Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Warning: this episode contains discussions of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. A rare twofer this week on our show: we discuss the lives and careers of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Both frustrated writers from the North of England making their way in the repressive, damp climate of the postwar UK, they were sent to prison for defacing library books into brilliant collage art. But when Orton achieved fame and success, the pressure was too much for Halliwell to bear. And their disturbing pattern of traveling to Tunisia to abuse children casts a pall on any simple attempt to recuperate them as heroes. Click here to subscribe to our monthly podcast "Extra Bad Gays" and support the work we do to make the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Ilsa Colsell, Philip Hoare, and Leonie Orton Barnett, Malicious Damage: The Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (Donlon Books, 2013) Prick Up Your Ears (Curzon Film Distributors, 1987) James Fox, “The Life and Death of Joe Orton,” The Sunday Times, November 22, 1970 John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, 1st edition (Berkeley: Univ of California Pr, 2000) Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries, Reprint edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996) “Joe Orton,” Front Row (BBC Radio 4, August 11, 2017), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08zzly6 Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, our outro music was made for us by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just a content note before we start today's episodes.
0:03.0	This episode contains discussion of domestic violence, childhood, sexual abuse and suicide.
0:08.0	So if that's not something you'd like to listen to, then 2 of Bad Gaze, a podcast about evil and complicated
0:35.2	queers in history.
0:36.3	I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board
0:39.4	of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:42.1	My name's Heulemi. I'm an author,
0:43.6	writer, artist, that sort of thing.
0:46.1	And last week,
0:47.4	we talked about Carl Lagerfeld,
0:49.5	the white-haired fashion designer
0:51.3	whose penchant for making racist
0:53.4	and misogynist comments,
0:54.7	a company to career spent helping convert the fashion industry into something that's really
1:00.0	image-driven and really based on mass production. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?
1:05.5	Well, today on Bad Gaze, we've got a very rare tufa. I don't think we've done two people
1:10.2	at once before, have we?
1:11.6	Well, we did the Simeon, Solomon, Sasha Schneider episode, but they weren't, I mean, it was two
1:15.1	sort of mini episodes, not a pair. Yeah, so, well, for the last few seasons, I've been weighing up
1:20.6	whether to do an episode on either Joe Orton or one on Kenneth Halliwell, but I decided that the men's lives, these two men's lives,
1:28.4	they're so inextricably linked, not just in terms of biography, but in terms of the meaning
1:32.3	of their lives. And, you know, both of them have aspects of their life that would make them
	...

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