Bad Gays

Today, special guest Liz Rosenfeld discusses the choreographer Jerome Robbins. Born in New York to Jewish immigrants, Robbins pursued dance and radical politics––until, under the threat of being blacklisted and exposed for his sexuality, reporting on his former comrades to the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. As one of Broadway's star choreographers, he helped define Broadway's Golden Age...

Starting with a reading from Martin Duberman's book Stonewall about the riots that kicked off a revolution, we reflect on the history of increasing corporate involvement in Pride, some unreasonably horny Subaru ads, a Raytheon Pride slogan from this year that made both of us momentarily speechless, and the politics and ethics of engaging with corporate pride in a moment of backlash. Enjoy this sne...

Today's special guest is Will Tosh, Head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe, London, and the author of a new book, “Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.” Having answered the obvious question in the prologue, the book becomes a sort of emotional biography of Shakespeare’s private life, but uses that his life and his work to ask broader questions about Elizabethan England, a...

We close out our season with the story of a dashing tomboy who was the first woman to found a British political party. The only problem: that party was the British Fascists.  Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation about queer life, culture, and politics. ----more---- SOURCES: Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Saint Martin's Press, 1963) Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism:...

Enjoy a sneak preview of EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly, subscriber-only show on contemporary queer politics and culture. For the full episode and a new episode every month, click 'subscribe' on Apple Podcasts or join our Patreon by clicking here.

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...

"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 st...

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 Bl...

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...

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...

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...

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 w...

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...

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 pu...

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-Raph...

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 transgress...

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, Homosexu...

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 Emp...

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 a...

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 gang...

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-...

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 fac...

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 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 p...

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...