1. It feels incredibly disingenuous to brand this book as being about the horrible, awful LGBT folk of history past, and then have 90% of the people mentioned be, basically, fine. Like, they're not heroes, but the standards presented here for what makes someone a "bad" person are way too modern and (forgive me for this phrase) "politically correct."

2. Only including ONE woman and ONE person of color as subjects is... disheartening. Also, having that one woman be Margaret Mead was dumb. She's obviously not above criticism, but come on, man - she's possibly the most important anthropologist in western history who dedicated her life to promoting values like sex positivity, feminism, and racial equality. And the section on Margaret Mead seemed, to me at least, significantly harsher in tone than any of the other sections.

3. Tying into my above point, the range of what counts as "bad" is way, way, way too broad. On what planet are literal fascists equivalent to some guy writing dirty poems? The idea that these are all gays "condemned by history" for being "bad" doesn't even work - even if Margaret Mead, Yukio Mishima, Pim Fortuyn, Hadrian, and Lawrence of Arabia are all widely considered incredible and important historical figures, in spite of (or, in many cases, because of) their "bad" actions! The method of judging who 'counts' as a 'bad gay' for the purposes of inclusion in this book are sloppy.

4. A lot of the promotional material for this book, and many of its positive reviews, talk about a incredibly engaging and witty, jokey tone - that's just not how this book reads. It's pretty boring for long sections at a time with very little in the way of clever, funny asides.