Hello and welcome to episode 6 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, gay historian, and member of the board of the Gay Museum in Berlin.

And each episode we'll 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 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 we sometimes remember our heroes.

Truman Capote referred to these bad boys as killer fruit, a certain kind of queer who has Frion refrigerating his bloodstream.

Last week we talked about a gay conservative writer who normalized gay marriage, demobilized gay movements, and advocated for race science.

So who are we talking about this week, Q?

This week we're discussing the art historian and writer Anthony Blunt.

The youngest son of a vicar, Anthony Blunt, was born into a well-off family in

2007. His father became a vicar for the British Embassy in Paris, and as such, the young Blunt

spent several years in the city as a child, and as a result, he became fascinated with the

artistic and cultural life of France, and he was a fluent French speaker from a young age,

and he was very much part of the British establishment.

His third cousin was Elizabeth Bowes-Lion, the future queen mother, and he was also a distant relative

of the fascist leader Oswald Mosley. He went to a school at the prestigious private school,

Marlborough College, and he was a very sensitive child and badly bullied as a result.

His friend, the poet Louis MacNeice, who was a school with him, said,

boys of that age are especially sadistic. They would seize him, tear off most of his clothes,

and cover him with housepaint, then put him in the basket and push him around and around the

hall. Government of the mob, by the mob and for the mob.

A perfect exhibition of mass sadism.

...