Hello and welcome to episode 9 of Bad Gays, a podcast where we uncovered a 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 inform 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.

Last week we talked about a gangster who piled a round of celebrities

and helped us think about class and sexuality in post-war

Britain. Who are we talking about this week, Ben?

Well, this week we're keeping up the theme of criminals and talking about Leopold and

Loeb, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, also known as Babe Leopold and Dickie Loeb.

They killed Bobby Franks, who was 14 years old when they were 18 and 19, respectively, in 1923.

And this spectacular killing set off a media frenzy that was about class, about sexuality, about fears of secularization, questions about the American dream and the meaning of the good life.

So Nathan Leopold was born in 1904 in Chicago and was born into a wealthy German Jewish immigrant family.

Nathan was a child prodigy. He spoke his first words at the age of four months and scored 210 on an IQ test,

although IQ tests have changed over time and also IQ tests are now known to not be particularly

scientific. And even though he was only 19 at the time of the murder, he'd already completed his

undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago murder, he'd already completed his undergraduate degree at the University

of Chicago with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and he had been accepted to Harvard Law School. He was going to

begin the following fall, and he was going to travel to Europe before starting at Harvard Law

...