Podcasts by Bad Gays

Benedetta Carlini from 2023-06-06T10:08:58

What'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 e...

Tokugawa Iemitsu from 2023-05-30T11:32:38

Through 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 ...

Dong Xian from 2023-05-16T06:00

There’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 ...

Tom Driberg from 2023-05-09T06:00

Today’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...

Griselda Blanco from 2023-05-02T06:00

Nicki 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 Res...

André Gide from 2023-04-25T06:00

Warning: 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 oscill...

Mustapha Ben Ismaïl (with Arthur Asseraf) from 2023-04-11T09:31:06

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 ...

Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero from 2023-04-04T06:00

Argentina, 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 apartme...

Julie D’Aubigny from 2023-03-28T06:00

She'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 th...

George Santos from 2023-03-20T06:00

We'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 le...

Jack Saul LIVE! at Foyles in London with Shon Faye from 2022-12-25T01:30

Happy 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 Laurie Marhoefer – Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University...

US Tour! from 2022-06-08T17:45:18

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 availab...

Eugen Sandow (with Ruby Hann) from 2022-06-01T16:42:46

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 s...

Our UK Tour! (US Coming Soon) from 2022-05-19T12:58:05

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 Brit...

Jeffrey Dahmer from 2022-03-15T14:59:12

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 construct...

John Wojtowicz from 2022-03-01T09:27:56

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 pa...

Cressida Dick (Part Two) from 2022-02-22T14:10:24

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. Unti...

Cressida Dick (Part One) from 2022-02-15T08:32:45

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 Commi...

Freddie Mercury from 2022-02-08T09:12:39

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-...

Franco Zeffirelli from 2022-02-01T08:35:21

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 ove...

Anne Bonny from 2022-01-25T08:05:13

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...

Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg from 2022-01-18T09:18:32

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...

Ernst vom Rath from 2022-01-11T06:00

This Nazi diplomat was assassinated by the Jewish activist Herschel Grynszpan –– and his death became a pretext for the murderous pogroms of Kristallnacht. Grynszpa...

Joe Carstairs from 2022-01-04T06:00

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 Baham...

Francis Bacon from 2021-12-24T21:05:33

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 wi...

Pacchierotto and Florentine Sodomites (with Max Fox) from 2021-08-10T06:00

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...

Arthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert) from 2021-04-13T06:00

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 ...

Dennis Cooper (with Diarmuid Hester) from 2021-02-23T06:00

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 traditio...

Violette Morris from 2020-12-22T06:00

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 outrage...

Camilla Hall from 2020-12-14T06:00

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 wo...

Gertrude Stein from 2020-12-08T06:00

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, ...

Prince Albert Victor from 2020-12-01T06:00

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...

Truman Capote from 2020-11-24T06:00

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...

Carl Van Vechten from 2020-11-17T10:22:43

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,...

Benjamin Britten from 2020-11-10T09:57:50

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 h...

Jeremy Thorpe from 2020-11-03T06:00

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 Engli...

Liberace from 2020-10-27T05:00

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 "c...

Cecil Rhodes from 2020-10-20T06:00

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 su...

Special Episode: John Maynard Keynes (with Richard Power Sayeed) from 2020-09-01T06:00

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 ...

Radclyffe Hall from 2020-07-28T06:00

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...

Lisa Miller from 2020-05-26T06:00

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, su...

Morrissey from 2020-05-19T06:00

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 ...

Aileen Wuornos from 2020-05-12T06:00

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 j...

Roger Casement from 2020-05-05T06:00

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 bein...

Philip Johnson from 2020-04-28T06:00

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 ...

Elmyr de Hory from 2020-04-21T06:00

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...

Barney Frank from 2020-04-14T09:12:33

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 ...

Lord Castlereagh from 2020-04-07T06:00

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 hat...

James Buchanan from 2020-03-31T06:00

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 c...

Nikolai Yezhov from 2020-03-24T05:00

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 Commi...

Iowa Caucuses Special: Pete Buttigieg from 2020-01-29T16:34:41

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 rac...

Christmas Special: Colonel Victor Barker from 2019-12-25T06:00

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 sa...

J. Edgar Hoover from 2019-11-27T06:00

The 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 ...

Piers Gaveston from 2019-11-19T09:07:46

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 whe...

The Stonewall Colony from 2019-11-12T06:00

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 ki...

Nicky Crane from 2019-11-05T06:00

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 bi...

Pim Fortuyn from 2019-10-29T06:00

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...

Gordon of Khartoum from 2019-10-22T07:00

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 wis...

Frederick the Great from 2019-10-15T07:00

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 al...

Pietro Aretino from 2019-10-08T07:00

A vituperative satirist who made kings tremble. Also, he wrote this:

My fingers are but stragglers at the rear,

Who go a-fora...

Andrew Cunanan from 2019-10-01T07:00

"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 twin...

Alexander the Great from 2019-09-24T07:00

Season 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, ...

Special Episode: Andy Warhol (with Sholem Krishtalka) from 2019-06-24T09:17

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 insi...

Teaser: Season 2 and Special Guests from 2019-05-28T18:00:14

Thanks to your support, Season 2 is incoming. And stay tuned for special guests in the weeks to come...

Episode 10: Roy Cohn from 2019-05-21T07:00

The 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 ...

Episode 9: Leopold and Loeb from 2019-05-14T07:00

They 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 beh...

Episode 8: Ronnie Kray from 2019-05-07T07:00

He 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...

Episode 7: Friedrich Radszuweit from 2019-04-30T07:00

Born 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...

Episode 6: Sir Antony Blunt from 2019-04-23T07:00

Cambridge-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 conviction...

Episode 5: Andrew Sullivan from 2019-04-16T07:30

It'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 comm...

Episode 4: James VI and I from 2019-04-09T07:00

If 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 witch...

Episode 3: Lawrence of Arabia from 2019-04-02T07:30

We 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:...

Episode 2: Bosie from 2019-03-26T06:00

We 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 te...

Episode 1: Ernst Röhm from 2019-03-19T09:00

A 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,...

Season 1 Coming Soon from 2019-03-08T12:39:57

Coming soon on this feed, it's Bad Gays: a podcast about evil and complicated gay men in history hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller.