When we began producing our podcast we thought we were making it for a tiny audience, one made up of mostly our friends. The fact we have been able to reach a much wider audience than that is down entirely to our listeners, and we are enormously grateful to all those who have listened to, shared, and recommended the podcast, and especially those who have supported us through Patreon and sent us their own suggestions for future bad gays, without whom the show and this book would have been impossible. Thank you.
We would like to thank our editor Leo Hollis for his guiding hand in shaping the book, and to Huw’s agent, Niki Chang, and Ben’s agent, Doug Young, for their help in realising the project from an idea over coffee to the book in your hand. It takes many hands to produce a book, and we’re grateful for all those at Verso whose hard work is involved, especially Jennifer Tighe, Maya Osborne, Michelle Betters, Catherine Smiles, Rowan Wilson, Federico Campagna, Brian Baughan, Jordan Taylor-Jones, Mark Martin, and Bob Bhamra.
Many thanks too to our guests over the years, for the insight and energy they have brought to the show: Sholem Krishtalka, Juliet Jacques, the late and much-missed Decorsey Macauleney (‘Mac’) Folkes, Edna Bonhomme, Jana Funke, Richard Power Sayeed, Diarmuid Hester, David Eichert, Max Fox, and Ari Níelsson.
For the researchers, writers, theorists, thinkers, and activists on whose work this book and its arguments are based, we have nothing but awe and respect; we hope that our citations have been generous enough to drive more people to engage more deeply with the rich variety of material available on queer pasts and queer futures.
Thanks to our friends, colleagues, and comrades who are always sharing, discussing, and expanding ideas on sex, identity, gender, and history, and have been such a rich source of knowledge over the years. Thanks are in order to those people, in no particular order: Davey Davis, Sz Huldt, Robin Craig, Joan Escofet, Joan Morera, Jay Owens, James Butler, Jesse Darling, Angelica Sgouros, Felix del Campo, Jack Young, Isabel Waidner, Shon Faye, Mathew Parkin, Claudia Pagès, Jasper Murphy, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Ray Filar, Andrew D. J. Shield, Sarah Shin, Seán McGovern, McKenzie Wark, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Samuel Delany, Jay Springett, Ben Vickers, Fer Boyd, Madeleine Stack, Connor Friesen, Onyeka Igwe, Pete Mills, Nina Wake-ford, Richard John Jones, Tamar Shlaim, Michael Harding, Liz Rosenfeld, Connor Spencer, Sawyer Huff, Syd Ramirez, Harry Stopes, AA Bronson and Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Dr Isabel Valli, Arash Fayez, Jim Richards, Danilo Rosato, Giovanni Turco and Giacomo Garavelloni, Peter Welz, Ronny Matthes, Khary Polk, Nicholas Courtman, Angela Zimmerman, Ashkan Sepahvand, Birgit Bosold and Heiner Schulze (and the entire team at Berlin’s Schwules Museum), Colin Self, Juliana Gleeson, Gabe Rosenberg and Harris Solomon, Sébastien Tremblay, all twelve brilliant Doctoral Fellows of 2020 at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Free University of Berlin, Barrie Kosky, Kate Davison, Rosa Lee, Michelle Esther O’Brien, Anna Hájková, Jennifer Evans, and Elijah Burgher and Jonathan Carreon. Thanks to the people we surely and shamefully forgot. Thanks also to our teachers, including Sherry Edwards, Sebastian Conrad, Marcelle Clements, Margrit Pernau, Linda Gordon, K Kevyne Baar, Martin Lücke, Greg Drake, and the late and dearly missed Ty Vignone. Finally, acknowledgements are due to the wider queer community that has nurtured us both for most of our lives, offering hope and consolation and bottles of poppers on the dancefloor, chatted with us on Twitter and in chatrooms and darkrooms, people who have held our hands and lived by example. We just love the faggots, and their (our) friends.
Last but certainly not least: thanks to our families and our partners, João and Cory John, for their care, love, and tolerance.