Jacob Israël de Haan

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Today's subject, Jacob Israël de Haan, wrote one of the first gay dutch novels. "What is it that I long for," he asked. "The sanctity of Israel or an Arab male prostitute?" Born in 1881 in the Netherlands, he was assassinated by the Haganah paramilitary at the age of 42 in Palestine, having moved there to establish Zion, and then having turned on the Zionist project because of its treatment of the Arabs. His love of young Arab men was both a source of scandal and a very troubling source of evolving solidarity. ----more---- SOURCES https://archive.ph/wkF8y#selection-1069.0-1074.0 https://www-literatuurgeschiedenis-org.translate.goog/teksten/pijpelijntjes?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_5/critical_urgencies/giebels.htm https://www.gerthekma.nl/ewExternalFiles/Jacob Israël de Haan. Pederast poet between Amsterdam and Jerusalem.pdf https://rabbidunner.com/assassination-in-the-holy-city/#_edn12 https://glreview.org/article/article-964/ https://archive.ph/wkF8y https://www.the-low-countries.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TLC_24_Chronicle_WASSING_NASSAU.pdf https://www.the-low-countries.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TLC_24_Chronicle_WASSING_NASSAU.pdf https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jacob-de-haan-political-poet https://glreview.org/article/article-964/ https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/haan-jacob-israel-de https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/c9843d1e-4703-45eb-a317-4de724d686a1/The multiple lives of Jacob Israel de Haan.pdf https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/Jacob Israel de Haan - A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine.pdf

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:21.2	My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.
0:23.5	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer and researcher currently at work on a new biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gernrick.
0:29.2	So last week we were talking about the 18th century Georgian thief-taker and a member of the Sodomitish Academy, Charles Hitchin.
0:37.4	Who are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:39.3	Today I'm going to do something that's a callback to early seasons and begin the episode by reading a poem.
0:45.3	The poem is entitled To a Young Fisherman.
0:48.3	Your naked feet more tender than a tulip, a rose less handsome than your ruddy cheeks. In no other's eyes did
0:56.8	I read more replete such a boundless hankering for friendship. Behind us the eternity of the sea,
1:04.0	above paled gray the everlasting sky, drifting on the lonely beach just we alone, no other than the sea to pry.
1:12.7	I went to my city, our last day ended.
1:15.8	You sail and fish content I drift and brood, and find no city refuge nor stiller field.
1:22.2	I am so tired, yet much I have loved.
1:25.6	Forgive me much, ask not what I withstood, and pray I never to your beauty yield.
1:32.0	Okay. So that poem, in its original Dutch, appears excerpted on Amsterdam's Homo Monument,
1:40.2	which is one of the first memorials to the persecution of gay people ever built in 1979.
1:45.0	It was written by the subject of today's episode, Jacob, Israel, Dahan,
1:50.0	and we can understand why it was chosen, right?
1:53.0	With its elegiac, melancholic references to the love that dare not speak its name.
1:58.0	I don't think anyone suggested engraving this next poem by Dahan onto any monuments,
2:02.8	but I want to read it here because it does open up the other side of his personality.
2:07.5	This one is entitled Doubt.
	...

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