Violette Morris

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Violette Morris, a powerhouse athlete with 14-inch biceps, discovered a love for trousers and fast driving while piloting ambulances for the Red Cross during the First World War. But her outrageous and mannish style – she dated Josephine Baker, smoked, and cut her breasts off to better fit behind the wheel of a race car – outraged the respectable upper-middle-class world of women's athletics. And when she was cast out of respectable society, she became a Nazi spy and a sadistic torturer known as the "hyena of the Gestapo." ----more---- SOURCES: Colvin, Kelly Ricciardi. Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness. London ; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Doyle, Jack. “How a Pioneering Lesbian Became the Nazis’ ‘Hyena.’” OZY, May 25, 2015. http://test-2017-elb-web-us-west-2.aws.ozymandias.com/flashback/how-a-pioneering-lesbian-became-the-nazis-hyena/40366. Kessler, Martin. “Violette Morris: Pioneering Female Athlete Turned Nazi Spy.” WBUR, February 24, 2017. https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/02/24/gestapo-hitler-book-anne-sebba. Mansky, Jackie, and Maya Wei-Haas. “The Rise of the Modern Sportswoman.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 18, 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rise-modern-sportswoman-180960174/. Papirblat, Shlomo. “Sporting Champion, Feminist Icon, Nazi Spy? The Extraordinary Life of Violette Morris.” Haaretz.Com. Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-sporting-champion-feminist-icon-nazi-spy-the-crazy-life-of-violette-morris-1.6869492. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008. FemBio: Frauen.Biografieforschung. “Violette Morris.” Accessed December 21, 2020. https://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/violette-morris/. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to bad gays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:20.6	My name is Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.
0:23.8	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, historian and member of the board of the Shulism Museum in Berlin.
0:29.2	Last week we discussed a nice Midwestern Lutheran girl who ended up joining a urban
0:34.7	guerrilla gang. Who are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:38.2	Well, I want to start by describing a photograph to you, and it's a photograph that was
0:43.1	taken by the photographer Brissai in a very stylish nightclub in 1920s, Paris.
0:52.4	We see in the photograph two people, one in a very elegant, silky, draped evening gown
1:05.2	with the waved hair and emphatic coal eyeliner of 1920s, Starlet. And the other person is wearing a suit and
1:15.0	tie, has their hair slicked back, is in what we might call a men's suit jacket with a pocket
1:21.1	square, has their arm around the other one, and at the other hand, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the table next to the wine glasses.
1:31.0	And we're going to be talking today about the person in the soup, a person named Violet Morris, or Violet Morris, who was an outstanding French athlete who won dozens of medals in international competition before being
1:45.0	banned from competing in sports due to her violation of moral standards.
1:51.3	So far, so lesbian, but what makes her story more complicated and more troubling is that during
1:57.1	World War II, she was accused of collaboration with the Nazis and the Vichy regime,
2:00.9	and she was killed in a hail of bullets in 1944 in a resistance-led ambush.
2:05.8	Well, that's quite a romantic life, no?
2:08.5	It's quite a romantic life. It's still unclear, and we'll get into this later in the episode,
2:15.2	the extent of her collaboration.
2:18.0	Certain things are known, certain things are not known.
2:21.0	And there's a fight between historians
2:23.4	and between people who've thought about her life
	...

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