Hello and welcome to episode 5 of season 2 of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated gay men in history.

I'm Ben Miller, a writer and researcher and member of the board of the Gay Museum in Berlin.

And I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and author.

Last week we profiled Frederick the Great, a Prussian king with a very bad dad who instituted domestic reforms at home while conquering much of Europe

in a series of pointless wars. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh? Today we're talking about

Charles George Gordon, better known as Gordon of Khartoum. Charles George Gordon was born into a military

family in Woolwich in London in 1833 to a long line of British army officers.

He was to be the fifth generation of officers in his family and was raised from birth with that model as the only expectation for his life, as was the case of all his brothers.

As his father, Henry William Gordon, was a major general in the British army.

Gordon's childhood was itinerant. Was he the very model of a mother? He was the very model of a modern major general.

I clearly didn't do my vocal warm-ups before today's show. He was, his childhood was

pre-itinerant. He was raised on army bases in England, Ireland, Scotland and in Greece.

So he's a standard army brat, really,

before being educated at private school in Somerset and then at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich.

It's a place that produces people with normal psychosexual profiles.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to find out.

When he was 10, his favourite sister, Emily, died,

which proved to be a very traumatic experience for him, and he claimed that he was never the same again. He then transferred his attachment onto his older sister, Augusta, who was extremely

pious, and this led him closer to her religion and his complex relationship

with Christianity and Scripture would be a driving force in his life as he struggled to battle

against his own tendencies. And I'm not talking here about any potential future homosexuality.

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