Bad Gays – Details, episodes & analysis

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 with striking dance theatre that integrated ballet technique into storytelling. His charisma, abuses of power, and boundary-obliterating working methods helped define an idea of choreographer-as-genius that still disfigures dance today.

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SOURCES:

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/97274711/the-real-life-drama-behind-west-side-story

https://www.dummies.com/article/academics-the-arts/performing-arts/what-was-the-golden-age-of-broadway-297863/

https://www.commentary.org/articles/terry-teachout/what-jerome-robbins-knew-that-leonard-bernstein-didnt/

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-jerome-robbins-west-side-story-un-american-activities-committee-32460/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/happy-hundredth-jerome-robbins   Jerome Robbins: By Himself: Selections from his letters, journals, drawings, photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir (ed. Amanda Vaill)   Wendy Lesser: Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance   Jerome Robbins - Something to Dance About, dir. Judy Kinberg Our intro is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

 

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 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.

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 monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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SOURCES:

Cassius Cocceianus Dio, Roman History: Books 71-80, trans. E. Cary, New issue of 1927 ed Edition (Harvard University Press, 1927)

Edward Gibbon and Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes 1 to 6: Volumes 1-3, Volumes 4-6, Reprint Edition (Everyman’s Library, 2010)

Harry Sidebottom, The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome (Oneworld Publications, 2022)

Elijah Burgher, “Our Lady of the Latrines – Western Exhibitions,” https://westernexhibitions.com/exhibition/elijah-burgher/

Anthony Birley, trans., Lives of the Later Caesars: The First Part of the Augustan History, with Newly Compiled Lives of Nerva & Trajan, Reprint edition (Harmondsworth, Eng. ; Baltimore etc.: Penguin Classics, 1976).

Our intro music is "Arpeggia Colorix" by Yann Terrien. Our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

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 way that only men were supposed to, the complex life of Ahebi Ugbabe helps tell the story of the colonization and decolonization of Nigeria and of the similarities and the differences between the sex-gender systems we are used to in the contemporary west and the vast array of possibilities in those sex-gender systems throughout different human societies.

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SOURCES:

Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner

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 books into brilliant collage art. But when Orton achieved fame and success, the pressure was too much for Halliwell to bear. And their disturbing pattern of traveling to Tunisia to abuse children casts a pall on any simple attempt to recuperate them as heroes.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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SOURCES:

Ilsa Colsell, Philip Hoare, and Leonie Orton Barnett, Malicious Damage: The Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (Donlon Books, 2013)

Prick Up Your Ears (Curzon Film Distributors, 1987)

James Fox, “The Life and Death of Joe Orton,” The Sunday Times, November 22, 1970

John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, 1st edition (Berkeley: Univ of California Pr, 2000)

Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, Reprint edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996)

“Joe Orton,” Front Row (BBC Radio 4, August 11, 2017), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08zzly6

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner

 

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 public comments, stay for Lagerfeld's great love, Jacques de Bascher, who may more perfectly epitomize Evil Twink Energy than anyone we've discussed on our show.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

Click here to buy our book, BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY.

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SOURCES:

Christian Allaire, “The Incredible Dandy Style of Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld’s Longtime Partner | Vogue,” Vogue, April 27, 2023, https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/jacques-de-bascher-dandy-style-karl-lagerfeld-partner

Irina Baconsky, “Jacques de Bascher: An Exhibition,” 032c, March 11, 2020, https://032c.com/magazine/jacques-de-bascher-an-exhibition

Holly Brubach, “School of Chanel,” The New Yorker, February 19, 1989, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/02/27/school-of-chanel

John Colapinto, “Karl Lagerfeld’s Fashion Empire,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/19/in-the-now

Brock Colyar, “The Man in an 18-Year Relationship With Karl Lagerfeld,” The Cut, February 20, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/who-was-jacques-de-bascher.html

Daniel Harris, “The Electronic Funeral: Mourning Versace,” The Antioch Review 56, no. 2 (1998): 154–63, https://doi.org/10.2307/4613651

Beatrice Hazlehurst, “Karl Lagerfeld Depicts Hitler in Political Cartoon to Criticize Angela Merkel - PAPER Magazine,” October 12, 2017, https://www.papermag.com/karl-lagerfeld-depicts-hitler-in-political-cartoon-to-criticize-angela-merkel

Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, “Diet Book Deep Dive: The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” Maintenance Phase, accessed February 14, 2024, https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/9898517

Anisha Mansuri, “The Met Gala: Ignoring Lagerfeld’s Islamophobia and Misogyny,” The New Arab (The New Arab, October 18, 2022), https://www.newarab.com/opinion/met-gala-ignoring-lagerfelds-islamophobia-and-misogyny

William Middleton, Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld (New York, NY: Harper, 2023)

Melissa Minton, “Karl Lagerfeld’s Most Controversial Quotes over the Years,” The New York Post, April 28, 2023, sec. Page Six, https://pagesix.com/article/karl-lagerfeld-most-controversial-quotes/

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, Reprint Edition (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2006).

“Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed February 12, 2024, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/a-line-of-beauty

“King Karl,” Kids of Dada, accessed February 12, 2024, https://www.kidsofdada.com/blogs/magazine/11625457-king-karl

Our intro and outro music are, respectively, Arpeggia Colorix, by Yann Terrien, and a tune written for us by DJ Michael Oswell Graphic Designer.

 

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-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

 

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 transgression, sin, belief and deviance that are worth discussing in more detail. Today, we discuss the 16th century mystic nun, lesbian, possibly demonically possessed and possibly visionary heretic, Benedetta Carlini.

Our paperback is available now!

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SOURCES:

Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Reprint édition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.   ———. “Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Sister Benedetta Carlini.” Signs 9, no. 4 (1984): 751–58.   Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.   Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Reprint edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.   “The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine - Journal #92.” Accessed June 6, 2023. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/205298/the-word-made-fresh-mystical-encounter-and-the-new-weird-divine/.   Our intro and outro music are, respectively, Arpeggia Colorix, by Yann Terrien, and a tune written for us by DJ Michael Oswell Graphic Designer.

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!

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SOURCES:

Louis Crompton, Homosexuality & Civilization, Annotated edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)

Koichi, “The Gay of the Samurai,” Tofugu, September 30, 2015, https://www.tofugu.com/japan/gay-samurai/

Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

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 Emperor. Their passion was so renowned it led to the creation of what remains a Chinese idiomatic expression for homosexuality. But we’ll also be talking about prevailing bisexuality in the Han dynasty court, the reception culture of this story both in China and outside it then and now, and how people in both China and the West have adopted this story.

Pre-order our paperback now for a free e-book!

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Howard Chiang, “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China: Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Gender & History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 629–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01612.

Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Reprint edition (Berkely, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992)

Martin W. Huang, “Male-Male Sexual Bonding and Male Friendship in Late Imperial China,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 2 (2013): 312–31

M. P. Lau and M. L. Ng, “Homosexuality in Chinese Culture,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 13, no. 4 (December 1, 1989): 465–88, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00052053

Tze-lan Deborah Sang, “Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949),” in Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing’ai in Republican China (1912–1949) (Duke University Press, 2000), 276–304

James D. Seymour, review of Review of Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (1992): 141–43

Ping-Hsuan Wang, “I’m a ‘Cut-Sleeve’: Coming out from a POC Perspective,” Narrative Inquiry 31, no. 2 (July 12, 2021): 338–57, https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19088.wan

Intersections: Interview with Samshasha, Hong Kong’s First Gay Rights Activist and Author,” accessed May 15, 2023, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue4/interview_mclelland.html.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.