Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.62 AVERAGE
3.62 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Absolutely fascinating book. Loved learning about the history in this book. I wish there had been more inclusion of women.
informative
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
dark
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This was a rather excessible and eye opening read. Sometimes the vocabulary went over my head, but I understood most of what was discussed. I love that this was a discussion about how bad people who are gay also helped shape the lgbt+ movement to where it is today. Everything has good and bad mixed in so certainly there are bad gays. I learned so much from this book and it was a rather fun experience at the end of each chapter I would wonder "how batshit crazy is the next person gonna be?" And I got to say some of these bad gays were indeed crazy.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
The first objective of Bad Gays is to introduce readers to gay people in history, who were not heroes. These people were flawed, sometimes even criminally so, but often, they were very successful. In many cases, people do not even remember that they were gay. In achieving this goal, the authors, Lemmey and Miller, have done an excellent job in curating and writing about a fascinating cast of characters. It's in their theorizing through the lens of queer studies into the behaviors of gays of the past I have difficulty with.
In some of the biographies, the authors succeed in making a point using intersectionality where a reasonable reader can understand the propositions and the argument. I can accept how bad gays from the past might have engaged in classist, racist behavior to define what normal homesexuality (masculine Greek love vs. effeminate sissy) is like. However, too often the authors dive into the deep end with little or no supporting propositions other than a citation to another paper.
---
Here's a small sampling of some howlers passing as coherent propositions or arugments:
"It is interesting here to think about homosexuality as a path towards anti-colonial alliance..."
"... was part of a group of gay men – not a group that understood itself necessarily as such, but a group we can definitely think of as relatively coherent in hindsight – who understood their homosexuality as part of a broader project of metropolitan anticolonial radicalism."
"Some people desired to separate themselves from colonized people by preserving strict standards of heterosexual morality, while some others, like the homosexuals beginning to recognise themselves and be noticed in European cities in the late nineteenth century, began identifying with these othered people."
"Sometimes, those homosexual encounters in the colonies led to ambivalence towards, or even explicit criticism of, European imperialism."
"While they were embracing Marxism, and pushing their work towards socially committed themes, his work seemed to revel in the densely poetic, baroque language of metaphor and sensation."
"...although he oriented himself against both the materialism of the Left and the dry, worthy literature of socialist realism that seemed to run contrary to his own literary imagination soaked in myth, metaphor, and historical drama."
"By the mid-1950s, it had become an elite bauble, and today its starchitects actively express Marie Antoinette–like disdain for the migrant workers who die en masse while constructing their fantasy forms."
"...spanning from his work as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art interpreting the new International Style of architecture and bringing it to the United States, to his post-war reinvention as the architect of choice for several generations of corporate elites – stands as a metonym for the severing of the bonds between modernist aesthetics and progressive politics. That this career was punctuated by dedicated work promoting fascism and racist eugenics at home and abroad demonstrates the extent to which work in the service of American capitalism is also work in the service of racial capitalism.
---
I believe the authors can't credibly make these arguments without a logical, ordered series of propositions. At best, I think the author's get an incomplete grade (assuming all the cited papers are reasonably argued) on proving a point about how gays behaving badly sold out their gender identity through acquiescense to the ruling majority. At worst, it makes the book, outside of the recounting of biogrpahical facts, extremely difficult to agree with.
In some of the biographies, the authors succeed in making a point using intersectionality where a reasonable reader can understand the propositions and the argument. I can accept how bad gays from the past might have engaged in classist, racist behavior to define what normal homesexuality (masculine Greek love vs. effeminate sissy) is like. However, too often the authors dive into the deep end with little or no supporting propositions other than a citation to another paper.
---
Here's a small sampling of some howlers passing as coherent propositions or arugments:
"It is interesting here to think about homosexuality as a path towards anti-colonial alliance..."
"... was part of a group of gay men – not a group that understood itself necessarily as such, but a group we can definitely think of as relatively coherent in hindsight – who understood their homosexuality as part of a broader project of metropolitan anticolonial radicalism."
"Some people desired to separate themselves from colonized people by preserving strict standards of heterosexual morality, while some others, like the homosexuals beginning to recognise themselves and be noticed in European cities in the late nineteenth century, began identifying with these othered people."
"Sometimes, those homosexual encounters in the colonies led to ambivalence towards, or even explicit criticism of, European imperialism."
"While they were embracing Marxism, and pushing their work towards socially committed themes, his work seemed to revel in the densely poetic, baroque language of metaphor and sensation."
"...although he oriented himself against both the materialism of the Left and the dry, worthy literature of socialist realism that seemed to run contrary to his own literary imagination soaked in myth, metaphor, and historical drama."
"By the mid-1950s, it had become an elite bauble, and today its starchitects actively express Marie Antoinette–like disdain for the migrant workers who die en masse while constructing their fantasy forms."
"...spanning from his work as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art interpreting the new International Style of architecture and bringing it to the United States, to his post-war reinvention as the architect of choice for several generations of corporate elites – stands as a metonym for the severing of the bonds between modernist aesthetics and progressive politics. That this career was punctuated by dedicated work promoting fascism and racist eugenics at home and abroad demonstrates the extent to which work in the service of American capitalism is also work in the service of racial capitalism.
---
I believe the authors can't credibly make these arguments without a logical, ordered series of propositions. At best, I think the author's get an incomplete grade (assuming all the cited papers are reasonably argued) on proving a point about how gays behaving badly sold out their gender identity through acquiescense to the ruling majority. At worst, it makes the book, outside of the recounting of biogrpahical facts, extremely difficult to agree with.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Mental illness tbh. Not the book's fault by any means
So many bad gays. So much new knowledge.
Content Warnings
Minor: Hate crime, Homophobia, Racism, Transphobia, Antisemitism
informative
reflective
medium-paced