Hello and welcome to episode 5 of Bad Gays, a podcast where we uncover the dark side of gay men in history.

I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and novelist.

And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, gay historian, and a member of the board of the Gay Museum in

Berlin.

And each episode will be profiling a different gay villain from history, looking at their

life in context, and how their sexuality has informed their infamy.

We want to complicate gay history by talking about evil and complicated people.

We're focusing on men because cis men are definitionally the most bad,

and we're trying to ask why we don't remember our villains sometimes,

as well as we remember our heroes.

Last week, we talked about a king whose debatably homosexual relationship with his favorites,

totally destabilized British politics. Who are we profiling this week, Ben? Well, this week we're talking about

somebody that I spend a lot of time wishing I could forget about. Andrew Sullivan, who is a gay,

Catholic, conservative journalist, in some sense, the inventor of gay marriage, and a sort of self-appointed arbiter of the

morality and the respectability of the gay community. Doing a living person, I think, takes us

someplace interesting in this podcast, because so far we've been talking about people who are dead,

people about whom there's kind of a formed historical opinion, something

we can push back in and challenge, trying to sort of reintegrate people into public

conversations.

And this is somebody who, I think, is all too integrated into gay public conversation.

Somebody who, basically, since the beginning of his journalistic career, has been the self-appointed, respectable gay, who will write for the big mainstream publication.

And somebody whose work in that role has, I think, done queer people and all people a great deal of harm.

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