The (Bad) Taste Test: Bad Gays Shines a Light on a History's Evil Homosexuals
Oscar Wilde was one of many famous historical queers to feel the full force of a culture, and a state, that was violently opposed to his existence. His story, established lore in queer canon, is given only a passing mention in the introduction of the new book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, based on their shared podcast of the same name. Instead, the two authors quickly pivot to Bosie Douglas, Wilde’s former lover, whom they describe as a historical “footnote,” and “an embodiment of ‘evil twink energy.’” The book is dedicated to deep dives into the stories of figures like Bosie, men that survived through the same times as their canonized peers, but who, for one reason or another, the authors say we “cannot make into heroes.”
The march of queerness towards respectability and integration into mainstream culture hinges on jettisoning from queer history the things that don’t fit so neatly into an approved or approvable narrative: events and individuals that show queer culture or identity in a bad light become too burdensome for progress to carry. These discarded pieces of historical debris are the things that a cis, straight majority would take offense at, and then project that offense onto contemporary queer people — even, god forbid, the respectable ones. What gets lost along the way is a necessary grappling with the ugly parts of our past.
One of the phrases most famously associated with Wilde, “the love that dare not speak its name,” actually comes from “Two Loves,” a poem written by Bosie, his evil twink ex. Inconveniently for those who appreciate his writing, Bosie was also “Machiavellian, anti-Semitic, and louche.” Acknowledging his shortcomings rather than brushing them under the rug enables us to put his life and work in a political context and gain a fuller understanding of his relationships with his contemporaries. It’s only by understanding what made Bad Gays like him bad, that we’re able to make sense of what a better future could look like.
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No matter where in history the lives of the individual bad gays took place, one of the things that seems to be common among the figures in the book is a lack of solidarity. Bosie’s own move towards far-right politics is mirrored in many of the figures that the authors explore, from the gays of Weimar Berlin, to Roy Cohn, to the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Being a Bad Gay is about more than just embodying harmful stereotypes or simply being a huge bitch. Instead, it’s about acting in ways that cast aside fellow queer people and other minorities for selfish interests, and choosing integration with power over moving towards a unified liberation.
As Lemmey and Miller move through history, they expose a gallery of rogues who are often more than happy to sell out other queer people if it means safety and advancement for themselves, however temporary it might be, and no matter what kind of compromises it necessitates. In a panoramic look at what the authors call the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin, they introduce us to Freidrich Radszuweist, the president of the first mass organization focused on the rights of queer people, who was more than happy to cozy up with fascism as it was on its ascendancy in Germany, arguing that National Socialist newspapers included “some very reasonable articles on homosexuality,” and later writing that those on the far right might even end up on the side of gay rights. Tragically believing (or at least claiming to believe) that members of the Nazi Party “on the whole only want to go after the Jews,” he chose proximity to power over solidarity with other marginalized people. The strained relationship that’s come to exist between mainstream queer culture and the uglier sides of its history makes some sense It’s no wonder that, when talking about queer figures from the past, someone like Radszuweist is left in the shadows, while martyrs to violence are moved into the spotlight. But Bad Gays refuses an airbrushed image of the past, revealing the ugliness of the final image as a way to explore the compromises people made to survive, and what it cost themselves, and those around them.
This deeply uncertain, shifting ground of what safety looked like for men like this is most strongly embodied in infamous McCarthy lawyer Roy Cohn. In a chapter dedicated to him, Lemmey and Miller reference a scene from Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, in which a fictionalized Cohn argues that “Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows.” Kushner’s dialogue depicts a man who sees the persecuted class that he belongs to as being weak, and rather than using his own position to try and lift it up, instead pulls up the ladder behind him. Cohn’s rabid right-wing politics existed at an intersection between homophobia and anti-communism, with each seen as having “their own codes of behavior and language with which they recognized each other, thus increasing the sense of collusion or conspiracy.” There’s an irony in this: the more Cohn chased after communists, the more he forced other queer people to the margins of society, implicating himself despite his best efforts. This irony of course extends to the almost theatrical tragedy of Cohn dying due to complications from AIDS — “to some extent, the victim of the homophobia he himself helped stoke in the 1950s.”
“There’s a temptation to assume that history will always curve towards progress, and that the future will be better than the past. But this look at the seedy underbelly of queer history — moving through violence, colonialism, and the shadow of the still ongoing AIDS crisis — reveals that progress isn’t that simple.”
The most contemporary figure in Bad Gays is the far-right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. One of the earliest examples of the insurgent far right across Europe in the early 21st century, he now seems like a template for contemporary right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Fortuyn’s politics seem to echo the Weimar gays who predated him; but rather than simply cozying up to extreme politics, he embodied it, even appropriating the language of solidarity in his messaging and espousing “the compatibility between a pro-homosexual politics, racism, and the far right.” If such a compatibility can be exploited, surely the efforts of figures like Fortuyn will be replicated in the future. The line between him and contemporary right-wing gays like Milo Yiannopoulos or Peter Thiel is, ironically, straight as an arrow.
There’s a temptation to assume that history will always curve towards progress, and that the future will be better than the past. But this look at the seedy underbelly of queer history — moving through violence, colonialism, and the shadow of the still ongoing AIDS crisis — reveals that progress isn’t that simple. These historical footnotes chart the course of history itself; from “the love that dare not speak its name” to gays willing to get in bed with the right for survival, power, notoriety, or for the simple reason that being gay does not make one inherently good. Whether they’re reacting in desperation to political systems that cannot accomodate them or gleefully participating in those very systems to the detriment of their would-be peers, bad gays will always be with us.
Words: Sam Moore
