Julie D’Aubigny

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment: today’s subject caused such a scandal in her life that even its fictionalized depiction in a novel was banned by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Mozart of bisexual drama, sword-fighting crossdressing opera singer Julie D'Aubigny burned through a dizzying series of lives, loves, husbands, mistresses, swordfights, operatic performances, lovers, and successes at the Paris Opera before dying in a convent in her early 30s. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! SOURCES “Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes: Julie D’Aubigny.” In The Dublin University Magazine, 408–10. William Curry, Jun., and Company, 1854. Blackmer, Corrine, and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. 0 edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Carlton, Genevieve. “Meet The Sword-Fighting, Bisexual Opera Singer Who Broke All The Rules In 17th-Century France.” All That’s Interesting, March 3, 2022. https://allthatsinteresting.com/julie-daubigny. Cuttle, Jade. “The Story of Julie d’Aubigny: The French Opera-Singing Sword Fighter.” Culture Trip, August 8, 2018. https://theculturetrip.com/france/articles/the-story-of-julie-daubigny-the-french-opera-singing-sword-fighter/. Gautier, Theophile. Mademoiselle de Maupin. Translated by Patricia Duncker. Revised edition. Cambridge, London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Giovetti, Olivia. “Women In Love.” VAN Magazine, April 9, 2020. https://van-magazine.com/mag/women-in-love/. Harris, Joseph. Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in 17th-Century France. Tübingen: Narr Dr. Gunter, 2011. Hoddinott, Fiona Zublin, Meradith. “The Badass Rogue Who Cross-Dressed and Dueled Her Way to Infamy.” OZY(blog), January 27, 2020. http://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-badass-rogue-who-cross-dressed-and-dueled-her-way-to-infamy/76908. Interlude. “The Daring Criminal Swordswoman Who Became an Opera Star!” Interlude (blog), October 28, 2016. https://interlude.hk/lesbian-diva-swordswoman-julie-daubigny-aka-mademoiselle-maupin/. Kelly Gardiner. “The Real Life of Julie d’Aubigny,” May 11, 2014. https://kellygardiner.com/fiction/books/goddess/the-real-life-of-julie-daubigny/. Koestenbaum, Wayne. Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire. Reprint edition. London: Da Capo Press, 2001. “Maupin, d’Aubigny (c. 1670–1707) | Encyclopedia.Com.” Accessed January 9, 2023. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/maupin-daubigny-c-1670-1707. Tucker, Holly. City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. Updated edition. New York: Verso, 2021. Westby, Alan. “Julie d’Aubigny: La Maupin and Early French Opera.” The Los Angeles Public Library, June 28, 2017. https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/julie-daubigny-la-maupin-and-early-french-opera. 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 and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:21.8	My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer, author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:30.6	So last week we were talking about the disgraced congressman George Santos. Are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:36.6	So the subject of today's episode caused such a scandal in her lifetime that even the fictionalized depiction of her life in a novel was almost immediately banned by the New York Society for the suppression of vice.
0:49.1	Excellent. Goals. So to quote the introduction to that novel, quote, this great affectation of morality
0:57.0	that rains today would be very laughable if it were not very tiresome. Every foetton becomes a
1:02.4	pulpit, every journalist a preacher, only the tonsher and the little neckband are wanting.
1:07.7	The weather is rainy and homiletic. One can defend oneself against both by going out only in a carriage and reading pentegril between one's bottle and one's pipe.
1:17.7	So that book, Mademoiselle de Mopin, shocked contemporary readers with its frank epistol
1:23.0	description of extramarital sex.
1:25.4	Its title character uses her captivating wiles to seduce both the
1:29.5	narrator who is a poet and also his somewhat hapless first mistress, Rosette. So when she first
1:37.0	appears, it is disguised as a man, Theodore, and the narrator experiences an epistemic and existential
1:42.7	crisis. Has his long-sought object of beauty, an ideal to which Rosette has failed to live up despite fulfilling the narrator sexually, suddenly appeared in the guise of a man?
1:54.2	In the world of the book, this occurrence is shocking, but not impossible.
1:58.6	The narrator gives sodomy, in so many words, a good long thinking over,
2:02.8	before deciding to follow his hunch. Surely, he concludes, anyone so beautiful is actually
2:08.3	a woman in disguise, and of course she is. At court, the characters put on a performance of Shakespeare's
2:14.7	play as you like it, with its own gender swaps and games of
2:18.2	chance and confusion, and the love triangle between them grows ever more complicated.
2:23.8	Theodore seduces the narrator as a woman and Rosette as a man, and when confronted issues
2:29.0	a passionate statement of erotic and sexual freedom.
	...

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