#huw lemmey

[elishanelsonfanacct]

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anne sexton, herman hesse (tr. damion searls), lancelot-graal (c. 1450—55), margaret atwood, thien-di do, huw lemmey, possession, will storr

[godzilla-reads]

💘 Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

[reds1981]

‘When people see behaviours, modes of existence, ways of being that are subject to repression or hatred, the imperative becomes to make them identities, and then demand that such behaviours are normalised. Perhaps we can […] make them credible, legible to the norm, feasible, and therefore deserving of rights. It doesn’t work: white American male homosexuality has been swept up in the new moral panic along with all the other queers. Resisting normalisation isn’t an issue of posing as radical, of wanting to be edgy. It’s about acknowledging the fact that, as Davey Davis says “normalcy does not exist without the abnormal.”

Perhaps we are not normal. Perhaps normal is no good. Perhaps normal is the thing that made us abnormal to begin with. I hope to become better at welcoming my abnormality, and in the process accepting and loving the abnormality of others. It’s no easy task: as I wrote last year, when I discussed disgust, in our society “...abjection - to be the object of revulsion - is to be unworthy of love. This is not just something preached from the homophobe’s pulpit, either, but is a belief that underpins a society constructed, at root, on the reproduced image, the once printed and now pixelated image. We live under the tyranny of the image. Disgust is to be erased, sanitised, purified, ejected. Only the immediately and crudely attractive, only the beautiful, is capable of being loved.” We don’t need to normalise anything: we need to reckon with our love of the norm’

- Huw Lemmey, Normalyze This

[1000rh]

Homosexuality is not an ever-fixéd mark; it’s a contingent identity, something developed through a slow accrual of meaning over the centuries. Within it are still the remnants of sin, its half-life still slowly poisoning gays millennia on, and sickness, and crime. There are remnants of a heritage of rebellion, of throwing established norms into anarchy, but also of order, of the relentless policing of the self, and of the behaviour of other queers. The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure – failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion. It is also a history of dead ends; of movements like the Uranians or the masculinists, trying to find new ways to express same-sex desire. It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.

– Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays (2022)

[benedictusantonius]

[2023|007] Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2022) written by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

[sigmastolen]

in my latest attempt to actually finish the bad gays book, i am giving the audiobook a try and it's fucking weird as all hell bc as much as i can hear ben and huw's spoken inflections in my mind whilst reading, it's even more obvious when i'm listening, except the audiobook reader is a different guy entirely so now i'm mentally superimposing the accents and conversational (okay, often somewhat rehearsed) speech patterns of the podcast hosts onto this very trained- and cultured-sounding reader who has yet a third accent and it's enough of a mindfuck to completely distract me from the actual text

so like

not super successful thus far

[onebluebookworm]

30 Days of Literary Pride 2023 - June 15

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History - Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

[queerographies]

[Lingua Ignota][Ildegarda di Bingen][Huw Lemmey]

Nel XII secolo Ildegarda di Bingen aveva già visto tutto – le fiamme divampare in ogni dove, l’atmosfera diventare rovente, i mari innalzarsi, la peste infuriare – traducendo poi le sue visioni in una Lingua Ignota in cui profezia e afasia, visione e aberrazione, diventano indistinguibili. Ed è con questa voce che Huw Lemmey – uno degli autori più importanti nel panorama radicale e LGBTQIA+…

[alessandroiiidimacedonia]

Publication day of the Italian edition of "Bad Gays" by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Good day everyone, I’m Elena from Italy and thanks to be here on Alessandro III di Macedonia- Alexander the Great and Hellenism. Today is the publication day of the Italian edition of a book that I won’t buy it and read the article to know why: Bad Gays. Crudeli e spietati: una storia omosessuale by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller Il Saggiatore Translator: Goffredo Polizzi Bad Gays raccoglie le…

[ickypuppi3]

spilled

[ash-and-starlight]

BOOKS OF 2024

the list nobody asked for. again <3 i think this time around i read less books than the previous year?? but still 😤 we did it boys we read some fine books. reviews under the cut since i love yapping and i cant be fucked to make a goodreads account

Cromorama - Riccardo Falcinelli this book was sooo cool so engaging so interesting, its a look into the history and science of colors but its also so much more rlly one of my favorite nonfictions of all time

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells disclaimer I only read this series up to Rogue Protocol, but I enjoyed it, I rlly liked the characters and the worldbuilding and the short novel format and most of all murderbooottt my best friend murderbot. when im in the mood for scifi again ill read the rest asw I prommyy

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong this is one of those books that as u read it you can already tell it will stay with you forever, dont be fooled by the shortness every single line will Kill You. it will kill you dead.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka probably my fav book of the year, it's beautiful it's gripping it's deep it's scathing it's irreverent it has a careful and deeply cultural magical surrealism it has sociopolitical satire it won the booker prize of 2022 and deserved it so much

Fuori le Palle! Privilegi e Trappole della Mascolinità - Victoire Tuaillon ill be hoooneestt I didn't find this uhh as groundbreaking as I was kinda expecting it to be?? but still it was a nice read and the "flipped" perspective to center the myth of """masculinity""" in a feminist text was interesting. also rlly pretty cover

Lavinia - Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula girl u did it again! constantly rising the bar for all of us!! another stunning book that sadly fell victim to the #girlboss tiktokification but DONT LET THAT STOP YOUUU its sooo good. bitches Love pre-hellenistic latin society <333 bitches love even more when the boundaries between story and characters and reality and fiction blur in such a masterful way that Lavinia can have a conversation with Vergil and it doesn't feel not even the littlest bit forced or out of place <333

Exordia - Seth Dickinson Went in for the giant snake alien/human toxic yuri stayed for the weird mystery body horror stuff almost left for the overabundance of USA military stuff that I just can't be bothered to care about. I liked it way less than the masquerade but it Does have all the classical elements that make it a Seth Dickinson book aka fucked up women. Imperialism Critique. the horrors. the trolley problem. being Very Long. etc

Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao wow guys. this book fucking sucked. like I'm speechless. you'd think that with the crazy popular rep it has it would have smth worth salvaging but uhhh- anyway go stream cocoon by corrupter which is iron widow if it was actually good

Fire from Heaven - Mary Renault nothing more special than a cultured fujo and her special golden shiny perfumed blorbo that everyone wants to fuck so bad <333 finally a book that healed my tsoa related trauma, the only thing that could've made it better is if hephaestion discovered brat taming

The Spear Cuts Through Water - Simon Jimenez beautiful and with such a dreamy magical atmosphere once again I LOVEEE interwoven stories, and I feel like some of the writing's style Choices are so original. it starts a bit slow tbh but I found it impossible to put down from the second half of the book til the end

Voyage of the Damned - Frances White well. it was a cherished super pretty shiny gift from a beloved friend so that's why I finished it but uh. uhhMMMMM uhghhh whhhhfhhmmm uhhhhh hmmmmm uhhhhh. yeah. I'm iconic 💅

Bad Gays: a Homosexual History - Ben Miller, Huw Lemmey ill be honest I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did but its really nice!! its a critique and analysis of white male gayness told through the lives of some Notable Controversial Homos, and I liked how it rlly paints a full picture not only of their lives but also of the socio-political landscape that shaped them and the concept of queernes of the time. only lil gripe tho is why there was only One woman and One Japanese guy then-

[1000rh]

A principle of understanding our status as gay people both within our culture and within wider society is this: we are not just the protagonists, but also the products of history. Not only do our rights come from prior political struggles that were full of faults and fault lines, but everything about what we conceive of gay to mean is also the product of centuries of accretions of meanings, roles, and experiences. […] We do not get to choose who we are but we do get to choose how, and with whom, we dance: what queerness, what faggotry, what transness, what gender trouble and abolition will be for us and with us and to us. The past is still with us; the revolutions of the queer future beckon.

– Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays (2022)

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

[featherquillpen]

Five Favorite Books I Read in 2023

In order of when I read them.

The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber

An amazing non-fiction book about the diversity of human societies across time and space, using interpretations of archaeological evidence to fill in what we previously didn't know about prehistory. This book absolutely blew my mind.

Bad Gays by Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey

I had already been a fan of the podcast Bad Gays for years, and it was great to dive deep on some more evil and complicated queer people from history in this book.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

If you follow me you know that I love utopian science fiction. This book is a great example. It's a first contact scenario set in a future in which we figure out how to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

A stunning debut by Blackgoose. This book is a scathing deconstruction of the "impoverished teenager is whisked away to magic school" trope, centered on an indigenous girl who is forced to attend a colonizer-run boarding school for dragon riders.

Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

A heroic fantasy Iliad fanfiction in which Achilles is a trans woman. Deane's colorful vision of a fantastical ancient world is well-researched with tons of really cool speculative elements added in. The trans feels are so real with this book.