Shows
Bad GaysLarry KramerToday we profile Larry Kramer, the writer and AIDS activist. Kramer took space, took credit, operated in the world with tremendous privilege, and was somewhere between actively and passively misogynist and racist. But politically effective people are not always as we imagine them. We document Kramer's exclusions and blind spots, and explore how his hatred and fear of gay male sex culture, one that predated the AIDS epidemic, made his political work less effective; his gay male supremacism that led actual gay men to constantly disappoint him; and his prefiguring of a moralizing social media politics understanding rhetorical maximalism...2025-02-051h 10Bad GaysAlbrecht MuthFor today’s episode, I we take you into the murky world of the Washington foreign policy elites, and one of its murkiest characters, a man named Albrecht Muth. Who is Albrecht Muth? Well, that’s another question entirely. He claimed to be a dashing German aristocrat and married into Washington's foreign policy elite. The shocking truth became one of official Washington's biggest mysteries...
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SOUR...2025-01-1452 minBad GaysElisar von KupfferA fascist femboy, a Baltic count, an orientalist white supremacist, editor of the first anthology of gay literature, painter of a 30-meter cyclorama featuring 90 androgynous twinks disporting themselves in the nude in a fantasia of the four seasons, devotee of Adolf Hitler, founder of a new religion, and poet: it's Elisar von Kupffer.
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays for monthly episodes, our advice segments, and to support our work.
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Marhoefer, Laurie. “Queer Fascism and the End of Gay Hi...2025-01-071h 05Bad GaysTom MitfordToday's episode profiles a very bad bisexual: the lawyer, soldier and society favourite, Tom Mitford. But the idea of featuring Tom is partly a ruse. This will be not just a profile of Tom himself, but of his whole family, and especially his six siblings, the famed Mitford Sisters, whose intense, often conflicting relationships have become something of an obsession for English culture - and not always a very healthy one. They embody so much about the English elite: eccentric, vicious, often listless and desperately sad. We also promise to you, as has become a theme of the podcast...2024-12-311h 05Bad GaysOlive YangFrom almost the first season of the show, we’ve been tantalised by stories of the Burmese gangster Olive Yang. Now, to open season 8, we have their story: Olive was a lesbian — or possibly transmasculine — gangster born royal in 1927 British colonial Burma, who when first married off to a man threw a pot of their own urine at him to prevent the marriage from being consummated. They ran away from polite society, dated actresses, ran opium, were involved with the CIA, and helped negotiate settlements between ethnic groups.
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C...2024-12-2448 minBad GaysExtra Bad Gays December 2024: Luigi Mangione, Folk Hero? (Trailer)available with easy shipping to both sides of the Atlantic.
On this month's episode of Extra Bad Gays, we discuss Luigi Mangione, who has now been charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City earlier this month. How do some assassins become folk heroes? Why is there such a groundswell of support for Mangione? Is it just because he's really hot? (He's really hot.) For the full story, and the charming Gaggony Guncles segment that concludes the show, subscribe on Apple or Patreon.2024-12-1915 min
Bad GaysExtra Bad Gays November 2024: The Transatlantic Anti-Trans Post-Election Backlash (Trailer)
Our new merch–evil twink energy socks, camo hats, and more–is now available with easy shipping to both sides of the Atlantic.
In the wake of Donald Trump's dismaying reelection to the Presidency, the most cynical consultants and commenters on both sides of the Atlantic have decided it's trans people who are to blame. We break down how ascending through the media breaks your brain––and the differences between US and UK center-left transphobia. For the full story, and the charming Gaggony Guncles segment that concludes the show, subscribe on Apple or Patreon.
2024-11-3013 minBad GaysMarianne Woods and Jane Pirie (with Indigo Dunphy-Smith)Today's special guest is the researcher and museum worker Indigo Dunphy-Smith, who is bringing her expertise to the case of Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, two Edinburghian school teachers who found themselves embroiled in a sex scandal and court case in the early years of the 19th century. Their legal woes followed accusations by a pupil about sapphic goings-on at their small private school, and raised issues regarding attitudes to sex, race and colonialism in late Georgian era Scotland.
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays, our monthly subscriber-only show for conversations about contemporary queer culture and advice segments from...2024-10-301h 07
Bad GaysExtra Bad Gays October 2024: Meet Your New Gaggony GunclesSay hello to your new agony uncles: or is that Gaggony Guncles? A gay guy wonders if he's having enough sex! People ask about moving to Berlin. A freshly out transmasc wonders: am I becoming an evil twink? For the full story, subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS directly in Apple Podcasts or on Patreon.
2024-10-2810 minBad GaysJerome Robbins (with Liz Rosenfeld)Today, special guest Liz Rosenfeld discusses the choreographer Jerome Robbins. Born in New York to Jewish immigrants, Robbins pursued dance and radical politics––until, under the threat of being blacklisted and exposed for his sexuality, reporting on his former comrades to the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. As one of Broadway's star choreographers, he helped define Broadway's Golden Age with striking dance theatre that integrated ballet technique into storytelling. His charisma, abuses of power, and boundary-obliterating working methods helped define an idea of choreographer-as-genius that still disfigures dance today.
Support our show by subscribing to our monthly podc...2024-08-251h 04
Bad GaysExtra Bad Gays June 2024: Pride From Stonewall to Subaru (Trailer)Starting with a reading from Martin Duberman's book Stonewall about the riots that kicked off a revolution, we reflect on the history of increasing corporate involvement in Pride, some unreasonably horny Subaru ads, a Raytheon Pride slogan from this year that made both of us momentarily speechless, and the politics and ethics of engaging with corporate pride in a moment of backlash.
Enjoy this sneak preview of EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly, subscriber-only show on contemporary queer politics and culture. For the full episode and a new episode every month, click 'subscribe' on Apple Podcasts or join...2024-07-0320 minBad GaysChristopher Marlowe (with Will Tosh)Today's special guest is Will Tosh, Head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe, London, and the author of a new book, “Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.” Having answered the obvious question in the prologue, the book becomes a sort of emotional biography of Shakespeare’s private life, but uses that his life and his work to ask broader questions about Elizabethan England, and especially how they understood their own sex gender system at the time. On today's special episode, we talk about one of his contemporaries, someone probably less well known but who has been deeply influe...2024-06-251h 16Bad GaysRotha Lintorn-OrmanWe close out our season with the story of a dashing tomboy who was the first woman to found a British political party. The only problem: that party was the British Fascists.
Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation about queer life, culture, and politics.
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SOURCES:
Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Saint Martin's Press, 1963)
Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement, 1923-1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)
Asa Seresin, "Lesbian Fascism on TERF Island," 2021 https://asaseresin.com/2021/02/11/lesbian-fascism-on-terf-island/
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britai...2024-04-2551 minBad GaysTRAILER: Extra Bad Gays April 2024 - Tory Sex Scandals and Capote's FeudEnjoy a sneak preview of EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly, subscriber-only show on contemporary queer politics and culture. For the full episode and a new episode every month, click 'subscribe' on Apple Podcasts or join our Patreon by clicking here.
2024-04-2216 minBad GaysBaron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-SzilvásToday’s subject had a multi-hyphenate name and a multi-hyphenate resume––, in his 55 years of life, he was an adventurer, a geologist, a spy, a dinosaur scientist, one of the founders of paleobiology, the world’s first airplane hijacker, a founder of the field of Albanian studies, a cosplay artist, and a murderer. Born in 1877 in Transylvania, the Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás may have been, except perhaps as a pub quiz answer, lost to history since his death, but in his lifetime he had an outsized impact on several scientific disciplines, central European politics and nationalisms, and, unfor...2024-04-1841 minBad GaysQutbuddin Mubarak Shah"If you have to take an beautiful enslaved convert boy from another province to become your lover, and then you fall hopelessly in love with him, and then promote him and he attains great power, do be aware than he might actually want to take your throne." Somehow, this extremely specific lesson was forgotten by two generations of rulers. Join us in a trip back to the court of 1300s Delhi for a story of love, lust, intrigue, revolution, and, in the words of a historian of the time, "the results of pampering young men and catamites."
...2024-04-0948 minBad GaysMarthe HanauMarthe Hanau built a several-hundred-million-franc financial powerhouse: which turned out to be a fraud. Her investors had been promised returns of 8% interest on savings and in investments forty percent a year —but by the time she died in prison, they were owed a hundred and fifty five million francs. Some people even credit her spectacular swindle to the political confluence that brought Leon Blum and his popular front to power in France at the end of the 1930s. This is the fascinating tale of just how far one woman was able to go to accumulate wealth and power by an...2024-04-0244 minBad GaysJohn WhitgiftToday's episode is about England and its capacity to be deeply weird. Weget into one of England's weirdest, bloodiest, and maybe horniest moments, the English Reformation: a time of enormous tumult and violence, but also new ideas that reconfigured and reshaped the world. Today’s Bad Gay is perhaps an unlikely and unfamiliar candidate, but one whose life and loves sheds a light on that time: it’s the theologian, reformer, and Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift.
Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the...2024-03-191h 05Bad GaysJames LevineWarning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and workplace sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Many people may have seen Maestro, a biopic about the American conductor Leonard Bernstein, a handsome and extroverted communicator. The next most famous gay Jewish conductor of the 20th century was, in many ways, Bernstein’s opposite. Neither handsome nor extroverted, he made his musical mark not as a flamboyant podium acrobat or someone who communicated with the public but as a musician’s musician. His career ended after years of rumors culminated in several serious allegations of sexu...2024-03-1259 minBad GaysElagabalusThis episode has everything: a tyrannical little boy king, a dictator who wanted to overthrow the Roman pantheon and install a meteorite as the object of a new monotheism, prostitution and vestal virgins, and drowning your party guests in rose petals. We break down Elagabalus: the myth, the legend, the gender-bending icon and the searcher for the biggest dicks in the Roman Empire.
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Cassius Cocceianus Dio, Roman History: Books 71-80, trans...2024-03-051h 02Bad GaysAhebi UgbabeToday’s subject was an uneducated woman who was born in approximately 1880 and rose in her nearly 70 years of life from enslavement to sex work to female king. She was a leader of her community of Enugu-Ezike in present-day Nigeria and a collaborator with British colonialism in the region. Finally removed from power by British officials and local elders because she participated in a ritual in a way that only men were supposed to, the complex life of Ahebi Ugbabe helps tell the story of the colonization and decolonization of Nigeria and of the similarities and the differences between the...2024-02-2750 minBad GaysJoe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell
Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and careers of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Both frustrated writers from the North of England making their way in the repressive, damp climate of the postwar UK, they were sent to prison for defacing library books into brilliant collage art. But when Orton achieved fame and success, the pressure was too much for Halliwell to bear. And their disturbing pattern of traveling to Tunisia to abuse children c...2024-02-201h 05Bad GaysKarl LagerfeldAre you wearing the Chanel boots? Yes, we are. A white-haired, powdered, starch-cuffed petty dictator who ruled over the expanding business with an iron fist, stopping every once in a while to make a misogynist or racist public comment, Karl Lagerfeld was one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry as it shifted into late capitalist hyperdrive. Come for the racist and misogynist public comments, stay for Lagerfeld's great love, Jacques de Bascher, who may more perfectly epitomize Evil Twink Energy than anyone we've discussed on our show.
Click here to subscribe to our monthly...2024-02-131h 02Bad GaysSimeon Solomon and Sascha Schneider - Live from Podfest BerlinSubscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation on politics and culture, here or by clicking "Subscribe" on Apple Podcasts.
Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! As usual, we're making our contribution to family holiday entertainment with an hour-plus podcast about sodomy.
Today's program, recorded live at Podfest Berlin in October 2023, profiles two artists. We start with the gay Jewish pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon, whose story is a snapshot of the complexities of aa changing English society in the Victorian era, full of darkness, violence and repression, but lit too by a sense of a sort of waking...2023-12-251h 06Bad GaysBenedetta CarliniWhat's your favorite Paul Verhoeven film? We knew you were going to say Showgirls–but we'll put in a word for his latest, Benedetta, with Charlotte Rampling acting up a storm and nuns diddling each other with dildos carved out of statues of the Virgin. Improbably, the film is based on a true story: and within it, and within its subject's life, there are important themes of power, gender transgression, sin, belief and deviance that are worth discussing in more detail. Today, we discuss the 16th century mystic nun, lesbian, possibly demonically possessed and possibly visionary heretic, Benedetta Carlini....2023-06-061h 19Bad GaysTokugawa IemitsuThrough the life of this 17th century Japanese shogun, we explore the role of same-sex relationships in Japanese court culture of the time, the radically different meanings of age and gender in different times and places, and a gay teen romance that ends, alas, with being stabbed to death in the bathtub.
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SOURCES:
Louis Crompton, Homosexuality & Civilization, Annotated edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Koichi, “The Gay of the Samurai,” Tofugu, September 30, 2015, https://www.tofugu.com/japan/gay-samurai/
Gre...2023-05-3056 minBad GaysDong XianThere’s power in being the king who sits upon the throne, but also power in being the throne upon who the king sits. This was true as ever in the court of Emperor Ai in Han Dynasty China in 22 BC. We’re going to be talking about someone who in 21 short years of life rose from a low class status to being one of the most powerful imperial officials in China – all by becoming the favorite of the Emperor. Their passion was so renowned it led to the creation of what remains a Chinese idiomatic expression for homosexuality. But we’...2023-05-1649 minBad GaysTom DribergToday’s figure is the sort of character who has been extinguished from British public life today, and maybe that’s for the best. He’s a mass of contradictions, the sort of mass that confuses the idea of an easy history of “lessons we can learn”. How did this man manage to be both an avant-garde poet and a gossip columnist, a communist revolutionary and a High Anglican devotee, a labour organiser and a lord? Or perhaps more accurately, how did he manage to inhabit all these roles with a level of seeming sincerity and honest commitment? Was he an hone...2023-05-091h 18Bad GaysGriselda BlancoNicki Minaj once rapped: Drug Lord Griselda, I used to move weight thru Delta. She’s referring to today’s subject, la Madrina, the drug lord of the Colombian Medellín Cartel, Griselda Blanco Restrepo, the Black Widow. Born in 1943 in Cartegena, on the north coast of Columbia, she became the so-called "Queenpin," and adopted all the macho tropes of the gangster. We argue she wasn't the biggest gangster at the head of her cartel, but one of the smallest gangsters in a whole world of cartels that have worked to bring the fruits of South America’s land into the...2023-05-0252 minBad GaysAndré GideWarning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.
This week, we tackle the French author André Gide, a self-styled "immoralist" who oscillated between an austere Protestantism and a sensualism he associated with the so-called "Orient," and who elevated pederasty above sodomy in a way that helps us understand the often-disfiguring influence of upper-class male sexual desires on the construction of the 20th century gay male identity.
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Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, an...2023-04-251h 00Bad GaysMustapha Ben Ismaïl (with Arthur Asseraf)Today we welcome special guest (and Associate Professor in History at the University of Cambridge) Arthur Asseraf to talk about Mustapha Ben Ismaïl, a terrifyingly ambitious twink who rose from being an illiterate street beggar to Prime Minister on the strength of the king's love for him –– and whose disastrous policies helped bring an end to Tunisia's independence.
Arthur's Twitter.
Arthur's faculty page.
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SOURCES:
Ramy Khouili & Daniel Levine-Spound, Article 230: A History of the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Tunisia, available online: https://article230.com/en/article-320-eng/…
Marcel Gandolphe, ‘Une figure...2023-04-111h 02Bad GaysJorge Horacio Ballvé PiñeroArgentina, 1942: a scandal breaks. Tabloids scream about newly discovered photographs –– taken by the amateur photographer Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero –– at homosexual orgies in Ballvé's apartment, photos allegedly depicting young cadets from the national military university in compromising positions. 29 cadets are expelled, discharged, and/or punished, Ballvé thrown in jail, and the government collapsed, toppled by a right-wing coup promising moral cleanup.
Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book!
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SOURCES:
Demaría, Gonzalo. Cacería. Primera edición. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2020.
———. Jugos de Amor e Guerra. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro Cultu...2023-04-041h 06Bad GaysJulie D’AubignyShe's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment: today’s subject caused such a scandal in her life that even its fictionalized depiction in a novel was banned by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Mozart of bisexual drama, sword-fighting crossdressing opera singer Julie D'Aubigny burned through a dizzying series of lives, loves, husbands, mistresses, swordfights, operatic performances, lovers, and successes at the Paris Opera before dying in a convent in her early 30s.
Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book!
SOURCES
“Biographical Sketches and Ane...2023-03-2853 minBad GaysGeorge SantosWe're starting off Season Six with George Santos, who rocketed the pathological homosexual narcissism we've spent much of our show discussing to the halls of Congress. In gay bar, there is at least one delusional queen who can't stop lying about his life. If you give him firearms and crystal meth, he turns into Andrew Cunanan. If you elect him to Congress, he turns into George Santos, who we argue is as likely as anyone else to become the first gay President of the United States.
Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book!
...2023-03-201h 01Bad GaysJack Saul LIVE! at Foyles in London with Shon FayeHappy Christmas! It's Bad Gays Live! Relive our reading of the Jack Saul chapter – covering the life and times of the Victorian sex worker and pornographer – from our book BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY at Foyles in London, with the inimitable Shon Faye reading out the saucy bits (maybe use headphones if you're spending today with Grandma, unless you and Grandma like joking about delicious frigging up the rear), followed by a conversation with her and the audience about the project.
Bad Gays: Season Six - Coming January 2023!
Thanks for listening!
SOURCES:
Chandl...2022-12-251h 26Bad GaysMagnus Hirschfeld (with Laurie Marhoefer)It's the Magnus Hirschfeld episode. We invited Laurie Marhoefer – Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, and one of our most-cited historians ever – to discuss their new book on Hirschfeld, called Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. On the episode, we touch on Hirschfeld's life story as a pioneering doctor who helped invent modern homosexual identities and worked on some forms of trans-affirming health care –– while also discussing the ways he integrated racism into the homosexual identities he was creating, collaborated with eugenicists, and was often...2022-10-051h 10
Listen To The Full Audiobook Everyone Is Talking About — So Spellbinding!Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey, Ben MillerPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/32716to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Bad Gays
Author: Huw Lemmey, Ben Miller
Narrator: Ben Allen
Format: mp3
Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
Release date: 07-19-22
Ratings: 4 out of 5 stars, 46 ratings
Genres: LGBTQ+ Studies
Publisher's Summary:2022-07-191h 31Bad GaysUS Tour!
Our UK tour has been fun -- and the US is next! Ben (sadly Huwless) will be stopping in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, New York City, and Boston in the back half of June. All the events are available for RSVP and booking –– many with great discounts on copies of the book and swag included! –– so visit badgayspod.com/book to get your spot before they're gone, as most of our UK events have sold out!
2022-06-0803 minBad GaysEugen Sandow (with Ruby Hann)Happy Pride! We invited Ruby Hann, who completed her MA in History in 2020 and her MSc in History in 2021, both at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about Eugen Sandow, the bodybuilder who spread the cult of muscle around the world. Her research is focused on masculinity, sexuality, and the body in early twentieth century Britain. Ruby is not currently in academia, but she still occasionally writes, lectures, and attends conferences. You can follow her Twitter @RubyVolunteers to find her work.
Our book is available at badgayspod.com/book along with tour dates in the US and t...2022-06-011h 29Bad GaysOur UK Tour! (US Coming Soon)Our book, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History is now available for pre-order from Verso –– and we're making many, many stops across every corner of Great Britain (Northern Ireland, we're sorry and we'll be there soon) to promote it, including three stops in London and stops in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol, and Cardiff. All the events are available for RSVP and booking –– many with great discounts on copies of the book and swag included! –– so visit badgayspod.com/book to get your spot before they're gone.
2022-05-1904 minBad GaysJeffrey DahmerFor white, suburban, heterosexual middle America, Jeffrey Dahmer, like AIDS, was the natural, even the righteous, consequence of homosexual promiscuity. He remains one of the exemplary constructions of the supervillain serial killer, the perfect subject of a true crime story. Today’s episode is about Jeffrey Dahmer as man and metaphor: about the phenomenon of the serial killer-monster, about the ways in which homophobia, racism, and the various true crime myths Dahmer helped reify ironically impeded his arrest and enabled his crimes, and about the twisted, slap-happy identification with Dahmer pursued by some gay men.
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...2022-03-151h 04Bad GaysJohn WojtowiczIt's a dog day afternoon: today's episode profiles the bank robber John Wojtowicz, who infamously (and as memorialized in Sidney Lumet's 1975 film DOG DAY AFTERNOON) held up a bank in 1972 to pay for gender-affirming surgery for Elizabeth Eden, his trans girlfriend. Or did he? We take a look, using the story to think through 1972 as a fault line for emerging attitudes about homosexuality and trans femininity, Wojtowicz' surprising involvement in early gay liberation activism in New York City, the DOG DAY AFTERNOON phenomenon and what it says about growing distinctions between gay men and trans women and how they...2022-03-011h 11Bad GaysCressida Dick (Part Two)
Unusually for this show, which normally focuses on long departed historical figures, today we’re going to talk about someone who’s still very much in the news. Until last week, she was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s police force, and was the first woman and the first LBGTQ person to hold the rank, Dame Cressida Dick. Today, part two of two: we discuss Dick's tenure at the Metropolitan Police, the extrajudicial murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, Dick's cynical deployment of her identity to deflect critique, the spy cops scandal, the botched investigation into gay serial...2022-02-221h 13Bad GaysCressida Dick (Part One)Unusually for this show, which normally focuses on long departed historical figures, today we’re going to talk about someone who’s still very much in the news. Until last week, she was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s police force, and was the first woman and the first LBGTQ person to hold the rank, Dame Cressida Dick. Today, part one of two: we begin telling Dick's life story and then delve into the history of the Met, its relationship with LGBTQ people, and the conflicting strands of LGBTQ politics that emphasize conflict vs collaboration with the police...2022-02-1558 minBad GaysFreddie MercuryFor a time, one of the world's most famous rock stars – singer of stadium rock anthems that still signify foot-stomping machismo – existed as an avatar of the most exuberant, feared, liberation-era forms of homosexuality: going from a 1970s long hair in skin-tight leotards cut to the navel to a Castro clone with a handlebar moustache who wore fisting T-shirts in his music videos. If the legacy of Mercury and his music often seems to smooth his work, and that of his band, Queen, into a sort of middle-aged, KISS FM everyday normality, here we lean into the contradictions of the...2022-02-081h 20Bad GaysFranco ZeffirelliA very special opera queen episode profiling an opera queen gone wrong: the Italian opera and film director (of 1968's famous Romeo and Juliet) who fought fascists as a partisan in the hills over Florence, mingled with Visconti and Cocteau and Marais and Chanel, and directed Callas in many of her mid-career triumphs before beginning to harden his style from lush realism to a celebration of set decoration above all. Zeffirelli, born at a time when the last composers whose works still fill the grand opera repertory were dying, faced, like all practitioners of the operatic arts in the 20...2022-02-011h 21Bad GaysAnne BonnyAre you ready to have your timbers shivered and your mainbrace spliced? Today’s subject is a mysterious one, a historical figure whose life and reputation are confused by propaganda, romance and mythology: the Irish pirate Anne Bonny. We'll use her story to discuss gender, race, and class in the Golden Age of Piracy.
Visit www.badgayspod.com for an episode archive, a link to pre-order our book, and more information about the show.
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SOURCES:
B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Ca...2022-01-251h 08Bad GaysPhilipp, Prince of EulenburgThe "Eulenberg Affair," a series of media scandals about homosexual behavior at the highest levels of the German Imperial court, dragged on in the press for years as it made and broke careers in journalism, sexology, and the court while helping define both Imperial Germany’s relationship to masculinity and the emerging homosexual emancipation movements. Plus drag ballet, Wagnerists, extremely racist paintings, songs about roses, and moustaches with names.
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SOURCES:
Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Vintage, 2014)
Miranda Carter, “What Happens When a Ba...2022-01-1859 minBad GaysErnst vom RathThis Nazi diplomat was assassinated by the Jewish activist Herschel Grynszpan –– and his death became a pretext for the murderous pogroms of Kristallnacht. Grynszpan's lawyer, the flamboyant anti-fascist Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, pioneered in this case what was perhaps the first –– and only morally good –- use of some version of a 'gay panic' or ‘gay blackmail’ defense. But was vom Rath actually gay?
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SOURCES:
Jonathan Kirsch, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris, First Edition (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W...2022-01-1157 minBad GaysJoe CarstairsThe eccentric inheritor of an enormous oil fortune and gender non-conforming-lesbian-trans man (we'll talk about it!) who dated Marlene Dietrich, raced speedboats, and turned their private Bahamian island into a domain over which they ruled over native people with an iron fist while allowing themselves and their guests every possible eccentricity and pleasure. All this accompanied by their lifelong companion: a foot-tall leather doll named Lord Tod Wadley.
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SOURCES
Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas, 3rd ed (Waterloo, Ont., Canada: San Salvador Press, 1986).
Kate Summerscale, The Queen of Whale...2022-01-041h 03Bad GaysFrancis BaconFrancis Bacon was an artist whose radical generosity teetered on the edge of self-obliteration –– and he sometimes pulled others over the edge with him. Many of our listeners will be familiar with Bacon’s work, or at least would recognise his idiosyncratic style if they saw it; sweeps of fleshy paint across black fields of colour, portraying contorted, mangled bodies, racks of hanging meat, and the iconic screaming mouth. But Bacon is almost as famous for the way he lived his life: his raucous partying, brutal barbed tongue, and love of boozing made him an emblem of London’s bohemian...2021-12-241h 13Bad GaysPacchierotto and Florentine Sodomites (with Max Fox)Not a huge amount is known about Pacchierotto, a sodomite who was convicted and publicly humiliated in Florence, Italy, in 1486, but his story tells us much about the changing fortunes of sodomites at the time, and the important role they played in the politics of the time. In this special episode, Huw talks to Max Fox, editor of Christopher Chitty's Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System about Florentine sodomy in the Renaissance, and Chitty's groundbreaking new book.
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Sources:
Chitty, Christopher, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World Sys...2021-08-101h 32Bad GaysArthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert)The crimes, trial and execution of Utah citizen and devout Mormon Arthur Gary Bishop seemed to be the manifestation of many of both the public fears and moral panics of the United States in the 1980s. 'Stranger Danger', pornography, homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse became the focus of heated public debate and new religiously-inspired political organisations such as the Moral Majority. Huw is joined by David Eichert, a PhD candidate studying international law, sexual violence, gender and sexuality, to discuss Bishop, his relationship with his Mormon faith, and wider social attitudes towards his crimes.
Visit our website...2021-04-1355 minBad GaysDennis Cooper (with Diarmuid Hester)On the (in)famous author of the George Miles cycle, The Sluts, and many other classic works of radically transgressive gay fiction. Joining Ben to tackle Cooper's work–as challenging to traditional notions of identity-driven and self-consciously pretty gay fiction as it is to the hetero mainstream–is Diarmuid Hester, a radical cultural historian of the United States after 1950, and an authority on sexually dissident literature, art, film, and performance. He is based at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and is the author of the acclaimed new critical biography of Cooper, Wrong.
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SOUR...2021-02-231h 22Bad GaysViolette MorrisViolette Morris, a powerhouse athlete with 14-inch biceps, discovered a love for trousers and fast driving while piloting ambulances for the Red Cross during the First World War. But her outrageous and mannish style – she dated Josephine Baker, smoked, and cut her breasts off to better fit behind the wheel of a race car – outraged the respectable upper-middle-class world of women's athletics. And when she was cast out of respectable society, she became a Nazi spy and a sadistic torturer known as the "hyena of the Gestapo."
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SOURCES:
Colvin, Kelly Ricciardi. Gender and Fren...2020-12-221h 05Bad GaysCamilla HallCamilla Christine Hall was born on March 24th, 1945, in St Peter Minnesota. Her father was a Lutheran pastor, and her childhood was suburban and unremarkable. Like many of her generation, she would become involved in the anti-war movement and the New Left; unlike many of her generation, she would also become involved in Gay Liberation, and a strange cult-like organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army, which became infamous for bank robberies, murders –– and the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.
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SOURCES:
Hearings, Reports and Prints of the United States House Committee on Interna...2020-12-1456 minBad GaysGertrude SteinGertrude Stein is remembered as a novelist, playwright, poet, and, art collector –– and the hostess of a Paris salon that gathered the cream of interwar modernism, including Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Matisse. A semi-open lesbian, her books include Q.E.D., one of the earliest English-language lesbian novels, and Tender Buttons, a book of poems full of allusion to lesbian sexuality. But in the last years of her life, as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein sustained her lifestyle as an art collector and ensured her safety through the protection of powerful Vichy government officials – part of a patter...2020-12-0851 minBad GaysPrince Albert VictorToday’s subject is the man who would be King, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, firstborn son of Edward VII, Grandson of Queen Victoria, known to his friends and family simply as “Eddy." Wrapped up in a sizzling sex scandal, he became a prime example of a British royal story: an intellectually dull man, charmless, with neither cultural interests nor creative talents, but who, due to sheer accident of birth, found himself permitted to indulge all his whims.
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SOURCES:
Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Pres...2020-12-011h 00Bad GaysTruman CapoteBorn in a violent and difficult childhood in the American South, Truman Capote would rise to the highest levels of literary celebrity, praise, and fame: even joining the highly-exclusive jet set of 1960s and 1970s high society. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel". His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas. But Capote would be pursued by demons throughout his life – alcoholism, other forms of addiction, and cr...2020-11-241h 15Bad GaysCarl Van VechtenA man with a passion for the dangerous, subversive, and avant garde; who eschewed the middle brow and loved the urbane and modern. Known in his life not just as a man of taste, but a tastemaker, someone who set the tone for elite cultural society in his lifetime; the white author, critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten became enchanted with the Harlem Renaissance, approached Black cultures as a source of ideas that he could take and exploit, and perpetuated racist stereotypes in his work.
Visit our website at badgayspod.com for an episode archive, T-shirts...2020-11-1757 minBad GaysBenjamin BrittenThe composer Benjamin Britten was a central figure of 20th century music; and the national composer that Britain had been searching for since the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. He never shook his Communist and pacifist sympathies –– even as he rose to the highest levels of elite British cultural production. A fervent pacifist, antinationalist, and homosexual –– with a deep, complex, and troubling love of children –– Britten, through the strength of his music and through the nation’s desire to have a musical hero of its own, became an utterly unlikely national celebrity.
Content warning: this episode contains discussions of...2020-11-101h 20Bad GaysJeremy ThorpeThis is a story of sex, death and political malfeasance that will make Teddy Kennedy look like Anne of Green Gables. It has everything you’ve come to expect from a Bad Gays story about the English upper classes — psychosexual repression, violence, class prejudice, hypocrisy, the brutality and cheapness of life at the heart of the political system, and plenty of people named things like Rupert, Auberon and Emlyn.
=Content warning for child sexual abuse in the early parts of this story=
But as ridiculous and kinky as the fruity rulers of Britain are, the stor...2020-11-031h 12Bad GaysLiberaceThis "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love" rose to stardom playing "classical music without the boring parts" and didn't need to stay in the closet because he wore its entire contents. How could he become an emblem of Middle American family entertainment? The United States of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was undergoing enormous social change –– the Civil Rights Movement, the Summer of Love, Women’s Lib, the Stonewall Riots, Gay Liberation, and the beginning of the AIDS movement –– and Liberace was an entertainer who appealed to precisely those parts of t...2020-10-271h 22Bad GaysCecil RhodesSeason 4 –– ! –– with apologies for socially-distanced audio quality. Today's victim was a British colonist and mining magnate who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. An ardent white supremacist – no matter what revisionist historians and the right-wing press claim – he rose from being a sickly child to having a near-complete domination of the world diamond market. Come for the "private secretaries," stay for the Big Hole.
Visit our website for t-shirts, an episode archive, and a link to our Patreon.
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SOURCES:
Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2003.
Brown, Robin...2020-10-201h 09Bad GaysSpecial Episode: John Maynard Keynes (with Richard Power Sayeed)Despite beginning his career as a member of the civil service ruling Britain's colonial empire, John Maynard Keynes was also a key member of London's cultural and artistic elite, the Bloomsbury Group, whose libertine approach to sexuality and relationships marked them out from their stuffy Victorian forebears. A patron of art, literature, opera and ballet, Keynes' economic writings would go on to make him one of the 20th century's most influential economists. Huw discusses the life and theories of John Maynard Keynes with Richard Power Sayeed, author of 1997: The Future That Never Happened (Zed Books, 2017).
Our intro...2020-09-011h 54Bad GaysRadclyffe Hall
The author of the iconic lesbian –– and trans –– novel The Well of Loneliness was born to privilege before consorting with suffragettes and radicals, embarking on scandalous lesbian affairs with singers, and writing the novel whose release and censorship would turn it into "the Lesbian bible" and them into "sapphic Jesus." But what problematic racial politics –– and flirtations with Fascism –– lie lurking in the biography of Radclyffe Hall, who offers a non-gay perspective on early 20th century theories of sexual inversion? Ben discusses these questions with special guest Dr. Jana Funke, co-editor of a critical edition of The Well of Loneliness set to...2020-07-281h 17Bad GaysLisa MillerTo close our season, the story of Lisa Miller, an American woman who gave birth to a child coparented with her partner Janet Jenkins, and then left Janet, became a self-proclaimed ex-lesbian, sued for single custody of their daughter, and when the courts decided against her, abducted their child and fled the country with the assistance of well-connected far-right pastors in 2009. Lisa and their daughter, Isabella, are still missing.
Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show.
If you have any information on the whereabouts of Lisa and/or I...2020-05-2651 minBad GaysMorrisseyAn essay on the Smiths frontman whose music and lyrics turned the abject aspects of the identities of so many queer teenagers into something that made them stand out and shine – and whose focus on working class cultures of masculinity began to turn towards the far right.
Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show.
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SOURCES:
Bret, David. Morrissey: Scandal & Passion. London: Robson Book Ltd, 2004.
Goddard, Simon. Mozipedia: The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths. 8/29/10 edition. New York: Plume, 2010.
Jonze, Tim. “Bigmouth Strikes Again and Again: W...2020-05-1952 minBad GaysAileen WuornosIn 1992, Aileen Carol Wuornos, an itinerant sex worker, was arrested for the murders of seven men in or near Volusia County, Florida in 1989 and 1990: all of them shot while Wuornos was on the job, all of them shot at point-blank range. She became, in the view of the public, according to the filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who made two documentaries about her and about the media storm that surrounded her, a "man-hating lesbian prostitute who tarnished the reputations of her victims,” a useful foil for family-values string-em-up-dead politicians who wanted to show that they were tough on crime–and an unli...2020-05-1252 minBad GaysRoger CasementAt the height of his career, today's subject was a national hero in the UK, knighted by George V. His life ended as a traitor and a pervert, executed by hanging in Pentonville Prison before being thrown in an unmarked grave in the prison yard, his body covered in quicklime. His name was Roger Casement, and we'll talk about his rise and fall, Britain’s hypocritical relationship with imperialism and colonialism, and secret black diaries full of "gentle thrusts" and "splendid erections."
Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show.
...2020-05-051h 00Bad GaysPhilip JohnsonPhilip Cortelyou Johnson may be more responsible than anyone for the shift from Modernism as a new way of living to Modernism as an elite bauble. Born into immense power and privilege, he was a deeply committed elitist, and dilettante fascist, who used his money and connections to whitewash his youthful (and ongoing) embrace of Hitler in specific and far-right politics in general. As a key curator and preacher of the Modernist gospel in the United States, he was central in divorcing the style from its egalitarian political aspirations. In response to criticism, he said: “I am a whore. Very...2020-04-2845 minBad GaysElmyr de HoryA fraud and liar of epic proportions: a dashing art forger whose difficulties selling his naturalistic work in the Modernist-dominated 20th century art market, and experience of persecution as a gay Jew in Central Europe during World War II, fueled the creation and sale of millions' worth of fake Picassos, Matisses, and other masterpieces: some of which are still hidden in major collections and museums.
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SOURCES:
Forgy, Mark. The Forger's Apprentice: Life With the World's Most Notorious Artist. Scott's Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2012.
Keats, Jonathon. Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art...2020-04-2144 min
Bad GaysBarney FrankOn the "complicated" side of "evil and complicated" that makes up our show's motto, we present the story of the gravely-voiced Congressman who blazed trails for gay political involvement at the highest levels of power in Washington, only to spend the latter part of his career selling out the left to finance capital and excluding trans people from fights for non-discrimination legislation. Whip-smart, funny, and always ready with a biting comeback, Barney Frank came to embody the transformation of the Democratic Party away from the working class and towards a suburban party preoccupied with shallow diversity rather than true...2020-04-141h 00Bad GaysLord CastlereaghThe Anglo-Irish aristocrat, politician and statesman Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry: better known, like Bjork or Madonna, by his mononym - Castlereagh. A Whig politician, he was hated by the populations of both England and Ireland for his support of vicious repression against liberal, reformist, and radical politics and activism. Lord Byron put it best: "Posterity will ne'er survey / A nobler grave than this: / Here lie the bones of Castlereagh: / Stop, traveller, and piss."
Like our show? Support us, buy cute shirts, and check out past episodes at www.badgayspod.com/
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S...2020-04-0749 minBad GaysJames BuchananThe United States of America's first gay – and worst – President. This bumbling slaveholder collaborated with the Confederacy, promoted the racist Dred Scott decision at the Supreme Court, and cohabited in Washington with a dashing Alabama Senator who, in the words of President Andrew Jackson was the "Aunt Nancy" to his "Aunt Fancy."
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Like our show? Support us, buy cute shirts, and check out past episodes at www.badgayspod.com/
Sources:
Baker, Jean H. James Buchanan: The American Presidents Series: The 15th President, 1857-1861. Macmillan, 2004.
Balcerski, Thomas J. Bosom Friends: The Intimate World o...2020-03-311h 04Bad GaysNikolai Yezhov
A man variously known as the “Iron Hedgehog” and a “malignant Dwarf”, but also as charming, courteous, and, most importantly “a good party man,” a man who held the position of the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs - the head of the NKVD during Stalin’s Great Purge - Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.
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Like our show? Support us, buy cute shirts, and check out past episodes at www.badgayspod.com/
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940. London: Verso, 2003.
"Gay in the Gulag." Libcom. https://libcom.org/history/gay-gulag
Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. The Roa...2020-03-2453 minBad GaysIowa Caucuses Special: Pete ButtigiegWith special guests Mac Folkes and Edna Bonhomme (@jacobinoire), Ben explores the life story, politics, and cultural phenomenon of Pete Buttigieg. From his resume-polishing early life to his racist record as Mayor to his recycling of stale right-wing attacks on progressive policy, we look at how longer-term trends in gay life and culture, including the split of the "mainstream" wealthy and white gay rights movement from multiracial struggle, have influenced both his politics and the broad audience they have found.
== Update, 8 March, 2020 ==
We are devastated by the recent death of Mac Folkes, one of our t...2020-01-291h 33Bad GaysChristmas Special: Colonel Victor BarkerFor a special episode, Huw is joined the writer and filmmaker Juliet Jacques to discuss Colonel Victor Barker.
As a military nurse, ambulance driver, kennelman, horse trainer, fascist, car salesman, thief, and actor, Colonel Victor Barker was the embodiment of early 20th century upper-class British masculinity. But he became famous after his trial and imprisonment for committing perjury on his marriage certificate to his wife —because Victor Barker was assigned female at birth. Juliet and Huw explore his life, and the questions it raises around gender identity a century ago.
SOURCES:
Collis, Rose. Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Fe...2019-12-251h 04Bad GaysJ. Edgar HooverThe other polestar of human evil. "Justice is incidental to law and order." Johnny and Clyde.
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SOURCES:
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Medsger, Betty. The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Simkin, John. "Clyde Tolson." Spartacus Educational: https://spartacus-educational.com/USAtolson.htm
Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 19...2019-11-2758 minBad GaysPiers GavestonThe namesake of the secret dining society at Oxford where David Cameron may or may not have committed unspeakable acts with a pig. Perhaps you’ll have a clue to the themes of today’s episode when we tell you that the motto of the Piers Gaveston Society is "(Sane) non memini ne audisse unum alterum ita dilixisse" or, for those of us without a private school Latin education, "Truly, none remember hearing of a man enjoying another so much".
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SOURCES:
Hamilton, J. S. Piers Gaveston: Politics and Patronage in the Reign of Ed...2019-11-1946 minBad GaysThe Stonewall ColonyWhat happens when a political analysis that comes out of the politics of alliance ends up departing from alliance: in other words, when people think that making something “gay” is enough. The kinds of people that get forgotten and spoken over when a certain kind of essentialist gay politics are deployed. And even though this crackpot plan never came to pass, today's show, about the failed attempt to establish a gay nation in rural California, reveals some of the flaws at the heart of ‘70s radical gay politics.
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SOURCES:
Bérubé, Allan. My Desire fo...2019-11-1255 minBad GaysNicky CraneA young white London lad driven by a passion for extreme violence and racial hatred, who climbed pretty easily through the ranks of a small fascist party, and went on to become something of a big fish in the far-right's murky, polluted, poisonous pond. But in 1992, the Sun ran the following story, under a photo of Nicky Crane in his White Power vest: "Nazi Nick is a Pansy."
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SOURCES:
Eden, Jon. Uncarved. http://www.uncarved.org/
Forbes, Robert, and Eddie Stampton. The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK and USA, 1979-1993. Lond...2019-11-051h 02Bad GaysPim FortuynThe fairy godmother of the new European far-right. A vile racist named "The Greatest Dutchman of All Time" in a 2004 TV poll. A lens into how a particular version of homosexuality is compatibile with a particular kind of far-right politics – how a certain kind of “live and let live” attitude at the heart of white liberal gay politics can immediately turn into a wave of immigrant-bashing hatred that turns, inevitably, on queer people themselves. “I don’t hate Arab men," he said. "I even sleep with them.”
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Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Beyond Tolerance: What did the Dutch see in Pim...2019-10-2948 minBad GaysGordon of KhartoumA colonialist and conqueror, upholder of ideals of English masculinity, and religious fanatic; possessed of a powerful death wish. “Yes, that is flesh, that is what I hate, and what makes me wish to die.”
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Ellis, Heather, and Jessica Meyer, eds. Masculinity and the Historical Other. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
Faught, C. Brad. Gordon: Victorian Hero. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Pollock, John. Gordon: The Man Behind The Legend. London: Constable Books, 1993.
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distribut...2019-10-221h 00Bad GaysFrederick the GreatEnlightenment monarch! Composer of hundreds of flute concertos. Emerged from the “sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire" to conquer vast swaths of Europe! Built a giant pink palace his wife wasn't allowed to visit. Worst dad in Bad Gays history? "Everything that speaks to eyes and touches hearts, Was found in the fond object that enflamed his parts."
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SOURCES:
Blanning, Tim. Frederick the Great: King of Prussia. New York: Random House, 2016.
Gaines, James. Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Ha...2019-10-1542 minBad GaysPietro AretinoA vituperative satirist who made kings tremble. Also, he wrote this:
My fingers are but stragglers at the rear,
Who go a-foraging for what they find;
And they are not ashamed to lag behind,
Since there’s no foe in front they need to fear.
They’ve wandered through a tufted valley near.
And you yourself have said they were most kind,
And so, I know, my lady will not mind
If they see other booty, nor think it queer.
And yet...2019-10-0843 minBad GaysAndrew Cunanan"The man who shot Versace." Vague intimations of homosexuality as a form of bloody death. A pure expression of the poisonous narcissism of American celebrity culture. The dark heart of evil twink energy. A black hole of gay narcissism. Black holes are attractors. We risk being sucked in.
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SOURCES:
Goldberg, Michelle. "The Gay Golem." Metroactive, May 13-19, 1999. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.13.99/cunanan-9919.html
Indiana, Gary. Three Month Fever. (Reprint.) Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017.
Orth, Maureen. Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U. S...2019-10-0144 minBad GaysAlexander the GreatSeason 2! The Greek Vice. Our first evil twink! Plutarch! Prophecies of world domination! Conquests of Persia! Pan-hellenism! Whitney Houston?
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SOURCES:
Badian, Ernst. Collected Papers on Alexander the Great. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2012.
Fox, Robin Lane. Alexander the Great. New York: Penguin, 1973.
Plutarch. The Life of Alexander. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/3.html
Donate on Patreon.
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music i...2019-09-2442 minBad GaysSpecial Episode: Andy Warhol (with Sholem Krishtalka)For the first of our very special interview episodes, we welcome the artist and writer Sholem Krishtalka to talk about Andy Warhol. How did a shy, fey outsider become the ultimate art world insider? And what price did his superstars pay for the fame he exposed them to?
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SOURCES:
Andy Warhol (New York: Viking, 2001).
A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story. (New York: Perennial, 1992).
Warhol, Andy. The Andy Warhol Diaries. (New York: Warner Books, 1989).
2019-06-2449 minBad GaysTeaser: Season 2 and Special GuestsThanks to your support, Season 2 is incoming. And stay tuned for special guests in the weeks to come...
2019-05-2800 minBad GaysEpisode 10: Roy CohnThe Polestar Of Human Evil.
Stay tuned to this feed for Season 2 coming late summer/early fall; and special episodes featuring interviews and other content all summer. Thank you so much for your overwhelming support over the course of this first season. We're chuffed. We wish you productive, healthy, happy summers; free of evil twinks.
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SOURCES:
Von Hoffman, Nicholas. Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Gov...2019-05-2137 minBad GaysEpisode 9: Leopold and LoebThey were young, rich, and in love in the Jazz Age – until they killed their neighbor just to prove they could get away with it. Hitchcock's Rope is based on their story; now learn the truth behind the fascinating lives of Leopold and Loeb.
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SOURCES:
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. Excerpts: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/leopold-and-loebs-criminal-minds-996498/
Barrett, Nina. The Leopold and Loeb Files. Chicago: Agate Midway, 2018. Reviewed: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/26/reopening-the-case-files-of-leopold-and-loeb/
Darrow, C...2019-05-1450 minBad GaysEpisode 8: Ronnie KrayHe was a a thug, a bully, and a murderer who made himself a British popular hero. He was a friend of Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra, and he once said, “I’m homosexual but I’m not a poof”. We use the deplorable story of Ronnie Kray to explore class, crime and postwar British attitudes towards homosexuality. A content note: this episode contains frank discussions of childhood sexual abuse; as such, listener discretion is advised.
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SOURCES:
Campbell, Duncan. "The Selling of the Krays: How Two Mediocre Criminals Created Their Own Legend." The Guardia...2019-05-0737 minBad GaysEpisode 7: Friedrich RadszuweitBorn in 1876,Weimar-era gay publisher and activist Friedrich Radszuweit joined public gay life in 1923, when he founded the Bund für Menschenrecht (Federation for Human Rights, or BfM) in Berlin and began publishing dozens of gay, lesbian, and trans*-themed periodicals. The BfM grew to become the largest (indeed in some sense the only) mass-membership LGBT organization of its time. It claimed 100,000 members. Too bad its founder would end up advocating for collaboration with the Nazis.
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SOURCES:
Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.
Hali...2019-04-3042 minBad GaysEpisode 6: Sir Antony BluntCambridge-educated art historian, Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, expert in French baroque art – and soviet spy? We profile Sir Antony Blunt, an art historian whose youthful political convictions reveal intriguing connections between sexuality and espionage, and whose dramatic life provided the basis for John LeCarrè's classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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SOURCES:
Boyle, Andrew. The Climate of Treason. London: Coronet, 1982.
Carter, Miranda. Antony Blunt: His Lives. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Costello, John. Mask of Treachery: Spies, Lies, Buggery, and Betrayal. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988.
Lownie, Andrew. Stalin's E...2019-04-2343 minBad GaysEpisode 5: Andrew SullivanIt's Andrew Sullivan: the gay catholic conservative journalist, supporter of race science, inventor of gay marriage, and self-appointed arbiter of the morality and respectability of the gay community.
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Sources:
Murray, Charles N. and Richard Herrnstein. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. (New York: Free Press, 1994).
Rubin, Gayle: "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." in: Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger (Abingdon: Routledge, 1984).
Sullivan, Andrew: published works and interviews/profiles of, including:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-votes-and-andrew-sullivan-his-landmark-1989-essay-making-a-conservative-case-for-gay-marriage.html
...2019-04-1641 minBad GaysEpisode 4: James VI and IIf you liked Yiorgos Lanthinos' court psychodrama The Favourite, you'll love this exploration of the complicated life of James VI and I – a king who united Scotland and England, persecuted witches, and granted his male favorites extraordinary power and privilege. Come for the court drama and stay for in-depth discussions of primitive accumulation and the question of whether using the word 'gay' to describe a 16th-century monarch makes any sense at all.
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Sources:
Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso Books, 1979.
Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Rom...2019-04-0938 minBad GaysEpisode 3: Lawrence of ArabiaWe take a look at the fascinating life of T. E. Lawrence: poet, archaeologist, sadomasochist, and agent of Arab self-determination and British colonial rule.
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Sources:
Aldrich, Robert: Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge, 2002)
Lawrence, T. E.: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
ed. Norton, Rictor: My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (Leyland, 1998) http://rictornorton.co.uk/lawrence.htm
Sattin, Anthony: The Young T. E. Lawrence (Norton, 2015)
2019-04-0240 minBad GaysEpisode 2: BosieWe profile Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, the beautiful and dissolute poet, publisher, and lover of Oscar Wilde–who helped bring Wilde to ruin, became an antisemite, and generally personifies the term "evil twink energy."
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Sources and further reading:
Frank Harris: Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand
Douglas Murray: Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
2019-03-2642 minBad GaysEpisode 1: Ernst RöhmA discussion of the life and ideology of Ernst Röhm, the world's first openly gay politician: and a Nazi. ----more----
Sources and further reading:
Eleanor Hancock: "Only the Real, the True, the Masculine Held Its Value: Ernst Röhm, Masculinity, and Male Homosexuality." Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 8, No. 4 (Apr., 1998), pp. 616-641.
Laurie Marhoeffer: "Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History." Notches Blog, June 19, 2018. http://notchesblog.com/2018/06/19/queer-fascism-and-the-end-of-gay-history/
Laurie Marhoeffer: Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. University of Toronto Press...2019-03-1937 min