Bad Gays

Happy pride! Gather around, we've got a story to tell! For Stonewall weekend, a special treat: writer, critic, and journalist Cameron Cook joins Ben to talk about the one and only Liza through the stories of the bad (and good) gays in her life, from her father Vincente Minnelli to her first husband Peter Allen to her diabolical fourth husband David Gest. Liza learned on her (and our) mother Judy G...

The final episode of our saga: Mandelson's fall from grace in the aftermath of Keir Starmer's election first as leader of the Labour Party and then as one of Britain's most rapidly unpopular Prime Ministers. Can't get enough Mandelson? Subscribe now to Extra Bad Gays to hear our subscriber-only followup discussion with James Butler of the LRB and Juliet Jacques of Suite 212. Mandelson knows too mu...

Today we are reaching the next to last chapter––for now!––of the Mandelson story. Listen to the sixth and final episode now by subscribing to Extra Bad Gays on Patreon. As we are recording this, on 18th May 2026, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is facing a potential leadership challenge and a collapse in legitimacy following two major crises, both of these the responsibility of Peter Mandelson;...

Peter Mandelson has been the definitive comeback kid of British politics, and it’s impossible to ever rule out his return. Listen to Episode Five right now and get Extra Bad Gays every month by subscribing on Patreon! Today, we will learn why he got that reputation as we look at Mandelson in power. The Millennium Dome, a Y2K fever dream! His public outing! A wider cultural shift in attitudes towar...

This week, on Mandelson: A Homosexual History, we cover the 1992 UK election and the birth of New Labour. Subscribe on Patreon to support our work and stay a week ahead on this miniseries! If Huw's Margaret Thatcher wasn't enough to turn your stomach, try his John Major on for size. Neil Kinnock loses the 1992 election. John Smith becomes leader of the Labour Party, flanked by two feuding up-and-c...

Subscribe on Patreon to hear Episode Three now, get our monthly Extra Bad Gays episodes, and stay a week ahead on the miniseries. Last week we looked at Mandelson’s early years, and his move from a flirtation with Marxism to being firmly on the right of the Labour Party. We also discussed the left-right split in the Labour Party, and how, in the 1980s, that became a full blown civil war. This week...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to hear Episode Two of Mandelson: A Homosexual History now, and to stay a week ahead as the miniseries continues. They call him the Prince of Darkness. Peter Mandelson's decades-long political career is a skeleton key to everything that's gone wrong in Western politics in the last forty years. He's a spin doctor, a sometime minister, and a n...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!   Daniel Dunglas Home always knew he wasn't like the other boys. Not because he was gay, but because, while they were out on the sports field playing rugby, he was communicating with the dead. Despite being a huge celebrity in Victorian England, today Home...

THIS IS A TRAILER! SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE OR PATREON TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE  We have heard your pleas. The news has made them even more urgent. We're going to do a whole main feed Peter Mandelson episode in Season 10: but for now, here's a taste of our legally-bounded musings on his arrest and what it says about UK political culture. We also talk about a Wired article about a supposed gay mafia in t...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming men. Originally his illustrations were controversial because of his graphic depictions of gay sex, of sodomy and cocksuck...

William Beckford, who was born not in Bath but in London in 1760, is someone for whom property, in every sense of the word, was the defining factor in his life. He was a novelist, a member of parliament, a collector of art, antiquities, and books, a travel writer, and a builder of great palaces; he regarded himself as a man of culture, but he made his cultural qualities known by buying and buildin...

This trailer is just a preview–for the full episode, click here to subscribe on Patreon, or subscribe directly through Apple Podcasts. We heard you, we see you, we're here for you: it's our take on Heated Rivalry, or at least on the Discourse surrounding it––straight women loving gay romance, social media shitstorms targeting out actors, and shipping. Then we take Gaggony Guncles questions from so...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Sheffield DocFest, it's E. M. Forster: who in his 91 years of life was one of Britain’s most successful novelists. He was raised in a climate of Victorian propriety so extreme he went to university without understanding human reproduction, and the...

It's never too late to give the gift of Bad Gays this holiday season: invite a friend or loved one into our community at https://www.patreon.com/badgayspod/gift This month, we discuss Christmas spirit, the cancellation of the Netflix Marines drama Boots and the death of homonationalism, and then take a Gaggony Guncles question from a listener who needs to hear that He's Just Not That Into You.

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Another episode down under: Andrew George Scott is best remembered to history as the enigmatic “Captain Moonlite”, and the story of his short but eventful life is a fascinating tale of personal conscience, colonialism, and criminality. Born in Ireland, he w...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! The place: Queensland, Australia; a state just recovering from decades of rule by "hillbilly dictator" Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a petty authoritarian with a reputation for brutal homophobia and the even more brutal repression of street protest. The time: the la...

With apologies for the delay, it's your episode of Extra Bad Gays for November of this year. We start by breaking down Ben's fight with a gay underwear brand, Huw's writing residency in an abandoned Austrian castle, and the Netflix series Boots: come for the homonationalism, stay for the shower scenes. Then we premiere our new Gaggony Guncles theme song and tackle a listener question about the eth...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Today we’re discussing a strange and compelling figure, the photographer Angela Calomiris. We can start at the end of her life, as a denizen of Provincetown, the little resort at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts that has long been a haven for LGBTQ peop...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Today's subject, Jacob Israël de Haan, wrote one of the first gay dutch novels. "What is it that I long for," he asked. "The sanctity of Israel or an Arab male prostitute?" Born in 1881 in the Netherlands, he was assassinated by the Haganah paramilitary at...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Let us take ourselves back to a very exciting time: we’re talking London, at the turn of the 18th century. The city is the largest in Europe, and growing - it’s passed the half a million mark and by the end of the century will have doubled. Crime was rife,...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Many people in our audience will have seen Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, an exploration of Black and Latinx ball culture in New York City. One of the film’s primary interview interlocutors is Dorian Corey, who is one of the film’s m...

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!   Today's episode is about three very different men and how their lives overlapped. The first was a pioneering rock and roll musician who stunned audiences with his fast-paced hits in a quite macho rock world: a huge influence on musicians from Elvis and Th...

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon for the full episode. It's Extra Bad Gays LIVE! from Helsinki, where we discuss Donald Trump–our first straggot President–and his pardoning of George Santos. Then, Ben plugs an upcoming queer leftist novella you'll probably love, freshly translated into English. And two questions from gay guys in their forties invite the Gaggony Guncles to reflect on sex, des...

This month on our subscriber-only show, we discuss the supposed A-Gays of Trump's Washington. Will the people working for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party get their faces eaten, or is their work paradoxically evidence that LGBT liberalism, now in its flop era, actually did deliver something on its own terrible terms? Then, we take on a Gaggony Guncles question from a listener curious how t...

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