Thanks to queer theory – and I mean that sincerely – discursive gymnastics are now an amusing accompaniment to our usually failed attempts to define slippery identity categories that we, by turns, lean into and resist as members of the queer community. I am as guilty as the next gay-queer of both grasping for and pushing against some tangible-yet-nebulous form of gayness. I spend a great deal of time thinking about how we define ourselves, think ourselves into the world, and navigate life as individuals and parts of larger wholes. I don’t have many answers; this makes me restless. Multitudinous as I am, though, I quite like being restless. Which brings me to my recently concluded excursion into the world of Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller.
Indeed, I take issue with the authors’ definition of a ‘Bad Gay’ and with the idea of the ‘gay’ identity, which they drape around the shoulders of an extraordinarily ambitious range of historical figures.
The ways we choose to make meaning matter. I am one of those people who doesn’t so much think we should proceed with caution when we attempt to develop any kind of long view of gay history as that we should be deeply skeptical of any such moves to do so. It is in this respect that I take good-natured issue with Bad Gays. Indeed, I take issue with the authors’ definition of a ‘Bad Gay’ and with the idea of the ‘gay’ identity, which they drape around the shoulders of an extraordinarily ambitious range of historical figures.
Why, for instance, was the Roman Emperor Hadrian a ‘bad gay’? Was he ‘gay’? He was certainly the leader of an imperialist colonizing force (bad), and historical records indicate that he was deeply flawed. Historical records cited by the authors also suggest that he engaged in intimate, sexual activities with other men and that he was in thrall to ancient Greek culture and its knowledge-power system that, amongst many other things, incorporated a particular kind of same-sex sexual activity into its structures (older man penetrates younger man or man of lower social status). I can clearly see how we might assign him the label ‘bad’ in a contemporary reading, but I’m less convinced by the reading of Hadrian as a ‘bad gay’ on the authors’ terms.
I have similar misgivings about each of the supposedly ‘bad gays’ from pre-nineteenth-century periods that Lemmey and Miller survey: Pietro Aretino, the Italian renaissance writer (a veritable comforter, philosopher, and lifelong shit if ever there was one – to be sure); James I, the Stuart King of Scotland and England; and Frederick the Great of Germany all rather stretch the boundaries of what we might call ‘gay’ today. The authors do acknowledge this, but nonetheless, a double bind comes into effect in these early chapters with these four figures – of the ancient, renaissance, early modern, and Enlightenment periods, respectively – being shoehorned into a genealogy of ‘Bad Gays’ in a way that is, for me at least, somewhat disingenuous.
There is no such thing as a coherent or universal gay identity.
Bad Gays might have begun with a survey of nefarious gays from the nineteenth century onwards, and it would have been none the worse for it. In fact, such a move might have strengthened Bad Gays’ core position, which seems best expressed in the concluding chapter: ‘it is only through solidarity and alliance that liberation is possible: it is also as part of the same process that we can build a better form of being’ (p.305). This is where Bad Gays and I find a way to get along. There is no such thing as a coherent or universal gay identity. Still, there is, or there should be, a strategic identification that can be picked up and then dropped the moment it outlasts its social and political usefulness.
I think Lemmey and Miller broadly work on the basis of that same unstable but useful organizing principle when injecting some kind of social value into our thinking about ‘gay’ identity.
The need for such an identification has arguably been central to queer-informed activism for decades now. ‘Gay’ is a valuable social and political marker in two ways: first, it roughly and inarticulately groups together people (usually men) who desire sex and/or intimacy with other people of the same sex; second, it aligns us as stars in the constellation of resistance to all forms of oppression, not just those which try to police who and how we love. I think Lemmey and Miller broadly work on the basis of that same unstable but useful organizing principle when injecting some kind of social value into our thinking about ‘gay’ identity. Bad Gays is at its most convincing when it highlights not just failures by White gay men to coalesce in solidarity with other marginalized groups but the apparent relish with which some White homosexual men in the relatively recent past have gone about ruining people’s lives. The chapters on White extremist homos such as J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Philip Johnson, and Pim Fortuyn are particularly blistering critiques in this vein.
Furthermore, by having us converse with the ghosts of flawed figures such as Roger Casement and T. E. Lawrence, Bad Gays also holds up an uncomfortable mirror – for me, anyway – to moments when White gay male privilege might be showing. The authors also usefully illustrate how figures such as Frederick the Great have been used and misused by extreme nationalist and masculinist discourses, shining a depressing light on the (usually White) gay men today who continue to gravitate towards right-wing extremists. This seems particularly urgent for our time.
Like all of the figures the book deals with, Santos is not best defined by his sexuality, but rather by his actions, and the damage he has caused in civic culture.
Reading this book at the same time as former Congressman George Santos has become our latest controversial diva down, I can’t help but think of how they would classify him. Like all of the figures the book deals with, Santos is not best defined by his sexuality, but rather by his actions, and the damage he has caused in civic culture. He was not, though, just a symbol of the particular kind of ‘anything goes’ narcissism and demagoguery that characterizes the current political moment while he was in office. He was also an active participant in the new authoritarian turn in US politics. Famous for touting his love of everything from Botox to Rupaul’s Drag Race, Santos saw no contradictions when he would praise queer culture symbols while simultaneously asking to restrict rights for the LGBTQIAP+ community, from speaking out against gay marriage (despite his own marriage) to his openly transphobic agenda.
All of this is to say (to quote a good pal of mine who also works in the trenches of queer optimism) that we need to have these conversations about meaning and purpose. White gay men, in particular, need to have these conversations. Whilst I might not accept the premise of Lemmey’s and Miller’s long view of gay history, I am four-square behind them on the need to critique the abject failures of White gay male solidarity with women, People of Color, other gays, and, increasingly, with our trans and non-binary comrades. Bad Gays offers a productive route into those conversations.
