Episode 4: James VI and I

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2019

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you liked Yiorgos Lanthinos' court psychodrama The Favourite, you'll love this exploration of the complicated life of James VI and I – a king who united Scotland and England, persecuted witches, and granted his male favorites extraordinary power and privilege. Come for the court drama and stay for in-depth discussions of primitive accumulation and the question of whether using the word 'gay' to describe a 16th-century monarch makes any sense at all. ----more---- Sources: Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso Books, 1979. Ackroyd, Peter. Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. London: Chatto and Windniss, 2017. Bergeron, David. King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2002. Holstun, James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso Books, 2002. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to episode 4 of Badgays, a podcast where we uncover the dark side of gay men in history.
0:21.6	I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and novelist. And I'm Ben Miller, a podcast where we uncover the dark side of gay men in history. I'm Hugh Lemmy,
0:26.9	a writer and writer, gay historian, and member of the board of the Gay Museum in Berlin.
0:31.2	And each episode will be profiling a different gay villain from history, looking at their life in context, and how their sexuality informed their infamy. We want to complicate gay history
0:36.5	by talking about evil people and complicated people.
0:39.4	We're focusing on men because cis men are definitionally the most bad, I think we can all agree.
0:44.1	And we're trying to ask why we don't remember our villains as well as our heroes.
0:48.3	So last week we talked about Lawrence of Arabia.
0:50.6	Who are we profiling this week, Hugh?
0:52.6	James Charles Stewart, better known as James the sixth and first.
0:57.6	The sixth and first?
0:58.9	That's the sixth and first of Scotland and the first of England.
1:02.3	Oh boy.
1:03.8	James was born in 1566, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley.
1:13.3	And this was an extremely turbulent time in British and European history. The English Reformation was barely 40 years underway when he was
1:18.7	born. The Reformation had kick-started a complete revolution in British religious, economic and
1:24.3	cultural life. The feudal state was transforming into a country of intense and economic
1:29.4	growth and a period of primitive accumulation and enclosure and the development of a bourgeois class.
1:34.8	All things we love. Yep. And it was less than 50 years since Luther had first nailed his
1:39.4	theses to the church door that had kickstarted that of the reformation and 40 years since the end of the
1:45.0	German peasants war and the French wars of religion were only just beginning. So Europe was in
1:49.3	a state of intense turmoil. And the queen of England was Elizabeth I, who was the daughter of Henry VIII,
	...

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