Hi and welcome to Season 4, Episode 5 of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.

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

And I'm Hugh Lem, a writer and author.

So last week we talked about Benjamin Britton, a significant mid-century British composer who combined homosexuality, communism, and pacifism

with entry into the very highest levels of British society, but also had a series of very

troubling relationships with adolescent boys. Who are we talking about this way, Q?

A few episodes ago, we discussed the life life of Liberace for whom delivering a sort of

comforting light and unchallenging form of popular classical music to the masses created for himself

vast wealth and allowed him to indulge his lifelong bad taste. Today's subject is perhaps the anti-liberarchy,

a man for whom the dangerous, subversive and avant-garde

was his passion, who eschewed the middle brow and loved the urbane and modernism.

He was known in his life not just as a man of taste, but as a taste-maker, somebody who set

the tone for elite cultural society in his lifetime.

He is the author, critic and photographer, Carl Van Wechton.

The society in which Van Wechton was raised was regarded as, I suppose, the moral bedrock of

Wasp America. He was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Charles Dwayne Van Wechden and Ada Amanda Vanvecton,

and his family were pillars of the Cedar Rapids community.

His father was a respected banker and insurance broker, a member of the Freemasons, and according

to his obituary, a benefactor of the home for the friendless, the art association, co-college

and the home for aged women. His mother, Ada Amanda, established the Cedar Rapids Public Library.

They attended the local Universalist Church and were close friends with a pastor, and they had three children.

Ralph, born in 1860, who became president of Cedar Rapids National Bank, and Emma born in 1867,

...