Bad Gays - Podcast Rankings and reviews

These guys are fascinating. In each episode they investigate the life of a particular person, but contextualize that person’s actions and thinking by exploring a broad range of topics, including sexual identities, politics, policing, education, class, etc., etc. Even when the person being studied may not be well known, I have learned to trust these guys to weave a fascinating and enlightening narrative. And they now have a book as well, which makes a great present.

A fascinating and engaging program with knowledgeable and thoughtful hosts. It’s given me new perspective and opened and changed my mind on many historical events and social issues.

The hosts strike a great balance of history narrative and personal editorializing. I greatly enjoy that they don’t over sensationalize and mention the limitations of assigning a sexual identity to figures that lived before such concepts. That and their easy conversation with each other makes all of the episodes a fun and interesting listen.

A great example of a history pod that is fun and sometimes funny without losing depth and critical edge on the intersection of messy human lives with ethics and politics. This professional historian approves!

I only listened to the Andrew Sullivan episode. Perhaps the others are different, but the hosts foundational argument seemed to be that being gay (or at least a good gay) is not a physiological fact about the gender direction of someone’s attractions, but rather a quasi-religious political identity. To be a real queer person you must assimilate to a worldview native to the farthest left corners of the political spectrum. Gay people who continue to hold even mild conservative or religious views are heretics and blasphemers and a threat to the awokened creeds of what looks more like a queer religion everyday. The hosts are so certain that skeptics of their beliefs are bigoted and evil that they cannot conceive of how elitist and marginalizing their own advocacy is. Like fish, they swim in echo-chambered waters and don’t know they are wet. I wonder if either of them know what it is to grow up gay in conservative or religious communities? How much more disadvantaged these gay people already are, and how many of them maintain cultural ties and worldviews adjacent to the views they were brought up in. These gay folks are not happy representatives of pluralism in the queer community to the hosts, but unbelievers to be converted or else weeds to be pulled out. They were fundamentally incurious about why Sullivan’s arguments could be so persuasive, writing off the near unanimous agreement he was able to achieve as obviously homophobic. Gay people like Sullivan, who embrace monogamy, marriage, pro-life policies, or the centrality of family and child-rearing to a healthy society, are not welcome. They aren’t even really gay. This is just a new kind of homophobia. It’s another effort to force gay people to conform to an oppressive shame enforced standard.

I gave this a couple months, and just couldn't get into it. The sound quality tends to be problematic for me. I don't have the best hearing and the speed and quietness with which Huw speaks caused me to actually stop listening to one episode in the middle. I am still at the beginning of season 2, and looking on ahead, I have to wonder if every famous gay person is "bad"? Maybe it's the nature of fame? In any case, after a few listens I had to quit this.