Ben Miller is a writer and historian living in Berlin.
With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded nearly two million times; a book based on the show and passionately arguing for a more complex and political queer public history, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, was published by Verso in 2022. It received rave reviews in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others, and has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Thai.
Ben's next book, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a history of how the politics of liberation travelled from the European interwar avant-garde to 1960s California, is currently under contract with W. W. Norton.
Committed to public history and to collaborative, interdisciplinary, artistic and community-based research, Ben is a Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität. He also teaches at the Freie Universität, the Berlin Writers' Workshop, NYUBerlin and Humboldt Universität, and has received long-term research stipendia from the Deutscher Akademischer Auschtauschdienst and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and been published in Radical History Review. His research focuses on primitivism and the rise of gay liberation in the German-speaking and anglophone worlds. He has been a guest expert and documentary narrator for Netflix (Eldorado: Everything The Nazis Hate, 2023), and given public talks, written catalogue essays for, and collaborated on public history projects with institutions including the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, the Toronto Biennial of Art (with AA Bronson), the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the Museum of Art and Design Hamburg, Kunstinstituut Melly, Volksbühne Berlin, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Since 2018, Ben has been a member on the board of the Schwules Museum, the world's largest independent institution devoted to archiving and preserving LGBTQI+ histories and visual culture. A regular contributor to the arts pages ofThe New York Times, and of book criticism and essays to outlets like Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub, Ben’s writing has been additionally anthologised in A Queer Anthology of Healing (Pilot Press, 2020) and Les Tasses – Toilettes publiques, Affaires privées, which won the 2020 Prix Sade. He is the author of Time Is A Queer Thing (Media Guru Editions), and The New Queer Photography (Verlag Kettler, 2020).
Agent: Doug Young