Part One: Grace O'Malley: The Pirate Queen of Ireland

Margaret talks with Hugh Ryan about the complicated legacy of Gráinne Ní Mháille and her piracy and her rebellion against the British.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. This week my guest is
Hugh Ran You. How are you. How about you, Margaret?
I'm very okay. I'm like grouchy, but that's no one's fault.
It's raining. Also, I'm forty something, so I'm grouchy at
all time. Oh yeah, excellent. Um, that's an important way

(00:23):
to okay. Um. Hugh Ryan, for anyone listening, is an
author and historian and on my very short list of
historians about queer stuff. I hit up all the time,
Like before I started this show, Like the first episode
of this show, I basically reached out to Hugh and
was like, please explain the history of homosexuality and heterosexuality

(00:44):
in the Western world. It's like the most wonderful thing
anyone could ever ask me, because usually when I talk
at length about that at people, they begged me to stop. Well,
I'm very excited to have you on. Uh. Sophie is
our producer. Hi, Sophie, how are you pie. I'm swell. Yeah,

(01:06):
I'm glad you're swell, but also grumpy. Yeah no, yeah,
I mean yeah. This is the the mortal wound of
modern civilized life is being both swell and always under
attack by capitalism and bad things. Ian is our audio engineer.
High Ian Hi Ian, a woman, wrote our theme song. Okay,

(01:33):
So I figured we've got one of the best historians
about LGBT history and a New York City expert on
so why not talk about sixte century Irish politics and piracy?
We don't, I think every knows us. We don't tell
the guests what we're going to talk about, um, mostly

(01:56):
because we don't want them to, like secretly go and
research it ahead of you. Don't worry. I wouldn't have.
But I'm so excited because I was gonna say, when
I first met you, you had recently lived on a boat.
But I think that's not true. No, I my my
boyfriend at the time lived on a boat and I
spent a lot of time on It was a boat

(02:17):
that floated but never moved because it was not capable
of moving, but it was still I think it does
that make it a raft? Like when do you go
from being a raft to a boat? I'm not sure.
I mean it was boat shaped, and like do rafts
have bilge pumps that constantly break and need to get fixed?
That actually just brought back, like real traumatic memories. When
the bilge pump would break, it would play for allez.

(02:37):
So that was the sound that meant I was drowning.
And now I can't hear it without thinking of to
be got to bed. See, I think that that counts
as boat life. Um maybe that's what makes it a
boat instead of a ship, right, because if you get
on like a ship that goes in the water, people
get really mad if you call it a boat. I
think I don't know, that's like a pet and thing

(02:58):
I've heard. M m, well that's only really tangentially related.
There's some boats or ships in today's episode because pirates,
they were pirates without ships, this would be really sad episode.
So I know i'd based I'd be like, they'd have
a go fund me to get themselves a ship. That's true.

(03:23):
So today we're going to talk about Grania no wallyam
or as her name is anglicized, Grace O'Malley, the Irish
pirate queen, the Irish pirate queen. That's right, That is
the next sentence that I was going to read. That's
also my nickname, but I'm glad she had it first.
Excellent there's a lot of hues in today's story. Actually

(03:45):
mostly near the end. They all come in at once.
It's very strange. I never meet other Hughes because we
have to battle to the death like Highlanders, so it's
good to hear about them. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it
makes sense. You've actually outlived all of these ones so
far to my knowledge, unless they're Highlanders, in which guess
they're still around. The English state papers, which are the
notes that people write down when you have a government.

(04:06):
You're just like, here's the stuff that happened today in government.
That's what a state paper is, as best I can tell.
The English State Papers, which is actually where we get
most of our knowledge about her. Ireland kind of wasn't
sure what to write about her. Referred to her as
the most notorious woman on all the western coasts, a
notable traitress, and has been the nurse of all rebellions

(04:27):
in the province for forty years, which is pretty cool.
I'd be pretty proud to get that on a tombstone day.
I know, traitress. I think traitress would fit on your knuckles.
I'm not entirely certain how to spell now it's nine letters.
I'm sorry, everyone, I know they got your hopes up
about sick knuckle tattoos. She is a messy hero. She

(04:50):
might not have been a hero. She might have sucked.
No one knows. We know a lot about her life,
and we know a lot about the legends that people
have built up around her, but we don't actually know
her motives, and we don't know which side she was
working on for most of the time. Double agent, triple agent.
Who knows? Basically she was a sailor, a merchant, a fighter,

(05:14):
a gambler, a crime boss, a pirate, a rebel, a
devoted mother and grandmother, and almost certainly a spy or
probably a spy. But if she was a spy, was
she a double agent? Was she? I don't know. She
was not a lot of fun. Let's just say that, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
So she's a pirate, but she's a hundred years before

(05:37):
the quote golden age of piracy, So she's not what
many Western listeners will first think of when they imagine
the word pirate. She's she's Irish as ship, she's medieval Irish.
She's sixteenth century Irish, which needs some explanation. And this
is how I work the entire history of Ireland into
a podcast. I'm ready to hear it. Boy, howdy, let's

(05:58):
do it all right. So I'm starting at the beginning.
There's a country called Ireland. You might have heard of it.
It's famous for exactly two things. One being colonized, the
first country colonized by the British and suffering brutally at
their hands time and time again. And of course it's
famous for how later these socialist revolutionaries called themselves the
Irish Republican Army. But right wing Irish Americans are really

(06:21):
dense and are like, yeah, Republicans like us. That's painful.
I know. If you would listen, if you ever listen
to I ra A songs on YouTube, the comments are
just all of these like blue lines skull avatars being like,
hell yeah, brother, ah yeah, I grew up singing a

(06:44):
lot of the black and you know, come out to
black and tans, come out and find us like a man.
And then when you hear that in a bar, the
people who respond make me go, I think you're thoroughly
forgetting the third thing that Ireland is known for. I
can't think of anything else that's true. They famously did
not have a good time with potatoes. We can fold

(07:06):
that under the British colonization though yeah, I could go yeah, yeah. Honestly,
the fact that the people who respond when you think,
come out your black contents are not necessarily the people
you want to be friends with is the main tension
I had about whether or not I was going to
record this episode, because I think it is really useful
for people to understand the history of British colonization and

(07:29):
to understand that Ireland was absolutely fucked by the British.
But I want to avoid playing into this like weird
like therefore white America thing that makes no fucking sense.
You know, it's interesting, it's it's a real generational thing,
I think to Two of my four grandparents came over
from Ireland after um, shall we say, involvement with the

(07:54):
resistance against the British. They don't speak about a lot.
My grandfather had a bullet in his shoulder that he
never really talked about, which actually was probably from the
falling apart of the IRA after you know, the devil
are after the nies um and so my grandmother who
he married, the two of them both emigrated and she

(08:15):
had held a gun for the first time against the
Black Intention when she was nine, when they came to
burn down her village. She ended up being a Republican,
you know, many decades later. And then my parents in
the American sense, not that in the American sense. Yeah,
and then my parents became fierce democrats, like very democratic
unionists and um. And then I am, you know, a

(08:37):
sort of queer anarchist. So we see the generations playing
out in unexpected ways that that tracks. So we're going
to talk about the history of Ireland, and we're gonna
be talking about sixteenth century island, which is not like England,
light like it sort of gets presented like. It has
an entirely different system, different cons steps. It's very different socially,

(09:01):
and so I want to give us some context because
the fact that everyone did everything very differently than England
caused most of the tension that caused why we're going
to be talking about gran today. Ireland is an island.
I don't know if you knew that people have lived
there for a funk off long time, like maybe during
the Ice Age, but people aren't super sure about that.

(09:24):
But definitely some folks showed up at around eight thousand
b C. They hung out hunting and gathering for about
four thousand years, and then they started do a little
bit of agriculture and herding. Here and there. They made pottery,
they built off really funk off cool tombs, and like
all this ship that's like lined up to the stars
and all that that great stuff. The most extensive archaeological
site of all of this era is in County Mayo,

(09:45):
which is in the northwest of Ireland, which is where
most of what we're going to talk about is today.
That's the only relation it has to that. But I
just don't think it's neat. And these these first people,
or the second people, possibly they're not the Celts, who
are now seen as the major ethnic group of Ireland,
or rather the Gaels, the subsection of the Celts. The
Celts show up later. And this is really interesting to

(10:07):
me because Irish mythology describes that there were six groups
of people who settled Ireland and the first three were
wiped out and some other descendants became like the gods
and ship. I'm not as versed in Irish folklore as
I would like to be, but I find it really
interesting that these myths, which probably would have just been
called history for a very long time, we're like, yeah,
a bunch of different groups of people were here and

(10:28):
then they all falked off or died or whatever. And
then more recent history is like, yeah, there were a
bunch of different groups of people here and then they
all fucked off or died or whatever. Ireland has a
real spiral to that history. Yeah, if you're ever going
to get lost in to see a very strong and
conflicting opinions, read all of the different theoretical anthropological origins

(10:48):
of the settlement of Ireland. But sixth century b c.
The Celts show up really slowly. And this is the
thing that I think is really cool about Ireland. Most
of the time, when people showed up, they're not like, yeah,
Ireland is ours now. But instead you get something called galicization,
where cultures merge rather than replace one another. And there's
a really strong exception to this rule that comes later

(11:12):
called the British, but prior to that you get galicization.
And the creation of the Gals itself was gaalicization. It
was probably a merging of Celtic and indigenous Irish culture.
And this whole synchronous synchronization thing is not unique to Ireland,
but since it's where a lot of my family's from,
I've paid more attention to it than some other places.
This is how you get classical Ireland. The gaels are there,

(11:34):
there are probably druids. You've got a bunch of kings
and bards and ship like a lot of kings. This
is not a unified country. There's tons of clans famously
not getting along great all of the time. Basically it's
a place of different warring clans or kingdoms for a
very long time. So Rome shows up and it's like

(11:56):
Britain is ours now and they didn't bother with Ireland,
which they called Hibernia which means winter land. Basically, historians
like to argue about this, like why they didn't go
funk with Ireland. Historians like to argue period, which is
actually kind of cool, Like what I'm talking, we don't argue.
I'm a historian. I feel like I feel like this

(12:19):
is the thing I really like because at first I'm like,
oh God, all of these sources are saying really different things.
But then you realize, like that's the point, right, Like
people listen to history or science and think, oh, this
is the answer science has told me whereas like actual
scientists and historians are like, no, no, no, this is
our best guest based on the evidence that we currently have,
which makes like even like the whole like I don't know,

(12:41):
like people revisioning history and all of that ship like
more interesting than it seems because it sounds like people
are like, are you just rewriting history? It's like no,
We're constantly readdressing this like series of facts to try
and figure out the best narrative to tie it all together.
And there's always new facts. I mean, even just the
time it takes to research history. New facts appear in

(13:02):
the research that you did at the start of a
project is possibly no longer valid at the end. Yeah,
I did that happen to dude, And when writing one
of your books for anyone who hasn't doesn't know he
Ryan has a couple of books of New York queer
history that rule that happened in certain ways several times
for me in particular, like when I was working on
this book about the Women's House at Attention, the prison

(13:23):
that used to be in Greenwich Village, I would find
that there were whole sources which were not accessible, did
not seem to exist and then like a year and
a half later, I would just type a phrase into
Google and it was like an entire archive had emerged
from the ocean. Which is I really like that. I
really like that. We're like it's so weird that we're

(13:44):
getting better at history, Like we're further away from all
the stuff, you know, but like the Victorians were so
bad at it that I think the thing we're getting
better at, maybe at least a little bit, is like
sharing it. I think archives always have this real rough problem, right,
They're tasked with two diametrically opposite chores. We must preserve

(14:06):
these things, and the most dangerous thing that we can
do to them is touching them. Right, you also have
to make them available to people on the outside who
need to touch them. And I think that for a
long time, archives swung more towards the preserve and protect
and less towards the share to popularize. And I think
we're moving in that direction. And I think part it

(14:27):
is about digitization and the Internet making it so much
easier to do those things that it's really hard to
not at least do partially job of it. And now
you don't have to have as many people touching this stuff.
So oh that's interesting. Okay. So, so Rome shows up.
They never conquer Ireland, and whether or not they tried
is again a matter of some historical debate. It's possible

(14:49):
that there was like a Gaelic chief of king it
was like, hell yeah, I will totally sell my people
out for power. But mostly they were like, why would
we bother with that backwater slum where everyone is filthy
and starving and it's fucking cold. We literally named it
winter Land? And have you met that? This is again
the Roman voice, not my voice. And have you met
those filthy Irish people? They're so fighty they how could

(15:12):
you rule them? They can't even rule themselves. Or the
Roman Empire was too big already and they were busy,
too busy conquering in Scotland. And there was nothing so
magical and special about the Irish like many people want
there to be. Whatever reason Rome doesn't conquer Ireland. Irish warriors, though, uh,
they funk up the Romans in Britain all the time,

(15:32):
probably not as some like war for liberation, probably more
just like hell yeah, let's go like raid and steal
some ship. But I think it's a little messier than
that because we get what's called Have you ever heard
of the Great Conspiracy or the Barbarian Conspiracy of three
sixty seven? Okay, so I'm really excited about this. This

(15:53):
is some like George armartin ship. Okay, everyone around it's like,
oh my god, funk these Romans. Let's go funk them up.
And if this was just a raid, why would there
be this enormous international collaboration. It was huge. You have
the Picks from Scotland, you have the Scotty from Ireland.
I know, I know, you have the Adakati, who I

(16:13):
think we're from around there, but I'm not entirely certain.
I think they're mostly Most of the history you can
immediately find about them is literally they threw down in
this fight. Um So if you want to be remembered
as a small group, you should fight an empire. It's
not a good way to last a long time, but
it's a good way to get remembered. You've got the
Saxons from Germania, which is roughly where you think it is,

(16:35):
and you've also got a Roman garrison that mutinied and
helped it all happen, which was probably local Brits and
other groups in the area, not soldiers from Rome, and
where was that mutinous garrison? But Hadrian's Wall? Did Adrian's Wall,
That's the like end of the whole property of Rome, right,
Like they built that wall to be like yeah, yeah,

(16:57):
they're like, we gotta keep the wildlings out. And it's
a twelve ft high, eight to ten ft deep, seventy
three mile long stone wall that goes from shore to
shore across the middle of fucking I don't want to
say England, people will get mad, the bigger island, Great
Britain or is that the name of the Yeah, I
don't know. Whatever. So, and it was to keep the Scottish,

(17:19):
to keep the Picts out, and it I don't know,
imagine building a physical wall as a symbol of separating
the good, god fearing civilized people from the impoverished people
just across it. This is this is the first in history.
Oh my god, it is because it's all white plastered too.
It took fifteen thousand people six years to build this wall,

(17:41):
and it took just one mutinous garrison to let the
Picts over and the afore mentioned Great Conspiracy. Meanwhile, everyone else,
like the Irish, they land in the south and They're like, hell, yeah,
let's sucking do this, raid, pillage, burn, possibly liberate little messy.
But the Romans they had this this group of pe
bowl who existed to make sure that they would know

(18:02):
if the picks were coming. They were called the the
Arcani or the Arianni, depending on which literal physical carved
into stone source you look at. And they're supposed to
report on conspiracies. It's like the Roman FBI of the area, right.
They were in on it. They were like, fuck it,
we're part of this. Do and people. Maybe they were bribed,
maybe they were just like, no, we don't. We don't

(18:23):
like the Romans either. So after all of this, when
the rebellion gets crushed, Rome is like, we're disbanding. You
a secret society called the Arkhani, which means secret or
it's a misreading of Arianni, which means people who have
sheep um too great possibilities. Yeah, both totally real. They

(18:47):
were a secret society and most of them probably had sheep.
Yeah they all go away? Or do they? Is there
still a Roman secret society of sheep herders in the
middle of England? There probably isn't. And the thing about
this like huge conspiracy is that this wasn't while Rome
was new in England. Rome had been ruling in England

(19:10):
since forty three a d. So this is like three
twenty years later. That's longer than the US has existed.
So when people tend to think that like, oh, I
don't know, empires and colonizing countries are forever, History says
that's not always the case. The Great Conspiracy retook huge

(19:32):
chunks of Britain back from Roman rule. They probably showed
up and murdered and raped and burned everything down because
they were raiders. But also it's a little bit micked
because like history is like, oh, this terrible thing happened, right,
but everyone who lived there was in on it. Like
huge chunks of all the British garrisons were just defecting

(19:52):
and abandoning their posts and joining the rebellion. So it's like,
I'm a little bit confused by this idea that I
was just a ray. I want to read more about
this is what I'm trying to say. But it's fucking interesting.
Rome rallied. They got after about a year, they got
a bunch of people's spears and swords, and they retook Britain,
and I don't know. I want to find a book

(20:14):
from like the Scottie or picked point of view about
all of this stuff, but I'm not aware of it yet. Yeah,
I don't know of any. So then eventually Rome sort
of falls apart. Roman Roman control in Britain ends like
less than about a generation or two later. It starts
with like Britain de urbanizing, people start growing food inside

(20:36):
the cities. Is like seeing as archaeological evidence or anthropological
evidence of the de urbanization of Britain, and it kept
being beset by barbarian hordes or whatever, and so is
Rome itself. And by four oh nine Brittain is free
from Roman rule and or it got plunged into the
dark ages, depending on who you ask. This isn't a
story about Britain. I just think it's cool that the

(20:57):
Irish kept sucking up Rome, and Rome never have to
funk up the Irish, and this idea the like I
think it's important to get a kind of groundwork understanding
to medieval Ireland and wasn't conquered by Rome and was
seen as backwards barbarians is a big part of that.
This idea that Ireland is the here there be monsters
like sketchy part of the map is a huge part

(21:19):
of everything that happens to Ireland, specifically in terms of
how Britain deals with it. It's not entirely true that
Rome didn't conquer Ireland because they did it in their
Catholic way. A little bit later St. Patrick shows up
and there are already a few Christians in Ireland, but
not a lot, and soon Ireland goes Catholic, which is

(21:41):
really funny to me because in so many ways they're
like so Catholic, and they do all this work of
like maintaining the Latin language during the early Middle Ages
when like everywhere else it was like falling apart or whatever,
and they like sent missionaries out all over Europe. But
they also like just didn't give up their pagan beliefs.
Their mythology is just running to everything. They're religious in

(22:01):
marriage rights and they're like secession rights and what it
means to be king that we're gonna get to in
a little bit is just not Catholic. My family was
super Catholic, supercoolic. My grandmother, my grandparents, you know, church
multiple times a week when I was little, and yet
still we were constantly like you're traveling, pray to St. Christopher,

(22:22):
your you know something's lost, pray to St. Anthony. It's
like a whole pagan theology and worship tacked onto different saints. Yep, exactly.
And there's even at this point we're gonna get into
this a little bit more, there's um, this Catholic country
has divorce that women can initiate. It has concubines, it

(22:45):
has um like trial marriages, it has uh in order
to become king. You literally like fuck the land like
you like? Um, Yeah, No, it's it's interesting as hell. Yeah,
Brand being the pre it's the Celtic legal system that
English law kind of tried to supplanted. And actually the

(23:07):
story we're gonna talk about today is when Brand law
and English law get into a fight, with lots of
people fighting on both sides. So Ireland, the Vikings show
up in eight hundreds, they start rating, they formed the
city of Dublin, They get the slave trade up and going.
The Vikings actually kind of suck. Dublin was a major
slave capital in the region. People get stolen from all

(23:29):
around the aisles in nineteen o sorry, not nineteen o two,
nine oh, two thousand years earlier than what I usually
talked about on this show. Some cool people got together
and sucked them up. We took Dublin. They lost again
in nine seventeen, then again in nine eighty the Irish
fucked up the Vikings again in the Battle of Tera,
and then the Vikings got it back again, and then

(23:49):
in ten fourteen you've got Ireland's High King going to
war and sucking them up. And High King is sort
of a it's not like a joke, but it's not.
It's not some like, oh yeah, that guy's in charge.
Everyone totally listens to that guy. But instead, so in
order to be king at this point in Ireland, you

(24:10):
have to you have to fuck a sovereignty goddess or
marry a sovereignty goddess, which is the representation of the land.
There's no kill option, just sucking marry. Yeah, well we'll
get Actually it's funny because there's gonna be a Mary
Kill reference later. But yeah, you've gotta like you've got
to like symbolically marry the land that you're going to rule,

(24:31):
because basically it's still sort of this goddess Earth in
a lot of ways that you are just caring for
and it gets embodied in a lot of different ways,
like fucking people, or in one case in this Catholic country,
in order to be named king, you fuck a horse
and then you kill the horse, and then you cook
the horse into a broth, and then you bathe in

(24:53):
the broth made out of the dead horse that you
fucked and killed, and then everyone drinks the broth of
the horse that you based in the blood of the
hole in the bottom of the sea in the bucket,
which is a very Catholic thing. It does not Catholic,
it's just taken. We should move back to that system.
You know, any of our presidential candidates were willing to
fuck a horse, maybe I'll vote for them. Actually, that's

(25:16):
a why all of them would do it. There, I
was going to say, I feel like there's several horsefuckers
that have already been president. Yeah, Well, do you know
who else wants you to have sex with? Yeah, become king.
I feel like some of the ads probably want you
to feel like you're king. Probably, uh ads, here's some

(25:41):
ads for stuff and we're back. So the High King
of Ireland Brian Boru. At this point, it's like, you
call yourself the High King of Ireland and it's like
an actual title. There's like only one of them. At
a gative point, you don't actually no one listens to you.

(26:01):
You're like, I'm the high King. Everyone's like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I prove it. But in this particular case, he was
able to use that in order to get enough people
together that on April fourteen, he got his armies together
and he attacked the Vikings. And there's a bunch of
different ways that people look at all of us. Of course,
you can basically look at it being like the Irish

(26:22):
got together and kicked out the Vikings, which is like
the most patriotic and easy way to look at it.
But then there's also like one Irish guy went to
war against another Irish guy who had more Vikings on
his side than the other guy. And actually it's go ahead. Oh,
I was just gonna say I I was in Ireland
like twenty five years ago visiting this monastery at Clon
mcnoy's kind of beautiful and ruined, and it's right on

(26:45):
the water, and you sort of walk all around and
like this is gorgeous. What happened? And they give you
a tour and in the tour they're like you know,
the the Irish monks who did so much to preserve Latin,
like you said, and the medieval texts, and you know,
this was a site of learning and intelligence which was
sacked by the Vikings some you know, half dozen times.

(27:06):
And then the tour guide like sort of pauses for
a moment and says, and it was also sacked by
the Irish like eight or ten other times. It's really
easy to be like. And then all the Irish just
wanted to get along with each other, like, no, they're
just people, that's the problem. We we people are just people. Um.

(27:26):
But in this particular case, they want the Vikings gone,
and so they get together a whole ton of people
in the Battle of Clontarf, and the Vikings had male
armor and the Irish were like poor as fuck and
we're like running around with spears and ship but they fought.
And Brian more than seventy years old, this high king,
he's there with the warriors. He died when the enemy

(27:48):
stormed his camp and killed him while he was praying.
His son died in the fighting, and so did his nephew,
and so did his fifteen year old grandkid. So three generations.
You can at least say that these particular kings weren't
sit at the back type, and they they won even
though their leader, their leader's kid, their leader's grandkid all

(28:10):
died in the fighting. The grandkid died drowning while chasing
after them in boats or something. They is this the
war where all the kids fought like the red branch?
Is that this repressed memories of Irish folklore and history
that were drilled into me between the ages of like
zero and sixteen, and like little bits of every story

(28:31):
sound familiar, but it's all just a big mush. There
was a war approximately every fifteen years at this point,
as far as I can tell, Like later when we
get to the English. The so the Irish rebellions against
the English. Most of the time you hear about like
rebellions like once a generation or whatever. Sixteenth century Ireland
was like every fucking five to ten years, like one

(28:52):
rebellion is down and another one crops up. So I
don't know, I'm not I'm not aware of this being
that story. But they won. This is what theoretically broke
the power of the Vikings in Ireland more or less
for good, although they did still manage to have some
power in Dublin and still do some slave trading, and
I want to know more about it. And one reason

(29:12):
I want to know more about it is that my
family name, actually my Irish family name, comes from the
brother of the high king. So I'm like, I I'm
not trying to be I don't know. I just think
it's cool the Irish kill joys. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um,
that's what ever, because I don't talk about my family
name very much publicly, you know, And uh yeah, so

(29:36):
that's the anglicization, That's what I'll claim. So Ireland had
a high king after that, and his power was constantly challenged.
He wasn't really much of a high king at all, um,
even though he'd like married and sucked the whole country
or whatever. You know. One guy, he's a regular king,
not a high king. His name is Diermitt Macmurkdam and
he gets exiled to what's now France and he's like,

(29:58):
fuck it, I'm going to get some Normans together and
invade Ireland. Norman's being a Newish group of French folks
that were mix of French and Norse because of a
Viking dude named Rollo who's in the TV show Vikings
had set up shop in Normandy, so the Normans invade.
In eleven sixties seven they conquered the east coast of Ireland. This,
somehow confusingly meant the English king gets to claim Ireland.

(30:22):
The fucking monarchy is the most nonsensical system that anyone
has ever come up with. The Irish they're not really
excited about this. I don't know if you knew that.
They don't really love being one country. That's kind of
part of their thing at this point, but they really
don't love being someone else's country. So they throw down.

(30:43):
Over the course of hundreds of years, and by twelve
sixty one you've got Irish armies sucking up all the
Norman armies and slowly they take the island back from
the British. And then you get the Black Death and
even like do any like medieval reading, and then the
Black Death just like comes in and shuffles all the
pieces around, and then just sometimes good things happen, sometimes

(31:05):
bad things happen. Obviously it's bad for the people who
were directly living through it, but it like, oh, I
don't know, changed property, property relationships and class structure in
all of Europe. When the third of the people died
or whatever. It's like that quote from Game of Thrones,
chaos is a ladder. Yeah, yeah, And so the Black
Death comes and the thing is the Normans in the

(31:28):
British they live in like they live near each other,
and the Irish they're like walking around like not near
each other. So the English and the Normans die and
the Irish don't. I mean, the Irish die too, but
not in the same kind of numbers. So you're telling
me social distancing works. Yes, Social distancing is what gave

(31:48):
Ireland back to all of you weird right wing Americans
who are really into Irish pride. Social distancing is how
Ireland got itself back from England. So distancing and horse
fucking you heard it here, that's right, that's right. So
they started getting to speak Irish again. And so the

(32:09):
Normans who didn't live near Dublin in general at this
point are galicizing and they become kind of Irish instead
of forcing the Irish become Norman. Although you've got this
class divide, that's divide building between the Hiberio Norman and
the Gaels. And all that England controlled was a little
area around Dublin called the pale, which is where the
phrase beyond the pale comes from. If something is beyond

(32:29):
the pale, it means it is beyond imagining, like that terrible,
scary barbarian place of Ireland. A sixteenth century priest named
Francisco Chacata toward Ireland and had this to say about it,
which is probably an exaggeration, but it's not quite as
much of one as you think. He said. Irish people
are very religious, but do not regard stealing as sinful,

(32:52):
nor is it punished as a crime. They hold that
we foreigners are uncivilized because we keep the gifts of
fortune to ourselves, while they live naturally, believing all things
should be held in common. This accounts for the number
of thieves. You are in peril of being robbed or
killed if you travel the country without a strong bodyguard.
I have heard that in places further north people are
even more uncivilized, going about nude, living in caves and

(33:14):
eating raw meat and so largely this just sounds like
people like talking trash. But it, I mean, one, nothing
in there is actually inherently bad. You know, maybe cook
your meat, just just throw that out there. But okay,
as for holding everything in common, they did, and they
didn't by a modern they weren't like socialist or communist

(33:35):
or something about it, right, but by English standards they
absolutely were. Because the king of the clan was in charge,
but he didn't own the land. He was temporarily married
to it. He was temporarily in charge. So the clan
owns the land and he is the steward of it.
Like in a lot of medieval cultures, there's like this

(33:56):
kind of constant tension between hierarchy and freedom that's happening
in that culture. And they're going about nude and living
in caves. Part I was like, but then I keep
finding all these references to like the English being like
I wish they'd build houses. And at another point a
Spanish guy's um fleeing from the English across Ireland and

(34:18):
he tells stories about being like And then I went
and hung out the chapel with a bunch of naked
ladies who are just sitting hanging out. Yeah, I don't
kind of chili like, I don't mind like regular public nudity,
but I do hope they had access to clothes, you know,
because there are some months where I don't think you
want to be naked in your cave. No. No, and
and to be clear, I'm not claiming that all medieval

(34:38):
Irish people lived in caves and were naked, but but yeah, no,
and and actually there was like sweat lodges and stuff.
I think that's where he was hanging out with the
naked people. That part didn't end up in the script,
and now I'm regretting that. So that's the context. So
you bring us to today's story. M Actually, I'm line
there's more context. Only forty minutes. I could keep listening

(35:04):
for hours. This is great. I think you should read
more history books. To me, I don't want the end
version of the podcast. I want to hear the whole
like six hour. Your cool, Well, this one almost ended
up at some point I was like, I actually, yeah,
it came close to this one being a very long episode.
Sixteenth century Ireland. You've got about sixty different clans. They're

(35:26):
led by kings. They got called chieftains a lot, which
is maybe in some ways accurate, but it's always like
that same, like when you're talking about like the uncivilized
people's the words we use kind of matter in terms
of the the way that people make certain assumptions about
those people and these kings are not hereditary, and that
was something that took me a while to wrap my

(35:46):
head around. And I think it's another part that's really
important to understand the difference between medieval Ireland and medieval England.
Instead of the eldest son becomes king, they practice a
form of secession called tannistry, in which the king's heir
is a elected by all of the eligible men, which
is basically all of the males descended from the current
king's great grandfather or something like that. It slightly different

(36:08):
and slightly at different times, which of course led to
a lot of war as people fought over secession and
as part of why Ireland didn't unite. But it also
is like interestingly like democratics a strong word, right, but
like it's different than this random fucking child is ordained

(36:31):
by God. You know, yeah, like keep it in the family.
But we're still going to pick the one that's least
like offensive. It's it's a little, you know, a bit
of both. Yeah, like the one who's not like murder John.
Oh yeah, I was like, like murder John, he just murders. Actually,
you know what, There's multiple people in here who are up?
That guy were like named like of the war and

(36:53):
like the Devil's Hook is a major character in today's story.
That's so big, I know, and nowhere how he got
is that fucking name? Have you tried saying in Gaelic?
I'm sure it involves a lot of like sounds, if so,
you know, I I most of the names I do
find the Gaelic version of, but the Devil's Hook I didn't.

(37:15):
So it's actually possible he was just called that by
the English, but I'm not sure. So there's so much
fighting happening in Ireland and against English attempts at rule
and within from clan to clan, that a ton of
Scots are like this sounds fun, we want to come.
So the Scots show up all the time. There's there's

(37:38):
two groups, the main most important one is called the
Gallo Glass, which means young fighting men. Some come over
and stay in Ireland for good, but most come over
for a quote fighting season between May and October. Every
year they show up and they fight for basically like
their clan will have like a sister clan in Ireland
where every summer they're like time to go help them,

(37:58):
you know, the McDonald's or whatever, and like can head
over and throw down all summer and then head home
for something for like the kids to do in the summer.
You know, get him out of the house right exactly,
shed blood in someone else's country, I know, because you know,
oh my god, this is brilliant, Like all these hot
headed young men. Let's send them over to Ireland. Put

(38:20):
the funk out, yes, go and bake that country. You go,
you help our sister clan. Yeah yeah. And they did
get paid, but they did not see themselves as mercenaries.
It was like a clan loyalty um issue. And then
there were Scottish mercenaries on top of that whose loyalty
was bought, and they were called the Red Shanks. A
lot of battles I read about most of one side

(38:42):
or the other might be almost entirely Scottish, Like a
lot of these like huge battles will be like it
will read the numbers and it'll be like it was
nine gallo glass and you know two hundred cairn, which
is Irish fighters and two horsemen or something. You know.
One of these many many Irish clans was the O'Malley's,

(39:04):
which is the Anglicization. There were the Omalias, and as
far as I can tell, I'm not great at pronouncing
pronouncing all of this stuff. They had lands and what's
now County Mayo, which at the time was called not
the whole county, but the area that they were in.
Their lands were called Owl and it was a kingdom
that lasted from the eighth century to fifteen seventy six,

(39:25):
when it was surrendered to the English, when most of
Ireland was surrendered to the English. It was a lowland coast.
Its name translates roughly to territory of the Owls, which
rules It is rough terrain with treacherous waters and treacherous cliffs.
It is a rough place. And the first reference to
the country of the Country of Owl is from the

(39:47):
eighteen twelve The record is a slaughter was made of
the foreigners, the vikings by the men of Owl. Though
the woll it sounds like Owl. I wonder if that's
where owl. I usually I look up etymology before it's
out this episode, but I didn't even think that through
until I've read it out loud. The next year was
the only the record was a battle between the men

(40:08):
of Owl and the foreigners in which the men of
owl were slaughtered. So that's the history of it for
the next several hundred years is just like this guy
killed that guy. These people pirated, and in sixteenth century
a poet wrote about it, being like this is a
really good place to do guerrilla warfare against the English
from huh um, which wasn't that's not direct quote. The

(40:28):
walia Is considered themselves true blooded Irish. They had stayed
like less normal sized and anglicized. The West coast in
general had um and particularly further away from Galway, which
was a little bit more Anglicized. But we'll talk about that.
Most of the clans. They didn't funk with the sea
in Ireland, Ireland's and Ireland. But they didn't fun. They

(40:49):
sucked the horse and the land, yes, but not the water. Yes.
O Walis are built different. They're not afraid to suck
the ocean in all the classic ways, fishing, trading, salvaging,
all the that wash up. Since the waters are so
rough around there that people are constantly dying, extorting other
people who want to use to see robbing people who
don't give in to the extortion thing. You know, piracy,

(41:10):
they're pirates. That's that's their family business. They're a family
whose power is built on organized crime, like all power
in hierarchy and state authority. Other people don't like this
as much. People from the sort of nearby Galway are like,
you know what, no one from your family is allowed here.

(41:31):
We don't like you. You're robbers. You are not invited
to the part I know and you know who else
wants to rob you. Capitalism in many ways, what we're
describing is the birth of capitalism, and and now we're
right in the center of capitalism. And that leads us
to advertising. But we should bring back sometimes this podcast

(41:53):
instead of being sponsored by all this like negative stuff,
we try to be sponsored by really good things. Um.
The most common is we're often sponsored by potatoes, the
concept of potatoes because they're good. We've been sponsored by
sleeping dogs. We've been sponsored by a good comb And
I'm wondering if you have you have any sponsors that

(42:14):
you would like to to be sponsored by. Sophie Will
whatever you come up with, Sophie's gonna track them down
and get a sponsored by them. I mean, I've got
to say, since we're talking about Ireland, I think Pete
Pete is an important part of Ireland's an important product.
Great smell. It makes your fireplace smell better, it makes
your whiskey smell better, it makes your house smell like shit.

(42:35):
But I love great. We are sponsored by Pete, not
the person, well, also the person. But if Pete makes Pete,
I'm okay with it. Pete's Pete would be a great company.
That's true. Pete and Pete is a show I liked
a kid. I watched a lot of Pete and Pete,
if I was perhaps too old for it. Anyway, here's

(42:57):
the Meds. We are back and we're talking about the
o Walias and they've got a king or a chieftain
or whatever. His name is black Oak, that's his nickname.
His name is actually Dudar, which gets anglicized as Owen
classic Owen pipeline. Yeah, but he didn't use a first

(43:21):
name because when you are the head of a clan,
his first name is the because he's the chief, so
he's the Wallya. His wife, though she had the best
name ever. Can you guess what her name was? Hello?
Wa Okay, that would have been really good. But no,
her name is Margaret, but probably her name was Margaret

(43:42):
like Dudar's name was Owen. Her name was probably married,
not entirely sure, in the year fifteen thirty. Dudar, or
rather the and married pad a daughter. They're only legitimate child.
She had a half brother too, but he wasn't around much.
Their daughter's name was Grania Amalia or anglicized Grace O'Malley,

(44:02):
which yeah, totally sounds like Grania. Now volume what the
fuck England she was? Yeah, she was raised in a castle.
Her family had five of them. These are not castles,
like you're immediately thinking of. These are stone towers. Um,
they are, Like, they're not the thing you look at
and mean like, yeah, dragon lives there. You're like those

(44:25):
people build things out of stone because they're constantly at war.
They're like yeah, well then, and they're also like two
to three stories and like one room per floor. They're
not They're smaller than the average suburban house in America.
These castles. So clearly these when I'm saying that she
grew up in a privileged life in a sixteenth century

(44:48):
West Coast of Ireland relative but she did. She grew
up privileged. She learned Latin, she learned how to read
and write, and actually for how barbarous Ireland was a
higher percentage of Irish people new Latin than English people.
They use at church obviously, but also they use it
for trade with foreigners, including the English, because a lot
of people didn't learn English. You learned Latin, Why would
you learn that other countries language? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Of course,

(45:12):
the Irish spoke Latin with an accent that boogie British
people like to complain about all of the time, because
it was actually kind of a living language in some
ways for Ireland, in a way that it wasn't for
a lot of places. Grannia learned seafaring young, even though
girls weren't supposed to. This part is like more legend
than history, but the end result of it, her of
her learning sea fairing, is absolutely true, so there's no

(45:34):
particular reason to doubt this story. Her legend name like
in the same way like Robin Hood's name wasn't Robin
Hood to his friends, right, But her legend name is
Granny mal or Granna the Bald because when she was little,
her dad was like, sorry, but you can't go sailing
because you're a girl, And she was like, well, why
the funk not? And he was like, because your hair

(45:54):
will get caught in the ropes, and so she shaved
her head, which rules, and she pushed her dad started
taking around sailing and you know, being beset by other
ships and be setting other ships. So she grows up
learning to sail and fight and cuss and gamble and
all this ship before she turns like fifteen mm. If

(46:17):
she'd been a generation younger, she would have lived a
really different life. For hundreds of years. England was like, oh, yeah,
we totally own Ireland. But they didn't do anything about it,
because why would you. The Irish people are scary, so
they just had the pale. But Henry the Eighth, he's

(46:37):
he's not my favorite person who's ever lived. I don't
know if you knew this. Um He was like, I
wonder if we can go over there and rob everyone
and steal all the things from the monasteries and stuff,
which is the part that people don't talk about a
lot with the like anti Catholic thing from the Anglican
Church did like, there's lots of reasons to be mad
at the Catholic Church when you're England, but a lot
of it was like they got so much stuff we

(46:57):
could totally rob them, which, to be fair, is also
a groctian and everyone else is doing too. But it
was kind of like the most common pastime I think
of the rich then and now. Yeah, yeah, totally, it's
how you get rich. So more accurately, he didn't just
go over there to rob everyone. The guy in charge
of the pale rebelled and Henry was like, nah, fuck

(47:18):
you and kill the ship out of him, even though
the dude surrendered. Um, and that's going to set up
a lot about what happens in Ireland for a while
you rebel. They're like, if you surrender, will play nice,
and you're like okay, and then they murder you. Anyway,
Henry the Eighth was like, fuck it, I'm taking Ireland.
This was one grand is eleven and the basic idea

(47:40):
was to replace claned fealty with crown feudalism. More importantly,
people weren't allowed to act Irish anymore. No more speaking Irish.
There's a new law you have to raise your kids
speaking English. There's also lots of fashion advice from Henry
the Eighth, And when Henry the Eighth gives you fashion advice,
it means we're gonna murder you if you don't do
the following. I'm quoting from Judith Cook's book The Pirate Queen,

(48:03):
which is the main biography. A lot of the stuff
about Grania comes from that I was able to find
about Grannia comes from and in this book. In this section,
she's quoting and paraphrasing the law fifty one from Henry
the Eighth. No person or persons shall be shorn or
shaven about the ears, or use the wearing of hair
on their heads, like onto long locks called glibes, or

(48:26):
have or use any hair growing on pond their upper lips,
called or named a crommeal, or use or wear any shirts, smock, kerchief,
or linen cap colored or dyed with saffron, Nor yet
use or wear in any of their shirts or smocks
above seven yards of cloth to be measured according to
the King's standard. No woman must wear or use any

(48:48):
any kertil or coat tucked up or embroidered or garnished
with silk, not couched nor laid with ornaments. In the
Irish fashion, no person or persons were to use or
wear any mantles, coat or hoods made after the Irish fashion.
I think it's so funny. We spend so much time,
you know, dissing on fashion and dismissing fashion, But as

(49:09):
soon as anyone colonizes your country, like the first thing
they do is like, we're gonna ban your language, ban
your religion, and make you stop dressing like fucking foreigners. Yeah, totally,
it's not a it's not a side part of colonization,
you know. And there's so much in even these like
specifics like uh to the last part, no use any

(49:33):
mantle coats or hoods made after the Irish fashion, Like
I'm not entirely certain. Um, I know some of it
was like conical hoods and stuff like that, but the
Irish cloak at the time was not It was a blanket.
It was a big, huge chunk of wool that you
fold up a certain way and pin over yourself. And

(49:53):
it is a thing that you can do when you
are poor and it is cold there, as we've discussed
in Hibernia. So telling people that they can't have that
fucking sucks and then to go into more of it.
Saffron dyes things yellow, so the banded Irish fashion color
was yellow, not green, which I just think is I mean,

(50:13):
I wasn't expecting everyone to wear green back then. But
it's just you know, the lepre cons didn't come until
the eighteenth century. Yeah yeah. Second, crommeal means mustache. The
English really hated mustaches. They didn't have the word mustache yet.
That comes about five sorry, fifty years later they get
the word mustache in English. There just wasn't a word

(50:36):
in English for the hair on your upper lip. They
like they referred to it as like, I don't know,
the hair on your upper lip mouth beard. They have
a word for like beard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so
they referred to it as like the beard of the
upper lips sometimes. And they're like this is why they
have to invade everywhere. They don't know anything. They gotta
go find it somewhere else. Goofy, you know, they're like,

(50:59):
we need word for this. Let's go back to some
people up okay. And then the haircuts. A glibe is
a is a haircut. It's it's really fucking cool haircut.
It's short in the back and long in the front
with a fringe that covers your eyes and like like
long in the front is like kind of like two

(51:19):
like bangs that just sort of cover your eyes. It's
kind of like a Chelsea And there's some illustrations at
the time of Irish peasant soldiers who have glibes. And
then of course there's some sources that or rather there's
some unsourced claims that the globe was like matted in
the front and there I believe there were a lot
of different like peasant cultures that would have matted hair,

(51:41):
not in like careful separated out locks, but just one
big matted fringe. But I don't know the illustration that
I found that it does not look madded to me.
And then the thing about getting to an argument with
those and you're talking about the Blue Lives Matter Irish,
have you ever run into the I can have dreadlocks

(52:02):
because my great great great great great great great great
Irish grandfad Yeah, sister had dreadlocks. Yeah, that's where these
unsourced things come from. And there's no evidence that if
they had madd at hair, it was locked. You know,
there's that like polish plate like mona dread thing that
some peasants had in Europe. But yeah, the other haircut

(52:28):
also ruled, and it was just a cross punk haircut.
It was a fucking power mullet it was. The thing
about having hair shaven around the ears was probably related
to the cool on, which is an Irish haircut that
where most of the front is shaved in the back
has grown really long. I'll try that, yeah, yeah, no,
I'm like, oh, I would, I would go for that.

(52:53):
And I think this is extra cool because you're too
cool haircuts that you can now have to break the law.
You have to pick between long in the front, short
in the back, or short in the front long in
the back. The British really believed in the equality of
hair length ything else and his culture war should have
been going on and sent for centuries in Ireland in
order to prevent Norman's from becoming coolest Irish people because

(53:16):
like a lot of people wanted to galicize, why wouldn't
you is where you fucking live double and passed a
bunch of laws preventing Normans from adopting Irish fashion. Part
of the reason for that was because if you kill
an Englishman or a Norman, that's a capital offense. That's
a big deal, right. You shouldn't go around killing people

(53:37):
by people, I mean English people, But if you kill
an Irishman or an Irish person, you have to pay
a fine. And the problem was, now all these English
people look like Irish people, so you think it's totally
fine to kill them, but then you're in big trouble
and that's just not fair. They just need to make
the Irish start wearing targets on their stomachs, you know.

(53:58):
So it was obvious, Yeah, exactly. And I just think
there's like some star belly sneeches ship going on in
this where it's like, because like it from a modern context,
this is like white on white racism or whatever. Right,
it's not racism, but it's an ethnic hatred, but it's
an ethnic hatred between people who are like physiologically not

(54:19):
particularly distinct. Yeah, so you need other ships. Yeah, it's
before like whiteness was consolidated in a certain sort of way,
but they still thought of each other as not fully human,
you know, right, And there's a bunch of stuff that
like later the medieval English are going through and they

(54:41):
literally refer to like women and children as prey as
they're like going off to go put down rebellions and
ship um, like just literally using the same languages that
they use for animals. And we have vermin all the
time they refer to the Irish as all of that
sort of dehumanizing language of genocide and colonization. And there's
also political ship happening. The king wanted everyone to drop

(55:04):
the O from their clan names or the mac from
their clan names. Oh means male, descendant of Mac means
son of girls would be instead of Oh, but the
clan names would use the masculine. And more importantly, he
started pushing what was called surrender and re grant, which
is he wanted all the clans to surrender to him.

(55:25):
In exchange, he would give them their own land back
with a proper English title and bring them into English feudalism.
They'd have to stop practicing tannistry no more. The men
owned the land in common and vote for who runs it,
just regular feudalism. And they wanted everyone to stop practicing
Irish ways of living, which is largely pastoralist rather than agricultural.

(55:49):
At this point, people weren't sitting around growing potatoes. Not yet.
That actually had to do with a lot with the
fact that all their land got dispossessed. A lot of
people were like kind of just hanging out with their livestock,
and I think some of the who are people were
like literally just wandering around with their livestock. Your family
would have like a cow and then you would just
drink the milk from that cow, and that's how you

(56:09):
stay alive. And there's this whole part in these laws
that are like plus you have to build houses. And
again someone who isn't me know slightly more about what
that means. And I don't want to conjecture too hard.
English hate caves. Yeah, yeah, and it was one of
the demands that the that they made and I don't know,

(56:30):
so the English were like, gross, some food, build some houses,
you useless Irish degenerates. And that's where we're gonna leave
it today. When we come back on Wednesday, we're gonna
talk about pirates and rebels and spies. But I want
to I want to talk about one thing unrelated to
any of this really quickly, because of something that happened
yesterday in the real world. I guess all this happened

(56:52):
in the real world too, but hundreds of years ago
yesterday as we record this last Wednesday for for those
of you listening when this drops and old news for
everyone else who's listening in the far future, as I'm
sure a lot of you are aware. There's been active
and lively protests happening in Atlanta right now trying to
stop the police from building a training facility through destroying
a forest, and there are protests against all of this,

(57:14):
and they tied together environmentalism, environmental racism, and police violence
and living up to the concept of police violence. The
police killed a protester yesterday, which is last Wednesday, as
this release is released, and you there in the future,
you already know more about what happened than we do
as we're saying this, But the police are already putting
out their narrative about what happened, and any cursory look

(57:35):
at recent range in history tells us there's literally no
reason to trust anything that the police have said after
they've killed somebody. So whatever happened that morning, I think
it's important to remember this person as a as a
whole person who had a whole life. So I just
want to say that the person they killed was named
Tortuguita or tort and he was a twenty six year
old non binary indigenous anarchist from folks who knew them.

(57:57):
I didn't have the pleasure they split their time between Atlanta,
where they worked to defend the forest and organize mutual
aid programs, and Florida, where they helped build housing for
low income communities that had been hit hard by recent hurricanes.
They worked as a medic with the Atlanta Resistance Medics.
They were vegan, they loved music, and they took inspiration
from the Zapatistas. So whatever happened, they were a person.

(58:19):
They were a whole person, and they had their own
life and their own interests in their own loves. And
they were killed by the police while working to stop
a facility the police will use to train more how
to do more violence to more people. That's my aside.
I think if it's pretty closely into any story about
the Irish resisting British colonization, that feels like a a piece,

(58:43):
you know, it's an aside and a continuation all unfortunately
at the same time. Now that's that's true. That's one
of the reasons why I think. It's why I read
about Irish colonization as the first modern Western colonization project
um and of course many of the people who suffered

(59:03):
from it are now part of that same empire. But
let's talk about you you Ryan here at the end, Yeah,
who are you? What if people like stuff that you
might like and want to read about it books? Yeah,
what books have you written? Right though? You said like

(59:23):
what do you like and what might people like to
read about it? And I was like, what do I like?
I write mostly about queer history, mostly like New York
City and American queer history too, mostly not entirely. But
I think that really the subject that I'm always kind
of interested in is not this sort of like I

(59:47):
don't know, petting Zoo of history where it's like, look
a lesbian in the fourth century. Look, you know that
this kind of like um universal idea of sex and
sexuality as being something that we can apply from now
into the past. It's a perfectly fine mode. It's just
not the mode I work. And I'm really interested in
the ways in which our ideas about what it means
to be a certain kind of sexuality, or that sexuality

(01:00:09):
even is a thing separate from gender, that we can
even talk about. How do those ideas developed developed, and
how do they spread and how can we watch that
happen through the history that is in our country or
our city. So I really focus on New York city.
So my work looks at the queer history of Brooklyn.
My first book was When Brooklyn Was Queer, or it
looks at a prison in twentieth century Greenwich Village. My

(01:00:32):
new book Women's House of Detention, and really sort of
asks how does sexuality and gender change over the course
of those times, through these institutions, through urban studies, through
the way people interact in space in cities, to produce
even the way we think about sexuality at all. Honestly,

(01:00:53):
you talking about that thing about not just going back
in the past and being like and this is a
trans person and all the ways we understand it now
and they just happened to live in eight seventeenth century
North America or whatever. The way that you challenge that
is like one of the reasons I reached out to you.
And um, so I just say that anyone who wants

(01:01:14):
to should should read huge stuff. I don't know if
you like history, people who are listening to this podcast,
but if you like cool things, though things, you should
read my stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but I think it's true
we all the time look at the past like they're
like stupid versions of ourselves, you know, like, oh, they're
exactly like us, they just didn't have this word yet
because they were moron except mustache referred to like old

(01:01:40):
British people as mustaches. No, no, I didn't mean to
derail you though, No, but it's it's you know, we
just think, oh god, they just didn't have this word.
But obviously all of our concepts are exactly the same.
Nothing has ever changed, and particularly with sexuality and gender
identity and queerness, because I think in American context will

(01:02:01):
talk specifically, though I think this is applicable, you know,
throughout the kind of Western world. But we have this
period in the mid twentieth century where like the culture
was absolutely cracked down on and hidden and repressed and
suppressed and destroyed. And I think because of that, many
people who grew up and we're adults in the seventies, eighties,
and nineties, when this kind of first period of modern

(01:02:22):
queer history is happening, it was instinctive to kind of say, well,
we were destroyed and hidden in these periods, so I
can look back further and I'm gonna find us everywhere,
because that's what it just happened, right. Homophobia teaches us
that queer people were hidden and suppressed and so then
we take what we learned from homophobia and transphobia from

(01:02:43):
the people who hated us, and we applied to history
and we say, well, they must be exactly like us.
And they were hidden all the time, they were suppressed.
They were suppressed so badly they didn't even have a
word for it, right, And I think that's one of
those insidious ways in which homophobia has taught us to
think something that is not true at all, and taught
us to think, in fact, something that is not progressive
is progressive. Right, that we can look back and always

(01:03:05):
see ourselves that sexuality is unchanging and in fact stands
outside of time, which means outside of culture, which means
it is natural. And I will go to my grave
de naturalizing basically everything humans do, particularly sex, sexuality, and gender.
There's not a lot of naturalness or everything we do
is natural. It's one or the other, there's no one between.

(01:03:26):
But our take on history when it comes to sexuality
is often just an attempt to say, like, gay people
have always existed exactly as they have existed, and the
borders between what it means to be gay and trans
are the exact same thing, and they've always existed when
those things have barely existed over the course of my
lifetime in certain places in the US. Now that I
mean one of the things that I realized by reading

(01:03:48):
so much history and also just being obsessed with medieval
ship even though it's funny because I feel like most
of these episodes are less medieval and more eighteen nineteenth century.
I guess because of when most of the political movements
that are currently reflected in the world, we're doing their thing.
But it's like, sometimes I look back at what seemed
to be older understandings of sexuality and gender and see
myself more easily represented, you know. And so it's like

(01:04:11):
and maybe it's because it's like, well, I want to
be a trans woman as a sword, and so like
I mean, I am a trans woman as a sword,
but it's like a slightly different thing, you know. Um,
only one sword. Oh no, I have more here. Um,
here's a bore spear. It was a prop for a
recording I did the other day. Um anyway, but no, no,

(01:04:35):
And I find it more liberating to realize that everything
is constantly in flux, and so instead of saying like
there's this like arrogance we have where being like Oh well,
this is these are the definitions of transnis and this
is the scientific truth we have uncovered, you know, as
compared to being like this is what we are currently
working with. That is really useful. And I'm not trying

(01:04:56):
to say we should get rid of it, but we
should look at people in their own context. That's why
I'm trying to talk about why this lady grew up
a pirate. Yeah, we gotta understand them in their period
and what's around them and what makes sense and what
I think is really liberating about that for me, Like
the true reason I actually do all the square history.

(01:05:16):
I came to it like everybody else. I didn't know
any queer people growing up. I had never met an
outgay person when I came out in the mid nineties,
and I was desperate for a reflection of myself. Right,
But that reflection is is something of a lie. Right,
It's it's it's we're looking at a piece of glass, right,
it's not a mirror. You don't see yourself. You are

(01:05:36):
enabled to see something that's really different from you and
really far away, and sometimes your reflection actually gets in
the way of seeing what's really out there. Right, The
reflection brings us to the glass, but it actually has
a barrier to understanding what's on the other side. But
once we do, once we learn to see into the
past and to really say, like, look, these people are
working with the same constituent parts, you know, the same

(01:05:58):
bodies and desires, and they were constructed things really differently.
That enables me to imagine a future where everything is
totally different. Again, I can't see the future, but because
I can see the past, I know it's going to
be different. There is no way, there is nothing in
history that it's constant except change, And so being a
historian for me is actually mostly about the future now

(01:06:20):
that I really like that. And honestly, one of the
reasons I talked about why I do this show is that,
like I mean, one, I like stories and I like
need stories. But one of the reasons I like stories
is so that we can understand, like our typical figures
and understand who we can be and stuff like that.
But also even just like understanding the context. It's like,
I clearly play a lot of baseball. I'm really good

(01:06:40):
at sports, but I imagine that if I'm trying to
hit a ball that's been thrown knowing. I don't need
to just know where the ball is. I need to
know like the pitch, I need to know the trajectory
it's on. And so learning history is often about learning
the trajectory of these things, these these powers that are

(01:07:01):
in motion right now, so that we can better anticipate
how to counter them or engage with them or whatever. Yeah,
I mean, I think we all get taught history like
a series of like static moments. When I was a kid,
you know, the education system totally changed, but it was
like names and dates and kings and presidents that you
had to memorize the most boring. That's like the raw

(01:07:21):
material of history. It's what happens in between those where
we find actual history. It's like if math, we're just
like learning the numbers one through ten and we called
it counting, right, It's what you do with those numbers
that is math. Do with this information is history. But
we teach kind of the wrong end of it. I
think at the earlier age, you're you're encouraged not to speculate,

(01:07:43):
not to imagine, not to build a world out of
the pieces, but to memorize them as like dead fact
and come back on Wednesday for more dead no way, no,
not dead facts, lots of speculation. I'm sure anyone who
listens to this knows I am not afraid of speculation.
That's a live fact. Yeah, it's in motion. Yeah and

(01:08:04):
uh yeah, Well we'll talk to you all on Wednesday.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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