Hello, and welcome to Queer as Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media.

I'm Jason. I'm Irene. I'm Alice.

And today we're talking about the 1926 play, The Captive, written by Eduar Bordeaux, and adapted

for Broadway, by Arthur Hornblow Jr.

Okay, I finished reading this play five minutes ago, so I'm very ready.

Okay. Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Wawandri-Woiwurung people of the Kulin Nation

as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay respect to their

elders past and present.

We recognize them as the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We also have some content warnings.

This episode includes significant amounts of period typical homophobia, I would say more so than

most of our episodes, including the medicalization of homosexuality.

If that doesn't sound like something you would like to listen to, please feel free to check out one of our other episodes. So to give you both an idea of how this

episode is going to go, and the audience, I suppose, the key people here. I'm going to give

a very brief summary of the play itself, but largely we're going to discuss the play's origins,

production, and reception before going on to the

meat of the content to contextualize the discussion we then have on the play itself.

Please save your comments about the characters and the themes to the appropriate moments.

Okay.

I'm also going to make a note here that, as always, I apologize for my pronunciation of French.

I feel like I torture myself a bit by continuing to choose things that include French names.

Is there just more queer French literature?

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