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

I'm Hugh Lemmy,

a writer and novelist. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, historian and 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.

While we're doing this podcast is because the primary emergency of gay history in its first 20

years was to uncover and restore histories of gay movements and gay heroes.

While the culture of academic research has moved on, the public conversation hasn't.

We want to complicate this history by talking about evil people and complicated

people. We're focusing on men because cis men are definitionally the most bad, and we're asking

why we don't remember our villains as well as our heroes. So last week we talked about a gay Nazi.

Who are we profiling for episode two, Hugh? Today we're going to talk about the poet, publisher,

and famous lover of Oscar Wilde,

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, who's better known as Bosi. Born in 1870, he comes from this

aristocratic family. His father was the ninth marquess of Queensbury, but he wasn't part of

this refined Victorian idea that we might have around British

aristocracy. He was at one removed from contemporary British manners. He was a bully. He was an

outspoken atheist. He was very aggressive and he was a pugilist. He actually gave his names

to Queensby Rules, which is a form of boxing. He was known for having lots of affairs and finally

divorcing. And his family was one of mental illness and controversy. Douglas's

elder brother was Francis Douglas, the Viscant Drum Lanrig. He was private

secretary to the former Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, the Fifth Earl of Rosebury,

...