This episode looks at Baron Samedi, the top-hatted, cigar-smoking lord of the dead in Haitian Vodou, and the Gede — the family of spirits associated with death, sexuality, and obscene comedy, whose ritual behavior often crosses between masculine and feminine. Drawing on ethnography from Elizabeth McAlister and Karen McCarthy Brown, along with Randy Conner and David Hatfield Sparks's work on queer Vodou practitioners, the episode traces how Gede spirits are described mixing funeral dress with women's clothing during possession, and how their bawdy Kreyòl humor mocks social pretension, including gender norms. It also engages a 2023 article by Paul C. Mocombe, who argues against reading Gede through a Western queer lens at all — a genuine scholarly disagreement the episode sits with rather than resolves. Along the way: how the dictator François Duvalier appropriated Baron Samedi's image for political terror, and how Vodou temples have historically offered gay priests and practitioners a form of religious belonging not always available to them elsewhere.

Sources referenced in this episode:

• Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press, 1991.
  
• Conner, Randy P., and David Hatfield Sparks. Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African-Inspired Traditions in the Americas. Harrington Park Press, 2004.
  
• Johnson, Paul Christopher. "Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006): 420–445.
  
• Lescot, Anne, and Laurence Magloire, dirs. Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Men and Gods). 2002.
  
• McAlister, Elizabeth. "Love, Sex, and Gender Embodied: The Spirits of Haitian Vodou." In Love, Sex, and Gender in the World Religions, edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin, 128–145. Oneworld, 2000.
  
• McAlister, Elizabeth. Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora. University of California Press, 2002.
  
• Mocombe, Paul C. "Gede and Homosexuality." Philosophy Study 13, no. 7 (2023): 278–283.

Image credit:

Joseph, Silva. ca. 1980s. Vodou Flag or Banner (Baron Samedi). Satin, sequins, plastic pearls, and glass beads, Birmingham Museum of Art, Collection of the Art Fund, Inc., Robert Cargo Folk Art Collection. Birmingham Museum of Art

Long before the celebrated traditions of Buddhist monastic nanshoku or samurai wakashudō, Japan's founding chronicle, the Nihon Shoki, recorded a very different kind of story: two Shinto priests, Shinu no Hafuri and Amano no Hafuri, buried together after one died of grief following the other's death — an act the eighth-century text frames not as devotion, but as a sin serious enough to darken the sky. This episode traces the story from its origins in Book Nine of the Nihon Shoki through its twentieth-century rediscovery by folklorist Iwata Jun'ichi, who made it a foundation stone of queer Japanese history, and the scholarly pushback that has complicated his reading ever since — along with a look at the gender-fluid kami Inari, and a correction of a common myth about the shirabyōshi.

References

• Aston, W. G., translator. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nihongi:_Chronicles_of_Japan_from_the_Earliest_Times_to_A.D._697/Book_IX.
  
• Borevitz, Brad. "The Discourse on 'Love Between Men' in Interwar Japan: Iwata's History of Homosexuality." onetwothree.net, Mar. 1993, onetwothree.net/writing/discourse-love-between-men-interwar-japan-iwatas-history-homosexuality.
  
• Conner, Randy P., David Hatfield Sparks, and Mariya Sparks. Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. Cassell, 1997.
  
• Leupp, Gary P. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. University of California Press, 1995.
  
• Murray, Stephen O. Homosexualities. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
  
• "Shirabyōshi." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirabyōshi. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.
  
• Smyers, Karen A. The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship. University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.

Image credit: KENPEI. (2008, December 20). Niutsuhime-jinja dai2-3honden [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niutsuhime-jinja_dai2-3honden.jpg.

Ada Dwyer Russell was a Broadway and London stage actress raised in a Mormon pioneer family in Salt Lake City — and later, the longtime partner of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Amy Lowell, the addressee of some of the most explicit lesbian love poetry published in America before the 1970s. This episode traces Russell's journey from the Salt Lake Theater to the Boston literary world, her father's own startling collision with LDS Church discipline over his views on homosexuality, and the unresolved question at the heart of her story: was she Lowell's equal partner, or a woman whose voice was folded into, and largely erased by, her more famous lover's legend?

References:

• Bellot, Gabrielle. "Lady of the Moon." Poetry Foundation, 3 June 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150142/lady-of-the-moon. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.
• Bradshaw, Melissa, and Adrienne Munich, editors. Amy Lowell, American Modern. Rutgers University Press, 2004.
• Lowell, Amy. "A Decade." Pictures of the Floating World. Houghton Mifflin, 1919.
• Lowell, Amy. "The Taxi." Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. Macmillan, 1914.
• Parker, Sarah. The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930. Routledge, 2015.
• Quinn, D. Michael. Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example. University of Illinois Press, 1996.
• Rollyson, Carl. Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
• "Ada Dwyer Russell." Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Dwyer_Russell. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.
• "Today In Mormon History: 100 Years Ago Today – May 9, 1913." On This Day in Mormon History, todaysinmormonhistory.blogspot.com, reposted at www.todayinmormonhistory.com/2013/05/100-years-ago-today-may-9-1913.html. Accessed 7 Sept. 2026.

Image credit: Stage actress Ada Dwyer (SAYRE 22875) [Photograph]. (n.d.). Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stage_actress_Ada_Dwyer_(SAYRE_22875).jpg