Bad Gays, good podcast

The Bad Gays podcast is hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, who discuss ‘evil and complicated queers in history’. Each episode is about a particular individual and seems to be structured as a pre-prepared biography followed by more general discussion. Podcasts like this and Do Go On, and really any podcast that is trying to explore a topic people may not know about, invariably faces the issue that I’m probably just not that interested. I haven’t heard of Ronnie Kray. I haven’t heard of Andrew Sullivan. I haven’t heard of Ernst Röhm. They’re probably fascinating. I want to know about them. But can I actually bring myself to download and listen to an hour-long conversation about their lives? Absolutely not. So, I chose an episode about a name that was vaguely familiar – Jeffrey Dahmer. 

I’m not a big true crime fan. I could pretend it’s some moral objection to its existence as a genre of entertainment, but really, it’s just not that interesting to me. Dahmer has very much been in the public zeitgeist over the past few years, in no small part due to the 2022 Ryan Murphy dramatisation, so at least now I can hold my own in those conversations without actually having to sit through that.

Once they started talking more freely, my opinion dramatically shifted

I wasn’t initially impressed with the way the podcast was produced. The biography is an important section to provide context for the following discussion, but it was very obviously being read aloud from a pre-prepared document. This is a totally valid form of delivering factual information, but I personally hate listening to people just read. It’s what put me off the Ungeniused podcast as well. Reading aloud without sounding like you’re reading aloud is a very underrated skill, and I wish these hosts would invest in it. 

They are critical of Dahmer’s fame and status in modern pop culture, and the problematic nature of true crime as a genre at all.

That said, once they started talking more freely, my opinion dramatically shifted. I found both hosts incredibly insightful and eloquent. They note how, especially at the time, Dahmer was viewed alongside AIDS as the natural consequence of living a homosexual life. There was a pervasive and homophobic idea that the gays get what was coming to them, one way or another. They talk about how reports of his cannibalism have been overstated. They are critical of Dahmer’s fame and status in modern pop culture, and the problematic nature of true crime as a genre at all. To quote the episode, they say “the real true crime is that the guy who got Jeffrey Dahmer arrested is in jail, and the police officer who delivered one of his victims back to him was promoted to president of the Milwaukee Police Association”. They talk more broadly about how most documentaries seem to underrepresent police incompetence, how none of his victims were big news stories because they were socially undesirable (with being gay and all), and even make bold postulations about how the consumption and propagation of this sort of true crime story inadvertently reinforces the systems and structures that facilitated this atrocity in the first place.

We’re obsessed with maintaining that knowledge so as not to let history repeat itself, but good celebrity tends to die with the person

Consuming queer content (that is, made by queers, not necessarily about queers) is so refreshing in terms of having that shared understanding and subculture. One quote from the podcast really exemplified this for me. It’s during the biography section, where they’re describing Dahmer’s early life, and they say, “he had begun at this point to experiment sexually with a couple of boys in the woods, sort of normal teenage stuff”. Most queer listeners probably related immediately, but I don’t know that straight podcasters, filmmakers, reporters, or historians would describe that as normal teenage stuff, because I don’t know that it is normal straight teenage stuff.

The queer insight into some of these individuals and events is lacking in mainstream history resources, despite often being highly relevant

Even though I enjoyed that particular episode way more than I expected I would, I can’t see myself listening to many more. I think I would be more inclined to engage with a podcast celebrating LGBTQIA+ people from history who have done good things. There are so few of us, and my historical knowledge is so bad that I don’t think I could even name 10 queer people from history famous for what they create rather than destroy. Part of this is, I think, because famous queer people’s sexuality is only really talked about when they do something bad. Even homophobic people may be content to overlook it if they’re a fan of the work. I also think it’s just easier to be publicly recognised for atrocity than it is to generate enough good things in life so as to be historically notable. In my head, most famous people from the 18th century and before are pretty despicable. We’re obsessed with maintaining that knowledge so as not to let history repeat itself, but good celebrity tends to die with the person. That said, Bad Gays is hosted by two queer men and is clearly done with good intentions. They at no point try to claim queer people have any predisposition towards poor moral character, and in fact even allude to the opposite –that much of the tragedy these people caused would not have happened if not for the homophobic culture of the time. 

While I didn’t subscribe myself, I would still recommend this podcast, especially to straight people. This is a highly well-researched show with extensive reference lists for each episode, and the queer insight into some of these individuals and events is lacking in mainstream history resources despite often being highly relevant.