About this episode
Feb 27
TRAILER: Extra Bad Gays February 2026: Mandelson, Gay Mafias, And Liza's Floor Mop
12m 44s
Feb 10
Tom of Finland
1h 25m
Feb 3
William Beckford
1h 9m
Mar 2025
Robert Dudley: Elizabeth I's Forbidden Love
58m 10s
Oct 2025
Voices of Thunder: Radical Women of the 17th Century
46m 58s
Jun 2025
What Did Jane Austen Know About Sex?
48m 56s
Sep 2025
Ballads of Love and Death
1h 1m
Aug 2023
William J. Mann, "Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair" (Harper, 2023)
51m 59s
Nov 2024
38. Fanny Davies - Uncommon Thief
28m 12s
Sep 2024
Best Of: Marguerite Duras
8m 3s
Jun 2024
Wordsmiths: Anita Cornwell
6m 31s
Oct 2024
35. Women Who Dare
28m 31s
Oct 2024
The Rise and Fall of Jane Boleyn
34m 50s
Today's special guest is the researcher and museum worker Indigo Dunphy-Smith, who is bringing her expertise to the case of Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, two Edinburghian school teachers who found themselves embroiled in a sex scandal and court case in the early years of the 19th century. Their legal woes followed accusations by a pupil about sapphic goings ... Show More
THIS IS A TRAILER! SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE OR PATREON TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE We have heard your pleas. The news has made them even more urgent. We're going to do a whole main feed Peter Mandelson episode in Season 10: but for now, here's a taste of our legally-bounded musings on his ... Show More
Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming m ... Show More
William Beckford, who was born not in Bath but in London in 1760, is someone for whom property, in every sense of the word, was the defining factor in his life. He was a novelist, a member of parliament, a collector of art, antiquities, and books, a travel writer, and a builder o ... Show More
<p>Passion, scandal, and power collided in the tumultuous relationship between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. Rumours of secret trysts between them set the court ablaze, but their love was doomed from the start.</p><br><p>Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and Dr. Joanne Paul unravel t ... Show More
In 17th-century England, women weren’t asked what they believed, they were generally told to obey. But amid civil war, revolution, and religious upheaval, a remarkable group of women risked everything to speak out. They preached, prophesied and published their defiance, surviving ... Show More
<p>She wrote some of the most enduring romances in literature. But what did Jane Austen really know about love ... and sex?</p><br><p>From longing looks and flirtation, to seduction and elopement, in this episode we're investigating how much of Jane Austen's works was based on ex ... Show More
In this enchanting episode, Dr. Eleanor Janega dissolves the boundaries between history, folklore, and music to explore the haunting world of medieval ballads. Joined by author Amy Jeffs, illustrator Gwen Burns and composer/singer Natalie Brice, Eleanor uncovers the timeless stor ... Show More
From the noted Hollywood biographer comes this celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before.
In Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood' ... Show More
In this new series Lucy Worsley switches her attention from Lady Killers to Lady Swindlers - con women, thieves and hustlers. This is where true crime meets history - with a twist. Lucy and her team of all female detectives travel back in time to revisit the audacious and surpris ... Show More
This back to school season, we're bringing back some of our favorite Womanica episodes you might have missed. Today's Womanican is Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). She was a pioneer of autofiction and one of the most widely-read French writers in the postwar era. She specialized in ... Show More
Anita Cornwell (1923-2023) made history as the first Black woman writer to openly identify as a lesbian in her published essays. From the 1950s to the 1980s, she wrote passionately about Black power and Black lesbian identity in magazines like Negro Digest, The Ladder, and Femini ... Show More
Lucy Worsley, historian Professor Rosalind Crone and author and journalist Helen Lewis, explore the lives of four notorious Lady Swindlers.
They’ll be discussing underworld boss Tilly Devine, fake heiress Violet Charlesworth, queen of shoplifting Alice Diamond and fake Princess M ... Show More
<p>In 1542 Jane Boleyn was executed for having aided and abetted Henry VIII's fifth wife Catherine Howard to commit adultery. It was the second time Jane Boleyn had been connected with charges of treason as just six years earlier, she had allegedly asserted a charge of inces ... Show More