18. Girls Gone Wilde
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2018
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What would an exploration of the Wilde family be without taking a closer look at Oscar Wilde's 'virulently lesbian' niece Dolly Wilde? Gretchen and Leigh take you on a journey to learn more about this elusive personality. Unlike her uncle, Dolly left little written work behind and is best known from her letters and from what other people have to say about her. Come join the ouroboros of gay that is the Sapphic 'sewing circle' of 1920s Hollywood and Paris.
Outline
0:00 – Introduction
5:02 – Main Topic: Dolly Wilde
5:23 – Socio-Historical Context: Paris and London in the 1920s
10:20 – Who were they? Bio Time.
48:53 – Why do we think they're gay?
58:50 – Fun Segment: Word of the Week
1:26:21 – How Gay were They?
1:28:44 – Closing and Where to Find us Online
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. |
| 0:34.6 | Yeah. never been as straight as you think. Hey folks, I'm Lee. |
| 0:36.9 | And I'm Gretchen. |
| 0:38.1 | And in this episode, we are following up with the Wild Legacy and talking about Dolly Wild, |
| 0:45.1 | the lesbian niece of Oscar Wild and noted bon vivant of the left bank lesbian scene of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. |
| 0:54.5 | She is said to have had the brains and wit to match her uncle, but instead of writing plays |
| 0:59.4 | and novels, she made her life itself into a work of art. |
| 1:02.2 | And some other folks may say that she had the wit and wonder of her uncle and all the |
| 1:06.9 | looseness of her father. |
| 1:08.4 | Oh. |
| 1:08.9 | We didn't talk a lot about Willie Wilde last time, but boy, are we going to talk about him |
| 1:13.6 | a lot now. |
| 1:14.5 | Oh, Willie. |
| 1:15.6 | I think I first heard of her on Tumblr where someone had had like a post. |
| 1:20.9 | It was about Oscar Wilde, and then it had these series of photos of Dolly that was |
| 1:26.3 | basically just like, oh, hey, she looked exactly like her uncle. |
| 1:30.3 | And she was also really gay and also really witty. |
| 1:34.2 | And I've like, I think I reblogged it and was like, Lee, we're going to have to do an |
| 1:38.2 | episode on her, aren't we? |
| 1:39.8 | Because she's great. |
| 1:41.9 | Like, while we were researching this before we had talked to anybody about doing this too, our, like, shirt designer V randomly came into my Twitter DMs. |
| 1:53.2 | It was like, Lee, have you heard about Oscar Wilde's obscenely lesbian niece? |
... |
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