On the pioneering sexologist and his troubling record on race, eugenics, and sex work; with the historian Laurie Marhoefer.

For white, suburban, heterosexual middle America, Jeffrey Dahmer, like AIDS, was the natural, even the righteous, consequence of homosexual promiscuity. He remains one of the exemplary constructions of the supervillain serial killer, the perfect subject of a true crime story. We look at how homophobia, racism, and the various true crime myths Dahmer helped reify ironically impeded his arrest and enabled his crimes.

The bank robber John Wojtowicz infamously held up a bank in 1972 to pay for gender-affirming surgery for Elizabeth Eden, his trans girlfriend. Or did he? We take a look, thinking through the ethical complications of Wojtowicz as a figure in history and in historical memory.

Until last week, she was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s police force, and was the first woman and the first LBGTQ person to hold the rank. We tell Dick's life story and then delve into the history of the Met, its relationship with LGBTQ people, and the conflicting strands of LGBTQ politics that emphasize conflict vs collaboration with the police.

If the legacy of Mercury and his music often seems to smooth his work, and that of his band, Queen, into a sort of middle-aged, KISS FM everyday normality, here we lean into the contradictions of the charismatic man and the nuances of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s.

This opera queen gone wrong fought fascists as a Partisan and mingled with Visconti, Marais, Cocteau, and Chanel in his youth before becoming a director increasingly devoted to reactionary excess above all — and with a troubling relationship to sexuality.

Are you ready to have your timbers shivered and your mainbrace spliced? Today’s subject is the mysterious historical figure Anne Bonny — a “lesbian pirate” (or was she?) whose story helps us think about gender, race, and class in piracy’s golden age.

The man at the center of a series of scandals about homosexuality at the highest levels of the Kaiser’s court that helped define Imperial Germany’s relationship to masculinity and the emerging identity of homosexuality itself.

This Nazi diplomat was assassinated by the German Jewish activist Herschel Grynszpan –– and his death became a pretext for the murderous pogroms of Kristallnacht.

The eccentric inheritor of an enormous oil fortune and gender non-conforming-lesbian-trans man (we'll talk about it!) who dated Marlene Dietrich, raced speedboats, and turned their private Bahamian island into a domain over which they ruled over native people with an iron fist while allowing themselves and their guests every possible eccentricity and pleasure. All this accompanied by their lifelong companion: a foot-tall leather doll named Lord Tod Wadley.

A podcast about evil and complicated queers in history – this week, profiling the artist and bon vivant Francis Bacon, whose generosity teetered on the edge of self-obliteration.