I think that the darkest and most depraved form of consumption of heroic narrative comes from the elision of human complexity.

I am aware that this book is based on a popular podcast, but therein lies its greatest weakness. The individual chapters are entertaining enough, if not offering anything new that even a casual student of gay history is likely to not already know. The heart of the book is in the above statement, and the authors seem to do a lot of unsuccessful shoehorning to come up with a unifying hypothesis. The authors state that by examining the lives and sexualities of a range of “evil and complicated queers from our history”, the book “investigates the failure of homosexuality as an identity and a political project.” Note the conflation of ‘evil’ and ‘complex’, probably a half-baked attempt to explain what Lawrence of Arabia and Margaret Mead (incidentally the only woman here) have in common in terms of ‘badness’.

The failure, however, of mainstream, actually existing white homosexuality to enact liberation and its embrace instead of full integration into the burning house of the couple-form, the family unit, and what we might hopefully call late-stage capitalism is real, and it is arranged on three primary axes: first, its separation from and fear of gender non-conformity; second, its simultaneous appropriation of the bodies and sexualities of racialised people and denial of those people’s full humanity, political participation, and equality; and third, its incessant focus on the bourgeois project of ‘sexuality’ itself. An antidote to assumptions that anyone oppressed must be the good guy. Catherine Fletcher, History Today, Books of the Year I've seen a lot of criticism about there not being representation of non-white folks or those who identify as something other than male in this book, but these criticisms miss the point, or at least don't take their criticisms the right point. The book isn't aiming to explore marginalized gays, but the bad gays who were front and center of culture, politics, and the sciences, those who wrote the narrative. So of course there won't be many marginalized bad gays in here, because their voices weren't shaping the dominant culture. Those would be the white, male ones (for the most part; there is one woman in here, Margaret Mead, and one Japanese man, Yukio Mishimi). Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects. A wry, rigorous account of centuries of gay villainy. Lemmey and Miller's historiography sparkles with salacious details and delights in showing us that there is nothing new under the sun. Shon Faye, Author of The Transgender Issue

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller's book "Bad Gays: A Homosexual History" explores the lives of fourteen bad gays, from the Hellenistic emperor Hadrian to the Far Right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. In the book, gay people from history who do not appeal to us or who we cannot elevate to heroic status are discussed. It examines the definitions of badness, and homosexuality, and how historically we have understood the connection between the two while creating an alternative "homosexual history" from the lives of difficult and troublesome queers. The overall mission of the book, aside from exploring these rejected gays, is purportedly to trace the evolution of our modern conception of what it means to be gay or queer through the lens of these "bad gays," many of whom were white and inextricably part of the patriarchal white supremacist systems that birthed our modern culture. Sexual desire towards colonised people’ … TE Lawrence, as played by Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Photograph: Ullstein bild/Getty Images

Eaar of Splaarghön - An Ear monster who is presumably the last member of The Underlords and 'master of ceremonies'. he rules over an arena dimension populated with demonic worm-like creatures. His goal is to 'play the game' with the A-team.