Hello and welcome to season four episode nine of bad gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history.

I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of Berlin's Shulis Museum.

And I'm Hugh Lemmy, a modernist writer and art collector who hosted a famous salon in Interwar Paris, but also had some uncomfortable views about fascism, as so many of our subjects do.

Who are we going to talk about this week?

This week we're going to talk about somebody called Camilla Hall.

And I'm actually not going to say much more about her before I start,

because first of all, I think she won't be very well known,

at least by her name, by any of our listeners,

including me before I started researching her. And also because I think it won't be very well known, at least by her name, by any of our listeners, including me before I started researching her.

And also because I think it's important, her life story and the way it sort of plays out,

I think is an interesting way to understand this development of how she went from one thing to another,

how she became what she became known for.

So, I'll just get on with it.

Camilla Christine Hall was born on the 24th of March, 1945, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Minnesota in the Midwest in general had experienced a huge amount of immigration from both Germany

and the Scandinavian region in the 19th century, and Hall's grandfather was part of that

he'd emigrated to the US in late 19th century from Sweden, while her maternal grandparents were

from Germany. Her father was George Friedelff Hall. Yes, all of the immigration from Scandinavia

is why they sort of talk like this in Minnesota, you know.

Well, I'll tell your word for it. I've never been to Minnesota. But yeah, so her father was called George Fry. Very, very cold. It's not, it's not really fit for human habitation.

Her father was called George Frydalf Hall, and was born in 1908 and he was a Lutheran pastor

at the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church, which was built by these migrants.

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