Hello and welcome to Season 3 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 Hulemi, a writer and author.

Last week, we talked about one of America's first openly gay politicians, whose heroism about his coming out was tempered by his right-wing response to the financial collapse of

2008. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh? This week's bad gay is a fraud and a liar of

epic proportions, a man who built his entire life on deceiving others. Elmere DeHoree. This is a story

all about appearances.

How much do we trust our own eyes and how much do we trust the judgments of experts?

It's also a story about value, about class, about judging worth, and about how by appearing as something we can become something.

Elmere DeHore was, in his own way, an artist. He was a skilled painter,

although perhaps painting wasn't his true art form, because in his life as much as in his paintings,

Elmere De Hore was a master of illusion. Truth was not an objective fact, but a material he could

use to shape how other people thought about him, and hence to create

his greatest artwork, his own life story.

So when we talk about Elmer, especially his early life, we have to remember that we're discussing

a work of art, an interpretation of reality.

Some parts are accurate, some parts are false, but all of it is an illusion.

To complicate the matter, the main source we have for DeHore's life is the author Clifford Irving, a man himself known for perpetrating one of the greatest literary hoaxes in the late 20th century.

So tread carefully from here on out.

According to DeHorey himself, he was born Elmer Albert Hoffman

on April 14th, 1906 in Budapest, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. De Hori claims his parents

were high society, his mother from a family of bankers to the Habsburgs, his father and ambassador

...