Bad Gays

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Francis Bacon Dec 24, 2021

Show notes

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 his idiosyncratic style if they saw it; sweeps of fleshy paint across black fields of colour, portraying contorted, mangled bodies, racks of hanging meat, and the iconic screaming mouth. But Bacon is almost as famous for the way he lived his life: his raucous partying, brutal barbed tongue, and love of boozing made him an emblem of London’s bohemian Soho scene. What linked his work and his life was an obsession with violence, something that he knew intimately.

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Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)

John Maybury et al., Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, Biography, Drama, Romance (BBC Films, British Film Institute (BFI), Arts Council of England, 1998)

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019)

Richard Curson Smith et al., Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence, Documentary, Biography (IWC Media, 2017)

David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Third edition (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2016).

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.

Pacchierotto and Florentine Sodomites (with Max Fox) Aug 10, 2021

Show notes

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 they played in the politics of the time. In this special episode, Huw talks to Max Fox, editor of Christopher Chitty's Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System about Florentine sodomy in the Renaissance, and Chitty's groundbreaking new book. ----more---- Sources: Chitty, Christopher, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, Duke University Press, 2020 Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, Oxford University Press, 1996 Online Digital Map: Flynn, Aidan, Sodomy and The City: Mapping Fear, Surveillance, Sexuality, and Punishment, University of Toronto, 2018https://utoronto.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=590a95cd059240388f003c49cd722dc9 Scelta di prediche e scritti di fra Girolamo Savonarola. [A cura di] P. Villari [e] E. Casanova. Con nuovi documenti intorno alla sua vita, https://archive.org/details/sceltadiprediche00savo

Arthur Gary Bishop (with David Eichert) Apr 13, 2021

Show notes

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 and childhood sexual abuse became the focus of heated public debate and new religiously-inspired political organisations such as the Moral Majority. Huw is joined by David Eichert, a PhD candidate studying international law, sexual violence, gender and sexuality, to discuss Bishop, his relationship with his Mormon faith, and wider social attitudes towards his crimes.

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SOURCES:

Carlisle, Al, The Mind of the Devil: The Cases of Arthur Gary Bishop and Westley Allan Dodd, Carlisle Legacy Books, 2020
Petrey, Taylor G., Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, University of North Carolina Press, 2020
Nathan, Debbie and Snedeker, Michael, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, iUniverse, 2001
Strub, Whitney, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, Columbia University Press, 2013

Dennis Cooper (with Diarmuid Hester) Feb 23, 2021

Show notes

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 is to the hetero mainstream–is Diarmuid Hester, a radical cultural historian of the United States after 1950, and an authority on sexually dissident literature, art, film, and performance. He is based at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and is the author of the acclaimed new critical biography of Cooper, Wrong.

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SOURCES:

Cooper, Dennis. The Sluts. New York: Da Capo Press, 2004.

Cooper, Dennis. The George Miles Cycle. Five novels, information available here: http://www.dennis-cooper.net/georgemiles.htm.

Hester, Diarmuid. Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 2020.

Dennis Cooper's blog.

Violette Morris Dec 22, 2020

Show notes

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, and cut her breasts off to better fit behind the wheel of a race car – outraged the respectable upper-middle-class world of women's athletics. And when she was cast out of respectable society, she became a Nazi spy and a sadistic torturer known as the "hyena of the Gestapo."

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SOURCES:

Colvin, Kelly Ricciardi. Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness. London ; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Doyle, Jack. “How a Pioneering Lesbian Became the Nazis’ ‘Hyena.’” OZY, May 25, 2015. http://test-2017-elb-web-us-west-2.aws.ozymandias.com/flashback/how-a-pioneering-lesbian-became-the-nazis-hyena/40366. Kessler, Martin. “Violette Morris: Pioneering Female Athlete Turned Nazi Spy.” WBUR, February 24, 2017. https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/02/24/gestapo-hitler-book-anne-sebba. Mansky, Jackie, and Maya Wei-Haas. “The Rise of the Modern Sportswoman.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 18, 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rise-modern-sportswoman-180960174/. Papirblat, Shlomo. “Sporting Champion, Feminist Icon, Nazi Spy? The Extraordinary Life of Violette Morris.” Haaretz.Com. Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-sporting-champion-feminist-icon-nazi-spy-the-crazy-life-of-violette-morris-1.6869492. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008. FemBio: Frauen.Biografieforschung. “Violette Morris.” Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/violette-morris/.

Camilla Hall Dec 14, 2020

Show notes

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 the New Left; unlike many of her generation, she would also become involved in Gay Liberation, and a strange cult-like organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army, which became infamous for bank robberies, murders –– and the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

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SOURCES:

Hearings, Reports and Prints of the United States House Committee on Internal Security.

Honig, Harvey Hilbert. “A Psychobiographical Study of Camilla Hall.” Loyola University of Chicago, 1979. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1788. Lauters, Amy. “On Camilla Hall.” Amy Lauters On Everything (blog), September 3, 2020. https://amylauters.com/2020/09/03/on-camilla-hall/. Matusitz, Jonathan Andre, and Elena Berisha. Female Terrorism in America: Past and Current Perspectives. Contemporary Terrorism Studies. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2020.

Gertrude Stein Dec 08, 2020

Show notes

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., one of the earliest English-language lesbian novels, and Tender Buttons, a book of poems full of allusion to lesbian sexuality. But in the last years of her life, as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein sustained her lifestyle as an art collector and ensured her safety through the protection of powerful Vichy government officials – part of a pattern of involvement in far-right, antisemitic, and fascist politics.

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SOURCES:

Johnston, Georgia. The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography: Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007. Malcolm, Janet. “Gertrude Stein’s War.” The New Yorker. June 2, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/06/02/gertrude-steins-war. Pavloska, Susanna. Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Routledge, 1999. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Reissue edition. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1997. ———. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage, 1990. Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Lincoln: Combined Academic Publishing, 2008.

Prince Albert Victor Dec 01, 2020

Show notes

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 sex scandal, he became a prime example of a British royal story: an intellectually dull man, charmless, with neither cultural interests nor creative talents, but who, due to sheer accident of birth, found himself permitted to indulge all his whims.

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SOURCES:

Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. London: Vintage, 2018. Cook, Andrew. Prince Eddy: The King Britain Never Had. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2009. Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Cleveland Street Scandal. New York: Coward McCann, 1976.

Truman Capote Nov 24, 2020

Show notes

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 short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel". His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television dramas. But Capote would be pursued by demons throughout his life – alcoholism, other forms of addiction, and crippling self-doubt which would end up leading him to destroy his own social reputation.

Visit our website at badgayspod.com for an episode archive, T-shirts, and a link to our Patreon.

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SOURCES:

Als, Hilton. “The Shadows in Truman Capote’s Early Stories.” The New Yorker, October 13, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-shadows-in-truman-capotes-early-stories. Capote, Truman. Answered Prayers. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. In Cold Blood. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Other Voices, Other Rooms. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. Illustrated edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Carl Van Vechten Nov 17, 2020

Show notes

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 the tone for elite cultural society in his lifetime; the white author, critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten became enchanted with the Harlem Renaissance, approached Black cultures as a source of ideas that he could take and exploit, and perpetuated racist stereotypes in his work.

Visit our website at badgayspod.com for an episode archive, T-shirts, and a link to our Patreon.

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SOURCES:

Bernard, Emily. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. 0 edition. Yale University Press, 2013. Holmes, David G. “Cross-Racial Voicing: Carl Van Vechten’s Imagination and the Search for an African American Ethos.” College English 68, no. 3 (2006): 291–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/25472153. Sanneh, Kelefa. “White Mischief.” The New Yorker, February 17, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/white-mischief-2. White, Edward. “The Making of an American.” The Paris Review (blog), May 14, 2014. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/14/the-making-of-an-american/. ———. The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. 1st edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Woolner, Cookie. “‘Have We a New Sex Problem Here?’ Black Queer Women in the Early Great Migration.” Process: A Blog for American History (blog), October 24, 2017. http://www.processhistory.org/woolner-black-queer-women/.

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