A podcast about evil and complicated gay men in history. Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? What can we learn about gay history by focusing on bad boys? Hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller.
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 willing to accept more rights for some at the expense of others. Our intro and outro music are, respectively, a tune written for us by DJ Michael Oswell Graphic Designer and Arpeggia Colorix, by Yann Terrien
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!
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 the UK! SOURCES: Budd, M. A. The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Chapman, David. Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Dyer, Richard. White: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2017. Waller, David. The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited, 2011. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: gay male eroticism in photography and film from their beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Brauer, Fae. ‘Virilizing and Valorizing Homoeroticism: Eugen Sandow's Queering of Body Cultures Before and After the Wilde Trials', Visual Culture in Britain 18:1 (2017), 35–67. Conrad, Sebastian. ‘Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century', Journal of World History 32:1 (2021), 95–125. Elledge, Jim. ‘Eugen Sandow's gift to gay men', The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 18:4 (2011). Mullins, Greg. ‘‘Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in "Physical Culture"', Discourse 15:1 (1992), 27–48. Snow, K. Mitchell. ‘Does this fig leaf make me look gay? Strongmen, statue posing and physique photography', Early Popular Visual Culture 17:2 (2019), 135–155. Watt, Carey A. ‘Cultural Exchange, Appropriation and Physical Culture: Strongman Eugen Sandow in Colonial India, 1904–1905', The International Journal of the History of Sport 33:16 (2016), 1921–1942.
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.
For 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. ----more---- SOURCES: ABC News. “Jeffrey Dahmer Hero Charged With Homicide.” ABC News. Accessed March 15, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/jeffrey-dahmer-hero-tracy-edwards-charged-homicide/story?id=14853608. Barron, James. “Milwaukee Police Once Queried Suspect.” The New York Times, July 27, 1991, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/us/milwaukee-police-once-queried-suspect.html. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Case Raises Complaints of Racism With PM-Dahmer Confession, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/6452017abebdb9eaa87e90817bf59b7e. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Tells Judge He Blames Nobody But Himself With PM-, AM-Dahmer Sentencing, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/49045923cf0d3c1a0ffc82eda398b935. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Tells Judge He Blames Nobody But Himself With PM-, AM-Dahmer Sentencing, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/49045923cf0d3c1a0ffc82eda398b935. Davis, Donald A. The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: An American Nightmare. St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1991. Gage, Gabriella. “True Crime's Deceits: The Genrefication of Tragedy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 21, 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/true-crimes-deceits-the-genrefication-of-tragedy/. Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. O'Brien, Brendan. “Homeless Man Who Escaped Cannibal Serial-Killer Jeffrey Dahmer Gets Prison Sentence.” National Post, January 24, 2012. https://nationalpost.com/news/homeless-man-who-escaped-canibal-serial-killer-jeffrey-dahmer-gets-prison-sentence. Sarah McGonagall. “Did You Know? In 1991 Officer John Balcerzak Was Fired after Handing 14 Year-Old Konerak Sinthasomphone Back to the Man He Had Just Escaped from despite Two Bystanders Begging the Officer Not to. Later That Night, Konerak Was Tortured and Killed by That Same Man - Jeffrey Dahmer.” Tweet. @gothspiderbitch (blog), June 19, 2020. https://twitter.com/gothspiderbitch/status/1273785359869116421. Toofab. “The Racist Reason White Cops Handed a Dying 14-Year-Old Back to Jeffrey Dahmer.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://toofab.com/2020/06/19/white-cops-handed-a-dying-14-year-old-back-to-jeffrey-dahmer/. Tithecott, Richard, and James R. Kincaid. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. ----more----
It'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 were represented and compensated, and the ethical complications of Wojtowicz as a figure in history and in historical memory. ----more---- SOURCES Check out trans historian Zagria's three part series on Eden and Wojtowicz, with links to some fantastic digitized primary sources at the end: Zagria, "Liz Eden and Dog Day Afternoon,” (three-part series), Gender Variance Who's Who. - https://zagria.blogspot.com/2020/08/liz-eden-and-dog-day-afternoon-part-i.html - https://zagria.blogspot.com/2020/08/liz-eden-and-dog-day-afternoon-part-ii.html - https://zagria.blogspot.com/2020/08/liz-eden-and-dog-day-afternoon-part-iii.html Check out Morgan M. Page's show One From The Vaults, you might want to start here with her three-part series on Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Morgan M Page, “OFTV 3: STAR House, STAR People,” accessed March 1, 2022, https://soundcloud.com/onefromthevaultspodcast/oftv-3-star-house-star-people-1. Anthony Macias, “Gay Rights and The Reception of Dog Day Afternoon (1975),” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 48, no. 1 (2018): 45–56. Arthur Bell, “Littlejohn & the Mob: Saga of a Heist,” The Village Voice, Vol. XVII, No. 35, August 31, 1972, https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/03/11/the-bank-robbery-that-would-become-dog-day-afternoon/. “The Boys In The Bank,” LIFE Magazine September 22, 1972, LIFE Magazine Garance Franke-Ruta, “The Prehistory of Gay Marriage: Watch a 1971 Protest at NYC's Marriage License Bureau,” The Atlantic, March 26, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/the-prehistory-of-gay-marriage-watch-a-1971-protest-at-nycs-marriage-license-bureau/274357/. Lisa Photos, “The Dog and the Last Real Man,” Journal of Bisexuality 3, no. 2 (March 1, 2003): 43–68, https://doi.org/10.1300/J159v03n02_04. Liz Eden Papers, Collection 6, The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center Archive, New York City, New York (digitized) Morgan M. Page, “It Doesn't Matter Who Threw the First Brick at Stonewall,” June 30, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trans-black-stonewall-rivera-storme/. “The Man Who Robbed a Bank for Love,” BBC News, February 16, 2015, sec. Magazine, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31457718. Regan Reid, “Talking To the Directors Who Made a Doc About the Real Guy Behind ‘Dog Day Afternoon,'” Vice (blog), August 18, 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn3pd5/talking-to-the-directors-who-made-a-doc-about-the-real-guy-behind-dog-day-afternoon-342. Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution second ed., (New York: Seal Press, 2008). 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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 killer Stephen Port, the Met's dismal record on race, and the protests that finally forced Dick out. ----more---- SOURCES: Ramzy Alwakeel, “I Covered Stephen Port's Murders. I Know Cressida Dick's Departure Isn't Enough,” OpenDemocracy, accessed February 22, 2022, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/cressida-dick-resignation-met-police-stephen-ports-murders/ Anonymous, “Gangs Violence Matrix and Black Londoners,” Text, Mayor's Question Time, December 10, 2018, https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2018/5242 Jason Bennetto, “We Are Still Racist, Police Chief Admits,” The Independent, April 21, 2003, sec. News, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/we-are-still-racist-police-chief-admits-116145.html Owen Bowcott and Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent, “Jean Charles de Menezes: Family Lose Fight for Police Officers to Be Prosecuted,” The Guardian, March 30, 2016, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/30/jean-charles-de-menezes-police-officers-shouldshould-not-be-prosecuted-echr Graham Bowley, “Police Erred in Shooting in London, Report Finds,” The New York Times, August 18, 2005, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/world/europe/police-erred-in-shooting-in-london-report-finds.html Caroline Davies, “Stephen Port Laptop Not Inspected until He Had Killed Three Times, Inquest Told,” The Guardian, October 13, 2021, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/13/stephen-port-laptop-not-inspected-until-he-had-killed-three-times-inquest-told Vikram Dodd and Dan Sabbagh, “Daniel Morgan Murder: Inquiry Brands Met Police ‘Institutionally Corrupt,'” The Guardian, June 15, 2021, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/15/daniel-morgan-met-chief-censured-for-hampering-corruption-inquiry Jamie Grierson and Jamie Grierson Home affairs correspondent, “Met Carried out 22,000 Searches on Young Black Men during Lockdown,” The Guardian, July 8, 2020, sec. Law, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/jul/08/one-in-10-of-londons-young-black-males-stopped-by-police-in-may Mark Hughes, “Seven Mistakes That Cost De Menezes His Life,” The Independent, December 13, 2008, sec. News, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/seven-mistakes-that-cost-de-menezes-his-life-1064466.html Marina Hyde, “Farewell, Cressida Dick, the Met Chief Only Interested in One Thing: Ignoring Bad Coppers,” The Guardian, February 11, 2022, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/11/farewell-cressida-dick-the-met-chief-only-interested-in-one-thing-ignoring-bad-coppers Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, “Secrets and Lies: Untangling the UK ‘spy Cops' Scandal,” The Guardian, October 28, 2020, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/28/secrets-and-lies-untangling-the-uk-spy-cops-scandal Ben Quinn, “Macpherson Report: What Was It and What Impact Did It Have?,” The Guardian, February 22, 2019, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/macpherson-report-what-was-it-and-what-impact-did-it-have Alex S. Vitale, “Cressida Dick Isn't the Problem. The Police Are the Problem,” OpenDemocracy, accessed February 22, 2022, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/cressida-dick-metropolitan-police-alex-vitale/ “Trapped in the Gangs Matrix” (Amnesty International, May 2020), https://www.amnesty.org.uk/london-trident-gangs-matrix-metropolitan-police “Review Identifies Eleven Opportunities for the Met to Improve on Stop and Search | Independent Office for Police Conduct” (Independent Office for Police Conduct, October 2020), https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/review-identifies-eleven-opportunities-met-improve-stop-and-search “Stephen Port: How Met Failings Contributed to the Deaths of Three Men,” BBC News, December 10, 2021, sec. UK, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59576717. We also encourage people listening to this episode to learn more about organizations combating police violence. Here are some organizations in the UK and around the world engaged in activist work related to this episode: London Campaign against Police and State Violence http://lcapsv.net/ United Friends and Families Campaign https://uffcampaign.org/ Sisters Uncut https://www.sistersuncut.org/ Inquest - a charity that focuses on getting truth and accountability for state related deaths https://www.inquest.org.uk/ https://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/ Kampagne für Opfer Rassistische Polizeigewalt Berlin: https://kop-berlin.de/ Critical Resistance resources on police abolition for US listeners: https://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ Also, follow local Copwatches on Twitter: @HackneyCopWatch @N15Copwatch @LambethCopwatch @CopwatchSthwrk @bizziewatch @MCRcopwatch @BristolCopwatch @KidsOfColourHQ @npolicemonitor 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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. Next week: more on Dick herself and her checkered career in the force. ----more---- SOURCES: Many of the sources we used to research this episode will be cited in next week's show notes. For this week: Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006 Maya Lothian-Maclean, “Lords of the Manor,” Human Resources, accessed February 15, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/human-resources/id1565249472. Asa Seresin, “Lesbian Fascism on TERF Island,” Asa Seresin (blog), February 11, 2021, https://asaseresin.com/2021/02/11/lesbian-fascism-on-terf-island/ “Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder,” accessed February 15, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/untold-the-daniel-morgan-murder/id1114802610. We also encourage people listening to this episode to learn more about organizations combating police violence. Here are four organizations in the UK related to this episode - next week we will add more resources to the show notes with similar groups in the other areas where we have the highest listenership: London Campaign against Police and State Violence http://lcapsv.net/ United Friends and Families Campaign https://uffcampaign.org/ Sisters Uncut https://www.sistersuncut.org/ Inquest - a charity that focuses on getting truth and accountability for state related deaths https://www.inquest.org.uk/ 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
For 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 charismatic man and the nuances of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s. ----more---- SOURCES John Harris, “The Sins of St Freddie,” The Guardian, January 14, 2005, sec. Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/jan/14/2 Jim Hutton and Tim Wapshott, Mercury and Me (London: Bloomsbury, 1995); Lesley-Ann Jones, Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury (London: Touchstone Press, 2012) Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne, Somebody to Love: The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury (London: Weldon Owen, 2016) “Remembering Queen's Infamous 1981 Tour of South America,” Remezcla (blog), accessed February 8, 2022, https://remezcla.com/features/music/we-remember-queens-infamous-tour-of-latin-america/ 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
A 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 20th century, a choice between making living theatre or dead, ten-ton museum pieces. He chose the museum-piece approach and in so doing did tremendous artistic damage. CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE DISCUSSES CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE AND RACIST LANGUAGE. ----more---- See Callas in Tosca in 1964 here. See Leontyne Price's costumes for Antony and Cleopatra here and here. See Zeffirelli's MET Opera Turandot set here. See Waltraud Meier sing the Liebestod here. SOURCES: Duane Byrge, “Franco Zeffirelli, Oscar-Nominated Director for ‘Romeo and Juliet,' Dies at 96,” The Hollywood Reporter (blog), June 15, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/franco-zeffirelli-dead-romeo-juliet-920639/ Rachel Donadio, “Maestro Still Runs the Show, Grandly,” The New York Times, August 18, 2009, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/arts/music/19zeffirelli.html Roger Ebert, “Romeo and Juliet Movie Review (1968) | Roger Ebert,” accessed January 31, 2022, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/romeo-and-juliet-1968 Johanna Fiedler, Molto Agitato: The Mayhem behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera (New York: Anchor Books, 2003) Jonathan Kandell, “Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96,” The New York Times, June 15, 2019, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/arts/music/franco-zeffirelli-dead.html Rebecca Keegan, “The Dark Side of Franco Zeffirelli: Abuse Accusers Speak Out Upon the Famed Director's Death,” The Hollywood Reporter (blog), June 18, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/franco-zeffirelli-abuse-accusers-speak-1219298/ Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (London: Da Capo Press, 2001) Barbara McMahon, “Zeffirelli Tells All about Priest's Sexual Assault,” The Guardian, November 21, 2006, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/21/books.film Peter Murphy, “Bruce Robinson Interview,” The New Review, accessed January 31, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20070707184620/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/brucerobinson.html John J. O'Connor, “TV Review; Zeffirelli's Lavish ‘Turandot' at the Met Opera,” The New York Times, January 27, 1988, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/27/arts/tv-review-zeffirelli-s-lavish-turandot-at-the-met-opera.html Neda Ulaby, “Franco Zeffirelli, Creator Of Lavish Productions On Screen And Stage, Dies At 96,” NPR, June 15, 2019, sec. Obituaries, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/15/514094174/franco-zeffirelli-creator-of-lavish-productions-on-screen-and-stage-dies-at-96 Daniel J. Wakin, “For Opening Night at the Metropolitan, a New Sound: Booing,” The New York Times, September 22, 2009, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/music/23opera.html Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli, 1st American ed (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986) “Opera: ‘Falstaff' Staged by Zeffirelli; New Production of the Met Is Magnificent; Bernstein Conducts —Colzani in Title Role,” The New York Times, March 7, 1964, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/07/archives/opera-falstaff-staged-by-zeffirelli-new-production-of-the-met-is.html 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. ----more----
Are 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. ----more---- SOURCES: B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York: New York University Press, 1995) David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors' Women: An Untold Maritime History (Random House, 2001) Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012) Charles Johnson and David Cordingly, A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press, 2010) Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997) Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Second edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2013) Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Verso Books, 2014) 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The "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. ----more---- SOURCES: SOURCES: Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Vintage, 2014) Miranda Carter, “What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?,” The New Yorker, June 6, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire Norman Domeier, “The Homosexual Scare and the Masculinization of German Politics before World War I,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 737–59 Norman Domeier, “Scandal & Science – The Power of Sexology in the Eulenburg Affair, 1906-1909,” n.d., http://www.hist.ceu.hu/conferences/graceh/abstracts/domeier_norman.pdf Martin B. Duberman, Jews, Queers, Germans: A Novel/History, Seven Stories Press first edition (New York ; Oakland: Seven Stories Press, 2017) John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, trans. Terence F. Cole, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Picador Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Theory and History of Literature, v. 22-23 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. The 15-second clip of "Monatsrose" by Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg is sung by tenor Marcel Wittrisch with orchestra and organ conducted by Bruno Seidler-Winkler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq2XXG8JRNU
This 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? ----more---- 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.W. Norton & Company, 2013) Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Forgotten Life of Herschel Grynszpan, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLl_iK1xiiE; Gerald Schwab, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan (New York: Praeger, 1990).
The 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. ----more---- SOURCES Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas, 3rd ed (Waterloo, Ont., Canada: San Salvador Press, 1986). Kate Summerscale, The Queen of Whale Cay (New York: Viking, 1998). “Obeah: ‘Magical Art of Resistance,'” Early Caribbean Digital Archive (blog), September 2, 2018, https://ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about-exhibits/obeah-narratives-exhibit/ Tom Cheshire, “Boss of the Bahamas,” The Rake, accessed December 20, 2021, https://therake.com/stories/icons/joe-carstairs/. Zora Neale Hurston, “‘Bahamain Obeah' (1931),” Bahamian Fragments: Bits and Pieces from the History of the Bahamas, accessed December 20, 2021, http://www.jabezcorner.com/Grand_Bahama/Ten%20Ten/hurston1.htm 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Francis 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 Soho scene. What linked his work and his life was an obsession with violence, something that he knew intimately. ----more---- Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) John Maybury et al., Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, Biography, Drama, Romance (BBC Films, British Film Institute (BFI), Arts Council of England, 1998) Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019) Richard Curson Smith et al., Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence, Documentary, Biography (IWC Media, 2017) David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Third edition (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2016). 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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. ----more---- Sources: Chitty, Christopher, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, Duke University Press, 2020 Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, Oxford University Press, 1996 Online Digital Map: Flynn, Aidan, Sodomy and The City: Mapping Fear, Surveillance, Sexuality, and Punishment, University of Toronto, 2018 https://utoronto.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=590a95cd059240388f003c49cd722dc9 Scelta di prediche e scritti di fra Girolamo Savonarola. [A cura di] P. Villari [e] E. Casanova. Con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita, https://archive.org/details/sceltadiprediche00savo
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 for t-shirts, an episode archive, and more. ----more---- SOURCES: Carlisle, Al, The Mind of the Devil: The Cases of Arthur Gary Bishop and Westley Allan Dodd, Carlisle Legacy Books, 2020 Petrey, Taylor G., Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, University of North Carolina Press, 2020 Nathan, Debbie and Snedeker, Michael, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, iUniverse, 2001 Strub, Whitney, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, Columbia University Press, 2013 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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. ----more---- SOURCES: Cooper, Dennis. The Sluts. New York: Da Capo Press, 2004. Cooper, Dennis. The George Miles Cycle. Five novels, information available here: http://www.dennis-cooper.net/georgemiles.htm. Hester, Diarmuid. Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 2020. Dennis Cooper's blog. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Violette 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." ----more---- SOURCES: Colvin, Kelly Ricciardi. Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness. London ; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Doyle, Jack. “How a Pioneering Lesbian Became the Nazis’ ‘Hyena.’” OZY, May 25, 2015. http://test-2017-elb-web-us-west-2.aws.ozymandias.com/flashback/how-a-pioneering-lesbian-became-the-nazis-hyena/40366. Kessler, Martin. “Violette Morris: Pioneering Female Athlete Turned Nazi Spy.” WBUR, February 24, 2017. https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/02/24/gestapo-hitler-book-anne-sebba. Mansky, Jackie, and Maya Wei-Haas. “The Rise of the Modern Sportswoman.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 18, 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rise-modern-sportswoman-180960174/. Papirblat, Shlomo. “Sporting Champion, Feminist Icon, Nazi Spy? The Extraordinary Life of Violette Morris.” Haaretz.Com. Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-sporting-champion-feminist-icon-nazi-spy-the-crazy-life-of-violette-morris-1.6869492. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008. FemBio: Frauen.Biografieforschung. “Violette Morris.” Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/violette-morris/. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Camilla 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. ----more---- SOURCES: Hearings, Reports and Prints of the United States House Committee on Internal Security. Honig, Harvey Hilbert. “A Psychobiographical Study of Camilla Hall.” Loyola University of Chicago, 1979. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1788. Lauters, Amy. “On Camilla Hall.” Amy Lauters On Everything (blog), September 3, 2020. https://amylauters.com/2020/09/03/on-camilla-hall/. Matusitz, Jonathan Andre, and Elena Berisha. Female Terrorism in America: Past and Current Perspectives. Contemporary Terrorism Studies. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2020. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Gertrude 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 pattern of involvement in far-right, antisemitic, and fascist politics. ----more---- SOURCES: Johnston, Georgia. The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007. Malcolm, Janet. “Gertrude Stein’s War.” The New Yorker. June 2, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war. Pavloska, Susanna. Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Routledge, 1999. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Reissue edition. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1997. ———. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage, 1990. Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Lincoln: Combined Academic Publishing, 2008. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Today’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. ----more---- SOURCES: Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. London: Vintage, 2018. Cook, Andrew. Prince Eddy: The King Britain Never Had. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2009. Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Cleveland Street Scandal. New York: Coward McCann, 1976. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Born 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 crippling self-doubt which would end up leading him to destroy his own social reputation. Visit our website at badgayspod.com for an episode archive, T-shirts, and a link to our Patreon. ----more---- SOURCES: Als, Hilton. “The Shadows in Truman Capote’s Early Stories.” The New Yorker, October 13, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-shadows-in-truman-capotes-early-stories. Capote, Truman. Answered Prayers. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. In Cold Blood. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Other Voices, Other Rooms. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. Illustrated edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
A 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, and a link to our Patreon. ----more---- SOURCES: Bernard, Emily. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. 0 edition. Yale University Press, 2013. Holmes, David G. “Cross-Racial Voicing: Carl Van Vechten’s Imagination and the Search for an African American Ethos.” College English 68, no. 3 (2006): 291–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/25472153. Sanneh, Kelefa. “White Mischief.” The New Yorker, February 17, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/white-mischief-2. White, Edward. “The Making of an American.” The Paris Review (blog), May 14, 2014. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/14/the-making-of-an-american/. ———. The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. 1st edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Woolner, Cookie. “‘Have We a New Sex Problem Here?’ Black Queer Women in the Early Great Migration.” Process: A Blog for American History (blog), October 24, 2017. http://www.processhistory.org/woolner-black-queer-women/. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The 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 sexual attraction to children. Visit our website at badgayspod.com for an episode archive, T-shirts, and a link to our Patreon. ----more---- SOURCES: Bridcut, John. Britten’s Children. Main edition. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Britten, Benjamin. Peter Grimes. London: BBC, 1969. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MyBUetbE38&t=1705s. Conlon, James. “Message, Meaning and Code in the Operas of Benjamin Britten." Hudson Review LXVI, no. 3 (Autumn 2013). https://hudsonreview.com/2013/10/message-meaning-and-code-in-the-operas-of-benjamin-britten/. Kildea, Paul. Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century. Allen Lane, 2013. Ryan, Hugh. When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
This 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 story is darker than that. This story is also about the way the law is impervious to the informal networks of power in the British establishment, and how homosexuality was subject to a series of double standards, tolerated in the powerful but suppressed in the ordinary citizen, practiced in private and denied in public. Today we’re discussing the life of a man whose sexuality stole his chance at power, the MP and leader of the Liberal Party, the Right Honorable Jeremy Thorpe. Visit our website at badgayspod.com for t-shirts, our Patreon, and an episode archive. ----more---- SOURCES: Bloch, Michael. Jeremy Thorpe. London: Time Warner Books, 2004. Freeman, Simon, and Barrie Penrose. Rinkagate: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1996. Preston, John. A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies, and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment. Illustrated edition. New York: Other Press, 2016. Thorpe, Jeremy. In My Own Time: Reminiscences of a Liberal Leader. Edited by Duncan Brack. London: Politico’s Publishing Ltd, 1999. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
This "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 the country who sought to resist those changes. Hated by classical music critics, he was beloved by audiences precisely because of the openness of his secret and the way he performed a kind of minstrel act that nevertheless won him fame, riches, and glory. Visit our website for Patreon, T-shirts, and an eopside archive.----more---- Gabler, Neal. “Robert Harrison’s Scandalous Confidential Magazine.” Vanity Fair, April 2003. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2003/04/robert-harrison-confidential-magazine.Liberace Music Video & Entrance 1981, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dioRwB4RvrQ.O’Connor, Pauline. “Mapping the Many Razzle-Dazzle Homes of Liberace.” Curbed LA, May 24, 2013. https://la.curbed.com/maps/mapping-the-many-razzledazzle-homes-of-liberace.Pyron, Darden Asbury. Liberace: An American Boy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.Rechy, John. “Randy Dandy.” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2000. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-06-bk-65295-story.html.Thorson, Scott. Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace. Head of Zeus, 2013. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Season 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. ----more---- SOURCES: Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2003. Brown, Robin. The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes' Plans for a New World Order. London: Penguin Books, 2015. Jourdan, Philip. Cecil Rhodes: His Private Life By His Private Secretary. London: Bodley Head, 1911. Rotberg, Robert I. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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 be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Visit our website for t-shirts, an episode archive, and a link to our 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
To 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 Isabella, please contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. ----more---- SOURCES: Ball, Carlos A. The Right to Be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2012. Bollinger, Alex. “A Man Who Helped Kidnap a Lesbian’s Daughter Blames It All on Obama.” LGBTQ Nation, December 5, 2018. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/12/man-helped-kidnap-lesbians-daughter-blames-obama/. Eckholm, Erik. “Virginia Pastor Sentenced for Aiding Parental Kidnapping.” The New York Times, March 4, 2013, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/us/kenneth-miller-convicted-of-aiding-in-parental-kidnapping.html. ———. “Which Mother for Isabella? Civil Union Ends in an Abduction and Questions.” The New York Times, July 28, 2012, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/us/a-civil-union-ends-in-an-abduction-and-questions.html. Edwards, David. “Fischer Calls for ‘Underground Railroad’ to Kidnap Children of LGBT Parents.” RawStory, August 8, 2012. https://www.rawstory.com/2012/08/fischer-calls-for-underground-railroad-to-kidnap-children-of-lgbt-parents/. “Legal Recognition of LGBT Families.” San Francisco, Calif.: The National Center for Lesbian Rights, 2019. http://www.nclrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Legal_Recognition_of_LGBT_Families.pdf. “Man Who Helped Rob Lesbian Mom of Her Child Sentenced to 3 Years.” LGBTQ Nation, March 23, 2017. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/03/man-helped-rob-lesbian-mom-child-sentenced-3-years/. “Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage!” Accessed May 14, 2020. https://queerkidssaynomarriage.wordpress.com/. Rudolph, Dana. “A Very Brief History of LGBTQ Parenting.” Family Equality (blog), October 20, 2017. https://www.familyequality.org/2017/10/20/a-very-brief-history-of-lgbtq-parenting/. “The Kidnapping of Isabella.” Birmingham, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, February 15, 2017. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/kidnapping-isabella. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
An 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. ----more---- 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: Why Morrissey Fans Feel so Betrayed.” The Guardian, May 30, 2019, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/30/bigmouth-strikes-again-morrissey-songs-loneliness-shyness-misfits-far-right-party-tonight-show-jimmy-fallon. Morrissey. Autobiography. 1 edition. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013. Reynolds, Simon. “Pale Ire.” Bookforum, March 2014. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2005/in-his-long-awaited-memoir-morrissey-sheds-his-wilting-wallflower-image-12774. Sandhu, Sukhdev. “Morrissey and Me: How an Ordinary Asian Fell in Love with the Smiths.” The Guardian, December 20, 2011, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/dec/20/morrissey-and-me-the-smiths. Thomas-Mason·May 31, Lee, and 2019. “Remembering When Cornershop Set Fire to Morrissey Posters, 1992.” Far Out Magazine (blog), May 31, 2019. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/cornershop-set-fire-to-morrissey-posters-1992-racism/. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
In 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 unlikely lesbian hero. Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Barrett-Ibarria, Sofia. “How Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Became a Cult Hero.” Vice (blog), September 19, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm3j4/how-serial-killer-aileen-wuornos-became-a-cult-hero. Broomfield, Nick. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Documentary, Crime. Channel 4 Television Corporation, Lafayette Films, 1994. Broomfield, Nick, and Joan Churchill. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Documentary, Crime. Lafayette Films, Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2003. chesler, phyllis. “A Woman’s Right to Self—Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos.” Off Our Backs 23, no. 6 (1993): 6–15. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui, eds. Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Pearson, Kyra. “The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos, Feminism’s ‘First Serial Killer.’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (September 2007): 256–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420701472791. Vronsky, Peter. Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. 1st edition. New York, N.Y: Berkley Books, 2007. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
At 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. ----more---- SOURCES: Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: And the Trouble with Nigeria. Penguin Great Ideas 100. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Dudgeon, Jeffrey, and Roger Casement. Roger Casement: The Black Diaries : With a Study of His Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Belfast Press, 2016. Goodman, Jordan. The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness. 1st American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Halifax, Noel. “The Queer and Unusual Life of Roger Casement.” Socialist Review, February 2016. http://socialistreview.org.uk/410/queer-and-unusual-life-roger-casement. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Inglis, Brian. Roger Casement. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Blackstaff Press, 1993. Mitchell, Angus. “REPUTATIONS: Roger Casement and the History Question.” History Ireland (blog), June 30, 2016. https://www.historyireland.com/volume-24/reputations-roger-casement-history-question/. O’Toole, Fintan. “The Multiple Hero.” The New Republic, August 2, 2012. https://newrepublic.com/article/105658/mario-vargas-llosa-dream-of-celt-fintan-otoole. Toibin, Colm. Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Philip 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 well paid.” Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Fixsen, Anna. “The Power and Paradox of Philip Johnson.” Metropolis, December 3, 2018. https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/philip-johnson-biography-mark-lamster-interview/. Goldberger, Paul. “A New Biography of the Architect Philip Johnson, the ‘Man in the Glass House.’” The New York Times, December 20, 2018, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/books/review/mark-lamster-philip-johnson-man-in-the-glass-house.html. Johnson, Philip, Robert A. M. Stern, and Kazys Varnelis. The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern. 1st ed. New York: Monacelli Press, 2008. Kaiser, Charles. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America. 1. Grove Press ed. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Lamster, Mark. The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century. First edition. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Ravenscroft, Tom. “Bjarke Ingels Meets Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro to ‘Change the Face of Tourism in Brazil.’” Dezeen, January 17, 2020. https://www.dezeen.com/2020/01/17/bjarke-ingels-jair-bolsonaro-brazil-president/. ———. “Criticism of Jair Bolsonaro Meeting Is ‘an Oversimplification of a Complex World’ Says Bjarke Ingels.” Dezeen, January 23, 2020. https://www.dezeen.com/2020/01/23/jair-bolsonaro-bjarke-ingels/. Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Stern, Mark J. “‘The Glass House’ as Gay Space: Exploring the Intersection of Homosexuality and Architecture.” Inquiries Journal 4, no. 06 (2012). http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/651/the-glass-house-as-gay-space-exploring-the-intersection-of-homosexuality-and-architecture. Wainwright, Oliver. “‘Norman Said the President Wants a Pyramid’: How Starchitects Built Astana.” The Guardian, October 17, 2017, sec. Cities. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/17/norman-foster-president-pyramid-architects-built-astana. ———. “The Despot Dilemma: Should Architects Work for Repressive Regimes?” The Guardian, January 27, 2020, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/27/despot-dilemma-should-architects-work-for-repressive-regimes-bjarke-ingels. Wortman, Marc. 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War. First edition. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016. ———. “Famed Architect Philip Johnson’s Hidden Nazi Past.” Vanity Fair. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/philip-johnson-nazi-architect-marc-wortman.
A 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. ----more---- 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 of our Age. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. Martinique, Elena. 'Elmyr de Hory - The Story of the Most Famous Forger in Art History.' Widewall.Ch, June 19, 2019. https://www.widewalls.ch/elmyr-de-hory-art-forger/ 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
On 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 racial and economic justice. ----more---- SOURCES: Aloisi, James. “Louise Day Hicks: ‘You Know Where I Stand.’” CommonWealth Magazine, October 16, 2013. https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/012-louise-day-hicks-you-know-where-i-stand/. Battenfeld, Joe. “Barney Frank Resurfaces, to the Dismay of Bernie Sanders.” Boston Herald, January 29, 2020. https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/01/28/barney-frank-resurfaces-to-the-dismay-of-bernie-sanders/. Chotiner, Isaac. “Barney Frank Is Not Impressed By Bernie Sanders.” Slate Magazine, March 30, 2016. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/03/barney-frank-is-not-impressed-by-bernie-sanders.html. Cottle, Michelle. “Bailout.” The New Republic, December 3, 2008. https://newrepublic.com/article/62857/bailout. Dayen, David. Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. New York, NY: The New Press, 2016. ———. “Bank Deregulation 2.0 Is Here.” The American Prospect, July 18, 2018. https://prospect.org/api/content/eaadfd42-4d07-5e1f-b580-4b75f1860cc4/. ———. “Dismantling Dodd-Frank -- And More.” The American Prospect, February 6, 2017. https://prospect.org/api/content/da53d9a4-10ff-57f6-97d0-a09f91c8cbd4/. Dedman, Bill. “TV Movie Led to Prostitute’s Disclosures.” The Washington Post, August 27, 1989. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/scandal/gobie2.htm. Frank, Barney. “My Life as a Gay Congressman.” Politico Magazone. Accessed April 13, 2020. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/barney-frank-life-as-gay-congressman-116027.html. Geismer, Lily. Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Henwood, Doug. “Radio Commentary, July 15, 2010.” LBO News from Doug Henwood (blog), July 16, 2010. https://lbo-news.com/2010/07/16/radio-commentary-july-15-2010/. Molloy, Parker. “What Barney Frank Still Gets Wrong on ENDA.” The Advocate, October 1, 2014. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/10/01/op-ed-what-barney-frank-still-gets-wrong-enda. Schleier, Curt. “Barney Frank on Being Barney, Not Bernie.” Times of Israel. Accessed April 13, 2020. http://www.timesofisrael.com/barney-frank-on-being-barney-not-bernie/. Sirota, David. “A ‘Grand Bargain’...For K Street.” HuffPost (blog), December 8, 2006. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-grand-bargainfor-k-stre_b_35853. ———. “Four Reasons to Oppose the Bush-Obama Request for Another $350 Billion Bailout.” Common Dreams. Accessed April 13, 2020. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/01/13/four-reasons-oppose-bush-obama-request-another-350-billion-bailout. Toobin, Jeffrey. “Barney’s Great Adventure.” The New Yorker, January 5, 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/12/barneys-great-adventure. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The 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/ ----more---- SOURCES: Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. London, UK; New York, NY: Random House, 2017. Bew, John. Castlereagh: A Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hyde, Harford Montgomery. The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh. London, UK: Heinemann, 1959. Kiernan, Victor. The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy. London, UK: Zed Books Ltd., 2016. Norton, Rictor, ed. “Homosexuality in Nineteenth-Century England,” January 15, 2020. http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/nineteen.htm. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London, UK; New York, NY: Penguin, 1991. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The 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." ----more---- 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 of James Buchanan and William Rufus King. Oxford University Press, 2019. Buchanan, James. Inaugural Address, March 4, 1857: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-4-1857-inaugural-address Katz, Jonathan. Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Watson, Robert P. Affairs of State: The Untold History of Presidential Love, Sex, and Scandal, 1789–1900. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
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. ----more---- 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 Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Getty, John Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s “Iron Fist.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Lewin, Moshe. The Soviet Century. London: Verso, 2005. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Hachette UK, 2010. Weston, Fred. "From Emancipation to Criminalization: Stalinist Persecution of Homosexuals from 1934." https://www.marxist.com/from-emancipation-to-criminalisation-stalinist-persecution-of-homosexuals-from-1934.htm Whyte, Harry. Letter to Joseph Stalin, May 1934. https://www.marxist.com/letter-to-stalin-can-a-homosexual-be-in-the-communist-party.htm 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
With 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 two guests on this episode. A legend of the scene, a devoted friend, and a fierce fighter for justice. Rest in power. ----more---- SOURCES: Mayor Pete editing his own wikipedia: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/pete-buttigieg-wikipedia-page-editor.html On his early life and childhood: https://apnews.com/47fc3e167cd64488b16890c8973bb208 On his time at Harvard, including quotes from his memoir, Shortest Way Home: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-pete Andrew Sullivan on Rhodes Scholars: https://books.google.de/books?id=cIdMpKduSmkC&pg=PA108&dq=andrew+sullivan+rhodes+scholars&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false On McKinsey, and its business model and recent scandals: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/world/africa/mckinsey-south-africa-eskom.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/business/mckinsey-puerto-rico.html, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners) On Mayor Pete's secretive record at McKinsey: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/henrygomez/pete-buttigieg-mckinsey-clients On Mayor Pete's record on housing and environmental racism: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/henrygomez/mayor-pete-buttigieg-south-bend-gentrification, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/south-bend-poor-say-democrat-pete-buttigieg-left-them-behind.html On the firing of Darryl Boykins: https://theintercept.com/2019/09/20/pete-buttigieg-south-bend-police/ On the shooting of Eric Logan and protests in June 2019: https://wsbt.com/news/local/probe-of-eric-logan-shooting-could-revive-scrutiny-of-buttigieg, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/mayor-pete-buttigieg-protesters-heckled-south-bend-police On the community/police events Mayor Pete skipped to campaign: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/23/pete-buttigieg-south-bend-police-oversight-fundraisers/ On the recent protest at a campaign event in which Mayor Pete asked the protestor to 'respect the format': https://twitter.com/AlxThomp/status/1221198787466665986/photo/1 On Mayor Pete's changing position on Medicare for All and attacks on proposals for universal social programs: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/16/buttigieg-tweet-medicare-for-all-048745, https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/467478-buttigieg-i-never-believed-in-medicare-for-all-that-ends-private-insurance, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/us/politics/buttigieg-sanders-warren-free-tuition.html An article on the campaign's treatment of staffers of color that came out too late for us to include in the episode: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/us/politics/buttigieg-campaign-black-hispanic-staff.html On allegations the campaign faked Black support for its racial justice proposal: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/15/pete-buttigieg-campaign-black-voters/
For 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 Female Husbandry, Boston: Little, Brown Book Group, 2001 Zagria. A Gender Variance Who's Who https://zagria.blogspot.com/ Oram, Alison: Her Husband was a Woman! Women's Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 2008 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The other polestar of human evil. "Justice is incidental to law and order." Johnny and Clyde. ----more---- 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, 1993. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The 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". ----more---- SOURCES: Hamilton, J. S. Piers Gaveston: Politics and Patronage in the Reign of Edward II. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Phillips, Seymour. Edward II. Yale English Monarchs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. Stewart, Alan. “Edward II and Same-Sex Desire” in: Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. 82-95.
What 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. ----more---- SOURCES: Bérubé, Allan. My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History. Edited by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Carter, Jacob D. “Gay Outlaws: The Alpine County Project Reconsidered.” Masters’ Thesis, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2015. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/masters_theses/307/. Hobson, Emily K. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2016. Wittman, Carl. "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto." https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/wittmanmanifesto.html 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
A 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." ----more---- SOURCES: Eden, Jon. Uncarved. http://www.uncarved.org/ Forbes, Robert, and Eddie Stampton. The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK and USA, 1979-1993. London: Feral House Press, 2015. Kelly, Jon. "Nicky Crane: The Secret Double Life of a Gay Neo-Nazi." BBC News Magazine, December 6, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25142557 "Today in London Anti-Fascist History: 1978 Blockade Against National Front March on Brick Lane." Past Tense: Radical Histories and Possibilities, September 24, 2018. https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/today-in-london-anti-fascist-history-1978-blockade-against-national-front-march-on-brick-lane/ Schaefer, Max. Children of the Sun. London: Soft Skull Press, 2010. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
The 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.” ----more---- Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Beyond Tolerance: What did the Dutch see in Pim Fortuyn?" The New Yorker. September 9, 2002. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/09/beyond-tolerance Margry, Peter Jan. "The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in The Netherlands." Etnofoor: antropologisch tijdschrift 16 (2003): 106-131. Osborn, Andrew. "Dutch Fall for Gay Mr. Right." The Observer. April 14, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/14/andrewosborn.theobserver 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
A 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.” ----more---- 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 distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
Enlightenment 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." ----more---- 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: Harper Collins, 2010. Hadley, Kathryn (with Vanessa de Senarclens). "Frederick the Great's Erotic Poem." HistoryToday, 21 September, 2011. https://www.historytoday.com/frederick-greats-erotic-poem The brief excerpt of Frederick the Great's Flute Concerto in C Major, No. 3, is performed by Emmanuel Pahud and the Kammerakademie Potsdam, led by Trevor Pinnock at the Harpsichord; we claim "fair use" for quotation and illustration purposes and encourage listeners who appreciate the extraordinary performance to purchase or legally stream it in full. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
A 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, it may be, you prefer the Lance; Then, let your stragglers reconnoiter, sweet, And guide him like a blind man to safe cover. He is no coward, since he takes a chance. Though he, my dear, has neither eyes nor feet; For a soldier always makes a perfect lover! ----more---- SOURCES: Aretino, Pietro. The school of whoredom. London: Hesperus, 2003. ———. The secret life of nuns. London: Hesperus, 2004. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Penguin Classics. London, England ; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 1990. Marrapodi, Michele, ed. Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition. Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Series. Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
"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. ----more---- 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. History. New York: Doubleday, 1999. 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 is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
