Who Are The Main Characters In 'Bad Gays'?

The book 'Bad Gays' by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller is such a fascinating deep dive into historical queer figures who were... well, complicated. It’s not your typical heroic LGBTQ+ narrative—it’s about people who were influential but also morally ambiguous or outright terrible. The main 'characters' (more like case studies) include figures like Emperor Hadrian, whose relationship with Antinous is legendary but whose imperial actions were brutal. Then there’s the creepy, manipulative FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who weaponized his closeted power against others. The book also covers the pirate Anne Bonny, who defied gender norms but was also a violent criminal. What I love is how the authors don’t shy away from the messy, contradictory nature of these figures—they’re not role models, but their stories force us to reckon with how queerness intersects with power, violence, and morality.

Another standout is the Nazi Ernst Röhm, whose homosexuality was both an open secret and a tool for his enemies. It’s chilling but important to examine how his identity coexisted with his atrocities. The book’s strength lies in its refusal to simplify these lives into tidy narratives. Instead, it asks uncomfortable questions: Can we celebrate queer history without sanitizing it? How do we reconcile pride in identity with condemnation of actions? It’s a provocative read that lingers long after you finish.

'Bad Gays' is like the anti-Hallmark version of queer history—it’s all about the villains, the morally gray, and the downright infamous. Some of the figures covered include the Roman emperor Nero, whose excesses and cruelties were as flamboyant as they were horrifying, and the Renaissance’s Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, whose mixed-race heritage and rumored bisexuality added layers to his tyrannical rule. The book’s brilliance is in its unflinching look at how these people’s queerness shaped their legacies, for better or worse. It’s not a celebration but a reckoning, and that’s what makes it so gripping.

It's like a queer history version of a police procedural, but the crime is complicity with power. In that framing, Lemmey and Miller are the world-weary detectives, and each 'bad gay' is a suspect they're interrogating. The interview room is the podcast itself. The twist is that the detectives are also implicated in the broader system; they're queer men trying to understand their own history's dark corners. So maybe the main character is that shared, uneasy investigation.

The main character is the myth of the 'good gay.' The entire project is about deconstructing that myth by presenting counter-examples. Every figure they discuss, from pop culture icons to fascist functionaries, chisels away at the simplistic idea that queer history is a straight line from oppression to respectable liberation. That myth is the antagonist, and each episode is a new battle in the war to replace it with a more honest, thorny history.