Hello, and welcome to Queer's Fact.

I'm Hamish.

I'm Irene. I'm Alice.

We are a fortnightly queer history podcast, and each episode we talk about a person, event, or a topic from queer history.

Just a heads up, we have some content warnings for this episode.

There's a lot of political and palace intrigues, so we have tales of suicide, murder, poisonings, and if that doesn't sound like something you'd like to hear, we have plenty of other content that I'm sure that you'll love. The three stories that we have for you today are all stories from around the warring states period, the chin period, and the Han period, and they're all used

in later Chinese writing to allude euphemistically to earlier homosexuality as a way of referring

to homosexuality in their own time or in the history that they're talking about.

In polite society, it generally wasn't done to speak about sex of any kind, and so these

allusions are used, even

in heterosexual situations, to allude to sex or sexual activity, to give a veneer of

respectability to the description of carnal acts. Because you can't go around saying, wow,

the emperor Shaw did have a penis in his mouth this morning. You have to be a little bit more

polite about it. And so you find things like in 18th

century, Western literature, you find people referring to the sin of Sodom so that they can refer to a

very respectable thing in referring to some very explicit sexual action. If it had been my penis in

the emperor's mouth. You totally would have said, yes.

Well, the emperor sure did have a penis in his mouth.

Yes.

Notably, all of these stories about noble men, because those are the people who are doing all of the writing at the time, because it's the first century C.

It's actually a range from, like, the third century BC out to the first century C.

And so female education is not particularly advanced at this time, and so we unfortunately don't have third century BC out to the first century C.

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