American Hysteria American Hysteria +

Justin McHenry, author of the forthcoming book Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place, tells me an expansive tale of an alleged long lost continent first written about in early scientific works, then harnessed by esoteric eccentrics and new age mystics, mutating over the decades into fantastical fuel that is embedded in the strangest of conspiracy theories and cults to this very day.

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American Hysteria is produced and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Edited by Miranda Zickler
Sound design by Clear Commo Studios
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To unpack the movie trope of the Murderous Man in a Dress, prolific horror film analysts and writers BJ and Harmony Colangelo discuss with me all the complicated trans and drag “representation” in movies like Sleepaway Camp, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We’ll look at how these crossdressing killers have affected the psyche of Americans through the decades, whether there is anything redeemable about these characters, and what they have to tell us about the horrors of the present day.

Listen to This Ends at Prom
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Read Harmony's thoughts on The Silence of the Lambs

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American Hysteria is produced and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Edited by Miranda Zickler
Sound design by Clear Commo Studios
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For part two of our series, we are starting in the anti-gay moral panic of the 50s and 60s to see how the drag scene continued to transform underground, with female impressionists dazzling the starlets they tried to copy as closely as possible. We'll be introduced to a nationwide pageant circuit which allowed drag queens the opportunity to compete just like Miss America contestants, leading to a popular and well-reviewed documentary that revealed the controversial personal lives of these performers. Then we'll drop right into the Gay Liberation Movement where rifts between gay men, lesbian feminists, and drag queens led to a harsh animosity. Next we'll look at the southern tradition of Womanless Weddings that stretches back to the 1800s, where well-to-do men acted out every part of ceremony as a community wide ritual of hilarity. Finally, we'll travel all the way back to 16th century London where a moral panic around the theater's evil influence very much included the boys and men who dressed in woman's costumes to play their roles.

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American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Sound design by Clear Commo Studios
Research Assistant: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Voice Acting by Will Rogers
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This series will cover the moral panics and cultural crazes that have long followed the controversial art form once called "female impersonation." For part one of our two part series, we'll start back in the 1800s to look at the earliest drag balls put on by formerly enslaved men as well as the police raids that made front page news. We'll learn about a famous Vaudeville star known for his hyper-feminine on-stage and hyper-masculine off-stage personas. We'll explore a time when gay was in, the 1930s Pansy Craze, and the political crackdown that inevitably followed. And finally, we'll cover the smash-hit drag musicals put on by the manly soldiers of WWII and the closeted GIs who may have woven in a secret campy code. Throughout, we'll start to analyze how the culture reacted to female impersonation based on the changing events of the decades, bestowing on these performers both massive success and frightening suppression, usually depending on who was performing and what their intentions were.

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Tell us your teenage tale on our Urban Legends Hotline!

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Sound design by Clear Commo Studios
Research Assistant: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Voice Acting by Will Rogers
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our upcoming series, Early Drag Queens, will cover the surprising relationship between "female impersonation" and American masculinity in the time before the gay and transgender civil rights movements. This episode will give historical context with excerpts from these previous episodes:
Gender Reveal Parties
Trash Talks Shows
Horror Movies pt. 1

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This episode was produced by Riley Smith
Produced and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
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As the social media and the news got word of the new cases of leprosy found in Florida, a slew of misinformation and stigmatization followed. José P. Ramirez Jr. is the author of the memoir Squint: My Journey With Leprosy (Hansen's Disease), which leads readers through the mystery illness that took over his life as a teenager in the 1960s, his diagnosis at age 20, and his years spent at the only facility for people with Leprosy in the United States, but it was far more than just a hospital. Today José will dispel myths and share his devastating and uplifting life story so we can better understand the disease that still strikes a biblically-inspired fear in Americans.

If you have any questions or comments, you can email José at joseramirezjr@hotmail.com
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American Hysteria is produced and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Edited by Miranda Zickler
Sound design by Clear Commo Studios
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices