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A ZOOM Conversation with Writer and Historian Ben MillerA ZOOM Conversation with Writer and Historian Ben Miller
Thursday, July 8, 2021 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Free
Ben Miller will discuss his role as co-host of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.
About Bad Gays
Bad Gays is a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. From Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover, our history is littered with them. Unlike the easy heroes, however — people like Oscar Wilde, Audre Lorde or Alan Turing — we rarely remember them as queer, or as gay. And yet their sexuality was just as important an influence on their life as those whom we celebrate.
Hosts Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller profile queer people from the past whose lives have been overlooked by queer people on the search for historical icons. Among their ranks are emperors and criminals, fascist thugs and famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, yet all of them have one thing in common — they engaged in same-sex or gender non-conforming behaviour that, in the context of today’s society, we would understand as gay or queer. Check out Bad Gays here: https://badgayspod.podbean.com/
About Ben Miller
Ben Miller is a writer and historian living in Berlin, where he is a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität. His research focuses on primitivism and the rise of gay liberation in the German-speaking and anglophone worlds. 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 culture. With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded nearly a half-million times, and is working on a book based on the podcast to be published by Verso in 2022. His essays, fiction, and criticism have been published in The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, SAND, Apogee Journal, Slate, Jacobin, VAN Magazine, Tin House, and Arts of the Working Class; and anthologized in A Queer Anthology of Healing (Pilot Press, 2020) and Les Tasses – Toilettes publiques, Affaires privées (Agua, 2019), which won the 2020 Prix Sade.