lezreadalot 's review for:

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Ben Miller, Huw Lemmey

4.0

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They also ask us to pose the question of the whole notion of gay heroes: why do we choose to remember, and why do we choose to forget?

Really entertaining! While I agree with some reviews that the book doesn't come together very cohesively as a whole, and it's very obvious that it started off as a podcast that discussed one person per episode, and that has now been transformed into a chapter by chapter project... idk, I still really liked this. Each individual chapter gave a fascinating summary and profile and interesting titbits about a queer person from history, and in a lot of cases, left me with a desire to read up on them more. (I feel like there's so much more to learn about Roger Casement and Margaret Mead and Yukio Mishima in particular. Also how is this the first time I learned that J. Edgar Hoover was gay?? Did I know, and somehow forget?? LOL.) And I mean, clearly, a lot of these people have nothing in common, and clearly, a lot of them are much worse than others. If you're reading this book hoping to get a clear thread connecting each person to the next, you're going to be disappointed. (I don't even know if that's what the authors intended to do, and if it was their intention, I can't say they succeeded.) They do add some sprinklings of their personal theories and politics and interpretation, which I did find satisfying. The writing style is loosely academic, casual with moments of humour that I enjoyed. And it was all pretty digestible; perhaps there were a few chapters where the subject matter wasn't quite as interesting, but none of it went over my head.

Listened to the audiobook as read by Ben Miller, which was quite good! Narrating non-fiction is a skill in and of itself, and this narrator was really easy to listen to, and had one of those universally pleasing voices. The production could have used some work, because there were more than a few instances of repeated lines, or moments where the narrator had recorded an alternate reading of a line, and it was left in. A little bit sloppy, perhaps, but it didn't actually bug me. I do wish that this had been a bit more expansive and diverse (surely there were a couple evil dykes we could have squeezed in here) but the book doesn't claim to be all encompassing, so that doesn't feel like a fair critique. I enjoyed this for what it was, and hopefully I can do some further reading soon.