Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

I liked this quite a bit, and I like the podcast. But it's uneven.

The best parts of the book are the insidery gossip about the lives of lesser known historical figures. Pietro Aretino, Jack Saul, Radszuweit in the Weimar Germany chapter. I enjoyed learning about people I genuinely knew nothing about. And the deep professional history grounding of the work really informs well beyond just fun facts, particularly the queer theory perspective of the authors. They have done a lot of deep research on some of these figures and it's great.

The book is a little less good on figures I knew something about already. Their treatment of Frederick the Great is strangely dismissive, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia has a lot more interesting detail. The J. Edgar Hoover + Roy Cohn chapter is kind of thin.

Where the book started to bother me is when the authors have an axe to grind. Often an anti-colonial / anti-capitalist axe. I'm sympathetic to those political views myself but they interfered with the narrative IMO. The chapters about Margaret Mead and Philip Johnson were particularly frustrating this way. I get it, it's Bad Gays, and they are talking about the bad parts of these folks. It just felt a little too reductive.

Overall a really entertaining and informative history. And a uniquely good and constructive queer viewpoint. Glad I read it and glad I have the podcast to enjoy. (The episode on EM Forster is terrific.)