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 Hil...
May 13, 2026•1 hr 9 min•Season 10Ep. 138
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:...
May 06, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Season 10Ep. 137
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 governme...
Apr 29, 2026•53 min•Season 10Ep. 136
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 ...
Apr 02, 2026•1 hr 18 min•Season 9Ep. 135
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 w...
Feb 27, 2026•13 min•Season 9Ep. 134
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming men. Originally his illustrations were controversial because of his graphic depictions of gay sex, of sodomy and cocksucking and fisting in a pre-liberation, pre-internet age. Today, things have changed so much you can bu...
Feb 10, 2026•1 hr 25 min•Season 9Ep. 133
William Beckford, who was born not in Bath but in London in 1760, is someone for whom property, in every sense of the word, was the defining factor in his life. He was a novelist, a member of parliament, a collector of art, antiquities, and books, a travel writer, and a builder of great palaces; he regarded himself as a man of culture, but he made his cultural qualities known by buying and building things. And he could afford to buy and build things - ridiculous things - because he was rich, ext...
Feb 03, 2026•1 hr 9 min•Season 9Ep. 132
This trailer is just a preview–for the full episode, click here to subscribe on Patreon, or subscribe directly through Apple Podcasts. We heard you, we see you, we're here for you: it's our take on Heated Rivalry, or at least on the Discourse surrounding it––straight women loving gay romance, social media shitstorms targeting out actors, and shipping. Then we take Gaggony Guncles questions from someone in love with an English public school boy who can't open up and a woman demanding our analysis...
Jan 29, 2026•13 min•Season 9Ep. 131
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Sheffield DocFest, it's E. M. Forster: who in his 91 years of life was one of Britain’s most successful novelists. He was raised in a climate of Victorian propriety so extreme he went to university without understanding human reproduction, and then fell in with a secret society known for alternative thinking and "aggressive" homosexuality. Italy...
Dec 30, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 9Ep. 130
It's never too late to give the gift of Bad Gays this holiday season: invite a friend or loved one into our community at https://www.patreon.com/badgayspod/gift This month, we discuss Christmas spirit, the cancellation of the Netflix Marines drama Boots and the death of homonationalism, and then take a Gaggony Guncles question from a listener who needs to hear that He's Just Not That Into You.
Dec 24, 2025•8 min•Season 9Ep. 129
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Another episode down under: Andrew George Scott is best remembered to history as the enigmatic “Captain Moonlite”, and the story of his short but eventful life is a fascinating tale of personal conscience, colonialism, and criminality. Born in Ireland, he was taken by his family to New Zealand, became a military man, attempted to become a priest, robbed a...
Dec 23, 2025•53 min•Season 9Ep. 128
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! The place: Queensland, Australia; a state just recovering from decades of rule by "hillbilly dictator" Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a petty authoritarian with a reputation for brutal homophobia and the even more brutal repression of street protest. The time: the late Eighties, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and public fear about queers and blood. The woman: T...
Dec 16, 2025•51 min•Season 9Ep. 127
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....
Dec 04, 2025•7 min•Season 9Ep. 126
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, busin...
Dec 01, 2025•49 min•Season 9Ep. 125
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 Zion...
Nov 25, 2025•46 min•Season 9Ep. 124
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 su...
Nov 18, 2025•54 min•Season 9Ep. 123
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 p...
Nov 11, 2025•59 min•Season 9Ep. 122
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...
Nov 04, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 9Ep. 121
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! Smalltownnovell...
Oct 29, 2025•3 min•Season 9Ep. 120
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 ...
Sep 30, 2025•13 min•Ep. 119
For the full conversation, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or on our Patreon.
Aug 21, 2025•5 min•Ep. 118
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 ...
Aug 12, 2025•1 hr•Season 8Ep. 117
A preview of our conversation about Mayor Pete this week. For more, subscribe at Patreon or Apple Podcasts.
Jul 31, 2025•13 min•Season 9Ep. 116
For full episodes of Extra Bad Gays, subscribe on our Patreon or directly through Apple Podcasts. Join our community of nefarious nellies and help support the show!
Jun 24, 2025•12 min•Season 8Ep. 115
Join our community of Extra Bad Gays on Patreon or Apple Podcasts for special episodes and more! Have you ever wondered who the sexual link between Edward Carpenter and Allen Ginsburg was? Wonder no more, and meet Gavin Arthur: grandson of US President Chester Allan Arthur, astrologer, sexologist, Irish Republican, sometime Communist, sometime Democrat, Haight-Ashbury hippie rabble-rouser, and chaotic bisexual. Our guide to his life is longtime friend of the show Maurice J. Casey, historian and ...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 8Ep. 114
This is just a trailer! For the full episode, join our community of Extra Bad Gays on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Weird Vibes Pride Month, nefarious nellies! What is this Pride Month's vibe? Who is its target audience? We're confused. How do we build power as queer movements hollowed out by corporate sponsorship appear to crumble? Then, we mourn the late, great Edmund White before turning to our now-standard Gaggony Guncles segment, in which a listener writes in with an exciting bisexual dilemma....
Jun 05, 2025•17 min•Season 8Ep. 113
We're coming to a city near you! Berlin on June 7, Sheffield June 20, and Bath June 22! Tickets and info: badgayspod.com/live
May 27, 2025•43 sec•Season 8Ep. 112
This month, it's all about a fantastic reader question about the sex we cannot have. What do we learn from it? How do we think about it? What can it teach us? Please keep sending your Gaggony Guncles questions to us: emailbadgays[at]gmail[dot]com. And for the full segment, and to support the show, subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Patreon or Apple Podcasts.
May 07, 2025•5 min•Season 8Ep. 111
Today we welcome Michael Huldt, host of Worm From Home , an environmental history podcast focused on East London, to discuss the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Born in Berlin in 1769, he would travel the world amassing a wealth of botanical, geological, and human knowledge. Working in Europe, Russia, and South America, Humboldt became a pioneer of Western environmental thinking, breaking with contemporary scientific norms to forge an interconnected, ecological view of the world that s...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 8Ep. 110
Subscribers to our monthly "extra" show get to hear advice segments that we, (hopefully) charmingly refer to as the Gaggony Guncles. Here's last month's sample–for one or two juicy questions and thoughtful answers each month, plus conversations about the latest in queer history, culture, and politics, subscribe at Patreon.com/badgayspod or on Apple Podcasts.
Apr 10, 2025•12 min•Season 8Ep. 109
