There Were Gay Nazis
‘Bad Gays’ by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller
It’s obvious why we seek out positive role models from our own identity groups and why we might be nervous about negative examples. Still, gay men can learn something from real-life gay villains.
In examinations of historical wrongdoing, we often ask whether we can fairly judge another person. Individuals cope with specific scenarios in their own times, and it may be hard to say what we’d have done differently because, if we’re honest, we can’t really imagine being them. On the other hand, some choices simply look bad, no matter who you were or what you felt you were dealing with, and it’s straightforward to reject them as evil. Bad Gays (as the title suggests) comes down more heavily on the latter side.
But the point of the book isn’t about whether we can judge. The book, rather, is about how we understand gay identity.
Considering where we come from,
“we are not just the protagonists, but also the products of history. Not only do our rights come from prior political struggles that were full of faults and fault lines, but everything about what we conceive of gay to mean is also the product of centuries of accretions of meanings, roles, and experiences.”
