Elisar von Kupffer

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A fascist femboy, a Baltic count, an orientalist white supremacist, editor of the first anthology of gay literature, painter of a 30-meter cyclorama featuring 90 androgynous twinks disporting themselves in the nude in a fantasia of the four seasons, devotee of Adolf Hitler, founder of a new religion, and poet: it's Elisar von Kupffer. Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays for monthly episodes, our advice segments, and to support our work. Check out our new merch, including hats, shirts, and socks. ----more---- SOURCES: Marhoefer, Laurie. “Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History.” NOTCHES (blog), June 19, 2018. https://notchesblog.com/2018/06/19/queer-fascism-and-the-end-of-gay-history/. Marhoefer, Laurie. “Was the Homosexual Made White? Race, Empire, and Analogy in Gay and Trans Thought in Twentieth-Century Germany: Race, Empire, and Analogy in Gay and Trans Thought in Twentieth-Century Germany.” Gender & History 31, no. 1 (March 2019): 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12411. Miller, Ben. In Search Of Lost Time: Primitivist Homomythopoetics and the Self-Invention of the White Gay Man. (Dissertation: Freie Universität Berlin, 2024). Miller, Ben. “Rejecting the Klarwelt: How Elisàr von Kupffer Complicates Queer History.” In To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900-1950, edited by Miriam Zadoff and Karolina Kühn, 62–75. Munich: Hirmer, 2023. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Season 8, Episode 3 of Budgays. My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.
0:21.2	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian currently at work on a biography of the fashion
0:25.3	designer Rudy Gerrnrich.
0:28.5	Great.
0:31.1	I love that we've been doing this show for eight seasons, Hugh, and we can still, I
0:35.7	would say a good 55% of the time
0:38.2	do an opening that isn't unbelievably awkward. But now we're drifting into banter, which we
0:44.2	would never do. So back to the script. Back to the script. So last week we talked about the
0:48.7	weird son, fascist son of a family of weird, mainly fascist socialites, Tom Mitford.
0:55.5	Who are talking about this week, Ben?
0:56.9	Well, weird and fascist are going to continue to be themes.
1:00.6	We're going to be talking about someone today who I've been itching to talk about on this show
1:04.9	ever since I first came across his work a couple years ago as part of the research into my dissertation.
1:11.3	Oh, exciting.
1:12.0	And you can hear me talk more about that dissertation on a recent episode of the Slate
1:19.5	LGBTQ podcast Outward, if you're interested in learning more about that project, which
1:23.3	is called In Search of Lost Time, Primitivist Homomithopoetics and the Self-Invention of the White
1:28.0	Gay Man, and is about, as will not be surprising to anyone who's heard me talk on this show,
1:32.6	the influence of anthropology, ethnography and other kinds of images of the other, colonial
1:36.7	images of the other, on the white gay man and his subject formation.
1:42.1	Primitive homo mythopoetics.
1:44.5	That's easy for you to say.
	...

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