librarypunk - 044 - Bad Gays feat. Ben Miller

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

Ben’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/benwritesthings  https://benwritesthings.com  https://badgayspod.com  Pre-order book https://badgayspod.com/book  Schwules Museum https://twitter.com/gaymuseum  Media mentioned Gabrielle Palluch - The Opium Queen  The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum  Nadezhda Durova - Wikipedia Curating Visual Archives of Sex: A Roundtable Discussion  University of Toronto Press - States of Liberation  Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love By Laurie Marhoefer  Emily Knox interview 

Awesome. Got it. All right. Let's do it. Yeah. Not super formal. Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. I never come up with a opening on time. Justin loves his drops, by the way. So just push through if, you know, he does one while you're talking. That's my new disclaimer I do for all of our guests. I got nothing. I'm Justin. I'm a Scallcom librarian.

My pronouns are here. He and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them? I'm Jay. I'm a metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he-him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure. My name is Ben Miller. I'm a writer and researcher, member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin. I co-host the podcast Bad Gaze with Hugh Lemmy, and my pronouns are he-him. He and is a live studio audience, which is very exciting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, and theme music and like a fifth. imaginary guest. This is what I expect from this podcast. And the boss baby.

In sound effects, we don't have sound effects on bad gays. So this is very, I feel like I'm, I've really hit the big leagues. Oh, yeah. It always reminds me of the episode of It's Always Sunny, where they try to do a podcast and they're doing the like, like morning jock radio style of talking and drops. It reminds me about every single time. Yeah, exactly that. Oh, and Officer Friendly just showed up. Now, I'm going to need some really good, like, local radio-style ads. Like, I grew up in Boston, so it was Ernie Bach Jr. Route 1 on the out of mile.

Come on down. I just moved to New England. Like, I live in New Hampshire now, like, only a few years ago. So I'm still getting used. Like, I'm only about an hour from Boston. So I'm still getting used to all the, like, Boston adjacent stuff. Bernie and Phil's everything you're looking for. Quality, comfort, and price.

That's nice. emblazoned in my head since the age of four. I'll spare everyone my singing of the theme sang. Anyway, thank you all so much for having me on. We're excited to have you on. So thank you for coming. Extremely excited. I've been a fan of bad gays since probably,

probably 2018 or 2019. So I'm very excited, yeah. Yeah, I listen to some of the episodes getting ready. I think I got the Pirate one and the Friday Mercury one which you were talking about earlier, which I was like, yeah, that does sound like you were really, that could have gone any direction.

Yeah. It reminded me of when you're talking about pop icons and maybe this was the Morrissey one. I listened to those back to back. I don't even know if they came out back to back, but I was like, someone is going to say that these are like, this is like trans trenders kind of discourse.

You know, you're making a face. Like, this is the first time you've heard of this. No, it's not the first time I've heard of it, but I'm trying to put trans-trenders discourse together with, together with Morrissey and Freddie Mercury. Say more about it and then maybe I'll be able to respond. Yeah, just like the explosion of pop icons who are saying that they were gay or queer or just like, oh, don't put me in a box. I'm not, whatever I am, I'm not straight. And then doing that all at the same time. I guess it's more Bowie, who is that? Because Bowie, actually then later in life went back on it and said, actually, like, I regret ever having said

that I'm actually straight or I'm actually, yeah, like it was more of a like affect and trend of the time. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, which is not to say that we don't stand David Bowie. I'm actually, the neighborhood in Berlin that I live in is near where he was when he was in Berlin and it's like bar about like, I'm gesturing because this is a podcast since people can see where I'm pointing. I was about to say like about a thousand yards that way, but basically about a thousand yards to my right ish. There's this bar that apparently he used to go to, but that's not been converted into a kind of shrine. And just get like red peppers and milk and cocaine. I mean, things aren't that legal in Berlin, but you know. Anyway. So I think we're going to start off

talking about bad gays. I didn't have anything to add for a segment since yesterday because we were recording twice in a row this weekend because both of our guests are not in the U.S., so this is the only time we could do it. Yeah. And ALA hasn't been doing any nonsense recently. It has. It has been. Yeah. Although everyone should vote for Emily Jerskine when voting happens. Yeah. It's more the elections that are happening right now. Yeah. So we just mentioned some of the episodes. And I don't have the encyclopedic knowledge that Jay probably does. But when you're doing researching for bad gays, you normally list your sources pretty well. But what are some of the struggles you've had putting those together? I guess we can start from like source issues. What sourcing issues have you had to deal with? Well, to be completely honest with you, it makes more sense to start answering that question by talking about how we put a season together.

We have this ever-growing long list of people who could be on the show, which comes from ideas people have sent us, names that we come across, thoughts that we have in our heads, and it all, we just kind of throw it all in this big long list. we sit down at the beginning of a season and we start to plan the season out. And we're thinking about a lot of things. We're thinking about balance both in terms of the kinds of people that we're talking about in terms of how they may have identified or what different kinds of queer history they might fit into, but also in terms of geographic area, also in terms of tone, right? You know, we don't want to have too many episodes that are incredibly heavy, but we also wouldn't just want to do a bunch of, like, Liberace episodes.

We want to find the sort of balance between those things. Yeah, now you said, like, you don't want too many, like, serial killer, like, true crime. We do not want too many serial killers. We do not want to become a true crime show. Our rule, the rule of our show is that we don't, we have no banter. We don't talk over each other, and we don't drink. That was how we just, I just set ourselves apart from some other podcasts. But one of the key factors.

I see what you're saying. One of the key, which is not to say that other people can't do those things, and that's not great, but not great for them, but that's not what we wanted to do. Another one of the key factors, though, there is that we think about what we can do just in terms of what, you know, what's the balance in a season, because the shows are researched as you hear them. The shows are researched as you hear them. So one of us will research the episode and narrate the episode. And the other one is, during the story for the first time and standing in for the role of the audience and kind of, you know, asking questions or raising issues or sort of, you know, modeling the audience's ignorance in some sense. And one of the things that we will think about when planning out the season is how many of these can we reasonably do and do well? And so that means balancing between areas of queer history where Hugh and I are relatively strong and areas where we need more time and more research. And then a third department, which is areas where we'll bring in

someone else because this is not a story that we want to be telling. And I don't know that we've always done the best job of finding the balance between those three. I mean, there's a reason why the show has a lot of stuff about the U.S., Germany, and England. And it's because that's where Hugh and I know, okay, in the week that we have to make this show, I know that I can, I may not know every detail of this story before I start researching, but I know, here's where I'm going to find the sources, here is secondary literature to look for, here's the footnotes that I need, that's the historian that I can trust, that's the one that you don't trust. Like, the sort of basic structure of how to think about the time period is there, like this episode we did this season

about the Oylenberg Affair. I had never researched the Oylenberg Affair, but I knew, okay, four, general context of sexuality in the primary area, we go to, Laurie Marhofer for, you know, this is like boom, boom, boom. And so I would say for that reason, the stories where we have had real source issues are not stories that you've heard.

Because those are people that we've had, and there's been some people that we've actually had on the list several seasons in a row, and we keep coming back to it and thinking, gee, we would love to do it. But we've just never quite been able to get the sourcing One example is there's this bisexual Burmese drug lord named Olive Yang, who we have wanted to do an episode about for a while, who was like dating showgirls in the 30s and 40s and 50s. And they died in 2017, like lived a really long time and was apparently influential in various Burmese political events of the 20th century that I'm not particularly familiar with.

and we just have kept running into the issue of never quite being able to place it, like never quite being able to get enough to narrate out a whole episode. And then the great news is that this writer named Gabrielle, I believe the name is Palluch, P-A-L-U-C-H, we just found out has a book coming out about Olive in the fall, and so we're going to have her on to talk about it and tell the story. So maybe that's an example of how we, tend to navigate sourcing issues, which is if there's a big sourcing issue, then that doesn't make it to air, basically.

That makes sense. Have you ever thought of doing, because now that you've explained the process, it makes a lot more sense to me, have you ever thought of doing sort of like a multi-part on people or a period? I'm thinking similar to like how blowback does, like, one season on one thing, but it's 20 different cast of people. Yeah, I think we like the, I think we like having the balance over the course of the season of the variety over the course of the season in terms of who we're bringing in and how we can

play stories off of each other and how we can give people over the course of the 10 weeks of a season some episodes that are going to be because as you are I think to anyone in the podcast business we're in the business of making people's commutes laundry days and workouts slightly less boring. And so to take that responsibility seriously, it's important for us to give some balance in terms of what the tone of the different episodes is. And that means that some of the...

It's important to us to have episodes in a season, like this season, we did this absolutely extraordinary British eccentric, non-binary oil million, named Joe Carstairs, who, like, dated Marlena Dietrich and raised, raced speedboats and et cetera, et cetera. It's important to have the balance of stories like that that come in, that come into someone's feed and give them an hour of joy. And then we balance it out with we're doing, we're in the middle right now of this two-part series on Cressida Dick, who was the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London until last year. And that's obviously

a story that's asking people to think about important and difficult political themes like the history of racism and policing and the existence of these unreformable police forces that are enacting extrajudicial state violence against people, mostly poor, mostly people of color, and are, I mean, I think in both Hugh and Mies view, essentially unreformable and therefore they need to be abolished. And so to have the balance of both of those things and to be able to, yeah, to have the balance of both of those things is, I think, important in terms of, I think that's what the show is. I think the voice of the show is being able to talk about both of those things and presenting

a range over the course of 10 episodes. That was a very rambling answer, but. No, that's good. I'll fix it in post. No, it's fine. Jay, I think you wrote this question. What is or isn't preserved recorded about our good gaze versus our bad gaze? And my first thought is like court records probably but or like the types of sources or how they're written like I know in the the Andrew Cunan episode there's like the two books where there's the one that was written in I think I don't remember when they were each written were one it was like the fact that like the gayness of it was sort of very front and center as the reason all of this happened versus the Gary Indiana book and so I sort of imagine this like playing off of the

like how much of a hard time do you have like finding materials and sort of what's written about our good gaze versus our bad gays and like how we write about them and how they are in libraries and archives and stuff like that. I didn't know if you've noticed anything like a difference. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, just so, I mean, this is something we try to be very upfront about on the show, but I'll be upfront about it again here, except in the rare cases where we're talking about something that is directly related to a research project that I have worked on or I am working on or that he was worked on or he was working on. Our show is based on secondary sources and secondary literature. We are, we started doing the show because we wanted to

connect an activist and academic conversation about queer history that is vibrant and interesting and critical and reflective with a mainstream, even among queer people, set of ideas about queer history or an accepted set of ideas about queer history, even among queer people, and especially in public-facing media that we thought was really one-dimensional and boring and had some potentially dire political implications. And so the show is not particularly based on intense work with primary sources. In terms of how people are written about, one of the things that we often do on the show is think about the difference between someone who like for us bad is a fairly flexible term.

And so some of the people that we're talking about are people who we think are absolute scumbags. And some of the people that we're talking about are people who we think were in their time thought of as being bad, but we now want to have a more complicated or nuanced opinion of our understanding of them. And around those people, oftentimes we will find interesting tensions in the secondary sources. Oftentimes we find ourselves in the position of depending on a given secondary source for basically, you know, the vast majority of our life narration about somebody.

But then at the same time, having a very critical view of how that secondary source talks about one or more aspects of that person's life. An example is, I already mentioned Joe Carstairs, that eccentric British billionaire, billionaire, oil air. And there's one biography of Carstairs, which was the basis of our narration, because that's the one biography. This biography was written by the former obituaries editor of the Telegraph, which is a very right-wing British paper. This is someone who used the word lesbian to describe themselves, so so did we. But this is someone who hated their given name at birth, insisted on being called Joe. The biographer writes that the principle, they define their life by a male principle,

were so horrified by seeing girl children that they would run out of the room and not be there. And then the biographer, just the whole biography through, she, her, her, she, she her, she's her. Like literally, the principle by which she defined her life was male. And so that's a case where we find ourselves. And what we do in those instances, and it's what we do whenever we hit really any problem in the show. And it's worked for us so far is to just show our work, to name the assumption that we're making, to name the place that we're coming from, and to explain why you might agree with us and why you might disagree and to invite that stance. And we think that people are smart enough to follow a set of conclusions, to understand why they were made, and then to make their own if they want, as opposed to thinking that we're smart enough to follow a set of conclusions, to understand why they were made, and then to make their own if they want, as opposed to thinking that we. We have to give people a definitive answer on everything, which then, to me, that is what

would invite more. I think it's actually, yeah, I think people are, I think people are smart enough to listen to people explain why they came to a conclusion and agree with them or disagree with them, basically. Yeah, I just move some stuff around in the notes so that we can talk about the identity and construction, constructivist views a bit, because I know Jay wanted me to help flesh out the notes in that area. and when we're talking about particularly like your secondary sources, you talked about like Richter Norton and how you're using constructivist theories of sexual identity,

but how he views them as sort of an anti-gay conspiracy. And I would see this as sort of like a constructivist, because I couldn't think of like a term in history, in historiography to like describe what Jay was asking me to talk about. Justin's the historian and I'm not. But I was like, okay, this is, this is, I found a term. I found a historiographical dispute. So we can start there.

So do you want to talk about a little bit about identity formation? Yeah, because my sort of thought with that question was like, how do like our information sources and resources, like, influence identity formation, including how we talk about other people like in the, and Bonnie episodes? if that makes sense. Sure. Yeah, again, this is a case with Richard Norton, where we have someone who, so just to maybe introduce Richard Norton for people, Richard Norton is a historian who lives in the United Kingdom

and who has published quite a few books and also quite a few kind of source anthologies around queer history. We find ourselves working from the source anthologies a lot. At the same time, Richter Norton is someone whose idea of what homosexuality is and, well, I won't even say how it came to be because I don't think he believes it came to be. I think he believes it always was the exact same way that it is, is diametrically opposite to our view and to the view that the show is advancing. And again, in that case, I mean, if we're quoting one or two letters that are in

a Richard Norton edited source anthology. It's not that big of a deal. There have been times when we've used him more, and we've talked about that, and we just explain where he's coming from, and we explain where we're coming from, and we explain why and how we're using the source. And to me, as a historian,

I mean, I also work as a historian in the academic context. That's just what you do. And yet there's the assumption, I think, a lot of the time that in media that is not specifically for an academic audience, if you do that, you're going to lose people, or if you do that, you're going to put people off or you can't. Everyone wants to be sure about everything all the time.

And what we've found is that people are completely willing and able and happy to follow us down these roads and to understand where we're coming from and to, yeah, that's it. People are willing to sort of to follow us and to understand what we're coming from and to think about the distinction between the different kinds of sources that we're using and to understand the ways in which a source. might be troubling or troubled in some ways and useful in other ways. Yeah, and there was, there's something in here about the Queen's Throat, Opera, homosexuality, and the mystery of desire. Jade, do you want to ask that one? Yeah, so I'm also a big opera person, and that's one of my favorite books. And so when you, in the Zeparelli episode, you cited from it heavily.

And so it reminded me, like, for those of y'all who haven't read, the queens throat one you should but it's sort of this like memoir but also like analysis and there's like eroticism in it and this is very fluid sort of how he is talking about um opera and homosexuality and his own relationship to it and i think what interests me about that text and maybe maybe this isn't as relevant since you don't use primary sources but sort of like what is the role of like these different types of sources of information, like memoir versus analysis, and is a source like the queen's throat where they're all sort of like mixed together in this fluid nature, like what kind of role might that play in the sort of historical analysis that y'all are

doing? Do you find any sort of like queerness in the types of sources that you are using, not just they're about queerness, but maybe how they are, how they are sources, if that makes sense. It's probably very rambly. Yeah, I think a good way to start thinking about that. For me, it's less about, I mean, in the case of the queen's throat, I think, and again, if anyone doesn't know the book, it's just one of the most extravagantly queer and also extravagantly faggity pieces of writing ever created by humans. and I say that as an enormous compliment in both instances.

But so, you know, in a case like that, then certainly there is something very queer about the source. You know, my favorite kinds of queer history are not just queer in their subjects, but queer in their methods. At the same time, we often find ourselves using sources that are not particularly queer in their methods. sometimes aren't even particularly aware that they're queer and their subjects or aware of what that might mean or how that might affect how you might think or write history. And so we find ourselves often, like, I think it has to do with reading and it has to do with understanding and interpreting. And that's analytic work that I think we take it upon ourselves to do as we're creating the show. Yeah, describing it as like queer method.

That's exactly what I was getting at. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but again, like, you know, when I'm working academically and I'm mixing kinds of sources, and you could talk about that as a method as like a queer historical method, maybe. But again, just to reiterate, the show is so, the show is secondary source based. And so, you know, as much as there are a variety of kinds of sources in some of the episodes, in a lot of the episodes, the source is five news articles and three books. And so that's the, you know, that's the source space for, I would say, even the majority of the episodes.

I have a bit here about historiography. My time period was early modern Atlantic, and there is a lot there in terms of the historiographical battle or argument of the construction of race and racial identity. And there is sort of a medievalist strain, which says, oh, these are all. pre-existent. These are things that were used for Jews and Muslims and then became expanded into Africa during the slave trade. And there's the older view, which is more of like, well, this is a byproduct of colonialism, which is the school that I sort of fall into. But it's the older historiographical school. And it's also, I don't disagree with the new argument. So I can see like where you're coming from trying to explain that to a non-historian audience. I definitely see

people like on Tumblr making fun of like Egyptologists being like, oh, yes, they're brothers. That's why they kiss with tongue. It's traditional for them to do this as brothers. So I can understand the difficulty you're having. And they were very, very good friends. Yeah. Gosh, I can't believe they couldn't afford a second bed, you know? It's just tough times back then. Can you believe that this female warrior was buried with all of these male symbols and tools? Yeah, which is fun to dunk on people. But yeah, I can see your, I can see your struggle here.

Yeah, I mean, I guess, so for us, the term gay is, the term gay in the title of the show and gay is in the title of the show is a term that occurs in the present tense. And the point is not to argue necessarily that anybody was definitively anything. The point is to think about what is it, what is useful about thinking about thinking about. them in this way for us having this conversation. And so as such, it is kind of, despite play acting as history, it's actually defiantly presentist. And so actually, if I'm being completely honest, the, I mean, this isn't entirely true. Of course, the nuances of those historiographic debates are important. And of course, they inform the conversations that we have. We want to be having informed conversations. But we're not trying to push any of those particular lines. We

make the show from a broadly Marxian and white anti-racist perspective and then move on from there to think about what is useful about having certain kinds of conversations now about certain people, if that makes sense. And when I say a white, anti-racist perspective, I mean we are two cis-white men having these conversations. And so we are aiming to be actively anti-racist and working on that and taking feedback. Yeah, I've always appreciated how you all approach, especially the episodes where was this person a lesbian, was this person a transmasculine person,

was this person both, like the Joe Carstairs and, oh God, Redcliffe Hall, like those types of episodes. I've always appreciated how you situate these discourses of like what we think. of identity now versus what it might have been then and sort of, yeah, like navigating what the sources written about them might say versus how we might talk about them now. Like I've always appreciated how you all have approached that. Yeah, I mean, something that, thank you. I mean, again, it's a, what my approach to it is just to try to narrate all of our assumptions and the

history of the assumptions that we're making as much as possible. One of the reasons, one of the reasons that it feels important to us to do that, I think, is because, like, to us, part of the history of why cis, especially cis male homosexuality didn't work is because of its fear of and attempts to identify itself by distancing itself from trans femininity. And so when we think about these, one of the reasons why it's important to, I think, talk about the ways in which someone like Joe Carstairs might be thought of as a lesbian, in addition to being thought of as transmask in some way, using both terms in their contemporary meanings, is because to do so is to acknowledge that the histories of those things are not separable,

and that the people who want to separate the histories of those things entirely and neatly are people who are trying to deny the existence of, and eradicate trans people now. And so we want to basically, like, to cast cis and trans queer people together in that way historiographically or to at least think about how they might be thought together as well as thinking about how they might be thought separately

is for us actually about implicating cisqueer people in the kind of historical work of thinking about where we come from, what our historic alliances and affinities have been and how we and what responsibilities that gives us. Yeah, like, and the role that, you know, how we make sources about these people. Like, I, last summer, I did a few, like, Wiki education trainings. Like, there's like a, like a Wiki LGBTQ thing that they do a couple times a year. Wiki Scholars, that's what it is. And one of the things that we discussed as a cohort was how

TERFs really love going into Wikipedia and on pages of people like Joe Carstairs or God, what's the doctor's name who did a hysterectomy? James Barry? Yes, Dr. Barry. Yeah, I have a terrible memory of recall. But if you go into like the talk and history pages, of people like that is just turf's going like trying to argue like, no, this was a woman dressing as a man in order to get into these spaces. And so these are like not just places of discourse, but of like attack and like I don't want to say battle, but of constantly having to like revise and go into these sources and see how people are changing them and undoing changes and like all of these things. Like I'm a big defender of Wikipedia. as a resource, but it is important to like look at how it's being edited, how our information resources are being shaped and by whom and why. Absolutely. And then in the, even in the more sort of formally traditional context, it's like, and this is

another reason to kind of, another reason why we talk about this stuff as much as we do, it's because so much of the time, you know, we're talking about histories oftentimes on the show that just haven't been written about that much. And so there was a, there's this, this is a case that I think of. This is in the, in the episode we did about Frederick the Great. And it was a sort of aside this story. But there was a soldier in the German army who was expelled by Frederick's father for, I mean, as the, as the court reports put it, this soldier was discovered to have been a woman. Or as we would probably say, discovered to have been a sign female at birth. And this is a someone. who was using a male name, occupying a male job in a marriage that was presumed by everyone to be different sex and heterosexual. And yet there's one academic article about this person in which excerpts from the court case are legible for people who do not have the time to go to the Stats' Archieven, Turingen, and look through a bunch of documents in Gothic script. And the

article was written by a lesbian historian in the 1980s and is titled something like the story of a lesbian soldier in 1790s Germany or whatever the decade was. And so we're presented with something like that. And again, it just feels like the only thing that we can do is say, okay, so here's the story. Here's where we're getting this from. But we can't just say here's where we're getting this from because now we're telling people to go look at this thing that is going to be obviously very different from how we're telling the story. So then we just have to explain why it's that it's different. And then at some point, we have to explain why it's different. Yeah, I actually also mentioned in the notes just in case it would come up,

Nidesda Dirova, who actually wrote an autobiographical account of their time as a cavalry officer in the Imperial Russian light cavalry, or heavy cavalry. And gender in war is always such an interesting place. I took a gender and war class in grad school. And it was one the most interesting things I've ever spent time reading because you really get a lot of blurring lines. And there's this extra layer in Dorova's story, which is translation, because their memoir is translated and is very much, Derova is very much, uses a masculine name, refers to themselves with masculine pronouns, but also refers to themselves as a woman, I think. is at least in the way it's translated.

So there's all this constructing going on. And you don't have a situation where they got married, as far as we know, or might have but lied about this part of, because like some of the years don't line up. So they're like, we think they might have had a kid and just ran away to the army. You know, stuff like that. So just have you found any kind of difference in the gender and war? intersections for those episodes or in the gender and war intersections.

I mean, there are a lot of gender and war intersections. And I think they're different at different times and under different sex gender systems. The story that you just told about Dorova, which is not a story I'm familiar with, and thank you for the link. I think this person may have to go on our long list. But that exact confluence of someone using male pronouns and but then still sometimes referring to themselves as a woman, that was the exact situation that we were in with Christ's airs. And so, again, the choice that we made was to do something that no one ever did, that they

never did about themselves and none of their friends ever did about them, which was to call them them, them, and to use they, them pronouns, and to be purposefully a historical, but to be purposefully a historical explaining exactly why, and to then let people understand where that frame was coming from as opposed to assuming that there was a correct natural frame that wouldn't require explanation and would just convey the complete truth of someone. Maybe, Jay, you were asking earlier, if there's something queer about the mix of sources, maybe the queer approach for the show is to not assume that there is any approach that is just going to reveal the natural truth of someone without requiring people to kind of think along and make the ideas with us in their heads

a little bit. Yeah, that's sort of like, there's so many layers of identity formation based on information that's happening there. There's like what was collected about them at the time, how they were written about, and then how the secondary sources write about them and construct that identity and form it there and then how people interpret it and then how you choose to interpret it on your show and then how the people listening choose to interpret it. I'm just very fascinated in all of the levels of how information is shaping how we view ourselves and how we view these other people. I mean, that's what we try to do. So I'm glad I'm glad someone thanks for doing it. Do you want to move on to the Schuels Museum and tell us about this position that you have on their,

I believe, board? Yeah, sure. I mean, to do it, I think I have to go back to 1984. But in that same way that I just said of, you know, everything, everything opens up the other problem and then the other problem and then suddenly you find yourself going back to 1984. But anyway, the museum was founded in 1984 by a group of gay men in West Berlin. And it followed an exhibition that had been done a year previously at the then City Museum of Berlin. And the exhibit was about gay and lesbian lives.

This was called Gay and Lesbian Lives. in the Weimar Republic it was called Eldorado after a famous drag bar but also oh boy can we talk about that for a while and the way the exhibit was set up was I shit you not two separate paths one the gay path

and one the lesbian path and you had to come back to the beginning to take the other one like they did not meet which were set up as a series of natural history museum style wax figure walk through dioramas of various locations in Berlin queer life so it was like now we go through the

drag bar. Now we go through the lesbian club. Now we go through Magnus Hirschfeld's office. So this exhibit was a big hit. And the men and the women afterwards mirrored the formation of their exhibit and split into organizing groups. And the context for that is that because, which is not, this is not to say that health care provision around HIV and AIDS was perfect in West Germany or even good, but it existed and was not catastrophic. And so the reunification of gay liberation and lesbian feminism that happened in the late 80s, early 90s, in the Anglo context, under the term queer, just didn't ever happen in Germany. Or it's happening now and under really different terms. Because gay men basically got state help early enough to just be like, well, now we're getting state help and that just didn't happen.

Like, no one had to, that reconfiguration never had to happen. So, they lesbians formed an organization called Spinboden, which still exists, which is a lesbian feminist archive and reading room. And there's also FF.Bits, the lesbian, another feminist and lesbian feminist archive. The gays started Fulist Museum. And later, I believe, in the early 2000s, an activist named, trans activist named Nikki Trautfein started a trans archive called the Lili Elbe Archiv. This is how it was all progressing. about 10 years ago, no, 15 years ago or so, the Shulles Museum elected to its board. It's a membership organization, I should say.

So anybody in the world can become a member. You pay an annual dues, and then it's run through an annual general meeting. At that meeting, a board of directors is elected. The board of directors is the collective executive. We then manage approximately 15 people, I would say, doing about 8 to 10 full-time jobs worth of work on about a 1.2 million euro annual budget, which comes half in guaranteed money from the city senate and the other half we have to bring in through grant applications to keep the doors open, to keep basically the grant applications to run shows. So we're entirely dependent

on generous state culture funding. About 15 years ago, the museum elected the first woman in its history to the board of directors, Berger Bozold, who is still my colleagues. And about 10 years ago, a process kicked off by which the museum began to open itself up to be about more kinds of people than just white, German, and especially West German, cis gay men. What is interesting, I think, about the museum is that because we are democratic, we are not only a place where these histories are archives and exhibited, but also a platform where people are actually really actively contesting what those histories mean and who they are for and how they should be told and what should count.

when I was elected to the board in 2018, it was a year in which there was an unprecedented, entirely doubled set of candidates for the board. So usually between 10 and 12 people are putting themselves up for eight slots. This year, there was very clearly like eight people on Team 1 and eight people on Team 2. And we, the side of the side of more opening things up and the side of continuing to expand one, that year. And so that's how I joined the board. And I was just re-elected to a second term last fall. So that's kind of the history of the museum. That's kind of where we're situated. And that's kind of

where we're at. We're at a place now where I would say our exhibition program is quite balanced in terms of who is being spoken to and who is curating. Our staff is catching up and our archive and collections are, of course, the slowest because you don't, you know, an exhibition program, you do less than one to do more of the other. An archive, you don't throw collections away in order to make room for new collections. You're just an additive process. And it's also a process of it doesn't go as quickly because it's one thing to have a curator from a community that hasn't been represented at your institution before, decide to work

with you to get funding and to be paid to do a show. It's another thing to convince someone from that community to give you their death request forever. And so that's a slower process, obviously, in terms of making the collection more reflective of the queer community that we're in both in Berlin and also in Europe and also globally. We like to say that we're the world's largest independent queer archive and museum. It kind of depends on your definition of the words independent archive and museum. The Archwives in Toronto also have a pretty good claim, as does the Geobotie Historical Society in San Francisco, but we have over 1.2 million objects in our collection spanning all the way from

18, no, I think the earliest objects in our collections from the 1680s, and our most recent collection objects are from last week, because every week we get all the flyers for all the Berlin gay events and they go into the boxes. So that's where we're at in the middle, I would say, of this very necessary process of growing and opening up. And I think a process that doesn't really have an end. So. Yeah. We spoke with the archivist at the Chicago Leather Museum. And we're talking with them about the sort of space limitations that came up and how the collection changed over time and how people's bequests happened. So that's that's familiar ground for us talking to people working in museums. But I was curious, is there any, since it's more exhibit focused,

Is there like a favorite exhibit that you've put on since you've been involved? Or is there something in the collection that you find particularly odd or weird? Or how did we get that? Or just whatever strikes you? Sure. I'll talk about a couple things. The exhibit I want to talk about is actually a show that we did before I showed up. But it's one of the first shows that brought me into the museum as something more than just a user of the archive.

I did an event on the program of it. And it was curated by Ashkan Sepawevon. and it was called Oda Rodley, which is Eldorado spelled backwards. If anybody who's listening to this is interested about this show, there's a catalog that's available, and also Ashkan spoke about it quite eloquently in a roundtable in the most recent issue of Radical History Review, which is a special issue called The Visual Archives of Sex,

and I'm sure that roundtable is available on SciHub as well for people who do not have the institutional access. But basically, he departed from this natural history museum style mode, of exhibition and from the idea that he had been invited in as part of a grant project to do a post-colonial show at the museum and basically said that he felt as though he was being invited in to do two things. One, to kind of give a wrap on the wrist to the Germans and say, look, at all, you know, be even very, very bad and, you know, now you have to be better. And also to, essentially, to present some kind of queer people of color, art, or identity or something in a

similarly ethnographic frame. And what he did instead was invite a very diverse international group of artists to do work that actually put into question the existence of the museum itself as a model of ethnographic display of queerness in the world. And I think it was a very, very, very good show. It was a show that got a lot of reactions from people in the building, even people who would generally, I think, consider themselves on the progressive side of our debates. And I think Ashkan did a great job in that roundtable of pointing out the ways in which the institution itself, we as an institution, need to urgently transform the way in which we respond to that kind of intervention and that kind of work. And I think that precisely because it was an intervention that the institution, I think the institution can feel good about it in the sense that it happened there and it was good. But I think the institution did not respond particularly well to it, even though it was happening at the institution.

And so I think that it's important to think about it precisely for that reason, because we need to be a better place, I think, for those kinds of things to happen. In terms of a favorite object, we have, so people may be aware of the history of divided Berlin and divided Germany that in 1962, essentially, the Berlin wall went up overnight and the city was divided. And I think for people who haven't been here, it's easy to think about East Berlin and West Berlin and assume that, okay, it's as though there were some kind of wall between, say, Boston and Cambridge, or a wall between Manhattan and Brooklyn, or a wall between, you know, that there's some natural marker or natural divider. Are there these two different neighborhoods or, you know, something like that? And in fact, it's completely artificial. It makes no sense. It was divided based on, like, land mass calculations. And so West Berlin as an island was carved out of East Germany by this wall and in a completely

random fashion. I mean, just a completely random fashion. Streets were gone down the middle of, you know, you'd have two doors to a house and one was on one side and one was the other. It was really, really, really very haphazard and happened very quickly. And there are two kind of documents in our collection that speak to that, I think, in very different ways. One of them, we have photos and other materials from this person named Rita Tommy Thomas.

And Tommy was a butch who had a dog salon in East Germany. It's a dog groomer. And who used to really enjoy going out to dike bars in West Berlin. And then one night they were walking home and were told essentially by a West German border guard as they were going to go cross back into the east zone of the city. if you cross that bridge tonight, you're never coming back, and had to make this choice in this moment of, well, what do I do? Do I go where my home, my pet, my this, by that, or do I stay here with these people with this community with the ability to travel? Like, what do I do? And they went back to the

east and lived in the east and eventually saw the wall fall in 1990. And so we have a picture of them standing near that bridge with one of their dogs. And then, in a completely different note, a lot of gay men would go back and forth between the two sides to visit partners or friends or established networks. And of course, in the West Germany, it was a lot easier to get commercially available porn. Actually, the legal situation for gay men was at various times better in East Germany than in the West. Sam Hunac has a really good book about this coming out soon called States of Liberation. But anyway, we have the complete collection of this East German gay guy named, last name was Piskam. And he had one of these apartments where every square foot has 175 objects of which 82 are pink and 40 sparkle. But he also would take the porn that his friends brought him, cut out the individual pictures and paste them into these big three foot by four foot albums and then write in German the most unbelievable captions and descriptions. And it's always three guys.

He really liked threesomes. And it's always two America, like stereotypical Americans. American names and then the most German name you've ever heard of. So it's like Mitch, Timmy, and Tusten, something said. And he's just, I mean, he was just such a filthy old pig. And it's just such a wonderful document, a wonderful and very individual document of one person's very precise sexual desire. And we have, I think he left us between eight and ten of these, several hundred page, three foot by four foot, enormous albums. And that I think, I mean, we certainly have things in our collection that are more quote-unquote important, you know, but that's one of my favorites in terms of, you know, fun to talk about and also the kinds of, you know, history that you can talk about with it.

Two very different ways of approaching this East-West divided city problem. Yeah, I think I've heard of that upcoming book. I'm going to check it out. Yeah, Sam's a really wonderful historian. And it should be great where all of us are eagerly awaiting it. and Laurie Marhofer's book about Herzfeld and race. All of the, those are the two books that, or two, rather, two of the books that all of the people who do queer history as it relates to Germany are waiting for with bated breath this year. So we've gone an hour, and usually we would like to wrap up with an action-oriented question.

And I'm sorry that this is kind of off topic. So that's why I sent you an extra message that you could read it beforehand. We have this context of book challenges coming in the United States, and I'm sure we will export them. as we do many of our other fine cultural products. And mostly it's over defining queer resources, fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter, as pornography. And as I've been thinking about how libraries try and say, well, no, you're censoring, you can't do this, but we throw out Nazi shit all the time. You know, we throw out, we make curatorial decisions all the time.

It's not so far beyond expectations that we're going to have. This is not always going to come from right-wingers. There's always going to be a division in terms of the way you are constructing queerness is now unacceptable, and we need these particular books out of the library as well. You can't have cruising. What's a good way to construct a defensive books with the gender queer focus? I've had a hard time thinking about if liberalism's up to the challenge. We've talked about other ideologies as the backbone for librarianship.

But I don't know. What do you think would be the best way to defend books that people are going to find objectionable from one side or another? That is a complicated question. I mean, I tend to think about the questions, collections questions, more like an archivist than like a librarian, which is to say that when I think about, collections, I tend to think about collections that are primarily, although hopefully not entirely for,

I won't say, no, I won't say they're primarily for professional audiences, but they're for specialist audiences. It just is a specialist audience of who's going to be directly interacting with a special collection. And so in that case, when it comes to all of the various troubling things that you might find in a special collection, of course, my responses will keep everything because, you know, everything should be available to people and people should, people should then be able to have the thing in order to write a critical history of it, right? You know, the classic example in Germany is that you're not allowed to have, you're not allowed to be in possession of objects with swastikas on them. But obviously, there's an exception for archives because if

you're collecting state documents from the Third Reich, they all have swastikas on them. And that's obviously everyone can understand that's not for, you know, that's not being like posted on the outside of someone's house as a political symbol, but rather is a historical article. But rather is a historical artifact and is there for the writing of we hope critical histories. I guess I also tend to be more, I mean, I don't think that I've really thought about questions of circulating book collections and far right material enough to be able to declare that I have a perspective on it. And in terms of constructing a defense of books about queer and gender queer people and lives, I think it's good to be affirmative, and I think it's good to say that we think that this matters. We think that it matters

that these stories are out there. We think that we have people coming to these libraries who are like this. We think that being queer is a good thing and being gender queer is a good thing, and being gay is a good thing and being trans is a good thing. And we are therefore going to have an affirmative rather than a defensive stance about these books, not just, oh, you know, maybe we have this, so we should also have this, but also to be affirmative about it. And that's also what I think a lot of people are doing. I don't know that there's any magic ideological potion that is going to get you beyond, that is going to like click everything into gears to stop incredibly bad faith people from on the one hand screaming about free speech and on the other hand trying to like get

all the queer books and all the books about racism thrown out of libraries. I think instead the work is done through like complicated alliance building and through. affirmative defenses of things that we think are good. Yeah, I really like your framing it as like affirmative versus defensive. That's a framework I hadn't thought of. So when I did my master's thesis, my advisor, Emily Knox, she is one of like the leading scholars in book challenges and book bannings. And one thing she said to me that sort of like,

she's one of the only people who changed my mind, not anything. and she said that like in her going across the country and like looking at book challenges and everything she said that like they you know they came from everywhere they came from you know evangelical Christians they came from leftists they came from parents they came from you know any political affiliation you could think of and she said that the thing that she noticed that they all had in common was that one they were making assumptions about like certain groups couldn't handle having something said about them or portrayed about them in a certain way. So it's this very like patronizing view. And also that like reading is so powerful that it can like change how someone views something or change how they view, uh, themselves. And so this is where you get like more, you know, maybe progressive people, maybe not liking the way the queerness is represented in a book or a film and wanting to challenge that. And where you might get a very, you know, maybe progressive people, maybe not liking the way the queerness is represented in a book or a film and wanting to challenge that. And where you might get a very, like a right-wing Christian person not wanting something about queerness at all.

And so I think doing like the affirmation of, no, it's important that we have these in here for these reasons and not just defending. I really just, I like that framework a lot. Gender. What is this? Soviet Russia? I'm excited to hear, I mean, I'm just excited to hear librarians and some people who have thought about this in the context of circulating collections more think about it and talk about it because, again, from the perspective of someone who is not dealing with circulating collections, and from the perspective of someone who, when there is vile right-wing stuff in books that are in circulating collections, tends to not be the direct target of it. For me, the book challenge does not see, that's not the thing to which I would

typically turn, or that's not an avenue, maybe, let's say, that I would necessarily think to go down when thinking about fighting right-wing ideology or when thinking about the ways in which far-right ideas circulate in culture and in media. However, that's with all those caveats. And so it's, I think, really interesting to hear people who have thought about this more deeply talk about it because, I mean, it's also one of these things, I think, that often one of these conversations that maybe doesn't always make it so far outside of the realm of librarians. into the realm of public conversations. And given that libraries are like the places where free ideas are, like, it's the one place in

the world where ideas are free, then, you know, it's actually a really important conversation to have because it's conditioning the whole, it's conditioning the whole scope of what people can think without having to pay for it or what people can access without having to pay for it. Yeah, like the one thing that is like a huge. huge side of contention with libraries is like, you know, the neutrality, we should collect everything. But what that ignores is that you only have so much shelf space. Like you are physically limited or even in electronic collection, those are still on servers somewhere. And you also have a limited budget. So every time you buy a book, there's another book that you aren't able to buy because of it.

And so having these sorts of discussions, like, because I am also of the like, we should have everything, but that's more of a like in an ideal world where infinite space and infinite budget exists, but that's not the reality that we live in. And so thinking about how we affirm the decisions that we make instead of defending, the decisions that we make about what we buy or what we make exists. Right. And I think that's also the context that's missing from a lot of these conversations about ideas that are supposedly being banned from discourse or whatever. You know, like this is something that you see with the quote unquote gender criticals all the time, well they'll say, you know, I can't believe that I went into this book and I went into this bookstore

and I didn't see my book on the front table. I'm being oppressed. Now, I have a book coming out in June, and as much as I would love to see it on the front table of every bookstore in the goddamn world, I do not suffer under the, under the delusion that every bookstore is going to think that they need to put it on the front shelf, nor do I think that every library needs to buy it. Although, if you're listening to it, please do order several copies of bad gays homosexual history, coming out from first soap books on May 31st. But to jump from that to like, I have been banned from the public sphere,

I say in my interview with the Sunday Times, you know, or whatever, is I think so telling. And I think what can contribute more to this conversation is to think more about the material conditions of speech and as in who gets to say stuff without getting fired and who gets to stay stuff without fearing that they're going to lose their like livelihood, as well as just their as as their political and sort of civil rights and freedoms because that

conditions I think that conditions speech in ways that I think most conversations about free speech completely ignore and also what are the material realities of a given discursive space whether that be a bookstore's front table or a library's collection or a newspaper opinion section and yeah to remember that that as you just quite eloquently said in a in a limited space which all of those are, everything that is added is something else that is not. And so it's, I think, the way to talk about those decisions is to be affirmative about them. And I think one of the problems we sometimes face or one of the traps we sometimes fall into is thinking that, and this is maybe what you were saying earlier, Justin, about the question of whether liberalism is up to the task of doing this. And I think

it isn't. I think one of the reasons is that liberalism, especially American liberalism, I think because of the tradition of constitutionalism and of thinking about the constitution in this very kind of almost mystical way tends to think that there's this like there's some like you know one special discourse trick you can do to defang everybody and to sort of make your point clear to everybody and you'll sort of catch them in their own hypocrisy and then everyone will see that you're right and is this kind of west wing fantasy version of politics and I think that that's maybe where you get into, that's maybe what I mean when I say a defensive position, where you try to articulate some way in which what you're doing is actually not arguing that, you know, for

example, it's better to have a book. It's better to have to keep going on this, on this example of trans issues because unfortunately trans people and they're writing about themselves and their struggle for affirmation and emancipation is this site of crazed fascist, lowback at the moment, you know, it is an affirmatively better decision. We as the library think it is an affirmatively better decision to have Grace Lavery's memoir than to have Abigail Schreier's book about how the transgender craze is seducing our daughters. Like, we think that is better. It's not that we think that it's important to teach the debate. It's not that we think that, oh, this, that, no, no, we think it is better to have this book than it is to have this book. We can only buy one book,

and we can only buy so many books, and we think it's better to have this book than that. And I think that ends up actually being a stronger retort, maybe, at least in the discursive field that I know more about than in the circulation librarian field where I am an amateur surrounded by, luckily, in this podcast, people who actually know what they're talking about and who can contribute probably better than I can. Thanks so much for that, Ben. Was there anything you wanted to plug? I know it's late where you are, so I won't keep you forever.

If people like the sound of my voice and want to hear more of it, they can go to badgayspod.com. That's badgayspOD.com. And there you can find an episode archive. You can find T-shirts. One of them says bad gays and one of them says evil twink energy, which is a world historical force that we've identified through our research on the show. You can also find there a link to pre-order our book, which is coming on May 31st from Verso. and there are also book tour dates that are slowly starting to populate that part of the website.

We're coming to somewhere between 15 and 20 cities across the U.S. and UK in June. And if we're coming to near you, you can come see us and have us sign your book and see our smiling faces. And if people are interested in other parts of my writing, they can go to benwritesthings.com. And at Ben Wrights Things is also my Twitter handle where you can find me mouthing off about many things. things until far too late in the evening. Great. That'll all be in the show notes. Good night.