Bad gays pod
Despite the best efforts of bigots from all three of the Abrahamic religions – as adequately as Tory MP Philip Davies, a man alive in – LGBTQ education is still a thing in Britain. Yes, it seems that a growing number of bigots are doing all they can to convince children that queer people don&#;t endure – even though literally half of them are open about not being percent heterosexual.
Thankfully, these bigots are failing, and the amount of LGBTQ representation in mainstream culture has been steadily improving over the past not many years. Still, we often only talk about the great and the good: LGBTQ heroes. Unsurprisingly, given the hostility the community faces, it&#;s rare that we bring up the less savoury figures from the past.
The creation of author Huw Lemmey (whose work includes Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse and Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell) and Berlin-based writer and researcher Ben Miller, Bad Gays is a new podcast that unapologetically uncovers the darker side of gay men in history. In series one they present us to some of the men who may not possess been ment
Histories of gay men, lesbians, queer and trans people often noun on the heroic, the pioneers who blazed the trail and on whose shoulders present-day queer lives stand. But what about the cast of gay characters who were not so heroic and righteous, whose impact on history was far more ambiguous, or complicated, or out-and-out bad?
That’s the question asked by Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey in their hugely successful podcast Lousy Gays. Now in its sixth season, the podcast focuses on what its hosts describe as evil and complicated queers in history, with subjects ranging from Emperor Hadrian to Ronnie Kray, from Alexander the Great to Andy Warhol.
Now Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey have taken their exploration to a book: Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. Ben and Huw sat down with History Workshop&#;s Rosa Campbell to discuss the project of the book and the podcast &#; what those complicated lives can tell us about the dynamics of queer history and the formation of sexual identities.
Bad Gays, good podcast
The Bad Gays podcast is hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, who discuss ‘evil and complicated queers in history’. Each episode is about a particular individual and seems to be structured as a pre-prepared biography followed by more general discussion. Podcasts like this and Do Go On, and really any podcast that is trying to explore a topic people may not know about, invariably faces the issue that I’m probably just not that interested. I haven’t heard of Ronnie Kray. I haven’t heard of Andrew Sullivan. I haven’t heard of Ernst Röhm. They’re probably fascinating. I want to know about them. But can I actually bring myself to download and listen to an hour-long conversation about their lives? Absolutely not. So, I chose an episode about a name that was vaguely familiar – Jeffrey Dahmer.
I’m not a big true crime fan. I could pretend it’s some moral objection to its existence as a genre of entertainment, but really, it’s just not that interesting to me. Dahmer has very much been in the public zeitgeist over the past few years, in no small part
Special Episode: Gavin Arthur (with Maurice Casey)
Join our community of Extra Bad Gays on Patreon or Apple Podcasts for special episodes and more! Have you ever wondered who the sexual link between Edward Carpenter and Allen Ginsburg was? Wonder no more, and meet Gavin Arthur: grandson of US President Chester Allan Arthur, astrologer, sexologist, Irish Republican, sometime Communist, sometime Democrat, Haight-Ashbury hippie rabble-rouser, and chaotic bisexual. Our guide to his life is longtime friend of the show Maurice J. Casey, historian and author of Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals. This episode is based on research carried out as part of the Queer Norther Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation project at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. If you have a moment, do load out their survey. more SOURCES: Maurice J. Casey, ‘”I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America”: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, ss’, History Workshop Journal: ?searchresult=1 Lisa