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Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

A podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? Hosted by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Learn more: www.badgayspod.com

Bad Gays

With apologies for the delay, it's your episode of Extra Bad Gays for November of this year. We start by breaking down Ben's fight with a gay underwear brand, Huw's writing residency in an abandoned Austrian castle, and the Netflix series Boots: come for the homonationalism, stay for the shower scenes. Then we premiere our new Gaggony Guncles theme song and tackle a listener question about the ethics and practice of tourism.

For the full episode, subscribe on Patreon or Apple Podcasts.

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays November 2025: Tourism House Down Boots

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!

Today we’re discussing a strange and compelling figure, the photographer Angela Calomiris. We can start at the end of her life, as a denizen of Provincetown, the little resort at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts that has long been a haven for LGBTQ people. Angie had a reputation as a formidable figure in the town as a tough, and not always fair, businesswoman. She had made good money through some stiff deals. But she was also regarded as generous, if eccentric, by others. Yet behind Angie’s role as a local doyenne, she trailed a dark secret about her life as a young photographer in New York. How did Angela end up in Provincetown, and why was the mere sight of her name enough to induce horror in a fellow photographer? In today’s episode, we’ll discuss Angela’s life of FBI collaboration, naming names, secrets and lies.

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Lisa Davis, Undercover girl : the lesbian informant who helped the FBI bring down the Communist Party (Imagine, 2017)

Lisa Davis, The Spy Who Came in from the Closet https://glreview.org/article/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-closet/

David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare (Chicago University Press, 2004)

Mason Klein, The radical camera : New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 (Yale University Press, 2011)

Carol A. Stabile, The Broadcast 4: Women and the Anti- Communist Blacklist (Goldsmith's Press, 2018)

Sophia Starmack, The rise and fall and P’town rebirth of Angela Calomiris https://eu.wickedlocal.com/story/provincetown-banner/2017/05/18/the-rise-fall-p-x2019/4502034007/

Veronica A. Wilson ‘I chose the values I regarded as American’: Sexuality, ethnicity, and FBI informant Angela Calomiris https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/lwish/tcc/2021/00000020/00000020/art00005

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner. This podcast may contain copyrighted material, and its use is under the principles of fair use for purposes such as commentary, criticism, and parody. All rights belong to the respective copyright holders.

Angela Calomiris

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!

Today's subject, Jacob Israël de Haan, wrote one of the first gay dutch novels. "What is it that I long for," he asked. "The sanctity of Israel or an Arab male prostitute?" Born in 1881 in the Netherlands, he was assassinated by the Haganah paramilitary at the age of 42 in Palestine, having moved there to establish Zion, and then having turned on the Zionist project because of its treatment of the Arabs. His love of young Arab men was both a source of scandal and a very troubling source of evolving solidarity.

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SOURCES

https://archive.ph/wkF8y#selection-1069.0-1074.0

https://www-literatuurgeschiedenis-org.translate.goog/teksten/pijpelijntjes?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_5/critical_urgencies/giebels.htm

https://www.gerthekma.nl/ewExternalFiles/Jacob Israël de Haan. Pederast poet between Amsterdam and Jerusalem.pdf

https://rabbidunner.com/assassination-in-the-holy-city/#_edn12

https://glreview.org/article/article-964/

https://archive.ph/wkF8y

https://www.the-low-countries.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TLC_24_Chronicle_WASSING_NASSAU.pdf

https://www.the-low-countries.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TLC_24_Chronicle_WASSING_NASSAU.pdf

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jacob-de-haan-political-poet

https://glreview.org/article/article-964/

https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/haan-jacob-israel-de

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/c9843d1e-4703-45eb-a317-4de724d686a1/The multiple lives of Jacob Israel de Haan.pdf

https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Jacob Israel de Haan - A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine.pdf

Jacob Israël de Haan

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!

Let us take ourselves back to a very exciting time: we’re talking London, at the turn of the 18th century. The city is the largest in Europe, and growing - it’s passed the half a million mark and by the end of the century will have doubled. Crime was rife, and getting worse. The law was administered by a pay-to-play criminal justice system: and today's subject, Charles Hitchen, got rich playing both sides while touring through London's infamous "molly houses," back rooms of taverns or gin houses, where queer men could meet, cruise, and even fuck. These developed a much richer culture, with their own slang, faux marriage rituals, and drag performances including a queen giving birth to a wheel of cheddar cheese.

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SOURCES:

Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: Jonathan Wild and the Emergence of Crime and Corruption as a Way of Life in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 1985)

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century (Verso, 2006)

Rictor Norton, The Georgian Underworld, https://rictornorton.co.uk/gu00.htm.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner. This podcast may contain copyrighted material, and its use is under the principles of fair use for purposes such as commentary, criticism, and parody. All rights belong to the respective copyright holders.

Charles Hitchen

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!

Many people in our audience will have seen Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, an exploration of Black and Latinx ball culture in New York City. One of the film’s primary interview interlocutors is Dorian Corey, who is one of the film’s most quotable characters. Corey's life helps us explore the history of drag from balls for enslaved people in the 1870s to today. And did you know that Corey knew, during all those serene interviews in Paris Is Burning, that the man she had murdered in self-defense and not trusted police to handle it (would you?) was mummified in the closet behind her. 

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SOURCES

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19931218/1737662/deceased-drag-show-star-leaves-mummy-mystery-behind-in-closet

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/24/burning-down-the-house-debate-paris-is-burning

https://files.eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5381/2016/06/16101213/hooks_paris-is-burning.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html

https://www.swervmagazine.com/entertainment-2/pioneers/

https://queermusicheritage.com/drag-pearl.html

https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2005/The-Gay-30S/

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/drag-queen-slave-ball/ 

https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/the-legendary-hamilton-lodge-ball-home-at-the-rockland-palace-dance-hall-in-harlem/

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/queens-and-queers-rise-drag-ball-culture-1920s

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935316?seq=1

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/24/burning-down-the-house-debate-paris-is-burning

https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/08/dorian-corey-1937-1993-performer.html

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Dorian Corey

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!
 
Today's episode is about three very different men and how their lives overlapped. The first was a pioneering rock and roll musician who stunned audiences with his fast-paced hits in a quite macho rock world: a huge influence on musicians from Elvis and The Beatles to James Brown, Prince, Patti Smith, Andre 3000, and more. It was a very eclectic mix and he lived an equally fast-paced private life off stage. The second man was a Seventh Day Adventist preacher from the deep south of the United States who preached about sin. The third person was a young Black queer man thrown out of his home by his domineering pastor father in the late 1940s who became a drag performer under the name Princess LaVonne, performing in clubs and for traveling medicine shows and dressing in capes and turbans, singing obscene songs about anal sex while cruising bathrooms for sexual contacts with men. These were all one and the same man: Richard Wayne Penniman, better known by his performing name, Little Richard.
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SOURCES
 

Abdurraqib, Hanif. "What Little Richard Deserved." The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-little-richard-deserved

Freeman, Scott. "Remembrance: How Little Richard Invented Rock'n'roll in Macon, Georgia." ArtsAtlanta. https://www.artsatl.org/remembrance-how-little-richard-invented-rock-n-roll-in-macon-georgia/

Little Richard: I Am Everything. HBO, dir. Lisa Cortes 

Little Richard, Live in Paris, 1966: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7TWclEcASU&themeRefresh=1

Nyong'o, Tavia. "Too Black, Too Queer, Too Holy." The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/12/too-black-queer-holy-why-little-richard-never-truly-got-his-dues-turbaned-drag-queen-sexual-underworld

Smith, Jami. "The Drag Queens Who Helped Little Richard Invent Rock And Roll." https://www.songsthatsavedyou.com/p/drag-queens-who-helped-little-richard

White, Charles. The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (Da Capo Press, 1994)
 
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner. This podcast may contain copyrighted material, and its use is under the principles of fair use for purposes such as commentary, criticism, and parody. All rights belong to the respective copyright holders.

Little Richard

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon for the full episode.

It's Extra Bad Gays LIVE! from Helsinki, where we discuss Donald Trump–our first straggot President–and his pardoning of George Santos. Then, Ben plugs an upcoming queer leftist novella you'll probably love, freshly translated into English. And two questions from gay guys in their forties invite the Gaggony Guncles to reflect on sex, desire, and the number homophobia has done on our psyches. Cruise carefully, catamites!

Smalltownnovella:

https://uglyducklingpresse.org/product/smalltownnovella/

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays October 2025

This month on our subscriber-only show, we discuss the supposed A-Gays of Trump's Washington. Will the people working for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party get their faces eaten, or is their work paradoxically evidence that LGBT liberalism, now in its flop era, actually did deliver something on its own terrible terms? Then, we take on a Gaggony Guncles question from a listener curious how to navigate coming out to a friend who has learned to use their pronouns correctly but seems to take them as an individual exception to broader enby- and transphobia.

Join our subscriber community to support our work and hear the full episode.

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays September 2025

For the full conversation, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or on our Patreon.

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays August 2025

Today, we welcome music writer Hannah Pezzack to talk about the experimental electronica band Coil – namely, its two frontmen and only consistent members: vocalist Geoff Rushton, who performed under the stage name John Balance, and Peter Christopherson, nicknamed “Sleazy." At the heart of it all was an intense interest in the occult: in magic, alchemy, and esoteric symbolism. But just as central was their homosexuality: a queerness expressed through sexualised violence, the taboo, bodily fluids — blood, sweat, and scat — and an obsession with self-annihilation.

Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS on Patreon or Apple Podcasts to join the community of subscribing members who make episodes like this possible, and get our monthly chat show about gay culture and politics!

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SOURCES:

 

Hayes Hampton. The Invocation of the Black Sun: Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work of Coil, in Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume I – Twisted Roots (Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018)

 

David Keenan. England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground, Revised and Expanded Edition (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023; originally published 2003)

 

Cormac Pentecost. Man is the Animal, zine issues 1–4, (Temporal Boundary Press)

 

Genesis P‑Orridge. Nonbinary (New York: Abrams Press, 2022)

 

Nick Soulsby. Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023)

 

Spencer Sunshine. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege (London: Routledge, 2024)

 

Cosey Fanni Tutti. Art Sex Music (London: Faber and Faber, 2017)

 

“AN INTERVIEW WITH COIL (Harvest History Month Pt. I),” conducted by Malahki Thorn, Heathen Harvest (originally published 1 April 2004), https://4ibrecords.com/2014/03/05/an-interview-with-coil-harvest-history-month-pt-i/

 

Hannah Pezzack on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hanapezzack/?hl=en 

Hannah Pezzack on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/hannah-pezzack 

Many thanks to Alina Valentina and Ruben Verkuylen for their invaluable technical assistance.

Gratitude to Elina Tapio (who first introduced me to Coil!) and Marco Segato – both part of eoobe – for keeping the spirit of John and Sleazy alive through their music: https://eoobe.bandcamp.com/ 

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays October 2025

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