Why do we remember our queer heroes better than we remember our queer villains?
And why is it sometimes so hard to tell the difference?
Bad Gays is a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. From Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover, our history is littered with them. Unlike the easy heroes, however — people like Oscar Wilde, Audre Lorde or Alan Turing — we rarely remember them as queer, or as gay. And yet their sexuality was just as important an influence on their life as those whom we celebrate. Over the course of our podcast, we profile queer people from the past whose lives have been overlooked by queer people on the search for historical icons. Among their ranks are emperors and criminals, fascist thugs and famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, yet all of them have one thing in common — they engaged in same-sex or gender non-conforming behaviour that, in the context of today’s society, we would understand as gay or queer.
Now entering our seventh season with more than two million downloads to date, our show is entirely supported by its listeners. We do hope you’ll join the ranks of nefarious nellies who support us on Patreon by subscribing to our monthly conversation about today’s queer life and culture, Extra Bad Gays (launched in November 2023).
About The Hosts
Huw Lemmey
is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of three novels: Unknown Language, forthcoming in spring 2020 from Ignota Books, Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell (Montez Press, 2019), and Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse (Montez Press, 2016). He writes on culture, sexuality and cities for the Guardian, Frieze, Flash Art, Tribune, TANK, The Architectural Review, Art Monthly, New Humanist, Rhizome, The White Review, andL’Uomo Vogue, amongst others. He writes the weekly essay series utopian drivel.
Ben Miller
is a writer and historian. He is a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin, has taught on queer history, literature, and visual cultures there and at the Humboldt-Universität. A regular contributor to outlets such as The New York Times, Baffler, and Literary Hub, Ben is also a member of the board of the Schwules Museum, one of the world’s largest independent institutions dedicated to archiving and exhibiting queer histories and visual cultures. His second book, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a history of how the counterculture traveled from the European avant-garde to the California youth movement and turned from a politics to a product, is under contract with W. W. Norton.