Rotha Lintorn-Orman

This week, on Mandelson: A Homosexual History, we cover the 1992 UK election and the birth of New Labour. Subscribe on Patreon to support our work and stay a week ahead on this miniseries! If Huw's Margaret Thatcher wasn't enough to turn your stomach, try his John Major on for size. Neil Kinnock loses the 1992 election. John Smith becomes leader of the Labour Party, flanked by two feuding up-and-coming reformers named Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Peter Mandelson buys a lovely home in Notting Hill with questionable financing, and sets himself to defeating Clause IV once and for all. The exciting but fundamentally reactionary Cool Britannia cultural moment helps us understand how tentative New Labour were about rocking the cultural boat. Their victory in 1997 was more about stasis than change.  

Subscribe on Patreon to hear Episode Three now, get our monthly Extra Bad Gays episodes, and stay a week ahead on the miniseries. Last week we looked at Mandelson’s early years, and his move from a flirtation with Marxism to being firmly on the right of the Labour Party. We also discussed the left-right split in the Labour Party, and how, in the 1980s, that became a full blown civil war. This week, it's time for the 1987 General Election, and for the paranoid homophobia of late-Eighties Britain: section 28, sleaze, AIDS panic, and tabloid hell.

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to hear Episode Two of Mandelson: A Homosexual History now, and to stay a week ahead as the miniseries continues. They call him the Prince of Darkness. Peter Mandelson's decades-long political career is a skeleton key to everything that's gone wrong in Western politics in the last forty years. He's a spin doctor, a sometime minister, and a networker whose downfall through the Epstein files now threatens the survival of the British government. This miniseries examines his gay life and times, tracing the collapse of mass politics, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the political history of homosexuality in the UK, from decriminalisation to Section 28, from Sleaze to Gay Marriage. A Faustian story, Mandelson: A Homosexual History plays out on a world-historical scale, but at its heart is driven by the failures and compromises of greed and lust. In Episode One, we trace the emergence of Mandleson’s career in the Labour Party, and the formation of the networks of power that would help hollow out British social democracy in the years of Thatcher and Blair. 

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!   Daniel Dunglas Home always knew he wasn't like the other boys. Not because he was gay, but because, while they were out on the sports field playing rugby, he was communicating with the dead. Despite being a huge celebrity in Victorian England, today Home is almost unknown. In this special episode, academic and novelist Avery Curran talks to Huw about one of the most significant mediums of 19th century Spiritualism, and what his life and reputation can tell us about gender and sexuality in high society at the time. ----more---- SOURCES:   Heyday of a Wizard - Jean Burton   The First Psychic - Peter Lamont   Experiences in Spiritualism with DD Home - Viscount Adare   ‘Very hot indeed’: Intimacy between men in Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home  - Avery Curran, Journal of Victorian Culture   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 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.