Little Richard

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 65 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 episode is about three very different men and how their lives overlapped. The first was a pioneering rock and roll musician who stunned audiences with his fast-paced hits in a quite macho rock world: a huge influence on musicians from Elvis and The Beatles to James Brown, Prince, Patti Smith, Andre 3000, and more. It was a very eclectic mix and he lived an equally fast-paced private life off stage. The second man was a Seventh Day Adventist preacher from the deep south of the United States who preached about sin. The third person was a young Black queer man thrown out of his home by his domineering pastor father in the late 1940s who became a drag performer under the name Princess LaVonne, performing in clubs and for traveling medicine shows and dressing in capes and turbans, singing obscene songs about anal sex while cruising bathrooms for sexual contacts with men. These were all one and the same man: Richard Wayne Penniman, better known by his performing name, Little Richard. ----more---- SOURCES Abdurraqib, Hanif. "What Little Richard Deserved." The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-little-richard-deserved Freeman, Scott. "Remembrance: How Little Richard Invented Rock'n'roll in Macon, Georgia." ArtsAtlanta. https://www.artsatl.org/remembrance-how-little-richard-invented-rock-n-roll-in-macon-georgia/ Little Richard: I Am Everything. HBO, dir. Lisa Cortes Little Richard, Live in Paris, 1966: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7TWclEcASU&themeRefresh=1 Nyong'o, Tavia. "Too Black, Too Queer, Too Holy." The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/may/12/too-black-queer-holy-why-little-richard-never-truly-got-his-dues-turbaned-drag-queen-sexual-underworld Smith, Jami. "The Drag Queens Who Helped Little Richard Invent Rock And Roll." https://www.songsthatsavedyou.com/p/drag-queens-who-helped-little-richard White, Charles. The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (Da Capo Press, 1994) Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner. This podcast may contain copyrighted material, and its use is under the principles of fair use for purposes such as commentary, criticism, and parody. All rights belong to the respective copyright holders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the first episode of season nine, Can You Believe It, Hugh, of Fab Gaze, a podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:25.7	My name is Ben Miller. I am a writer, historian, and a member of the board of the Troilus Museum here in beautiful downtown Berlin, Germany.
0:33.1	And my name is Hugh Leni. I'm a writer and author.
0:36.3	And here we are. Back, back, back, back, back, back again. I'm a writer and author. And here we are.
0:39.2	Back, back, back, back, back again.
0:41.6	I'm looking forward to this season. I think it's going to be a good one.
0:42.7	We've got some really good subjects.
0:43.9	We do.
0:51.3	We save the bans for our subscriber-only show Extra Bad Gays. So why don't we get right to the point?
0:53.9	Who is the subject of this week's
0:56.4	episode, Hugh? Today's episode, perhaps unusually for us, is really actually about three very
1:01.1	different men and how their lives are overlapped. So the first was a pioneering rock and roll
1:06.4	musician who stunned audiences with his fast-paced hits in a quite macho rock world.
1:12.5	He became a sort of heart throb and sex symbol for young women in 1950s,
1:17.0	and a huge influence on musicians from Elvis and the Beatles to James Brown,
1:22.5	Prince, Patty Smith, mystical, Andre 3,000, and even bands like Motehead and Audio Slave.
1:28.6	And even, as I found out last week, my father cellist Jonathan Miller.
1:33.9	Yeah, it was a very eclectic mix. And he lived an equally fast-paced private life. Offstage,
1:39.5	he was known very much for hard drinking and smoking weed, having multiple brushes of the law, before
1:45.3	hitting rock bottom in the 70s through heavy use of heroin, cocaine and PCP, partying
1:51.2	hard while nursing a long-standing resentment that he had been taken advantage of for his whole
1:56.5	career and not been shown in the respect he felt he was due for his early groundbreaking recording work.
	...

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