Olive Yang

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From almost the first season of the show, we’ve been tantalised by stories of the Burmese gangster Olive Yang. Now, to open season 8, we have their story: Olive was a lesbian — or possibly transmasculine — gangster born royal in 1927 British colonial Burma, who when first married off to a man threw a pot of their own urine at him to prevent the marriage from being consummated. They ran away from polite society, dated actresses, ran opium, were involved with the CIA, and helped negotiate settlements between ethnic groups. Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays for more from us. Check out our new merch. ----more---- SOURCES: Paluch, Gabrielle. The Opium Queen: The Untold Story of the Rebel Who Ruled the Golden Triangle. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023. Scott, James C., ed. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Season 8 of Budgays, a brand new season. My name is Shee Levy. I'm a writer and author.
0:20.7	And I'm Ben Miller'm a writer and author.
0:26.6	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian currently at work on a biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gerrnrich.
0:29.4	It's season eight of our show, Hugh.
0:30.8	Very excited to be back.
0:34.6	How did we do 80 hours already of this?
0:37.4	Yeah, it's been a labor of love, I think. It's absolutely a labor of love
0:39.5	and a labor of love that we can only perform thanks to those of you who subscribe to our
0:44.5	monthly show Extra Bad Gays. So if you've missed us terribly and don't want to miss us again
0:49.3	after your 10 normal season eight episodes come out, then take a look at extra bad gays, subscribe
0:54.9	if you feel like it. But let's get right to it, shall we? Because we've got a lot to cover today,
0:58.8	Hugh. Yeah, I'm really excited. So who are we covering on our first episode? Well, today's episode,
1:03.4	Hugh, is about someone we've had on our long list for a long time and on our short list several
1:08.6	times. And it's one of these stories where we've tried a few
1:11.8	times to pull together the threads, but we keep getting lost in the foothills of our own ignorance.
1:16.4	Right, right. You and I both have our own language skills. We have our own knowledge bases.
1:21.1	In some cases, they're enough to take us into something resembling original research.
1:25.1	But in a lot of cases, we run into languages we don't speak, sources that
1:28.8	we're not familiar with, and we need historians and journalists who've already done the work.
1:33.5	So since just about the first season, I think, we've been tantalized by stories of the Burmese
1:39.6	gangster Olive Yang.
1:41.5	Oh, great. Yes.
	...

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