Bad Gays

By Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

What's Bad Gays about?

A podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? Hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Learn more: www.badgayspod.com

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Bad Gays episodes:

04.25.2024
Rotha Lintorn-Orman
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...
04.22.2024
TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays April 2024 - Tory Sex Scandals and Capote's Feud
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.
04.18.2024
Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás
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...
04.09.2024
Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah
"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...
04.02.2024
Marthe Hanau
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,...
03.19.2024
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...
03.12.2024
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...
03.05.2024
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...
02.27.2024
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...
02.20.2024
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...
02.13.2024
Karl Lagerfeld
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...
12.25.2023
Simeon Solomon and Sascha Schneider - Live from Podfest Berlin
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,...
06.06.2023
Benedetta Carlini
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...
05.30.2023
Tokugawa Iemitsu
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...
05.16.2023
Dong Xian
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...
05.09.2023
Tom Driberg
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...
05.02.2023
Griselda Blanco
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...
04.25.2023
André Gide
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...
04.11.2023
Mustapha Ben Ismaïl (with Arthur Asseraf)
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...
04.04.2023
Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero
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...
03.28.2023
Julie D’Aubigny
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...
03.20.2023
George Santos
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...
12.25.2022
Jack Saul LIVE! at Foyles in London with Shon Faye
Happy Christmas! It's Bad Gays Live! Relive our reading of the Jack Saul chapter – covering the life and times of the Victorian sex worker and pornographer – from our book BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY at Foyles in London, with the inimitable...
10.05.2022
Magnus Hirschfeld (with Laurie Marhoefer)
It's the Magnus Hirschfeld episode. We invited Laurie Marhoefer – Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, and one of our most-cited historians ever – to discuss their new book on Hirschfeld, called Racism and the Making...
06.08.2022
US Tour!
Our UK tour has been fun -- and the US is next! Ben (sadly Huwless) will be stopping in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, New York City, and Boston in the back half of June. All the events are available for...
06.01.2022
Eugen Sandow (with Ruby Hann)
Happy Pride! We invited Ruby Hann, who completed her MA in History in 2020 and her MSc in History in 2021, both at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about Eugen Sandow, the bodybuilder who spread the cult of...
05.19.2022
Our UK Tour! (US Coming Soon)
Our book, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History is now available for pre-order from Verso –– and we're making many, many stops across every corner of Great Britain (Northern Ireland, we're sorry and we'll be there soon) to promote it, including...
03.15.2022
Jeffrey Dahmer
For white, suburban, heterosexual middle America, Jeffrey Dahmer, like AIDS, was the natural, even the righteous, consequence of homosexual promiscuity. He remains one of the exemplary constructions of the supervillain serial killer, the perfect subject of a true crime story....
03.01.2022
John Wojtowicz
It's a dog day afternoon: today's episode profiles the bank robber John Wojtowicz, who infamously (and as memorialized in Sidney Lumet's 1975 film DOG DAY AFTERNOON) held up a bank in 1972 to pay for gender-affirming surgery for Elizabeth Eden,...
02.22.2022
Cressida Dick (Part Two)
Unusually for this show, which normally focuses on long departed historical figures, today we’re going to talk about someone who’s still very much in the news. Until last week, she was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s police force,...
02.15.2022
Cressida Dick (Part One)
Unusually for this show, which normally focuses on long departed historical figures, today we’re going to talk about someone who’s still very much in the news. Until last week, she was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s police force,...
02.08.2022
Freddie Mercury
For a time, one of the world's most famous rock stars – singer of stadium rock anthems that still signify foot-stomping machismo – existed as an avatar of the most exuberant, feared, liberation-era forms of homosexuality: going from a 1970s...
02.01.2022
Franco Zeffirelli
A very special opera queen episode profiling an opera queen gone wrong: the Italian opera and film director (of 1968's famous Romeo and Juliet) who fought fascists as a partisan in the hills over Florence, mingled with Visconti and Cocteau...
01.25.2022
Anne Bonny
Are you ready to have your timbers shivered and your mainbrace spliced? Today’s subject is a mysterious one, a historical figure whose life and reputation are confused by propaganda, romance and mythology: the Irish pirate Anne Bonny. We'll use her...
01.18.2022
Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg
The "Eulenberg Affair," a series of media scandals about homosexual behavior at the highest levels of the German Imperial court, dragged on in the press for years as it made and broke careers in journalism, sexology, and the court while...
01.11.2022
Ernst vom Rath
This Nazi diplomat was assassinated by the Jewish activist Herschel Grynszpan –– and his death became a pretext for the murderous pogroms of Kristallnacht. Grynszpan's lawyer, the flamboyant anti-fascist Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, pioneered in this case what was perhaps the...
01.04.2022
Joe Carstairs
The eccentric inheritor of an enormous oil fortune and gender non-conforming-lesbian-trans man (we'll talk about it!) who dated Marlene Dietrich, raced speedboats, and turned their private Bahamian island into a domain over which they ruled over native people with an...
12.24.2021
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was an artist whose radical generosity teetered on the edge of self-obliteration –– and he sometimes pulled others over the edge with him. Many of our listeners will be familiar with Bacon’s work, or at least would recognise...
08.10.2021
Pacchierotto and Florentine Sodomites (with Max Fox)
Not a huge amount is known about Pacchierotto, a sodomite who was convicted and publicly humiliated in Florence, Italy, in 1486, but his story tells us much about the changing fortunes of sodomites at the time, and the important role...
04.13.2021
Arthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert)
The crimes, trial and execution of Utah citizen and devout Mormon Arthur Gary Bishop seemed to be the manifestation of many of both the public fears and moral panics of the United States in the 1980s. 'Stranger Danger', pornography, homosexuality...
02.23.2021
Dennis Cooper (with Diarmuid Hester)
On the (in)famous author of the George Miles cycle, The Sluts, and many other classic works of radically transgressive gay fiction. Joining Ben to tackle Cooper's work–as challenging to traditional notions of identity-driven and self-consciously pretty gay fiction as it...
12.22.2020
Violette Morris
Violette Morris, a powerhouse athlete with 14-inch biceps, discovered a love for trousers and fast driving while piloting ambulances for the Red Cross during the First World War. But her outrageous and mannish style – she dated Josephine Baker, smoked,...
12.14.2020
Camilla Hall
Camilla Christine Hall was born on March 24th, 1945, in St Peter Minnesota. Her father was a Lutheran pastor, and her childhood was suburban and unremarkable. Like many of her generation, she would become involved in the anti-war movement and...
12.08.2020
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein is remembered as a novelist, playwright, poet, and, art collector –– and the hostess of a Paris salon that gathered the cream of interwar modernism, including Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Matisse. A semi-open lesbian, her books include Q.E.D.,...
12.01.2020
Prince Albert Victor
Today’s subject is the man who would be King, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, firstborn son of Edward VII, Grandson of Queen Victoria, known to his friends and family simply as “Eddy." Wrapped up in a sizzling...
11.24.2020
Truman Capote
Born in a violent and difficult childhood in the American South, Truman Capote would rise to the highest levels of literary celebrity, praise, and fame: even joining the highly-exclusive jet set of 1960s and 1970s high society. Several of his...
11.17.2020
Carl Van Vechten
A man with a passion for the dangerous, subversive, and avant garde; who eschewed the middle brow and loved the urbane and modern. Known in his life not just as a man of taste, but a tastemaker, someone who set...
11.10.2020
Benjamin Britten
The composer Benjamin Britten was a central figure of 20th century music; and the national composer that Britain had been searching for since the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. He never shook his Communist and pacifist sympathies –– even...
11.03.2020
Jeremy Thorpe
This is a story of sex, death and political malfeasance that will make Teddy Kennedy look like Anne of Green Gables. It has everything you’ve come to expect from a Bad Gays story about the English upper classes — psychosexual...
10.27.2020
Liberace
This "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love" rose to stardom playing "classical music without the boring parts" and didn't need to stay in the closet because he wore its entire...

What's Bad Gays about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Bad Gays episodes:

Rotha Lintorn-Orman

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays April 2024 - Tory Sex Scandals and Capote's Feud

Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás

Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah

Marthe Hanau

John Whitgift

James Levine

Elagabalus

Ahebi Ugbabe

Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

Karl Lagerfeld

Simeon Solomon and Sascha Schneider - Live from Podfest Berlin

Benedetta Carlini

Tokugawa Iemitsu

Dong Xian

Tom Driberg

Griselda Blanco

André Gide

Mustapha Ben Ismaïl (with Arthur Asseraf)

Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero

Julie D’Aubigny

George Santos

Jack Saul LIVE! at Foyles in London with Shon Faye

Magnus Hirschfeld (with Laurie Marhoefer)

US Tour!

Eugen Sandow (with Ruby Hann)

Our UK Tour! (US Coming Soon)

Jeffrey Dahmer

John Wojtowicz

Cressida Dick (Part Two)

Cressida Dick (Part One)

Freddie Mercury

Franco Zeffirelli

Anne Bonny

Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg

Ernst vom Rath

Joe Carstairs

Francis Bacon

Pacchierotto and Florentine Sodomites (with Max Fox)

Arthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert)

Dennis Cooper (with Diarmuid Hester)

Violette Morris

Camilla Hall

Gertrude Stein

Prince Albert Victor

Truman Capote

Carl Van Vechten

Benjamin Britten

Jeremy Thorpe

Liberace