Bad Gays

THIS IS A TRAILER! SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE OR PATREON TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE  We have heard your pleas. The news has made them even more urgent. We're going to do a whole main feed Peter Mandelson episode in Season 10: but for now, here's a taste of our legally-bounded musings on his arrest and what it says about UK political culture. We also talk about a Wired article about a supposed gay mafia in the tech world that doesn't deliver on its promises, and take Gaggony Guncles questions from an enby worried about their relationships with their cis family and a cis woman wondering what to call her enby coparent. Plus, we descend into madness imagining Liza Minnelli hosting a floor mop infomercial.    

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming men. Originally his illustrations were controversial because of his graphic depictions of gay sex, of sodomy and cocksucking and fisting in a pre-liberation, pre-internet age. Today, things have changed so much you can buy Tom branded products in department stores like Selfridges, and books of his drawings in Barnes and Noble. But at the same time, his representations of Black men and of Nazi aesthetics have drawn new criticisms, even while the fisting and piss and cock-sucking have become perfect home decorations. And the influence of his work on gay male sex cultures, on ideals of queer masculinities, and especially on leather scenes, remains enormous and contested. ----more---- SOURCES: F. Valentine Hooven III, Tom Of Finland: His Life And Times (St. Martin's, 1992) Arnie Kantrowitz, Swastika Toys, in Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson, pp. 193–209. Hunter Scott,  “Facing Sameness: Reconsidering the Radicality of Tom of Finland.” InVisible Culture 36, https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.262a8f58.   Carta Monir, "Morally Erect," Lux Magazine, https://lux-magazine.com/article/tom-of-finland/ https://worldcrunch.com/in-the-news/tom-of-finland-double-life-of-the-gay-icon-who-changed-a-nation/  https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/lgbtqia-in-helsinki/tom-of-finlands-helsinki/ https://kunstkritikk.com/the-cult-of-iconified-homosexuality/ 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.

William Beckford, who was born not in Bath but in London in 1760, is someone for whom property, in every sense of the word, was the defining factor in his life. He was a novelist, a member of parliament, a collector of art, antiquities, and books, a travel writer, and a builder of great palaces; he regarded himself as a man of culture, but he made his cultural qualities known by buying and building things. And he could afford to buy and build things - ridiculous things - because he was rich, extraordinarily rich, richer than we can possibly imagine. So all his status, his legacy, the thing that made him who he was, came from his wealth, and his wealth came from another form of property he owned: chattel slaves. And that wealth also enabled him to pursue troubling relationships with boys. ----more---- SOURCES James Lees-Milne, William Beckford (Compton Press, 1976) J. W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (Oxford University Press, 1932) Guy Chapman, William Beckford (Scribner, 1937) Caroline Stanford, Beckford’s Tower History Album (National Trust) A number of essays on Rictor Norton’s website about him including “The Fool at Fonthill” https://www.rictornorton.co.uk/ 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.

This trailer is just a preview–for the full episode, click here to subscribe on Patreon, or subscribe directly through Apple Podcasts. We heard you, we see you, we're here for you: it's our take on Heated Rivalry, or at least on the Discourse surrounding it––straight women loving gay romance, social media shitstorms targeting out actors, and shipping. Then we take Gaggony Guncles questions from someone in love with an English public school boy who can't open up and a woman demanding our analysis of the fg hg (or fruit fly!) phenomenon.    

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Sheffield DocFest, it's E. M. Forster: who in his 91 years of life was one of Britain’s most successful novelists. He was raised in a climate of Victorian propriety so extreme he went to university without understanding human reproduction, and then fell in with a secret society known for alternative thinking and "aggressive" homosexuality. Italy — and later India — represented paradises of freedom and liberation in comparison to the cramped, horrid Edwardian upper middle classes. Erotic contact with the working-class/brown Other was the waters of Lourdes for this uptight Englishman, who was never able to transcend his own position. ----more---- SOURCES Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, 2010). https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-man-out-of-time-e-m-forsters-a-passage-to-india-at-100-and-the-legacies-of-colonialism-236324 https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/25279 http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/cambridge_apostles_S.pdf https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/06/forster-love-story/ https://variety.com/2017/film/global/james-ivory-why-wont-u-s-actors-do-nude-scenes-starting-with-call-me-by-your-name-stars-1202581485/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/diversity/lgbt-history/fwwhomosexuality/forster-fww/# https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/e-m-forster-my-policeman https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/alan-hollinghurst/poor-dear-how-she-figures https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/books/review/Toibin-t.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.