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.

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SOURCES:

Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Saint Martin's Press, 1963)

Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement, 1923-1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)

Asa Seresin, "Lesbian Fascism on TERF Island," 2021 https://asaseresin.com/2021/02/11/lesbian-fascism-on-terf-island/

Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I. Thurbis, 1998)

Edward White, "Conservatism with Knobs On," The Paris Review, December 2, 2016, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/12/02/conservatism-with-knobs-on/

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

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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 Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás may have been, except perhaps as a pub quiz answer, lost to history since his death, but in his lifetime he had an outsized impact on several scientific disciplines, central European politics and nationalisms, and, unfortunately, the man who he lived with until a murder-suicide ended both of their lives.

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SOURCES:

Gëzim Alpion, “Baron Franz Nopcsa and His Ambition for the Albanian Throne,” BESA Journal 6, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 25–32

Gareth Dyke, “The Dinosaur Baron of Transylvania,” Scientific American, October 1, 2011, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dinosaur-baron-of-transylvania/

Robert Elsie, “1907 | Baron Franz Nopcsa: The Baron Held Hostage in the Mountains of Dibra,” Texts and Documents of Albanian History, accessed April 18, 2024, http://www.albanianhistory.net/1907_Nopcsa2/index.html

Robert Elsie, “The Viennese Scholar Who Almost Became King of Albania: Baron Franz Nopcsa and His Contribution to Albanian Studies,” n.d., http://www.elsie.de/pdf/articles/A1999VienneseNopcsa.pdf

Emily Osterloff, “Franz Nopcsa: The Dashing Baron Who Discovered Dwarf Dinosaurs,” Natural History Museum, accessed April 18, 2024, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/franz-nopcsa-the-dashing-baron-who-discovered-dwarf-dinosaurs.html

Vanessa Veselka, “History Forgot This Rogue Aristocrat Who Discovered Dinosaurs and Died Penniless,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed April 18, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-forgot-rogue-aristocrat-discovered-dinosaurs-died-penniless-180959504/

Traveler, Scholar, Political Adventurer: A Transylvanian Baron at the Birth of Albanian Independence: The Memoirs of Franz Nopcsa, NED-New edition, 1 (Central European University Press, 2014), https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt6wpkrc;

"A Field Guide to the Long History of Skyjackings,” CrimeReads(blog), May 10, 2021, https://crimereads.com/skyjackings/.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music is by Dj Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

"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 in a trip back to the court of 1300s Delhi for a story of love, lust, intrigue, revolution, and, in the words of a historian of the time, "the results of pampering young men and catamites."

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SOURCES:

Indira Chatterjee, "Alienation, Intimacy and Gender: Problems for a History of Love in South Asia," in Ruth Vanita ed., Queering India: Same-Sex Love And Eroticism In Indian Culture And Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002)

Abraham Eraly, Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate (Delhi: Penguin India, 2014)

Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)

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

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 swindle to the political confluence that brought Leon Blum and his popular front to power in France at the end of the 1930s. This is the fascinating tale of just how far one woman was able to go to accumulate wealth and power by any means necessary.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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SOURCES:

Stéphanie Bee, "La Bancquiére des Annès Folles," Univers-L, January 11, 2020, https://www.univers-l.com/portrait_marthe_hanau.html

Janet Flanner, "The Swindling Presidente," The New Yorker, August 18, 1939, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/08/26/annals-of-crime

Paul Jankowski, Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Dean Jobb, "The Ponzi of Paris," CrimeReads, December 3, 2021, https://crimereads.com/marthe-hanau-paris-ponzi-confidence-woman/

Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu - France and the French since 1900 (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

Wilfried Knapp, France--partial Eclipse: from the Stavisky Riots to the Nazi Conquest (London: Macdonald, 1972).

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

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 whose life and loves sheds a light on that time: it’s the theologian, reformer, and Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift.

Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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SOURCES:

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, 38831st edition (Penguin UK, 2004)

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Archbishops of Canterbury (Tempus, 2006)

“John Whitgift History,” John Whitgift Foundation(blog), accessed March 18, 2024, https://johnwhitgiftfoundation.org/about-us/john-whitgift-history/.

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

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 biggest dicks in the Roman Empire.

Subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show.

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SOURCES:

Cassius Cocceianus Dio, Roman History: Books 71-80, trans. E. Cary, New issue of 1927 ed Edition (Harvard University Press, 1927)

Edward Gibbon and Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes 1 to 6: Volumes 1-3, Volumes 4-6, Reprint Edition (Everyman’s Library, 2010)

Harry Sidebottom, The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome (Oneworld Publications, 2022)

Elijah Burgher, “Our Lady of the Latrines – Western Exhibitions,” https://westernexhibitions.com/exhibition/elijah-burgher/

Anthony Birley, trans., Lives of the Later Caesars: The First Part of the Augustan History, with Newly Compiled Lives of Nerva & Trajan, Reprint edition (Harmondsworth, Eng. ; Baltimore etc.: Penguin Classics, 1976).

Our intro music is "Arpeggia Colorix" by Yann Terrien. Our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.