Roger Casement

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.5 • 934 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the height of his career, today's subject was a national hero in the UK, knighted by George V. His life ended as a traitor and a pervert, executed by hanging in Pentonville Prison before being thrown in an unmarked grave in the prison yard, his body covered in quicklime. His name was Roger Casement, and we'll talk about his rise and fall, Britain’s hypocritical relationship with imperialism and colonialism, and secret black diaries full of "gentle thrusts" and "splendid erections." Visit our website for T-shirts, an episode archive, and more information about the show. ----more---- SOURCES: Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: And the Trouble with Nigeria. Penguin Great Ideas 100. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Dudgeon, Jeffrey, and Roger Casement. Roger Casement: The Black Diaries : With a Study of His Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Belfast Press, 2016. Goodman, Jordan. The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness. 1st American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Halifax, Noel. “The Queer and Unusual Life of Roger Casement.” Socialist Review, February 2016. http://socialistreview.org.uk/410/queer-and-unusual-life-roger-casement. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Inglis, Brian. Roger Casement. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Blackstaff Press, 1993. Mitchell, Angus. “REPUTATIONS: Roger Casement and the History Question.” History Ireland (blog), June 30, 2016. https://www.historyireland.com/volume-24/reputations-roger-casement-history-question/. O’Toole, Fintan. “The Multiple Hero.” The New Republic, August 2, 2012. https://newrepublic.com/article/105658/mario-vargas-llosa-dream-of-celt-fintan-otoole. Toibin, Colm. Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to season three episode six of bad gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.
0:21.9	I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:26.0	And I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and author.
0:28.3	Last week, we talked about Philip Johnson, an architect whose youthful flirtation with fascism
0:32.9	helped contribute to his decision to remove all of the sort of political content of modernism
0:38.6	from its designs. What are we talking about this way, Q? Well, as usual, I'd like to start with a poem.
0:46.1	Another one? Yeah. Are there dicks in this one, at least? No dicks. Damn.
0:51.0	John Bull has stood for Parliament. a dog must have his day.
1:00.6	The country thinks no end of him, for he knows how to say, at a bean feast or a banquet that all must hang their trust.
1:07.0	Upon the British Empire, upon the Church of Christ, the ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door.
1:13.6	Today's subject was, at the height of his career, a national hero in the UK, knighted by George V. His life ended as a traitor and a pervert, executed by hanging in Pentonville prison,
1:20.2	before being thrown in an unmarked grave in the prison yard, his body covered in quicklime.
1:25.2	His name was Roger Casement, and his rise and fall tells of Britain's
1:29.0	hypocritical relationship with imperialism and colonialism. The poem was by William Butley Yates,
1:35.3	published a few years after he died. Roger Casement was born in 1864 at the family home in Sandy
1:42.9	Cove, a very pretty seaside suburb south of Dublin in Ireland.
1:47.1	As we discussed in previous episodes on James I and 1st, and earlier this season on Castleray,
1:52.9	Ireland was at the time part of the United Kingdom, and like Castleray, Casement was born into
1:57.5	an Anglo-Irish family. The family were middling sorts. His father was a captain
2:02.8	in the Royal Dragoons who had fought in the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842, a devastating defeat for the
2:08.6	British East India Company. For the first 200 years of British colonisation in the Indian subcontinent,
2:14.5	the wars of conquest were fought by the army and navy of a joint stock
	...

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