Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated

queers in history.

I'm Ben Miller, writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.

This week is a special episode, so it's just me and our guest, who I'll introduce in just a

moment.

I think more so than in that anyone book has in gay culture, in lesbian and trans cultures,

in sort of queer femme cultures more broadly, the book The Well of Loneliness still has an enormous,

an outsized cultural impact.

It's still the first point of reference, I think,

for so many people who are coming to terms with who they are,

with understanding who they are.

And the more that we started looking into that book and into the person who wrote it, Radcliffe Hall, the more we started to realize that the story behind the book and behind Radcliffe's Hall's life is not only very interesting in its own right, but also adds a lot of really

important dynamics to conversations that we've had about primitivism, about queerness and race,

about queerness and colonization, about the extremely good and normal sexual lives and

habits of the British upper classes,

about the ways in which class has often kind of structured and limited queer radicals

and their politics and the way that whiteness has done the same.

So in order to talk more about Radcliffe Hall and about this book, The Well of Loneliness

and all of the various

issues and questions and problems that are sort of imbricated in it and in its author.

I would like to bring in our very special guest, Dr. Yana Funka, who is a senior lecturer in medical humanities

at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on modernist literature and

...