Saturday, June 7th, 6:30 pm, Bad Gays with Ben Miller
Join us for a book Presentation of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, published by Verso Books.
Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and notorious gangster Ronny Gray, we tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. We examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs like the Nazi Ernst Röhm, artists and debauched bon viveurs, and imperialists: including Lawrence of Arabia, Roger Casement, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover and lawyer Roy Cohn, and the architect Philip Johnson. Together, these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, that was from the beginning marked by exclusion and violence, and that has been central to major historical events.
Ben Miller is a writer and historian living in Berlin. With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded more than three million times; their book, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, was published by Verso in 2022, received rave reviews in the Washington Postand the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others, and has been translated into Italian and Spanish. His next book, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a history of how the politics of liberation traveled from the European interwar avant-garde to 1960s California, is currently under contract with W. W. Norton. He holds a PhD in global intellectual history summa cum laude from the FU Berlin and is a member of the board of the Schwules Museum.