86 episodes

A podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? What can we learn by focusing on the dark side of queer history?

Bad Gays Extra Bad Gays

    • History
    • 4.5 • 8 Ratings

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A podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? What can we learn by focusing on the dark side of queer history?

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher

    John Whitgift

    John Whitgift

    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.
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    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 Graphicsdesigner

    • 1 hr 5 min
    James Levine

    James Levine

    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.
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    SOURCES:
    Michael Cooper, “Met Opera to Investigate James Levine Over Sexual Abuse Accusation,” The New York Times, December 3, 2017, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/arts/music/james-levine-sexual-misconduct-met-opera.html
    Michael Cooper, “Met Opera Reels as Fourth Man Accuses James Levine of Sexual Abuse,” The New York Times, December 5, 2017, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/arts/music/james-levine-met-opera.html
    Michael Cooper, “James Levine’s Final Act at the Met Ends in Disgrace,” The New York Times, March 12, 2018, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/arts/music/james-levine-metropolitan-opera.html
    Matt Dobkin, “Conductor James Levine Spurns Opera Gossips,” New York Magazine, January 6, 2006, https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/music/features/15494/; Malcolm Gay and Kay Lazar, “In the Maestro’s Thrall,” The Boston Globe, March 2, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/02/cleveland/cn2Sathz0EMJcdpYouoPjM/story.html
    Ben Miller, “Silence, Breaking,” VAN Magazine, December 7, 2017, http://van-magazine.com/mag/james-levine-silence-breaking/
    Ben Miller, “Shush Money,” VAN Magazine, May 23, 2018, http://van-magazine.com/mag/james-levine-met-opera-hush-money/
    John Rockwell, “Met Opera Changes Managerial Balance,” The New York Times, July 23, 1987, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/23/arts/met-opera-changes-managerial-balance.html
    Emily Saul and Ben Feuerherd, “Met Opera, James Levine Reach Settlements amid Sex Misconduct Claims,” New York Post, August 6, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/08/06/met-opera-james-levine-reach-settlements-amid-sex-misconduct-claims/
    James B. Stewart and Michael Cooper, “The Met Opera Fired James Levine, Citing Sexual Misconduct. He Was Paid $3.5 Million.,” The New York Times, September 21, 2020, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/arts/music/met-opera-james-levine.html
    Anastasia Tsioulcas, “James Levine Accused Of Sexual Misconduct By 5 More Men,” NPR, May 19, 2018, sec. The Industry, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/05/19/612621436/james-levine-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-by-5-more-men
    Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein, “Legendary Opera Conductor Molested Teen for Years: Police Report,” New York Post, December 2, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/12/02/legendary-opera-conductor-molested-teen-for-years-police-report/
    Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein, “Disgraced Met Conductor’s Brother Was ‘in on the Game’: Police Report,” December 9, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/12/09/disgraced-met-conductors-brother-was-in-on-the-game-police-report/
    Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

    • 59 min
    Elagabalus

    Elagabalus

    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/
    Anthony Birley, trans., Lives of the Later Caesars: The First Part of the Augustan History, with Newly Compiled Lives of Nerva & Trajan, Reprint edition (Harmondsworth, Eng. ; Baltimore etc.: Penguin Classics, 1976).
    Our intro music is "Arpeggia Colorix" by Yann Terrien. Our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

    • 1 hr 2 min
    Ahebi Ugbabe

    Ahebi Ugbabe

    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 Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner

    • 50 min
    Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

    Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

    Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. 




    A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and careers of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Both frustrated writers from the North of England making their way in the repressive, damp climate of the postwar UK, they were sent to prison for defacing library books into brilliant collage art. But when Orton achieved fame and success, the pressure was too much for Halliwell to bear. And their disturbing pattern of traveling to Tunisia to abuse children 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 and Death of Joe Orton,” The Sunday Times, November 22, 1970
    John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, 1st edition (Berkeley: Univ of California Pr, 2000)
    Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, Reprint edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996)
    “Joe Orton,” Front Row (BBC Radio 4, August 11, 2017), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08zzly6
    Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner
     

    • 1 hr 5 min
    Extra Bad Gays February 2024: Pride Flags in Gaza, Homonationalism, and Pinkwashing

    Extra Bad Gays February 2024: Pride Flags in Gaza, Homonationalism, and Pinkwashing

    Jumping off from the now-infamous photograph of an Israeli soldier flying a pride flag in the rubble in Gaza, we discuss pinkwashing, homonationalism, and temporalities of gay civil rights that understand Europe and the United States as ahead of the 'backwards' Middle East.

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
8 Ratings

8 Ratings

Otsonikerros ,

Excellent listening!

Came for the bite-sized looks into queer history, stayed for the class analysis. This podcast offers deep insights into class, sexuality and society and trusts the listener's ability to process complicated and sometimes seemingly contradictory information. This is good listening for anyone interested in queer history that isn't dumbed down or whitewashed.

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