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

queer people in history.

I'm your host, Hugh Lemmy, and I'm joined today by a guest, Dr. Will Tosh. Will is head of

research at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and it's also the author of a new book called

Straight Acting for Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare. Hello, Will.

Hello, Hugh.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming on.

So before we talk about today's subject, I just wanted to talk a little bit about your book, actually.

In the prolog, you begin by asking the sort of simple question, essentially, was Shakespeare gay or not?

But then you answer it very quickly with a sort of yes, probably.

So has this been a perennial question for people who have been interested in Shakespeare over the years? And is it

something you still get asked about? Or even do you receive pushback for making these claims about him?

Yes to all of those questions, really. So as you know, you and your listeners will, terminology

is a sort of vexed issue in history of sexuality.

So, yes, I say kind of slightly sort of tongue-in-cheekly that like Shakespeare probably was,

or certainly was what we would call queer with that much more capacious term.

But I really focus on him being a queer artist in the sense that he is artistically,

literarily, intellectually, and emotionally really interested in same-sex desire, and he writes

about it at length in his plays, but sort of most strikingly in his lyric poetry, in his sonnets,

very large number of which are about and passionate and intimate and kind of sort of crazily intense relationship between a poetic speaker and a beautiful young man.

And long before, there was terminology around sexual identity.

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