This book grew out of the very popular Bad Gays podcast. What made you decide to focus on ‘bad or complicated gays throughout history’ and into the present? What made you feel it was more possible, or even necessary, to focus on these darker or more negative aspects to LGBT+ and especially gay history?

I don’t think we’d have found a publisher or, more importantly, an audience fifteen years ago. That’s largely because of a wider acceptance of specifically lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights and visibility—it’s now virtually taboo, in the UK at least, to be explicitly homophobic. As a result, there’s a confidence amongst lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, but at the same time, there has been a corporate recuperation of those issues and so a lot of the edge has been taken off mainstream liberal representations of LGBTQ+ identities, politics, and culture. Twenty years ago, being LGBTQ+ was portrayed as virtually abject; now, almost all mainstream media representations are almost Godlike creatures of pure acceptance, talent, and beauty. For a lot of our audience, who are LGBTQ+, it’s not reflective of our lives or history, it’s not interesting, and it papers over the complexities, and problematic parts, of the evolution of gay and lesbian identities. Every time Pride month comes around, Ben and I roll our eyes at these lists of LGBTQ+ heroes—Harvey Milk, Billie Holiday or whoever. So, Bad Gays talks about the specific formation of a white, gay male identity in the UK and US in particular, and how that has intersected with less pure or holy currents.

Can we talk about the selection of the characters in the book? It’s a tiny fraction of those featured on the podcast, and there’s only one woman (Margaret Mead) and one person of colour (Yukio Mishima).

The podcast has evolved to have a much broader than when we started. The first season was all about men: I used to joke about how that was because men are ‘definitionally worse and more evil’. We got a lovely, very constructive note from a lesbian saying, ‘I love the show, but it’s fucked up that on every episode, you talk about how these are structural issues and get away from essentialist narratives but have this essential joke and approach.’ We opened it up to be about a wider range of people. It’s partly about building trust with a diverse audience: as two white men, it took time to feel like there was mutual trust about the stories we told.

For the book, we wanted to tell a more specific story—about the evolution and failure of the white gay man. How did that construction of subjectivity go from a contradiction in terms to a dominant identity category within queer movements? Why was that a mistake? What should we do instead? We picked people who could help us tell that story. Mead features because of the work anthropological she did in popularising a ‘comparative cultures’ approach that many gay liberation activists picked up, often justifying what they did in racialised ways. Mishima provided a useful case study in what happened when these Western ideas of sexuality go out into the rest of the world.

Readers have criticised us for focusing on white, gay men but the themes of exclusion and racism that run through the story mean it will necessarily be focused on those categories. It would feel like falling into a trap of representational politics to put in subjects whose lives don’t fit into that story.

Unlike the podcast, there are no living people featured in the book…

Dead people don’t have lawyers!

When we cover living people on the podcast, they have to be relevant and newsworthy—people like Pete Buttigieg, Cressida Dick, or Andrew Sullivan, who we want our listeners to understand within the framework we’ve been developing. With dead people, often they’re unknown, but an interesting story that illuminates our thesis. The book sticks to history.

Which were your favourite stories in the book? Was there anyone you found to be sympathetic?

I found Jack Saul fascinating, because there’s so little known about him, but he existed in such an important moment in the formation of British gay male identities, with changes in the law and criminalisation of homosexuality [with the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885] playing a huge role in constituting those identities. Within the context of inequities of inter-class sexual relations, poverty, and expanding Empire, he had such a strong force of personality.

Margaret Mead was my favourite chapter to write. The story of someone driven by her own queerness to travel the world searching for justification in some other ‘primitive’ cultures, writing books while in the closet that were taken up by people much more like her than those she wrote about, shows how these concepts evolve.

What sort of reviews and reactions have you had, from reviewers or audiences?

Ironically, some of our best reviews have been from the more liberal end of the spectrum—perhaps because of that recent lack of nuanced discussion of homosexual identities. A book looking at the darker aspects of our history while obviously not being homophobic has been refreshing for some audiences. What’s been surprising, especially in person, has been that the most virulent criticism has come from other gay men who feel largely like the politics around the gay identity is a settled matter, on which they’ve won. They’ve accused us of bringing gay men into disrepute, or think we’re ‘cancelling’ certain figures. But we never conclude that our subjects should be written out of history—we’re doing the exact opposite of that. People who have some of these characters as heroes find it hard to engage with complexities without fearing that we’re waging some culture war. We got a hostile response in someone in Rotterdam for calling Pim Fortuyn a fascist—he went through a list of people he thought were my heroes, from Morrissey to Mark E. Smith, asking me to condemn their politics. He was was extremely offended that I would regard Fortuyn as a fascist, because Fortuyn supported gay rights, but I wouldn’t condemn Smith in similar terms because Smith supported Brexit—for him, Fortuyn’s explicit Islamophobia was nowhere near as bad as Smith’s Euroscepticism.

A non-white but rich, gay liberal contrasted Oscar Wilde to Ernst Rohm and said that at least Rohm ‘was true to himself’. This seems like a very confused conception of what a positive homosexual identity might be; he accused us of engaging in Marxist cancel culture, applying today’s morality to people in the past. But I don’t have a problem with condemning Rohm for supporting Nazi genocide.

I don’t think Rohm’s politics passed without comment at the time…

Well, quite.

Pim Fortuyn died twenty years ago, after building a far-right coalition in which he combined gay politics with War on Terror-era anti-Muslim sentiment. Throughout the 2000s, this was quite common, but in the 2010s, we’ve spent a global anti-LGBTQ+ far-right politics that has used transphobia as its spearhead, but has aimed to roll back that social taboo against explicit homophobia in the UK and elsewhere, also setting itself up against corporate recuperation of LGBTQ+ politics. In the Conservative leadership campaign, we’ve seen the leading candidates speak out against the Equality Act 2010, attack trans rights, and advocate some update of Section 28, with Black woman Kemi Badenoch positioning herself as a culture warrior against LGBTQ+ people and politics.

What explains this shift in right-wing coalition-building, and where does it leave the type of right-wing, white gay politics that Fortuyn advanced?

One flaw in the Whig narrative of gay rights about everything always getting better is that it led, in the mid-2010s, to a lot of triumphalist books about queer history that contributed to the demobilisation of a lot of movements and people not being prepared for what’s going on now. Regarding the right and the anti-trans backlash, despite there being a small number of gay men and lesbians who side with them, as soon as a cisgender gay man like me says anything on Twitter in support of trans rights, my mentions are full of people calling me a groomer. It’s been darkly hilarious lately to see truly reprehensible commentators saying ‘I didn’t want the leopards to eat my face, just the trans kids’ and freak out about the gay and lesbian politics of their new friends on the far-right. It remains to be seen whether the legal attacks on gay and lesbian civil equality will take place with the same ferocity and success as against trans people, and that will determine the path of it. If the right ends up not caring so much about gay marriage, it will be easier for people to continue on the Fortuyn route.

After the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in the US, I feel like all bets are off…

Me too. Certainly, there were justices on the Supreme Court who want to overturn same-sex marriage. It’s also possible that the US Senate may have concluded that there’s too much money and power behind same-sex marriage now to really go after it.

In the US, it’s more clear that in general, the trans issue is divided on left-right grounds. Some of its potency in the UK comes from how it’s functioned as a way to split feminist and left-wing politics, hence the funding that British anti-trans groups get from the US far-right. The way class influenced the British political and media ecosystem is important—the media has drawn so much from Oxbridge that this fake Debating Society attitude to other people’s rights predominates. The wagons circle around anyone within that system who gets criticised, which has led to the radicalisation of columnists who were criticised online for thoughtless or unfortunate comments, who decided not to reflect but to align themselves with very transphobic friends. Transphobia is embedded within the establishment on the left as well as the right. For regular people, it falls more on the left-right spectrum, but less so within systems of political or media power (which are entirely intertwined). For the Conservatives, it’s a culture war issue that easily gets a lot of media coverage, and paralyses the left—people in the Labour Party can’t clearly back trans rights without getting hauled over the coals in liberal media.

The Conservatives have spent so long suggesting that any concern for the rights of people of colour is a liberal, metropolitan concern that any Tory from such a background has to work harder to establish their credentials. The quickest way to make it clear is to take this line as it’s seen as a matter of common sense within the Party.

It’s the same structurally generated hyper-assimilationist impulse that gave the Conservatives the first two (and likely three) women Prime Ministers, and twelve openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual Tory MPs after their 2015 election victory. (There were 13 openly LGB Labour MPs at that point, overwhelmingly from the Party’s right.) Are we seeing a similar process for Black and minority ethnic people now?

It’s the same reason why the British left has always passed the less monumental but ultimately more important legislation in dealing with the active repression of LGBTQ+ people—decriminalisation in 1967, repealing Section 28, equalising the age of consent and so on, but the more assimilationist, monumental firsts that became the bedrock of gay rights politics in the 2000s, like equal marriage, were passed by the Tories.

The publication of Bad Gays implied the existence of Good Gays. What do you think Good Gays might look like, and what should they be doing in 2022?

The story of the book is about the fluidity of homosexual identity. Not necessarily in sexual terms, but in what constitutes homosexuality identity, which things it attaches itself to and influence it, and its visions for how people interact in romantic relationships, how this is open to change, and how it has contributed to wider social change. The world is very different, sexually, to sixty years ago, and the freedoms forged for everyone have been won by LGBTQ+ people. It comes in waves, but it’s almost certain that we’re currently underground a huge shift in our sexual epoch, which explains the resistance and especially the virulent transphobia, but LGBTQ+ identities have been liberatory despite their complexities. So I thought the future is bright, but we need to get there with as few casualties as possible.

It makes sense that we’re going through this epoch shift when we consider how these identities are co-constitutive of broader structural realities. I hope that the attacks we’re seeing against trans kids, and against gay men for being groomers, will get people thinking more about what the politics of solidarity could look like. History shows us plenty of ways in which such solidarity can change things for the better.