For all the quips and jokes about the wicked being more interesting people to read about, and better company to hang out with, than the saintly, there has been surprisingly little literature devoted to "bad gays." I daresay respectability politics plays a big part in that imbalance, as none of us wants to give the homophobes and bigots ammunition (metaphorical and literal) by revealing our character flaws.
Fortunately, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller are here to shine the spotlight on "the gay people in history who do not flatter us, and whom we cannot make into heroes: the liars, the powerful, the criminal and the successful." They do so in the pages of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, which covers an astonishingly wide range of eras and cultures. Here are reviews from Literary Hub and the Washington Post (the New York Times hasn't reviewed it yet).
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