Francis Bacon

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2021

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Francis Bacon was an artist whose radical generosity teetered on the edge of self-obliteration –– and he sometimes pulled others over the edge with him. Many of our listeners will be familiar with Bacon’s work, or at least would recognise his idiosyncratic style if they saw it; sweeps of fleshy paint across black fields of colour, portraying contorted, mangled bodies, racks of hanging meat, and the iconic screaming mouth. But Bacon is almost as famous for the way he lived his life: his raucous partying, brutal barbed tongue, and love of boozing made him an emblem of London’s bohemian Soho scene. What linked his work and his life was an obsession with violence, something that he knew intimately. ----more---- Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) John Maybury et al., Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, Biography, Drama, Romance (BBC Films, British Film Institute (BFI), Arts Council of England, 1998) Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019) Richard Curson Smith et al., Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence, Documentary, Biography (IWC Media, 2017) David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Third edition (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2016). 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. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody, and welcome back after far too long a pause to the first episode of Season 5 of Bad Gays,
0:23.1	a podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:26.5	I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulhas Museum in Berlin.
0:31.3	And my name's Healymi. I'm a writer and author.
0:34.0	And there's been a reason why we've been away from you for so long,
0:36.7	which is that we have
0:38.1	spent the past year in various forms of lockdown writing a book. The book is called Bad Gays,
0:44.7	a homosexual history, and it has many stories of evil and complicated queer folks in it. About
0:51.1	half of them have already been profiled on the show, but we have more room to go into more detail. And about half of them are brand new. Yes, we finally did Mishima.
0:59.9	You can stop adding us. We did it if you're happy. You don't need to ask us about it anymore.
1:06.9	We're very proud of it. And we hope that you will all pre-order it and buy it. And the good news is that
1:13.8	there's actually right now a sale on at Verso. Everything's 40% off. So if you would like to buy the
1:19.2	book, you can go to badgayspod.com slash book. Yeah, and that's going to be out in June next year,
1:25.2	just in time for pride. So what a better way to show your pride?
1:29.1	Exactly.
1:30.1	Pride, shame.
1:31.1	There was actually a group in San Francisco called Gay Shame.
1:34.4	And we're trying to join their legacy.
1:37.5	And it also makes a great belated holiday solstice, et cetera, present because you get the pre-order now and then it's like
1:45.0	a second present comes when the actual book shows up in gym.
1:48.4	So do be on the lookout for that.
1:50.4	Once again, it's badgayspod.com slash book.
	...

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