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A review by redheadreading
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Ben Miller, Huw Lemmey
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
Expected this to be a slam dunk for me but I have mixed feelings!
I wish there had been some kind of parameters established for what "bad" is classified as in this collection. It bothered me that there was such a range of morality all clumped together without delving into those distinctions more explicitly. One guy just wrote bawdy stuff in the Renaissance whereas others were legit Nazis! The level is not the same!! I also feel like the unifying thread got a bit lost for me? Based on the intro, it seemed like the focus was going to be on white gay men for a specific reason so I wasn't surprised that they dominated the collection, but with the inclusion of Maragret Mead and Yukio Mishima it clearly isn't the case, so why does the collection focus so heavily on this limited selection? (Also many of these are bisexual, which kind of gets acknowledged but also kind of doesn't?)
I could very much tell this is based on a podcast in the way it was written and it didn't always work for me as a result - it felt like sometimes we got bogged down in summarising biographical info and lost the argument, whereas at other times it was really engaging. Perhaps the podcast itself would work better for me than this book has?
I wish there had been some kind of parameters established for what "bad" is classified as in this collection. It bothered me that there was such a range of morality all clumped together without delving into those distinctions more explicitly. One guy just wrote bawdy stuff in the Renaissance whereas others were legit Nazis! The level is not the same!! I also feel like the unifying thread got a bit lost for me? Based on the intro, it seemed like the focus was going to be on white gay men for a specific reason so I wasn't surprised that they dominated the collection, but with the inclusion of Maragret Mead and Yukio Mishima it clearly isn't the case, so why does the collection focus so heavily on this limited selection? (Also many of these are bisexual, which kind of gets acknowledged but also kind of doesn't?)
I could very much tell this is based on a podcast in the way it was written and it didn't always work for me as a result - it felt like sometimes we got bogged down in summarising biographical info and lost the argument, whereas at other times it was really engaging. Perhaps the podcast itself would work better for me than this book has?