meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Bad Gays

Special Episode: Gavin Arthur (with Maurice Casey)

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6842 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Join our community of Extra Bad Gays on Patreon or Apple Podcasts for special episodes and more!   Have you ever wondered who the sexual link between Edward Carpenter and Allen Ginsburg was? Wonder no more, and meet Gavin Arthur: grandson of US President Chester Allan Arthur, astrologer, sexologist, Irish Republican, sometime Communist, sometime Democrat, Haight-Ashbury hippie rabble-rouser, and chaotic bisexual. Our guide to his life is longtime friend of the show Maurice J. Casey, historian and author of Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals.  This episode is based on research carried out as part of the Queer Norther Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation project at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. If you have a moment, do fill out their survey.   ----more----   SOURCES: Maurice J. Casey, ‘”I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America”: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, 1890s-1920s’, History Workshop Journal: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbaf004/8096618?searchresult=1Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives, New York, 2012Philip Longo, ‘Between the Sheets: Gavin Arthur’s Sexual Circulation’, in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, ed. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander, London, 2022, pp. 140–7Martin Murray, ‘Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Gavin Arthur and the Circle of Sex’, Walt Whitman Quarterly 22: 3, 2005, pp. 194–8: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/wwqr/pdf/anc.00943.pdfThe 1930 film starring Gavin Arthur and Charlotte Arthur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_(1930_film)   Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:21.0

queer people in history.

0:22.6

My name is Hugh Lemmy, and today we have a special guest, Dr. Morris Casey.

0:27.5

He's a Belfast-based historian and author of one of my favorite books from last year, Hotel

0:32.2

Locks, an intimate history of communism's forgotten radicals.

0:36.0

And, well, quite often when we start a podcast that I have an idea of who we're going to talk about,

0:40.8

or I know a vague live story, or I can put them in some sort of context.

0:44.4

But you suggested this guy to me, Gavin Arthur.

0:47.8

I'm assuming a guy actually, don't know anything about him.

0:49.9

And I didn't Google him.

0:50.7

I know nothing about him.

0:51.7

So I'm going in really cold. So, yeah, I'm as

0:54.2

clueless to this as the rest of the audience. So who are we talking about? Who is Gavin Arthur?

0:58.9

Well, thanks you for having me on speak about Gavin Arthur, who's a kind of a figure that I came

1:05.7

across maybe about four or five years ago. But ever since I've learned his name and who he was and where he showed

1:11.8

up, I've begun to find him everywhere, just a kind of gadfly figure moving through the 20th

1:17.4

century, through Irish history, through queer history, through American history.

1:22.5

One of the ways I like to introduce him is to actually start at a kind of a, in the final act of his life,

1:29.3

at the corner of Fourth and Market in San Francisco in the late 1940s, where Herb Kane, who was a

1:37.3

famous San Francisco journalist, found this newspaper salesman, Hawking newspapers in a quite grand

1:43.8

voice, and got talking to this newspaper salesman, newspaperking newspapers in a quite grand voice, and got talking to this

1:45.7

newspaper salesman, newspaper salesman said that he was Gavin Arthur, that he was the grandson

...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 7 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.