Today, special guest Liz Rosenfeld discusses the choreographer Jerome Robbins. Born in New York to Jewish immigrants, Robbins pursued dance and radical politics––until, under the threat of being blacklisted and exposed for his sexuality, reporting on his former comrades to the House Committee on Unamerican Activities. As one of Broadway's star chor…

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 corpo…

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 …

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. ----more---- SOURCES: Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Saint Martin'…

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.By Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

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 …

"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 i…

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 swindl…

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 whos…

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 …

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 b…

Today’s subject was an uneducated woman who was born in approximately 1880 and rose in her nearly 70 years of life from enslavement to sex work to female king. She was a leader of her community of Enugu-Ezike in present-day Nigeria and a collaborator with British colonialism in the region. Finally removed from power by British officials and local e…

Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and careers of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Both frustrated writers from the North of England making their way in the repressive, damp climate of the postwar …

Are you wearing the Chanel boots? Yes, we are. A white-haired, powdered, starch-cuffed petty dictator who ruled over the expanding business with an iron fist, stopping every once in a while to make a misogynist or racist public comment, Karl Lagerfeld was one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry as it shifted into late capitalist…

Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation on politics and culture, here or by clicking "Subscribe" on Apple Podcasts. Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! As usual, we're making our contribution to family holiday entertainment with an hour-plus podcast about sodomy. Today's program, recorded live at Podfest Berlin in October 2023, profiles …

Franz Alvardo has watched the world of design evolve and along with it his career from the material to digital. Franz started at a jewelery story and over a ten year career now works as a principal designer at T-mobile and has amassed over 100 million downloads associated with the projects he's worked on. Many have heard of a full-stack developer, …

I'm back after a half a year and ready to start this creative thing all over again. Let's get to work.

What's your favorite Paul Verhoeven film? We knew you were going to say Showgirls–but we'll put in a word for his latest, Benedetta, with Charlotte Rampling acting up a storm and nuns diddling each other with dildos carved out of statues of the Virgin. Improbably, the film is based on a true story: and within it, and within its subject's life, ther…

Through the life of this 17th century Japanese shogun, we explore the role of same-sex relationships in Japanese court culture of the time, the radically different meanings of age and gender in different times and places, and a gay teen romance that ends, alas, with being stabbed to death in the bathtub. Order our book in paperback for a free e-boo…

There’s power in being the king who sits upon the throne, but also power in being the throne upon who the king sits. This was true as ever in the court of Emperor Ai in Han Dynasty China in 22 BC. We’re going to be talking about someone who in 21 short years of life rose from a low class status to being one of the most powerful imperial officials i…

Today’s figure is the sort of character who has been extinguished from British public life today, and maybe that’s for the best. He’s a mass of contradictions, the sort of mass that confuses the idea of an easy history of “lessons we can learn”. How did this man manage to be both an avant-garde poet and a gossip columnist, a communist revolutionary…

Nicki Minaj once rapped: Drug Lord Griselda, I used to move weight thru Delta. She’s referring to today’s subject, la Madrina, the drug lord of the Colombian Medellín Cartel, Griselda Blanco Restrepo, the Black Widow. Born in 1943 in Cartegena, on the north coast of Columbia, she became the so-called "Queenpin," and adopted all the macho tropes of …

Warning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised. This week, we tackle the French author André Gide, a self-styled "immoralist" who oscillated between an austere Protestantism and a sensualism he associated with the so-called "Orient," and who elevated pederasty above sodomy in a way that helps us und…

Today we welcome special guest (and Associate Professor in History at the University of Cambridge) Arthur Asseraf to talk about Mustapha Ben Ismaïl, a terrifyingly ambitious twink who rose from being an illiterate street beggar to Prime Minister on the strength of the king's love for him –– and whose disastrous policies helped bring an end to Tunis…

Argentina, 1942: a scandal breaks. Tabloids scream about newly discovered photographs –– taken by the amateur photographer Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero –– at homosexual orgies in Ballvé's apartment, photos allegedly depicting young cadets from the national military university in compromising positions. 29 cadets are expelled, discharged, and/or puni…

She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment: today’s subject caused such a scandal in her life that even its fictionalized depiction in a novel was banned by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Mozart of bisexual drama, sword-fighting crossdressing opera singer Julie D'Aubigny burned through a dizzying series of lives, lo…

We're starting off Season Six with George Santos, who rocketed the pathological homosexual narcissism we've spent much of our show discussing to the halls of Congress. In gay bar, there is at least one delusional queen who can't stop lying about his life. If you give him firearms and crystal meth, he turns into Andrew Cunanan. If you elect him to C…

Happy Christmas! It's Bad Gays Live! Relive our reading of the Jack Saul chapter – covering the life and times of the Victorian sex worker and pornographer – from our book BAD GAYS: A HOMOSEXUAL HISTORY at Foyles in London, with the inimitable Shon Faye reading out the saucy bits (maybe use headphones if you're spending today with Grandma, unless y…

On this episode of the podcast we get into a good idea I learned from the author, Simon Sinek. What follows is a discussion of the movie 'Insomnia' one of Christopher Nolan's first which followed the wildly successful 'Memento. Featuring an excellent performance from Al Pacino and Robin Williams it is without question a fantastic film. Then, we end…

From swimming with dolphins to a dicussion of corporate evil. The interstice podcast will not subject itself to things like being beholden to one particular range of topics.

Ever in search of the most light-hearted topics for the podcast this episode I chose to focus on the most cheery of all, death. Not only that of course, human evolution found its way in there as well. Finally we get into a discussion of what it takes growing older to avoid become embittered or left behind by life. You know, fun stuff.…

I ran a social experiment on myself using a companion ai app. The results were very interesting. It will be a fascinating thing to see how ai companions and the relationships they have with us meat bags evolve over the next decade. If you thought life was weird now, just you wait. Other than that we go hard on the nerd discussion, touching on a gre…

Moving to two episodes a week we have our first guest in some time. Jason Mcnamar is an accomplished texture artist and modeler who's work can be found in both summer blockbusters and netflix originals. He is currently living in Japan and took the time to share his life story with us and insights on his industry.…

It's the Magnus Hirschfeld episode. We invited Laurie Marhoefer – Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, and one of our most-cited historians ever – to discuss their new book on Hirschfeld, called Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. On the episode, we touc…

#davetrippin #theinterstice #podcast It's official we are moving to two episodes a week for the podcast. And we've got a lot to talk about in this one. It has now been three weeks since finally giving the full productive effort to creating the amount of content that I feel fits the standard necessary to grow and do this who creative thing full time…

After so much time away I finally got back to Tokyo. I think it's been over two years actually but there I was back in the ol.. I don't know if there's a nickname for it. I got a chance to meet up with a subscriber who's become a good friend over the years. His story was amazing. For anyone who is determined to carve their own path through life he …

Hormesis and Post Traumatic Growth, these are nearly completely new terms to me and they're both great for considering the idea of healthy stress. That's our opener for this episode but then we get into some juicy history details. I saw a clip on reddit of soldiers who had shell shock and it made me think of warfare and its evolving impact on us an…

In this podcast: 1. Alex McCartney, 2. Ernst Stolz, 3. Oberlin Consort of Viols, 4. Ensemble Mirable, 5. Dufay Collective, 6. Trio Dafne, 7. Poeticall Musicke, 8. Music for a Winter's Eve, 9. Poeticall Musicke, 10. Alex McCartney, 11. Trio Dafne, 12. Trio Dafne, 13. Wildcat ViolsBy Magnatune

Let's get to it EP.59. We are a little leaner this epsiode. For whatever reason I had a few less things to discuss. Perhaps a sign I need to crank up the adventure in my life. No biggy. I'll do it. That doesn't mean though what is here was not worth the talk. I have been reading and I have been watching a lot of great media recently which informed …

In this podcast: 1. Ernst Stolz, 2. Alison Crum and Roy Marks, 3. Ernst Stolz, 4. Alison Crum and Roy Marks, 5. Ensemble Carpe Diem, 6. Music for a Winter's Eve, 7. Trio Dafne, 8. Music for a Winter's Eve, 9. Poeticall Musicke, 10. Poeticall Musicke, 11. Ensemble Carpe Diem, 12. Oberlin Consort of Viols, 13. Poeticall Musicke, 14. Ensemble Mirable,…

Joseph Keating is a fascinating man. Managing to develop a skill-set that expresses both his understanding of technical fields alongside the artistic is no simple task. We dicuss the kind of thinking that goes into creating the inside of retail stores as well as a his philosophy with it is for himself as opposed to a client. This was a good one. It…

In this podcast: 1. Alex McCartney, 2. Music for a Winter's Eve, 3. Poeticall Musicke, 4. Ensemble Vermillian, 5. Poeticall Musicke, 6. Pellingmans' Saraband, 7. Bach Collegium San Diego, 8. Gilles Zimmermann, 9. Dufay CollectiveBy Magnatune

I'd never been to anywhere in Japan more south than Kobe until very recently. I finally got a chance to go to Hiroshima for the purpose of filming a wakeboarding tournament taking place there. Come August our studio is filming a major tournament in Kyushu so this was a great opportunity to see what the realities on the ground were for filming this …

Alan is a friend who I've met since moving to Kyoto. This man has skill. When you look at his body of work it is self evident. Crisply composed and tuned to some of the best colouring you've ever seen, Alan is a pure pro. I particulary enjoyed in the course of our conversation getting into how Alan described his style having a melancholic quality t…

Adam and I grew up together on Vancouver Island. It has been incredible to reconnect with him and discuss the absolutely mad path that he has taken through life. Like myself he was bit with the desire to seek out new horizons but where my path took my to Japan, his took him all over the world. There is so much to Adam's story that we cannot nearly …

Our UK tour has been fun -- and the US is next! Ben (sadly Huwless) will be stopping in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, New York City, and Boston in the back half of June. All the events are available for RSVP and booking –– many with great discounts on copies of the book and swag included! –– so visit badgayspod.com/book to get your spot before they'r…

Today's guest is James Palmer an old friend and mechanical engineer. He'll joined me to talk about mostly anything but then we ended up staying on the topic of education for quite some time. It will be fascinating to see how these systems develop going into the future as the freedom to information and education continues to grow.…

Happy Pride! We invited Ruby Hann, who completed her MA in History in 2020 and her MSc in History in 2021, both at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about Eugen Sandow, the bodybuilder who spread the cult of muscle around the world. Her research is focused on masculinity, sexuality, and the body in early twentieth century Britain. Ruby is not cu…

Teacher, student, creator, are these the elements which make up a fully actualized human being? In this episode I do my best to argue for that fact. Recently I saw a quite touching clip on instagram taken from a Louis CK's show and it was talking about love. I offer a few thoughts on that. Then we move into a discussion of deep fake technology and …

Went all out on this episode and actually for once made a list of topics to work through. I like to dabble in books as a topic but it's often fun to make sure I try and get outside of that box. For that reason we go all over the place. Perhaps hitting the most meta discussion of all, what other podcasts have taught me. One Dr in particular is of gr…