Hello and welcome to the first episode of Bad Gays, a podcast where we uncover the dark side of gay men in history.

I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and novel uncover the dark side of gay men in history. I'm Hugh Lemmy,

a writer and novelist whose work is mainly about sex, cities and history. And I'm Ben Miller,

a writer, gay historian, and a member of the board of the Gay Museum in Berlin. And each episode will be profiling a different gay villain from history. Each of these characters have

incredibly compelling stories and

there's value in looking at why people with complicated lives do bad things. So why are we doing this

podcast? Why bad gays? To get a little academic for a second, the primary emergency of gay history

in its first decades was to uncover and to restore histories of gay movements and of gay heroes.

And while the culture of academic research has certainly moved on from that, the public conversation really hasn't.

So we want to use our bad boys to complicate these stories of gay history.

We're going to be talking about some people who are unequivocally bad, people like fascists and serial killers

and their collaborators. We're going to be talking about people who society thinks is bad,

but who maybe we think are a little more complicated. And finally, we're going to talk about

figures who might have done great things with bad intentions or done bad things with great

intentions. So why don't we remember these people as part of gay history? When we remember our gay heroes,

we're very keen to look at how their relationships of their sexuality and public perceptions of that

was intrinsically linked with their achievements. But conversely, with our bad boys, how is their

badness and their sexuality related? What do we choose to remember and why do we choose to forget some things?

For our first episode, we're profiling a man who is quite incontrovertibly a bad egg.

Ben, who is our first subject? Our first subject is Ernstrum. Now, you're going to say that

with me, Hugh? Do you want to try it once? Ernstdreum. Ernstruem, not bad. Ernstdstream was a gay Nazi and was the leader of the essay, the Strom Outtelang or the brown shirts,

who are a fascist paramilitary that are part of the Nazi party before they come to power.

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