Peter Mandelson has been the definitive comeback kid of British politics, and it’s impossible to ever rule out his return.

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Today, we will learn why he got that reputation as we look at Mandelson in power. The Millennium Dome, a Y2K fever dream! His public outing! A wider cultural shift in attitudes towards gay men, one which contributed to the idea that poofs were everywhere at the top of society! Resignations, and returns!

 

 

This week, on Mandelson: A Homosexual History, we cover the 1992 UK election and the birth of New Labour.

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If Huw's Margaret Thatcher wasn't enough to turn your stomach, try his John Major on for size. Neil Kinnock loses the 1992 election. John Smith becomes leader of the Labour Party, flanked by two feuding up-and-coming reformers named Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Peter Mandelson buys a lovely home in Notting Hill with questionable financing, and sets himself to defeating Clause IV once and for all. The exciting but fundamentally reactionary Cool Britannia cultural moment helps us understand how tentative New Labour were about rocking the cultural boat. Their victory in 1997 was more about stasis than change.

 

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Last week we looked at Mandelson’s early years, and his move from a flirtation with Marxism to being firmly on the right of the Labour Party. We also discussed the left-right split in the Labour Party, and how, in the 1980s, that became a full blown civil war. This week, it's time for the 1987 General Election, and for the paranoid homophobia of late-Eighties Britain: section 28, sleaze, AIDS panic, and tabloid hell.

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They call him the Prince of Darkness. Peter Mandelson's decades-long political career is a skeleton key to everything that's gone wrong in Western politics in the last forty years. He's a spin doctor, a sometime minister, and a networker whose downfall through the Epstein files now threatens the survival of the British government. This miniseries examines his gay life and times, tracing the collapse of mass politics, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the political history of homosexuality in the UK, from decriminalisation to Section 28, from Sleaze to Gay Marriage. A Faustian story, Mandelson: A Homosexual History plays out on a world-historical scale, but at its heart is driven by the failures and compromises of greed and lust. In Episode One, we trace the emergence of Mandleson’s career in the Labour Party, and the formation of the networks of power that would help hollow out British social democracy in the years of Thatcher and Blair. 

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners!   Daniel Dunglas Home always knew he wasn't like the other boys. Not because he was gay, but because, while they were out on the sports field playing rugby, he was communicating with the dead. Despite being a huge celebrity in Victorian England, today Home is almost unknown. In this special episode, academic and novelist Avery Curran talks to Huw about one of the most significant mediums of 19th century Spiritualism, and what his life and reputation can tell us about gender and sexuality in high society at the time. ----more---- SOURCES:   Heyday of a Wizard - Jean Burton   The First Psychic - Peter Lamont   Experiences in Spiritualism with DD Home - Viscount Adare   ‘Very hot indeed’: Intimacy between men in Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home  - Avery Curran, Journal of Victorian Culture   Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

 

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We have heard your pleas. The news has made them even more urgent. We're going to do a whole main feed Peter Mandelson episode in Season 10: but for now, here's a taste of our legally-bounded musings on his arrest and what it says about UK political culture. We also talk about a Wired article about a supposed gay mafia in the tech world that doesn't deliver on its promises, and take Gaggony Guncles questions from an enby worried about their relationships with their cis family and a cis woman wondering what to call her enby coparent. Plus, we descend into madness imagining Liza Minnelli hosting a floor mop infomercial.

 

 

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Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming men. Originally his illustrations were controversial because of his graphic depictions of gay sex, of sodomy and cocksucking and fisting in a pre-liberation, pre-internet age. Today, things have changed so much you can buy Tom branded products in department stores like Selfridges, and books of his drawings in Barnes and Noble. But at the same time, his representations of Black men and of Nazi aesthetics have drawn new criticisms, even while the fisting and piss and cock-sucking have become perfect home decorations. And the influence of his work on gay male sex cultures, on ideals of queer masculinities, and especially on leather scenes, remains enormous and contested.

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SOURCES:

F. Valentine Hooven III, Tom Of Finland: His Life And Times (St. Martin's, 1992)

Arnie Kantrowitz, Swastika Toys, in Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson, pp. 193–209.

Hunter Scott,  “Facing Sameness: Reconsidering the Radicality of Tom of Finland.” InVisible Culture 36, https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.262a8f58.

 

Carta Monir, "Morally Erect," Lux Magazine, https://lux-magazine.com/article/tom-of-finland/

https://worldcrunch.com/in-the-news/tom-of-finland-double-life-of-the-gay-icon-who-changed-a-nation/ 

https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/lgbtqia-in-helsinki/tom-of-finlands-helsinki/

https://kunstkritikk.com/the-cult-of-iconified-homosexuality/

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

William Beckford, who was born not in Bath but in London in 1760, is someone for whom property, in every sense of the word, was the defining factor in his life. He was a novelist, a member of parliament, a collector of art, antiquities, and books, a travel writer, and a builder of great palaces; he regarded himself as a man of culture, but he made his cultural qualities known by buying and building things. And he could afford to buy and build things - ridiculous things - because he was rich, extraordinarily rich, richer than we can possibly imagine. So all his status, his legacy, the thing that made him who he was, came from his wealth, and his wealth came from another form of property he owned: chattel slaves. And that wealth also enabled him to pursue troubling relationships with boys.

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SOURCES

James Lees-Milne, William Beckford (Compton Press, 1976)

J. W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (Oxford University Press, 1932)

Guy Chapman, William Beckford (Scribner, 1937)

Caroline Stanford, Beckford’s Tower History Album (National Trust)

A number of essays on Rictor Norton’s website about him including “The Fool at Fonthill” https://www.rictornorton.co.uk/

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

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We heard you, we see you, we're here for you: it's our take on Heated Rivalry, or at least on the Discourse surrounding it––straight women loving gay romance, social media shitstorms targeting out actors, and shipping. Then we take Gaggony Guncles questions from someone in love with an English public school boy who can't open up and a woman demanding our analysis of the fg hg (or fruit fly!) phenomenon.

 

 

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Live from Sheffield DocFest, it's E. M. Forster: who in his 91 years of life was one of Britain’s most successful novelists. He was raised in a climate of Victorian propriety so extreme he went to university without understanding human reproduction, and then fell in with a secret society known for alternative thinking and "aggressive" homosexuality. Italy — and later India — represented paradises of freedom and liberation in comparison to the cramped, horrid Edwardian upper middle classes. Erotic contact with the working-class/brown Other was the waters of Lourdes for this uptight Englishman, who was never able to transcend his own position.

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SOURCES

Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, 2010).

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-man-out-of-time-e-m-forsters-a-passage-to-india-at-100-and-the-legacies-of-colonialism-236324

https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/25279

http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/cambridge_apostles_S.pdf

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/06/forster-love-story/

https://variety.com/2017/film/global/james-ivory-why-wont-u-s-actors-do-nude-scenes-starting-with-call-me-by-your-name-stars-1202581485/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past

https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/diversity/lgbt-history/fwwhomosexuality/forster-fww/#

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/e-m-forster-my-policeman

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/alan-hollinghurst/poor-dear-how-she-figures

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/books/review/Toibin-t.html

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

 

It's never too late to give the gift of Bad Gays this holiday season: invite a friend or loved one into our community at https://www.patreon.com/badgayspod/gift

This month, we discuss Christmas spirit, the cancellation of the Netflix Marines drama Boots and the death of homonationalism, and then take a Gaggony Guncles question from a listener who needs to hear that He's Just Not That Into You.