Bad Gays is a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. Each of these characters have incredibly compelling stories, and theres value in looking at why people with complicated lives do bad things. The primary emergency of LGBTQ history in its first decades was to uncover and restore histories of gay heroism. While the culture of academic research has moved on, the public conversation hasnt. They think it’s time to ask why we don’t remember our villains as well as we remember our heroes. Often, they have more to teach us. Always, they provide provocative and compelling hooks on which to hang conversations about some of gay history’s biggest debates: assimilationism vs. cultural uniqueness, social construction vs. essentialism, and entangled histories of queerness, race, and class.
