Bad Gays

Extra Bad Gays June 2024: Pride From Stonewall to Subaru (Trailer)

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.

Christopher Marlowe (with Will Tosh)

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, and especially how they understood their own sex gender system at the time. On today's special episode, we talk about one of his contemporaries, someone probably less well known but who has been deeply influential for queer writers and theatre practitioners through the ages: Christopher Marlowe.

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 queer life, culture, and politics.

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.

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 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, except perhaps as a pub quiz answer, lost to history since his death, but in his lifetime he had an outsized impact on several scientific disciplines, central European politics and nationalisms, and, unfortunately, the man who he lived with until a murder-suicide ended both of their lives.
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays, our monthly conversation podcast, to support the show!

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 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 story of love, lust, intrigue, revolution, and, in the words of a historian of the time, "the results of pampering young men and catamites."
Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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, they were owed a hundred and fifty five million francs. Some people even credit her spectacular swindle to the political confluence that brought Leon Blum and his popular front to power in France at the end of the 1930s. This is the fascinating tale of just how far one woman was able to go to accumulate wealth and power by any means necessary.
Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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 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 the theologian, reformer, and Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift.
Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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 most famous gay Jewish conductor of the 20th century was, in many ways, Bernstein’s opposite. Neither handsome nor extroverted, he made his musical mark not as a flamboyant podium acrobat or someone who communicated with the public but as a musician’s musician. His career ended after years of rumors culminated in several serious allegations of sexual harassment and assault, including against teenaged boys. We talk about beauty and power and what it means when people who make great art also do terrible things. 
Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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 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.