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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-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon, whose story is a snapshot of the complexities of aa changing English society in the Victorian era, full of darkness, violence and repression, but lit too by a sense of a sort of waking dream of the possibilities of a rapidly shrinking world and modernising world. He was animated by those dreams, intoxicated by them, but his own desires would come into conflict with a society that was scared by these changes and would use all the tools in its power to halt them. Coming up the rear is Sascha Schneider, a German painter, sculptor, and bodybuilding instructor (does he, you know, run a bodybuilding academy?) whose work characterized both the Weimar-era masculinist gay political movement and four generations of Germans’ racist attitudes towards Native Americans. 

Enjoy! Wear headphones if Grandma is around. Season 7 drops very soon. 

To view the slideshow, click here.

SOURCES

Michael J. Cowen, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (State College: Penn State University Press, 2012)

Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy, "Simeon Solomon Two-Part Biography," Simeon Solomon Research Archive, 2000-2023, https://www.simeonsolomon.com/simeon-solomon-biography.html

Karl-May-Gesellschaft, https://www.karl-may-gesellschaft.de/index.php?seite=mininewsdetails&sprache=de&showdetail=133

Minneapolis Institute of Art, "Whatever Happened to the First Gay Art Star?" June 3, 2021, https://medium.com/minneapolis-institute-of-art/what-really-happened-to-the-first-gay-art-star-e5b830e19f86

H. Glenn Penny, Kindred By Choice: Germans and American Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Erwin in het Panhuis, "Karl Mays ziemlich offen schwuler Künstfreund," queer.de, 20. September 2020, https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=37110