Bad Gays

Today’s subject had a multi-hyphenate name and a multi-hyphenate resume––, in his 55 years of life, he was an adventurer, a geologist, a spy, a dinosaur scientist, one of the founders of paleobiology, the world’s first airplane hijacker, a founder of the field of Albanian studies, a cosplay artist, and a murderer. Born in 1877 in Transylvania, the Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás may have been, except perhaps as a pub quiz answer, lost to history since his death, but in his lifetime he had an outsized impact on several scientific disciplines, central European politics and nationalisms, and, unfortunately, the man who he lived with until a murder-suicide ended both of their lives. Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays, our monthly conversation podcast, to support the show! ----more---- SOURCES: Gëzim Alpion, “Baron Franz Nopcsa and His Ambition for the Albanian Throne,” BESA Journal 6, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 25–32 Gareth Dyke, “The Dinosaur Baron of Transylvania,” Scientific American, October 1, 2011, https://www.scie

"If you have to take an beautiful enslaved convert boy from another province to become your lover, and then you fall hopelessly in love with him, and then promote him and he attains great power, do be aware than he might actually want to take your throne." Somehow, this extremely specific lesson was forgotten by two generations of rulers. Join us in a trip back to the court of 1300s Delhi for a story of love, lust, intrigue, revolution, and, in the words of a historian of the time, "the results of pampering young men and catamites." Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Indira Chatterjee, "Alienation, Intimacy and Gender: Problems for a History of Love in South Asia," in Ruth Vanita ed., Queering India: Same-Sex Love And Eroticism In Indian Culture And Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002) Abraham Eraly, Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (Delhi: Penguin India, 2014) Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same

Marthe Hanau built a several-hundred-million-franc financial powerhouse: which turned out to be a fraud. Her investors had been promised returns of 8% interest on savings and in investments forty percent a year —but by the time she died in prison, they were owed a hundred and fifty five million francs. Some people even credit her spectacular swindle to the political confluence that brought Leon Blum and his popular front to power in France at the end of the 1930s. This is the fascinating tale of just how far one woman was able to go to accumulate wealth and power by any means necessary. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Stéphanie Bee, "La Bancquiére des Annès Folles," Univers-L, January 11, 2020, https://www.univers-l.com/portrait_marthe_hanau.html Janet Flanner, "The Swindling Presidente," The New Yorker, August 18, 1939, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/08/26/annals-of-crime Paul Jankowski, Stavisky: A Co

Today's episode is about England and its capacity to be deeply weird. Weget into one of England's weirdest, bloodiest, and maybe horniest moments, the English Reformation: a time of enormous tumult and violence, but also new ideas that reconfigured and reshaped the world. Today’s Bad Gay is perhaps an unlikely and unfamiliar candidate, but one whose life and loves sheds a light on that time: it’s the theologian, reformer, and Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, 38831st edition (Penguin UK, 2004) P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Archbishops of Canterbury (Tempus, 2006) “John Whitgift History,” John Whitgift Foundation(blog), accessed March 18, 2024, https://johnwhitgiftfoundation.org/about-us/john-whitgift-history/. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphics

Warning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and workplace sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Many people may have seen Maestro, a biopic about the American conductor Leonard Bernstein, a handsome and extroverted communicator. The next most famous gay Jewish conductor of the 20th century was, in many ways, Bernstein’s opposite. Neither handsome nor extroverted, he made his musical mark not as a flamboyant podium acrobat or someone who communicated with the public but as a musician’s musician. His career ended after years of rumors culminated in several serious allegations of sexual harassment and assault, including against teenaged boys. We talk about beauty and power and what it means when people who make great art also do terrible things.  Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Michael Cooper, “Met Opera to Investigate James Levine Over Sexual Abuse Accusation,” T

This episode has everything: a tyrannical little boy king, a dictator who wanted to overthrow the Roman pantheon and install a meteorite as the object of a new monotheism, prostitution and vestal virgins, and drowning your party guests in rose petals. We break down Elagabalus: the myth, the legend, the gender-bending icon and the searcher for the biggest dicks in the Roman Empire. Subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Cassius Cocceianus Dio, Roman History: Books 71-80, trans. E. Cary, New issue of 1927 ed Edition (Harvard University Press, 1927) Edward Gibbon and Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes 1 to 6: Volumes 1-3, Volumes 4-6, Reprint Edition (Everyman’s Library, 2010) Harry Sidebottom, The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome (Oneworld Publications, 2022) Elijah Burgher, “Our Lady of the Latrines – Western Exhibitions,” https://westernexhibitions.com/exhibition/elijah-burgher/ A

Today’s subject was an uneducated woman who was born in approximately 1880 and rose in her nearly 70 years of life from enslavement to sex work to female king. She was  a leader of her community of Enugu-Ezike in present-day Nigeria and a collaborator with British colonialism in the region. Finally removed from power by British officials and local elders because she participated in a ritual in a way that only men were supposed to, the complex life of Ahebi Ugbabe helps tell the story of the colonization and decolonization of Nigeria and of the similarities and the differences between the sex-gender systems we are used to in the contemporary west and the vast array of possibilities in those sex-gender systems throughout different human societies. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Our intro music is Arpegg

Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised.  A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and careers of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Both frustrated writers from the North of England making their way in the repressive, damp climate of the postwar UK, they were sent to prison for defacing library books into brilliant collage art. But when Orton achieved fame and success, the pressure was too much for Halliwell to bear. And their disturbing pattern of traveling to Tunisia to abuse children casts a pall on any simple attempt to recuperate them as heroes. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Ilsa Colsell, Philip Hoare, and Leonie Orton Barnett, Malicious Damage: The Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (Donlon Books, 2013) Prick Up Your Ears (Curzon Film Distributors, 1987) James Fox, “The Life

Are you wearing the Chanel boots? Yes, we are. A white-haired, powdered, starch-cuffed petty dictator who ruled over the expanding business with an iron fist, stopping every once in a while to make a misogynist or racist public comment, Karl Lagerfeld was one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry as it shifted into late capitalist hyperdrive. Come for the racist and misogynist public comments, stay for Lagerfeld's great love, Jacques de Bascher, who may more perfectly epitomize Evil Twink Energy than anyone we've discussed on our show. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. Click here to buy our book, BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY. ----more---- SOURCES: Christian Allaire, “The Incredible Dandy Style of Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld’s Longtime Partner | Vogue,” Vogue, April 27, 2023, https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/jacques-de-bascher-dandy-style-karl-lagerfeld-partner Irina Baconsky, “Jacques de Bascher: An Exhibition

Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation on politics and culture, here or by clicking "Subscribe" on Apple Podcasts. Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! As usual, we're making our contribution to family holiday entertainment with an hour-plus podcast about sodomy. Today's program, recorded live at Podfest Berlin in October 2023, profiles two artists. We start with the gay Jewish pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon, whose story is a snapshot of the complexities of aa changing English society in the Victorian era, full of darkness, violence and repression, but lit too by a sense of a sort of waking dream of the possibilities of a rapidly shrinking world and modernising world. He was animated by those dreams, intoxicated by them, but his own desires would come into conflict with a society that was scared by these changes and would use all the tools in its power to halt them. Coming up the rear is Sascha Schneider, a German painter, sculptor, and bodybuilding instructor (does he, you know, run a bodybuilding

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 each other with dildos carved out of statues of the Virgin. Improbably, the film is based on a true story: and within it, and within its subject's life, there are important themes of power, gender transgression, sin, belief and deviance that are worth discussing in more detail. Today, we discuss the 16th century mystic nun, lesbian, possibly demonically possessed and possibly visionary heretic, Benedetta Carlini. Our paperback is available now! ----more---- SOURCES: Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Reprint édition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.   ———. “Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Sister Benedetta Carlini.” Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 751–58.   Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists o

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 different times and places, and a gay teen romance that ends, alas, with being stabbed to death in the bathtub.  Order our book in paperback for a free e-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Louis Crompton, Homosexuality & Civilization, Annotated edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) Koichi, “The Gay of the Samurai,” Tofugu, September 30, 2015, https://www.tofugu.com/japan/gay-samurai/ Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 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.

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 BC. We’re going to be talking about someone who in 21 short years of life rose from a low class status to being one of the most powerful imperial officials in China – all by becoming the favorite of the Emperor. Their passion was so renowned it led to the creation of what remains a Chinese idiomatic expression for homosexuality. But we’ll also be talking about prevailing bisexuality in the Han dynasty court, the reception culture of this story both in China and outside it then and now, and how people in both China and the West have adopted this story. Pre-order our paperback now for a free e-book! ----more---- Howard Chiang, “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China: Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Gender & History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 629–57, https://d

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 idea of an easy history of “lessons we can learn”. How did this man manage to be both an avant-garde poet and a gossip columnist, a communist revolutionary and a High Anglican devotee, a labour organiser and a lord? Or perhaps more accurately, how did he manage to inhabit all these roles with a level of seeming sincerity and honest commitment? Was he an honest man, or a devious one? A man driven by fidelity, or by treachery? Perhaps we’ll get to the bottom of it when we discuss the life of Tom Driberg, the Lord Bradwell, journalist, socialist, MP, Chairman of the Labour Party, and cocksucker. Pre-order our book in paperback and get a free e-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (London: Quartet Books, 1980). Francis Wheen, The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg ; Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Out

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 Restrepo, the Black Widow. Born in 1943 in Cartegena, on the north coast of Columbia, she became the so-called "Queenpin," and adopted all the macho tropes of the gangster. We argue she wasn't the biggest gangster at the head of her cartel, but one of the smallest gangsters in a whole world of cartels that have worked to bring the fruits of South America’s land into the United States market, at the cost of millions of human lives. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free e-book! ----more---- SOURCES: José Guarnizo Álvarez, “Colombia’s ‘Cocaine Queen’ Living in Obscurity When She Was Shot Dead,” EL PAÍS English, September 13, 2012, sec. International, https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/09/13/inenglish/1347536945_696771.html Episode 2: Berner Interviews Michael Corleone Blanco (Full Episode), 2019, https://www.youtube

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 oscillated between an austere Protestantism and a sensualism he associated with the so-called "Orient," and who elevated pederasty above sodomy in a way that helps us understand the often-disfiguring influence of upper-class male sexual desires on the construction of the 20th century gay male identity. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History, electronic resource, Theory Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) Andre Gide, If It Die . . .: An Autobiography, New Ed edition (New York: Vintage, 2001) Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (Vintage, 2012) Andre Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard, Reissue edition (Vintage, 2014) Mary McAuliffe, Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoi

Today we welcome special guest (and Associate Professor in History at the University of Cambridge) Arthur Asseraf to talk about Mustapha Ben Ismaïl, a terrifyingly ambitious twink who rose from being an illiterate street beggar to Prime Minister on the strength of the king's love for him –– and whose disastrous policies helped bring an end to Tunisia's independence.  Arthur's Twitter. Arthur's faculty page. ----more---- SOURCES: Ramy Khouili & Daniel Levine-Spound, Article 230: A History of the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Tunisia, available online: https://article230.com/en/article-320-eng/…   Marcel Gandolphe, ‘Une figure tunisienne: Mustapha ben Ismaïl’, Revue tunisienne, 144, mars-avril 1921, p.83-87   Khayr al-Din al-Tunsi, Memoirs, (ed. Mohamed-Salah Mzali and Jean Pignon), Tunis, 1971.   Ibn Abi Dhiaf, Ahmad, Ithaf Ahl al-zaman bi Akhbar muluk Tunis wa 'Ahd el-Aman (إتحاف أهل الزمان بأخبار ملوك تونس وعهد الأمان), (1990 edition), Tunis.   Jean Ganiage, Les Origines du Protectorat fra

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 apartment, photos allegedly depicting young cadets from the national military university in compromising positions. 29 cadets are expelled, discharged, and/or punished, Ballvé thrown in jail, and the government collapsed, toppled by a right-wing coup promising moral cleanup.  Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Demaría, Gonzalo. Cacería. Primera edición. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2020.   ———. Jugos de Amor e Guerra. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, 2019.   Encarnación, Omar Guillermo. Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.   Espinoza, Lucas E, and Rosalva Resendiz. “Los Secretos de La Redada de Los 41 (The Secrets of the Raid of the 41): A Sociohistorical Analysis of a Gay Signifier.” In NAACS Annual Co

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 the Suppression of Vice. The Mozart of bisexual drama, sword-fighting crossdressing opera singer Julie D'Aubigny burned through a dizzying series of lives, loves, husbands, mistresses, swordfights, operatic performances, lovers, and successes at the Paris Opera before dying in a convent in her early 30s.  Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! SOURCES “Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes: Julie D’Aubigny.” In The Dublin University Magazine, 408–10. William Curry, Jun., and Company, 1854. Blackmer, Corrine, and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. 0 edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Carlton, Genevieve. “Meet The Sword-Fighting, Bisexual Opera Singer Who Broke All The Rules In 17th-Century France.” All That’s Interesting, March 3, 2022. https://allthatsint

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 least one delusional queen who can't stop lying about his life. If you give him firearms and crystal meth, he turns into Andrew Cunanan. If you elect him to Congress, he turns into George Santos, who we argue is as likely as anyone else to become the first gay President of the United States. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! SOURCES: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/27/pete-buttigieg-police-shooting-south-bend-indiana https://gothamist.com/news/listen-george-santos-eviction-tapes-show-him-begging-to-feed-pet-fish-mulling-public-assistance https://forward.com/fast-forward/529798/george-santos-jewish-american-republican-congress/ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/george-santos-9-11-attacks-