An actual spy struggles with layers of concealed identity, and the season ends with a fixture of the McCarthy era and Donald Trump mentor, Roy Cohn, who aids a witch hunt against imagined gay spies in the US government. Listeners also hear about a very different side of Andrew Sullivan, the contemporary writer who helped popularize the conservative case for gay marriage and continues to argue against perceived radicalism in the LGBTQ community. Lawrence of Arabia makes his appearance, along with BDSM fiction he writes that is tied to his deeply problematic work in the colonial Middle East. “Some of them might have been considered bad at the time or might be considered bad in popular conversation, but actually we end up coming to a more sympathetic understanding of them.”īad Gays’ first episode concerns a less well-known figure: Nazi leader Ernst Röhm, “the world’s first openly gay politician.” The show later turns to perhaps the first publisher of gay, lesbian, and transgender magazines - who tried to appease the Nazis. (The title is a clever misdirect it’s not just about villains, and definitely not about performative enthusiasm for brunch.) “Some of them are bad because they went along with the prevailing spirit of their time,” Miller says. Some are famous, like Lawrence of Arabia, but questions about their sexual identity have often been considered more as scandals or footnotes than as important details of their story.Īnd “bad” can be as slippery a term as “gay” for Bad Gays’ subjects. Bad Gays, focusing on the “evil and complicated gay men in history,” tries to tell some of the stories that get left out.Įach installment of the podcast’s 10-episode first season centers on a particular historical figure. Even among historians, the focus at times has been on finding and recognizing the queer heroes.
LGBTQ history is often ignored or misrepresented in pop culture. That’s the idea behind the new podcast Bad Gays from writers Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey. LGBTQ Pride Month is a time to celebrate the queer people in history who have fought for equal rights.īut how should we talk about influential queer figures who don’t fit that narrative?