Huw Lemmey Knihy

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveals more than we might expect?Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects.Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America.Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.

Long before the collapse of the Information Age, in the twelfth century since the appearance of the prophet Christ, young Hildegard of Bingen finds grace in the ruins of her medieval world. After the great cataclysm and the Angelic power struggle that follows, Hildegard flees the City of God and embarks upon a pilgrimage towards the kingdom of the poor. In this story of survival and miracles, Hildegard encounters love, both queer and divine, and great peril. As the visionary healer travels through the desolate landscape, she discovers the mythic quantum energy of viriditas in the natural world around her. Her journey becomes one of return, to the sacred truth of her own being. On the planet Avaaz, in a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls, Pinky Agarwalia finds fragments of a beautiful codex thought to be lost during the evacuation of Earth in the third millennium. Pinky must decipher its strange illegible symbols and illuminations to unlock this mystic toolkit bearing the seeds for humanity’s rebirth. Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's unknown language, arrives for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.