Ben Miller on the Bad Gays of History

Описание: A conversation between Ben Miller and Emilie Biggs at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 06/06/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

How can speaking about the villains of LGBTQ past build a more just LGBTQ future? Ben Miller reveals an alternative queer history.

Pride month is populated by LGBTQ iconography, celebrating the figures across history who demanded the right to live and love freely. Yet how is gay history oversimplified when we only spotlight the heroes of the movement? In Bad Gays, authors Ben Miller and Huew Lemmey have the courage to complicate things. Recounting the lives of people who made mistakes, harmed others, acted in contradictory ways, and happened to be queer, they reveal hidden, human nuances across queer history. At the Library, Miller offers a more critical perspective on the current status of LGBTQ politics, asking who has been excluded from the political terrain, how previous political failures have been glossed over, and how introducing nuance into our understanding of queer identity can lead to a more just queer future.

About the speaker:

Ben Miller is a writer and historian living in Berlin. With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded nearly a million times; a book based on the show and passionately arguing for a more complex and political queer public history, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, was published by Verso in 2022. Since 2018, he has been a member of the board of the Schwules Museum, the world’s largest independent institution devoted to archiving and preserving LGBTQI* histories and visual cultures.

Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.