Historical Homos

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Welcome to the wild and infuriating world of ancient homophobia!

You know how everyone thinks ancient Greece and Rome were queer free-for-alls, where all holes were goals (as long as you were a male, bisexual top) and pederasty was the ...

Why is Disney's Hercules one of the greatest LGBTQ+ films ever made?

This episode attempts to answer that fraught and necessary question.

As you may know, Hercules (1997) is a story about a small-town girl who goes to the big city to discover himself, become famous, land a few sponsorship deals, and build a chosen family in an imperfect world.

It's like All About Eve but with much, much better music. (Though Hades and Bette D...

Wait, what’s so gay about witches, you ask?

First of all — sit down.

When I was a young f/hag in the late ’90s, Wicca was having a moment. The Halliwell sisters ruled the WB, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock were burying men in their back gardens, and I gobbled the GAGathon down with glee.

Only later did I realize what made these witchy bitchies so alluring: it wasn’t (just) that they were different — it was that they were po...

Remember when you found out you were gay (iconic of you btw) and you thought:

"Oh this is fine – I'll just have a regular heterosexual wife, a couple of kids, and a very elaborate sex life on the side."

Just me? OK, fine.

But the question remains: why do little gay children like me grow up assuming a straight nuclear family is our only option?

Has family always been one man, one woman, and a couple of snot-nosed heirs to the m...

"Hollywood was swarming with gay people."

You know how Pedro Pascal hasn't come out yet? Well: this episode will explain why.

Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Hays Code banned “sexual perversion” of all kinds from the silver screen, which (spoiler alert) meant queers.

That has bequeathed us a predominantly homophobic industry in Hollywood, even if the stars and culture have always been decidedly – how do you say? – VERY G...

"An important precedent was set: fascist groups will always use you until you're no longer useful to them."

Welcome to one of history’s darkest (and dumbest) closets: fascists who are also, annoyingly, gay.

From Hitler’s Brownshirt boy toy, Ernst Röhm, to closeted McCarthyists like Roy Cohn, to lesbian “nationalist” hypocrites like Alice Weidel — it seems that the 20th and 21st centuries gave rise not only to modern fascism,...

What happens when a teen prodigy meets a drunk poet with a pistol in his pocket (the gun kind, not the fun kind)?

Answer: extremely gay chaos.

This week on Historical Homos, we’re diving into the doomed romance of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine—the most sensationally toxic boyfriends in the history of French poetry.

With our guest this week, Robert St. Clair, we’ll unpack:

• The social revolution of the 19th century: just ...

We all know James Baldwin the high priest of Civil Rights, but what about Jimmy B, the extremely horny homosexual?

JB was a chain-smoking, vodka-swilling romantic who fell hard and often—usually for straight men he could never have.

This week, Bash and his bestie guestie, Clark Moore, crack open Baldwin’s chaos: from his Harlem childhood all the way to his retirement villa in the South of France.

Along the way we meet the En...

"Make love, take a bath, make love again."

That was Frida Kahlo’s motto—and sweetie, she LIVED by it.

We all know about Frida’s messy, horny marriage to Diego “Toad Face” Rivera and her revenge fling with Leon Trotsky.

But what about the women? The affairs, the crushes, the rumors, the gossip that turned her into Mexico’s most iconic bisexual?

This week, we’re serving you a slutty portrait of the artist as she truly was: a fea...

"Love was the foundation of everything for Frida. This bisexuality, this eroticism was fundamental to her character."

She’s on your ex-girlfriend’s tote bag, your niece’s notebook, and probably a few questionable dorm-room tapestries.

But behind the unibrow is a Frida Kahlo you don’t know: a bisexual, communist, pain-embracing rascal who painted from her gut and fucked whomstsoever she pleased.

This week, we’re peeling back t...

Powdered wigs. Satin breeches. Candlelit salons.

And of course: sodomy.

This week we’re swanning back into Georgian England (1714–1837), a century of empire, cholera, imperialism, and very flouncy coats – but also one of the gayest domestic revolutions in history.

With special guest Dr. Anthony Delaney (author of Queer Georgians, out today!), we explore the LGBTQIA+ pioneers who didn’t just hook up in parks or "molly houses,"...

The Dark Ages: Rome has fallen, the Church won't shut the fuck up, there's a killer plague for every season, and everyone else is dying of BOREDOM.

Right? WRONG.

Western Europe may have been a shitshow for much of what we ridiculously call the "Dark Ages," but the rest of the world had its act together.

Specifically: Baghdad around the 800s AD. At the height of the Golden Age of Islam. They had libraries, they had mathematics...

Welcome to The Hanky Code, aka Grindr for Boomers.

Following on from our cruise through history last week, we've delved deeper into the notorious handkerchief code.

The code was a form of flagging, which used different coloured bandanas to signal sexual / kink preferences.

In this bonus Quickie episode, Bash unpacks the extremely colourful history of flagging—from gay Gold Rush cowboys to scrappy leather entrepreneurs in San ...

You know the feeling: when you lock eyes and the look lingers just a little too long. His hand brushes over his fly. And boom! A small smile confirms it:

You're about to be cruising, my king!

And all it took was a public park, centuries of sexual shame, and a little bit of courage to get you there...

Now it's no surprise that the elegant and much-envied act of Fucking in Public has been around for thousands of years.

But how ...

He fiddled while Rome burned. He married two men. He may even have kicked his pregnant wife to death.

But he ALSO  invented animal pelt kink, so could he have been THAT BAD?!

This week, Bash is joined by classicist and queer historian, Professor Andrew Lear, to discuss the scandalous, salacious, and slanderous life of Emperor Nero — Ancient Rome’s most notorious bisexual bad boy.

From castrating (and marrying) his wife’s male...

🏴‍☠️ Before there was BRAT, there were Butt Pirates. 🏴‍☠️

This week we're hoisting our slutty sails – that's what I call my underpants – to plunder the treacherous homosexual deep, with pirate historian and author Dr. Rebecca Simon (Pirate Queens; The Pirate’s Code) to answer the age-old question:

Why are men on a ship always kinda gay?

First of all, when we say "pirate," we mean the real 17th- and 18th-century swashbuckle...

Leonardo da Vinci? More like Leonardo da Fist Me.

We've all heard of the man behind the Mona Lisa. But did you know he was also one of Florence's sodomitical sweethearts?

In this episode, we pull back the vajazzled curtain on Leonardo da Vinci to reveal a homo neither tormented nor repressed, suffering dramatically for his art, but a messy, charismatic, and brilliant dilettante obsessed with the world.

More than anything, Leo...

Hot, rich, European, emotionally unavailable... sound familiar?

It's your Hinge profile all over again.

No, silly, it's vampires!

We are thrilled to welcome back folklorist and queer historian, Sacha Coward (author of Queer as Folklore) this week, as we trace the gloriously queer history of vampires—from ancient blood-sucking demons to modern brooding bisexuals.

Drape your capes and get ready to dive into:

• Lilith, the origi...

Heads up! This is the episode where we solve gender.

Famously a "construct," it turns out Mx. Gender has been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

This podcast is only 70 minutes long so we're sticking to the last 5,000... but still. Not bad.

Join Bash and his honoured guests this week – Kit Heyam and Marty Davies – as they delve into the deep-cut history of gender, long before we had words like cis, trans, or nonbinary...