Hello and welcome to episode three 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 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, gay historian, and member of the board

of the Gay Museum in Berlin. And each episode will be profiling a different gay villain from history,

looking at their life in context, and how their sexuality informed that infamy.

So we want to complicate gay history by talking about evil people and complicated

people instead of just the heroes that a lot of histories of gay lives and gay movements focus on,

and we're focusing on men because I think we can all agree that cis men are definitionally the

most bad. We want to ask why we don't remember our villains as well as we remember our heroes.

Last week we talked about the nightmare twink who helped bring down Oscar Wilde. Who are we profiling this week, Ben?

Well, this week we're talking about T.E. Lawrence, who is better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

And this gives us the opportunity to talk about this relationship between

anthropology and imperialism and especially male homosexuality and male homosexuality in what we

would now call the modern period. One of my favorite facts is that the term homosexuality and the first professional organizations

for anthropologists are both invented in the same place in Berlin in the same year, 1869.

Isn't that nuts?

That is nuts.

Yeah.

And there are connections between homosexuality and the anthropological discipline and homosexuality

and a kind of modernist primitivism in anthropology and archaeology and in visual culture

that are really, I think, interesting to think about.

And that connection is a big part of the focus of my own academic research. This is one of my big

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