit superficial, and they also did not disclose any of the difficulties that come with handling it as a historical source.