Hello everybody and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast about evil and complicated

queers in history. My name

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

And my name's Heulemi. I'm a writer and author. Last week we talked about Dongshan, the Han Dynasty

imperial favorite whose passion of the cut sleeve became a literary model for

homosexuality throughout Chinese history. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?

Well, today's subject is a sort of character who has, I think, sort of been extinguished

from British public life today, and maybe that's for the best, as we'll learn.

Well, British public life today is so positive and healthy.

Yeah, I mean, it's not got any better, I guess.

He's this sort of mass of contradictions, and he's this sort of mass that confuses the

idea of like an easy history, I guess, of lessons we can learn, because few of us, obviously,

are saints, and most of us are also a massive contradictions, more or less.

But what's fascinating about today's subject is how willing he was to live his contradictions out in public.

And yeah, that's what we'll be exploring today.

So how did this man manage to be both an avant-garde poet and a gossip columnist,

a communist revolutionary and a high Anglican devotee, a labour organiser, and a lord.

Or perhaps more accurately, how did he manage to inhabit all these roles with a level of seeming

sincerity and honest commitment? Was he an honest man or a devious one, a man driven by fidelity or by

treachery? Perhaps we'll get to the bottom of it all when we discuss the life of Tom Dryberg,

the Lord Bradwell, journalist, socialist, MP, chairman of the Labour Party, and cock sucker.

I cannot wait for this episode, too. You have been teasing me with this story for years.

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