Hello and welcome to Season 8 Episode 2 of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.

My name is Ben Miller.

I'm a writer and historian currently at work on a biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gernrick.

And my name's Helemy.

I'm a writer and author.

And last week we talked about Olive Yang, who was a CIA-involved, potentially trans-masculine, potentially

lesbian opium smuggler who was active in the border regions between Burma and China in the 20th century.

Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?

I want to talk about a very bad bisexual, a man who would probably have passed into the footnotes of the memoirs of countless other bad bisexuals, were it not for the writings of his, frankly, astonishing band of sisters.

This episode is about the lawyer, soldier, and society favourite Tom Mitford.

I am looking forward to this, Hugh, because every single anecdote you have told me about

the Midfords as a family, I don't quite believe that such people could ever have existed,

and yet if they ever existed anywhere, it would have to be England, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I am going to hold up my hands here and confess that the idea of featuring Tom is

partly a ruse to actually talk about his whole family and especially his six siblings, the famed Mithford sisters, whose intense, often conflicting relationships have become something of an obsession really for English culture.

And not always, it has to be said, a very healthy obsession.

They really embody so much about the English elite. They're eccentric, vicious, often listless,

desperately sad at times. And I have to say it's an obsession that I am not personally immune to.

Ever since I read Jessica Mitford's memoir Ons and Rebels as a teenager, I found him a really fascinating

family whose sort of contradictions really illustrate the strange political and social atmosphere

of England in the first half of the 20th century, and who seemed in many ways to provide

a sort of object lesson in British class politics as it began to morph and mutate as the century progressed.

...