André Gide

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Warning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised. This week, we tackle the French author André Gide, a self-styled "immoralist" who oscillated between an austere Protestantism and a sensualism he associated with the so-called "Orient," and who elevated pederasty above sodomy in a way that helps us understand the often-disfiguring influence of upper-class male sexual desires on the construction of the 20th century gay male identity. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History, electronic resource, Theory Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) Andre Gide, If It Die . . .: An Autobiography, New Ed edition (New York: Vintage, 2001) Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (Vintage, 2012) Andre Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard, Reissue edition (Vintage, 2014) Mary McAuliffe, Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends, Illustrated edition (Lanham Boulder New York London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020) George D. Painter, Andre Gide: A Critical Biography (London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1994). Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Harvard University Press, 1999) Edmund White, "On the chance that a shepherd boy...," London Review of Books, December 10, 1998, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n24/edmund-white/on-the-chance-that-a-shepherd-boy. 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode will discuss childhood sexual abuse, and if that is not something that you would like to listen to, this is not the episode for you, and see you again next week.
0:12.0	Hello and welcome to Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people from history.
0:27.5	Last week we had a special episode with Arthur Azaraf, who was talking about Mustafa bin Ismail,
0:33.4	a Tunisian street sweeping twink who rose to become prime minister and he ended up taking down a whole nation.
0:39.3	Who are you talking about this week, Ben?
0:41.4	Well, I'm going to begin today's episode by reading from the first pages of our subjects,
0:47.3	autobiography.
0:51.3	I was born on November 22nd, 1869. My parents at that time lived in the Rue de medicis in an apartment on the fourth floor,
0:59.4	which they left a few years later and of which I have kept no recollection. Still, I do recall the balcony,
1:05.6	or what could be seen from the balcony, the bird's eye view of the place with its ornamental piece of water and fountain, or rather,
1:12.2	to be still more exact, I remember the paper dragons which my father used to cut out from me in which
1:17.0	we launched into the air from the balcony. I remember they're floating away in the wind over the
1:21.6	fountain in the plas below and being carried away as far as the Luxembourg gardens, where they
1:26.2	used sometimes to catch in the top
1:27.8	branches of the horse chestnut trees. I remember, too, a bigish table, the dining room table,
1:33.2	no doubt, with its tablecloth that reached nearly to the ground. I used to crawl underneath
1:38.3	it with the concierge's little boy who sometimes came to play with me. What are you up to under
1:43.3	there, my nurse would call out.
1:45.2	"'Nothing, we're playing.
1:46.5	"'And then we would make a great noise of our playthings,
1:49.1	"'which we had taken with us for the sake of appearances.
1:51.7	"'In reality, we amused ourselves otherwise.
	...

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