Heads up! This is the episode where we solve gender.

Famously a "construct," it turns out Mx. Gender has been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

This podcast is only 70 minutes long so we're sticking to the last 5,000... but still. Not bad.

Join Bash and his honoured guests this week – Kit Heyam and Marty Davies – as they delve into the deep-cut history of gender, long before we had words like cis, trans, or nonbinary.

Kit Heyam is the author and historian behind Before We Were Trans, our guiding text for this episode. And Marty Davies is the founder of Trans+ History Week, an award-winning initiative now in its third year in the UK.

You might think – like Bash did for an embarrassingly long time – that gender and sex binaries have been the norm since the beginning of time.

Everyone has "male" and "female" right? Husband and wife, penetrator and pregnancy-haver. And that's that.

That's actually wrong. It's waaaay messier than that. As long as there have been humans, there has been what Kit Heyam calls "gender disruption."

This essentially experimental and creative approach to gender is in fact the norm – the one thing we find in almost every civilisation.

As if that weren't enough, here are some other essential things you'll learn about in this episode:

• Ancient Egypt's female pharaohs, who insisted on wearing their beards
• (Plus, why their high priests didn't like gender creativity – spoiler alert: it fucked with their revenues!)
• A 17th century stand up comic who once wore trousers in St. Paul's Cathedral (WITCH!!!!! KILL IT!!!!!)
• The elegant and silk-draped wakashu, who were a third-gender class of adolescent sex workers in early modern Tokyo
• And the truth of why writing trans+ history is so fucking hard but so necessary.

As always thanks for listening, and if you love what you hear, please leave us a FIVE STAR ONLY review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

You can follow Historical Homos on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ if you care about gay people at all.

You can also listen to the QueerAF podcast on Apple, Spotify or your fave podcast app, including all the episodes that came out this season with Trans+ History Week.

And subscribe to QueerAF's free newsletter to understand the LGBTQIA+ world every Saturday, or find them on Instagram and Bluesky.

Episode Credits:

Written, researched, and hosted by Bash. Special thanks to guests Kit Heyam and Marty Davies. Edited by Alex Toskas and Jamie Wareham.

A QueerAF and Historical Homos Production.

She was young, she was hot, and she was hated. But did she eat pu$$y?

Marie Antoinette was many things: a teen bride, a fashion icon, and according to Sofia Coppola, a big fan of The Strokes (I knew I liked this bitch!)

She's famous nowadays for losing her head, but did she also give it? And to whom / with what degree of relish?

In this week’s episode, Bash is joined by bestselling author and royal dirt-digger Eleanor Herman (Sex with Kings, Off With Her Head) to untangle the messy myth and misogyny surrounding France’s last queen.

From bedroom rumors to an actual revolution, we trace how Marie’s alleged lesbian love affairs and slutty reputation helped take down the French monarchy.

But how much of a labial libertine was dear old Marie?

Did she really let they/them eat cake, or did she prefer to have hers eaten?

And why did the revolutionaries care so much about who she was (or wasn’t) shtupping?

Get ready to cover:

👑 Marie’s teenage trauma: a 14-year-old Austrian girl dropped into horny French court politics

👑 Her disastrous marriage to Louis XVI, France’s least sexy locksmith

👑 Count Axel von Fersen: the hot Swede who became her baby daddy and was the only man in France who loved her

👑 The lesbian propaganda: 18th-century porn pamphlets and political smear campaigns that took Marie down

👑 Marie’s tragic downfall—and why she still makes us feel some kind of way about money, sex, fashion, and power

Plus: masquerade balls (aka cruising for cis-hets), Versailles orgies with her stepbrother, and the story of how Marie Antoinette's lesbian reputation became a 19th century pickup line for aspiring sapphics.

You can find out more about women in power by reading Eleanor Herman's books at her website.

Please also follow Historical Homos on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ if you care about gay people at all.

Episode Credits

Written and hosted by Bash.

Guest: Eleanor Herman

Edited by Alex Toskas.

Produced by Dani Henion.

Once upon a time—aka the 90s, when I bravely decided to be born—gay marriage was the only thing we queers could talk about.

But why? Why were we so hell-bent on getting married? And how did the fight for marriage equality impact real people on the ground?

In this episode, Bash is joined by writer and memoirist Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, to explore the long, messy, and horny history of gay marriage in America—from deportation threats in the 1950s to a rainbow-lit White House under Obama.

Along the way, we ask:

💍 Who decides what a marriage is? Who gets to say who/what you are?

🏳️‍🌈 What happens when a bi(coastal) relationship collides with the full force of the U.S. immigration system?

🐴 Is a man marrying a man the same as a man marrying a horse? (The question, historically, was asked.)

Also featuring:

– Clive Boutilier, the Canadian gay man deported for being a “psychopath” (1950s medical slang for "gay")

– A 1996 government letter from the Department of Justice that literally said to two gays: “A legal marriage cannot exist between two faggots.”

– Bill Clinton wriggling out from under the S&M grip of DOMA

– And one very filthy reading from our beloved guest...

Not to mention this very real quote:

🗣️ “Ordinarily a homo is psycho, but many are not.” — actual Supreme Court justice, 1967

You can follow Historical Homos on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ if you care about gay people at all.

Episode Credits

Written and hosted by Bash.

Guest: Jeremy Atherton Lin

Edited by Alex Toskas.

Produced by Dani Henion.

Imagine a world where you're Russian, gay, and happy about it.

No this is not propaganda from the ultra-secret "Pinko" department of the Kremlin (they def have one of those).

This is the very real story of the magnificent Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, one of the world's greatest composers and a big old homosexual.

He wrote the 1812 Overture, The Nutcracker, and the world’s gayest violin concerto (because it's "exuberant").

He also did Swan Lake, by the way, so perhaps most importantly, we wouldn't have Natalie Portman calling herself a WHORE on a mirror in red lipstick without him.

This week, Bash is joined by Princeton professor of music history Simon Morrison — author of Tchaikovsky’s Empire — to explore what it meant to be gay (and fabulous) in 19th-century Russia.

Together, they dismantle the myth of the tortured, closeted genius and paint a much queerer, more joyful picture of Tchaikovsky’s life.

💅 Topics include:

• Why Tchaikovsky thrived as a gay man (in certain elite Russian circles, of course)

• His disastrous lavender marriage to Antonina Milyukova

• The kinky rumors, the tragic myths, and the straight up gay lies about his death

• His read on Wagner (who made him yawn) and the dish on the famous Violin Concerto, dedicated to his hottie violinist crush, Iosif Kotek

Along the way, we ask the hard questions: Where were the best gay bars in St. Petersburg? Is Eugene Onegin queer-coded? And why does being gay make us better artists?

Stick around at the end for a special conversation with Oliver Zeffman, founder of Classical Pride, about this year’s line-up of queer classical music events in London and LA.

You can follow Historical Homos on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ if you care about gay people at all.

Written and hosted by Bash. Guest: Professor Simon Morrison. Edited by Alex Toskas. Produced by Dani Henion.

What's so gay about food? (Besides the fact that you use your mouth for it.)

The answer, OF COURSE, lies in 18th century France.

In fact, food's sexy origins go even further back, all the way to the ancients: from Eve's naughty apple to Ancient Roman oysters (they made their orgasms more intense!).

But it was the invention of the restaurant in 18th century Paris that made food sexy, dangerous, and ultimately, gay.

By the 20th century, figures like Oscar Wilde and the Bloomsbury Set had made sure it was officially queer to eat out. Their associations of food with aesthetics and art ran counter to Anglo-American fears of public pleasure.

Eventually, it became more normal for people other than the French to talk about food, and even to try making their daily fare at home more edible. Thus began the modern association of caring about good food with homosexuality.

We end this episode discussing the lasting impact of those associations on our modern relationship with food.

Join us for this open buffet on food's queer history, featuring Professor Rachel Cleves, author of Lustful Appetites: A History of Good Food and Wicked Sex.

Together we uncover:

• The origins of the restaurant (aka Whore Dinner)
• 18th century Viagra broth
• Virginia Woolf's gay best friend who made English food more French (thank GOD)
• The Lavender Scare's impact on American food
• How capitalism made food less gay for straight men

You can follow Historical Homos on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ if you care about gay people at all.

Written and hosted by Bash. Guest speaker: Rachel Cleves. Edited by Alex Toskas. Produced by Dani Henion.

Why do bottoms always die in Greek mythology?

If you're a fan of Greek myth, you know the gods love to act like humans: they love, they fuck, they fight...they throw dinner parties.

But they also love to kill us. When gods show up on Earth, it typically means someone's about to get pregnant or dead, real quick. (Or both.)

And the pattern holds for the gay Greek myths. (With admittedly fewer pregnancies carried to term.)

Zeus and Apollo never seem able to keep their mortal boyfriends alive, while demigods like Herakles and Achilles also find it tricky to maintain their lovers' pulses.

Why is this? What's going on psychologically, historically, narratively, and yes, erotically, when the ancients were sang of so much LITERAL twink death in their myths?

Join Bash and Liv Albert, renowned Greek myth expert and host of the Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! podcast this week as they discuss:

• Herakles and Hylas being afraid of women (and the bottomless depths of ancient Greek misogyny)
• Apollo, the god of being a total DICK all the time, and Hyacinth, a beautiful youth slain in a totally avoidable "frisbee tragedy"
• Achilles and Patroclus, the famed comrades-at-arms, who die for one another in most toxic fashion

You can follow Historical Homos for more on our ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ too, if you care about gay people at all.

Written and hosted by Bash. Guest host: Liv Albert. Edited by Alex Toskas. Produced by Dani Henion.

The year is 1395. The city: London. The crime: an "unmentionable, ignominious vice" commonly known as sodomy.

And the perp? A rascally, resourceful enigma named John Rykener, who enters the court records "calling herself Eleanor," wearing women's clothes, and defying gravity / everything we know about medieval gender.

But John/Eleanor Rykener – or Jeleanor, as they shall henceforth be known to scholars – doesn't map easily onto our modern categories of "trans," "queer," or "sex worker."

Jeleanor lived and presented as both a man and a woman, depending on when it suited them. That made them highly creative with their gender, especially when it came to their day job, but does it mean they were "trans"?

They learned the cons that kept them surviving and thriving from a local madam. But in medieval London, to be a prostitute was to be a woman. The court is clear that Jeleanor was AMAB and that their crime was sodomy, not prostitution. So can we say they were seen as a sex worker in their own time?

And finally, they took to bed men and women from all walks of medieval life, for money and for fun. Does that make them queer or "bisexual"? Can we trust this court record to tell us about Jeleanor's experience of sexual desire? Did the court care more about the gender of Jeleanor's conquests, or their ties to the Church?

Join Bash and the brilliantly clever medievalist, Dr. Mireille Pardon, as we unpick and unpack the surviving legal record that details Jeleanor's deliciously saucy life.

Along the way we'll learn about:

• Streetside sodomy in the Little Ice Age

• Common cons to make sure your medieval john pays
• The wages for a sex worker in the 1390s
• Why the cops REALLY cared about busting trans sex workers 600+ years ago

You can follow Historical Homos for more on our ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠⁠ too, if you care about gay people at all.

Credits: "Running up that hill Cover in Early Middle English BARDCORE/MEDIEVAL version. Original by Kate Bush." Accessed June 2025 on YouTube. Owned by @the_miracle_aligner.

What comes after the collapse of capitalism? Mass famine? Global war? Environmental destruction? Oh wait, all of that's already happening!

It seems like, as a species, we're at a bit of a breaking point. Which means revolution is afoot, and we have to wonder: what the hell happens when it gets here?

For most of us, though, it's not easy to project what life looks like after the next economic revolution.

It's even more complex to wonder what happens to queer life: do we keep all our labels – "gay" "cis" "queer" – without a capitalist framework? Can we still go on vacation with our chosen families? Will there be any good gay bars?!

In this bonus episode, we team up with sociologist and author, Eman Abdelhadi, to imagine the radical, queer, and–get this–genuinely optimistic future that The Much-Awaited Revolution could offer us.

Drawing from her speculative oral history novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072, we explore what a world organized around care, kinship, and collective survival might look like.

Books mentioned:

• Everything for Everyone – Iman Abdelhadi & E.M. O'Brien

• Family Abolition – M.E. O'Brien

• Enemy Feminisms – Sophie Lewis

• The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin

• Against the Grain – James C. Scott

• The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison

You can follow Historical Homos for more on our ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠, and you should ⁠⁠sign up to our newsletter⁠⁠ too, if you care about gay people at all.

What if it's actually your butthole that will lead the revolution?

This week, we're getting penetratingly political with writer and podcaster Josh Rivers (⁠Busy Being Black⁠), as we explore the radical legacy of Mario Mieli's ⁠Towards a Gay Communism⁠.

Here's the thing: Capitalism doesn't just steal your time and money—it also reinforces the gender binary, nuclear families, and heterosexual urges (which are totally normal to have!).

It turns out Capitalism is extremely tied up in our sex lives, because our sex lives have economic value.

And for that reason, The Big C is terrified of anything that rocks our sexy boats. According to Mieli, eros – ancient Greek for romantic-sexual desire – is a liberating force, which has the power to free us from the constrained categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual." These "mutilations," as he calls them, only developed to reinforce the gender and sexual "norms" Capitalism needs to survive, the very same ones that keep us reproducing and addicted to respectability.

In this time of Globapocalypse, we're all looking for answers as to (a) what has led us here and (b) how we can move forward. It could be that part of the answer is in our pants, so join us this week as we discuss:

• Eros as substructure: how sex and desire determine with our society's economic logic

• The radical nature of anal sex (especially The Gay Version)

• The capitalist scam of the "nuclear" family

• Homo-normativity and the gay betrayal of queer radical Marxists

We also talk The Italian Job (what I call cruising in Rome), "educastration," "psychonazis," and the emotional dilemma of getting Obama’s inauguration date tattooed on one's arm (the solution is to get more tattoos of people doing sex on each other apparently).

Fabulous Books To Read:

• Towards a Gay Communism – Mario Mieli

• One-Dimensional Queer – Roderick Ferguson

• The Prophetic Imagination – Walter Brueggemann

We're back my little Hormones! Join Bash and his heavy flow of genius guests this season for another no-fucks-given romp through humanity's Big Gay Past. (We all have one!)

Come for the history, stay for the laughs, and if you're lucky, leave with a boner.

Please note: Erectile Gift With Purchase (EGWP) not guaranteed. First cum, first served.

We'll be penetrating your tight little earholes – with consent – on May 29, 2025.

Hit that follow/subscribe button, so you don't miss a thing.

Love you...bye!