21. The Real Housewife of Rome
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2019
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What better way to celebrate the New Year than with a new episode of History is Gay? This time, Gretchen and Leigh dive into the brief, controversial, and totally extra reign of Emperor Elagabalus of Rome. Or rather, Empress Elagabalus! Whether it be marrying multiple wives and one husband, revolutionizing the Roman religion, installing women as senators, throwing parties with sex workers, or enjoying the attention of well-endowed men, Elagabalus was as unconventional as they come. And chances are, she may very well have been a trans woman.
Outline
0:00 – Introduction
4:23 – Main Topic: Elagabalus
8:40 – Socio-Historical and Religious Context
13:31 – Fun Segment: Word of the Week
22:47 – Elagabal and Roman Religion
29:39 – Who were they? Bio Time
54:48 – Why do we think they're gay?
1:08:30 – Analysis from Queer Historians
1:09:49 – Fun Segment: Pop Culture Tie-In
1:12:45 – How Gay were They?
1:17:10 – 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. |
| 0:12.0 | Because history has never been as straight as you think. |
| 0:32.3 | Yeah. My name is Gretchen. |
| 0:33.4 | And I'm Lee. |
| 0:48.9 | And in this episode, we are going to be talking about eligabalus, the scandalous teen Roman empress, who may in fact have been Rome's first empress, first empress, and a foreign one at that, a non-native Roman. |
| 0:54.6 | We do have to give a little shout out to Sarah Prager, who wrote Queer There and Everywhere. |
| 0:58.9 | We will link to our interview with Sarah in our show notes. |
| 0:59.8 | Utterly delightful. |
| 1:06.3 | But we just loved the title for her entry on Eligabalus so much that we made it the title of this episode, because it's perfect. |
| 1:08.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:09.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:09.7 | The real housewife of Rome is very apt for a young emperor who wandered about as a very |
| 1:18.9 | extravagant woman. |
| 1:20.9 | Oh, gosh, she's extra. |
| 1:23.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:23.7 | It's extra, extra. |
| 1:25.1 | Listen, all about her. |
| 1:26.6 | Any follow up from our last episode, anything like that. |
| 1:30.1 | Apologies for not having this episode out at the beginning of this month like we had expected to. |
| 1:35.2 | We said that we were going to try to have episodes out on the first Monday of the month. |
| 1:39.3 | But life. |
| 1:41.3 | Yay. |
... |
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