Hello and welcome to a special episode of Babgay, a podcast about evil and complicated

queers in history.

I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, member of the board of the Shvulles Museum in Berlin,

and I'm currently at work on a biography of Ritty Gernerick.

And today, we don't have few, but we do have a guest that I'm really excited about.

The culture journalist Cameron Cook,

who has just launched the newsletter Cooked, which offers pop culture essays, music playlists,

and generally recommendations from an expert, which Cameron is in all things, music and divas

and pop culture. So, hi. Indeed. Hello. And Cameron is also, I'll use an appropriate

expression for today's episode, A Good Judy. So this episode, as you've already seen from the title,

was built around a slightly deranged concept, which is that we wanted to, I mean, it was mostly

the fact that Cameron and I wanted an excuse to sit down

and talk about Liza Minnelli's memoir, kids, wait until you hear this, which came out a couple

months ago. But it evolved into the idea that we were basically going to look at her life

through her relationships with these different kinds of gay men and kind of think about how Liza's bad

gays or were they bad, we're going to do our typical good bad thing for each one of them,

how they sort of shaped her, how they shaped her career, how they shaped this strange relationship

and I think this very self-conscious relationship that both Liza Minnelli and her mother

had with gay men. They really knew what they were doing. They did. I mean, she does. Liza's alive.

Yes. I hope it's a long time before she, as she says in the book, joins the celestial choir,

as she likes to call the afterlife, which who else could put it like that? I was talking about this earlier with you.

It's does she, is she aware of how her life has been impacted by these men?

...