Hello and welcome to this special episode of Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated

gay people from history. My name is Hugh Lemmy, and joining me today is the writer and filmmaker

Juliet Jakes. As well as publishing two books, Juliet also writes short fiction, as well as journalism

on literature, film, art, music, politics, gender sexuality and football.

She was also the founder and co-host of the Fantastic Culture and Politics Podcast Suite 212.

Hi, Juliet.

Hey.

So, Juliet, who are we discussing on today's episode?

Today we're talking about somebody who was widely known as Colonel Victor Barker,

who was most famous for marrying a woman in Brighton in Sussex in England in 1923,

and then being sent to prison for perjury six years later,

uh, for lying about, basically for lying about the sex assigned at birth and marrying

a woman while legally being female. Barker was also a member of the British Armed Forces,

where he was a nurse, ambulance driver and horse trainer, but never actually a colonel. Barker was

also an actor, car salesman, film extra, kennelman, petty thief, and a member of the

national fascistee. Yeah. So normally, Ben, as our resident historian, likes to sort of interject at

some point to discuss the language that we use, but he's not here today. So I'm going to sort of play

the role of Ben. But normally, yeah, he discusses how

identities are sort of historically contingent and they don't always map directly onto

contemporary identities. So when we're discussing, in the past, we've discussed a lot of gay men.

We sort of, we refer to them as gay men as a provocation, but obviously the concept of being a gay man doesn't really exist

before the early 20th century,

...