Hello and welcome to Queer is Fact, a queer history podcast.

My name is Alice.

I'm Irene.

I'm Eli.

Hamish isn't here, but I would like to thank him for recording me the sound file of all the French words I'm about to mingle,

because that's my fault and not his.

Each fortnight, one of us will talk about a person, a place, or a topic in queer history from around the world and throughout time. This week I'll be talking to about Julie Dobiny,

a bisexual French opera singer and jewelist from the 17th century.

Just a couple of content warnings before we begin the episode.

There will be mentions of violence, murder and self-harm,

as well as underage marriage and sex with minors. So if any of that sounds like something you don't

want to hear, we'll have plenty of other episodes and they'll all have a wide variety of different

content. Before we begin, I'd just like to include a quick mention that we had some issues with

sound quality when we started recording this episode.

So the first 10 minutes are worse quality than our previous episode and then the rest of

the episode.

It picks up after 10 minutes.

We're sorry about that.

So you've probably heard of Julie because she's on the internet a bunch as everyone

just being like, yes, she's like a super badass opera singer who gets in a lot of jewels

and kills people and is also queer.

And people are quite keen on her.

...