Hello and welcome to Queerous Fact. My name is Eli. I'm Alice. I'm Irene.

We are a queer history podcast that comes out on the first and 15th of every month.

And in each episode, we'll talk to you about a figure or an event or an object or what have you from queer history.

Today we're talking about Henrietta Biggham, a jazz age heiress.

Yeah. about Henrietta Biggham, a Jazz Age heiress. Before we begin, we have several content warnings for this episode.

We have discussions of alcohol and drug addiction and abuse, including two overdoses,

a possible suicide attempt, an alleged murder and the death of one of

Henry Hed's family members in a car crash.

There's also unhealthy parent-child relationships, period-typical homophobia, including conversion

therapy, early 20th century psychoanalysis, including electroshock therapy, and mentions

of a lobotomy, periodical racism, including mentions of lynchings and

the Ku Klux Klan, and one use of the word bitch in a quotation. So if any of that sounds like

something that you don't want to listen to, feel free to check out any of our other episodes.

We have content warnings at the start of all of them, so you can tailor the content to what

you want to hear. So Henrietta Bingham is born on

the 3rd of January, 1901, and she grows up in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother's side has

amassed a huge fortune in ironworking, so they make engines and stoves and pipes and things,

and her father's side isn't all that well off at all. He opens up a legal

practice and he sort of tries to get involved with politics, but he's never really that successful

and they're primarily supported by the mother's wealth, which means that there's a lot of

tension in the family because her mother-in-law views her father with a lot of suspicion.

Henrietta is the middle of three children. She has an older brother and a younger brother. And she is

...