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Moveable Type is a new podcast series and an aural counterpart to the Moveable Type Journal. On this page you can read the transcript for Episode 3 which celebrates LGBTQ+ History Month.
Part 2:
Roxie:
Hello and welcome back to the Moveable Type Podcast, brought to you by University College London.
We are starting this episode with writer, filmmaker, and journalist, Juliet Jacques. She is known for her writing on trans life, including her own experiences with transition which she documents in Trans A Memoir released by Verso in 2015. She is author of the short story collection Variations released las year by Influx Press. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, London Review of Boks, Granta, amongst many many other outlets. She currently teaches Queer fiction at City Lit London and also on the Contemporary Art Practice MA at the Royal College of Art. Hi Juliet, welcome, thank you for being with us today.
Juliet:
Thanks for having me
Roxie:
We wanted to talk to you a little bit about your writing, a big part of your writing career has been reluctant memoirist can we say? You have talked about how you were asked to write about gender and ended up writing about your transition in your landmark, fabulous Guardian column that later became Trans: A Memoir. But, of course, a lot in the book is about culture, history, and mainstream discourse and identity – all concerns that are also at the heart of your short story collection Variations. So, my first question is, why fiction this time, and why fictional archives and found text?
Juliet:
Well, I always wanted to write fiction. I got kind of side-tracked into memoir when I was in my late teens/ early twenties when I really started writing a lot of short stories which trans and non-binary or gender variant characters gradually move from the periphery of my stories to the centre as I let my own trans identity give a bit more. So, that was what I was really doing before I had to start thinking about how to make a living out of something I was good at, which was writing. I also fell into writing memoir partly because I was also quite skilled at that, and I brought literary techniques to this process of writing about myself. But, from the age of about twenty one to twenty two, I had this idea for one of my short stories that would take this kaleidoscopic approach to trans and non-binary life, identities, and over the years whittled the scope of the project down to a history of trans people in Britain, because I found out that as well as trans fiction – there still wasn’t much coming into the early 2010s, and very little in the UK, what there was coming largely from North America, there still wasn’t much fiction and there also wasn’t much history, and I kind of found that my writing for the Guardian and becoming involved in mainstream liberal conversations about trans issues that the transphobic wing of British liberal journalism, which is going to get louder and louder and more and more organised, one of their attack lines was that this is a new thing and tarted existing with your weird identities and blue hair and pronouns and everything, and, obviously, I knew that not to be true. Indeed, when I was in my early twenties, one of things that I found difficult was that all of the trans people I had come across were at least twenty years older than me, so I wanted to counter that historical ignorance, and I also wanted to fill this void for a trans fiction – I’ve been very interested in queer fiction by Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, Ann Quinn, Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, and others, and I read a few South American writers like Kopi and several …. who brought gender variance into their work, one way or another, and this made me feel that there could and should be a place for trans writers and characters in literature, and so that was the mission with fictional writing, literary writing, which was actually what I wanted to do and how I always saw myself, even as – and I think everyone else also saw me as a memoirist and commentator, and so the archival side of the book and the decision to present the book as a fictional archive of documents came from that historical impulse – I mean I did a history degree, I’ve always been quite interested in certain types of historical fiction – they’re usually from a modernist or postmodernist perspective, but this feeling that something I’ve experienced at times, and not being open about my own identity, and the more I looked into the history, the more I found that to be the case for most gender variant people throughout history, and so doing it as a fictional archive of rediscovered documents allowed me to explore the processes by which trans people have been silenced and or marginalised, and how that fed into this more long-term process of identity formation, political organising, cultural representation, and so on.
Roxie:
That’s fantastic. Zooming in on your story, ‘Standards of Care’ which also of course has a lot of relation to trans history and this idea of the archive, can you expand a bit more on the choice of a diary form and its intertextual relationship to the documentary series about Juliet Grant?
Juliet:
Yeah. ‘Standards of Care’ has been identified by a lot of reviewers as one of the standouts in Variations, which I think partly speaks to the facts that it deals with lots of people and places and topics that are very close to my heart. So, it’s set in Norwich which is a city which I visit every other weekend for football reasons.
Roxie:
I love Norwich, it’s amazing.
Juliet:
I’m a season ticketholder at Norwich City and it was a way of shoehorning a reference to the club into the book!
Laughter
Juliet:
Yeah, so it’s set in Norwich, it’s set in the late 70s which is a period I’ve always found culturally very interesting. Post-punk, and the highpoint and also the end of this popular modernism which you see in television and a lot of youth culture at the time, and the punk movement.
So its dealing with Sandy Paine, the central character, finding herself through the medical process of transition and its sort of documenting this time in which transexual people in the public consciousness went during the ‘70s in particular, I think they went from isolated glamorous individuals like Roberta Cowell or April Ashley through to being something of a recognised group of people, you know, with stereotypes forming, with political organisations or support groups at least starting to appear – the gender identity clinics starting to fix some sort of process for managing people’s transitions through hormones and surgery and psychiatry, and obviously this feminist and anti-psychiatry movement backlash as well.
But really kind of before the point where there’s that much openly trans culture – so Sandy is picking her way through this queer subculture, trying to find people and places and scenes that suit her, and a lot of the stuff is a bit too radical for her, in some ways she’s a bit mumsy and she makes friends with a couple of much cooler, younger trans women – that relationship between them is at the core of the story really – and the diary is a way of recording all of these things, and of course, allowing Sandy to say things and think things that she’s not able to say to the gender identity clinic who want her to present a very conventional type of femininity, and they won’t give her what she wants if she won’t. So, it’s recording this process of the tension between her just giving them what they want to get what she wants, and it actually affecting her personality. And tugging her in the opposite direction is Elena, this trans woman who is in a band and plugged into things like alternative Miss World, sort of pulling her into this much more countercultural direction which the people at Charing Cross will not really like which is probably truer to her. And, obviously yes, the 70s were a time when transsexual people were coming more into the public consciousness. So, you’ve mentioned the change of sex documentary with Julia Grant which terrified the life of Britain’s trans community for a couple of decades after it was first shown due to the very cold and clinical and sometimes quite controlling and cruel attitude of the psychiatrists whose voice you hear, John Randall at the Charing Cross gender identity clinic. But I wasn’t just drawing on that. There are other things I mention: A Play for Today on the BBC strand about Eva Solomon which is all about a young transsexual woman trying to deal with her drunken overbearing mother and her colleagues at the bank that she works in that I watched while researching the book – you know, there’s a lot of stuff that’s wrong with it, the medical information in it is -- I don’t know where they got that from – but the portrayal of the central character is very nuanced and sensitive and quite touching. And then there was Open Door which the BBC used to which was to let members of the public make programmes, and one of the Open-Door strands had a group of 4 or 5 transsexual woman talking about their lives, and how they’re treated, and the medical services and far more intelligent and extensive discussion on the issue that you’ll get on mainstream media now, often the case with programmes from the 70s. So, there was a sort of subculture and infrastructure that I was drawing from and the BBC documentary you mentioned was the most prominent and best remembered part.
Roxie:
Yeah, and no, you mentioned also Sandy sort of being thrust into this scene with Elena and this cooler younger trans woman, and something that stood out for me in that story was that there was so much about complicated friendship, girl from smaller city out and about in this intimidating London, the queer punk scene – it’s basically also a coming-of-age narrative, and so I just wondered, how do you see this cultural networks in relation to care? Do you see them as a form of care, and do you think your stories and narratives can act as a similar space for people who may not have access to these community spaces?
Juliet:
Well yeah, to touch on the second part of that question, a lot of my writing and really my entire writing project – at least as it relates to when I’m write about trans subjects, was really so that young people, you know people who are like the teenager I was, don’t have to feel as lonely and confused as I did. You know, in Trans: A Memoir, I talk explicitly about giving a language to a community, and because it’s a memoir and I have to be true to what has happened in my life, unfortunately I have to do it through talking about The Smiths who, you know, were obviously very important to a generation – particularly a small town alienated kind of pseudo-intellectual queers, who – and Morrisey’s terrible politics were present at the time, but we felt able to ignore them, brush over them, and take what we wanted from The Smiths. I think The Bad Gays episode covers – it’s really good. But that was the aim with the newspaper series with The Guardian and the memoir, and also in Variations, but you know, to extend that project further back into the past, and to give literary people something to cling onto because, as I’ve said, until pretty recently, you couldn’t really find trans protagonists in literature, they’re often just added to make a narrative more exotic or make some wider point about gender. They’re very rarely written by trans people, they often weren’t dealing with people’s lived experiences -- and that’s not all bad – there’s plenty of novels, particularly from the 60s, which I’ve read that do that, and they’re often by gay men that I’ve really enjoyed textual experiments like In Transit by Bridget Brophy or Cobra by Severo Sarduy. I really wanted to write something that experimented with form and sat in this modernist and postmodernist tradition, but also gave people characters they could hook onto. So, Sandy Paine in ‘Standards of Care’ has struck a real chord with people because we’ve all been in that situation where we’re around people we want to be friends with, but we now are kind of being mean to us or making fun of us, but maybe you make some sort of breakthrough. That was often the case for me of course as a teenager trying to get into queer scenes and punk scenes and things and getting the feeling that everyone thought I wasn’t cool enough for it and, you know, resenting having to prove yourself in a space that claims to be really open, welcoming, and tolerant, but usually isn’t.
Roxie:
Exactly, that’s such a relatable story.
Juliet:
Yeah, exactly. And I think anyone who’s had any interest in counterculture, or maybe even more mainstream culture, has been there.
Yeah, and care, obviously the title ‘Standards of Care; is drawn from the WPA health organisation’s standards of care for gender identity clinics that relates specifically to the standards of care for the clinics, the standards of care provided by the clinics which Sandy is frequently suggesting in her diary are not great and are actually making her feel worse, and also a sort of informal care networks, ad more formal care networks that people make for each other. There’s a scene where Sandy and Elena go to this support group for transsexual women and crossdressers, and Sandy has to talk Elena into it because Elena is already familiar with the space and thinks its naff basically, but they go anyway. Elena in reaction makes a lot of fun of Sandy for being square, to use the parlance of the time, and there’s this kind of back and forth between them as Elena treats Sandy badly, and makes up for it, and then screws up again, and then things kind of bring them back together. So yeah, there’s all sorts of approaches to care in the story, I think.
Roxie:
Exactly, and it really stands out as a story that has really resonated with both critics and readers. So, in that vein, is there a story that you would like to highlight, and you think has not received that much attention that you want to go read right now?
Juliet:
Yeah, I mean, I really liked writing ‘The Twist’ which is set in the 1990s but written from the vantage point of about 2015 which indeed is more or less when I wrote the story. And it’s probably the most experimental story in the book, its written as a film script - nearly every story in Variations is written in a different form, there’s a couple of diaries – one of which is kept secret and the other of which is published which is ‘Standards of Care.’ But mostly the forms are different and try to be appropriate for the times, so the 2010 stories are a set of blog posts, 1950s stories are chapters of an invented memoir which was a time when transsexual women started to publish memoirs, and actually, again, it’s written with hindsight, its published in the 1970s but covers the mid to late 1950s, and so on. And a lot of the stories are actually written with explicit hindsight. ‘The Twist’ is – I mean, the title is drawn from the marketing campaign from The Crying Game -it’s about the last time in history you can do this when the film was marketed to have this big twist and everyone was begged not to reveal it – and I actually found out about this through an episode of The Simpsons where the mayor says the chick in The Crying Game is really a man and everyone boos, and then he just stops when he realises he’s screwed up and says ‘man that was a good movie.’ But like (laughs), the twist in the crying game was parodied unpleasantly in Ace Ventura which was popular with kids in my school on the mid-90s. But also, there were a lot of films in the 90s that had trans subjects and trans characters that weren’t played by trans actors, I don’t think they were written by trans people or directed by them, they maybe had some input on the consultancy level. So, ‘The Twist’ is this script by a trans woman called Zelda who becomes involved in a mainstream film about the life and death of a close friend of hers, where they’ve written – it’s based on a woman called Julianna who’s died of an AIDS related illness and has published this memoir to try and make some money while she was ill because she couldn’t really do sex work anymore – and this does largely disappear, but is dug up by this director who is turning it into a film, and so the narrative is all about who own the story, who controls it. But there’s just layer upon layer upon layer of meta-textuality, and at one point Zelda falls in love with an actor who’s playing her, so it all gets quite complicated. It felt like the highest wire act of the texts in the book, I mean maybe it hasn’t received the same attention because that high wire act doesn’t come off, or the film script feels a bit incongruous in the rest of the book – I don’t know, but it’s one of my very favourites of the stories, I think.
Roxie:
It’s definitely great, it does jump out, but as you said, sometimes the script format can be not as engaging for some people – I love reading plays though, so for me it’s very interesting, I love reading scripts as well, so I really enjoyed that one. Moving to the last story in the collection, ‘Tipping Point’, it’s a very unique story because it replicates your own experience but through a fiction lens and through the character, Edward McCreary who’s a trans man, so my question is, why did you wish to replicate your own experience, and what does it do to look at it from a fictional lens?
Juliet:
Yeah, I mean in each story, I try to sort of capture what I thought was the most important or interesting thing happening to the trans and non-binary community in that decade – most of the stories broadly capture every decade. I really do think in Britain, in the 2000s you had a number of legal victories, most notably the rather flawed but nonetheless landmark Gender Recognition Act 2004, and this sort of performance art scene that comes out of that. And that dies away at the end of the 2000s, I think there’s a realisation from lots of people simultaneously, myself obviously a big part of it, but also lots of people like Paris Lees, Ian Lester, Transmedia Watch, numerous others that the media is doing us a lot of damage, and that something needs to be done about it, and a mixture of external pressure creating our own media institutions but also infiltrating the ones that still exist and using social media to build up platforms can all be ways of trying to tackle this problem. And I think Ed, at some point, tipping point, tries all of these things – blogging, twitter, writing for newspapers in Belfast where he lives, and finding that the physical trans activist scene, despite the kind of utopian promise of the internet actually remains very London-centric – which I think it does – perhaps London and maybe Manchester, but yeah broadly speaking, London-centric. So, in that story, Ed finds himself sort of finding an audience almost by accident, or a much bigger audience than he expects for a post about Time magazine’s landmark tipping point article of May 2014, and I think it did signal a tipping point, just not in the direction we were hoping, because I feel like lots of things got a lot worse since then. Ed sort of writes a critique of that, and again, it’s this sort of classic thing and I think it goes back to this 70s problematic of ‘things get a bit better, you who are pushing for change critique the nature of that change and want things to get better still, this is taken as you being ungrateful and contributes to quite a lot of pushback’, this is the dynamic at play in the story. I mean, yeah, it obviously has parallels with my own experiences as a writer, particularly the first sort of year or so I was writing about trans issues for The Guardian when I was living in Brighton, and even in Brighton found myself sort of not-- I could go to London for certain events, but even in Brighton I felt cut off from the centre of this activity, and it was one of the reasons I moved to London in 2011. But obviously Ed is in Belfast and is much more cut off, so I wanted to try and tap into people who felt like that and that is people I’ve met online and in real life in the first half of the 2010s which is really my peak of doing this kind of work. So, I wanted to tackle the frustrations of working within mainstream media, because I mean it’s been a problem for decades, you know I think since the 80s with a mixture of the miner’s strike and the printer’s strike in Whopping. The Conservatives took a lot of power away from the Trade Unions and gave it to the media, and this was something that the New Labour government embraced rather than pushed back against – sort of entrenched. And we’ve really seen it in this last decade, with Brexit and the 2019 election campaign, and everything that’s happened since, but the media basically run this country now, and politicians, basically their role in this system is to convince the media that they are the right people to basically do PR for the oligarchical interests that that media pushes for. And, so, working within that media is becoming increasingly difficult, and for some reason – I’m not really sure why because it’s not really a left/right issue, I mean, I have some theories but I that’s probably a little bit beyond the scope of this podcast, but you can find it elsewhere if you want. That corporate media, as well as the more predictable stuff like deciding it doesn’t want any redistribution of wealth, it’s also decided to be searingly transphobic, and maybe this taps into conversations about funding and the NHS here, public spending and taxes – might account for some of it – but the media-political complex is really clamping down on trans and non-binary rights, representation, and healthcare, and so I think the story is trying to capture how that process works as well, I mean as well as bringing a quite cathartic take on some of my own frustrations with the industry. I mean, obviously, I went into that quite a lot in Trans: A Memoir and it was really important for me to do it in that book, that book had to be a book about the media as well as my transition. But, obviously doing it through fiction means you can maybe say things that you can’t in a more straightforwardly autobiographical space, and yeah of course, everyone’s going to read that story and think ‘oh right, we’re taking this as autobiographical to some extent’, if that’s how people read it, you know I’m okay with that, and even if I wasn’t, there’d be nothing I can do about it.
Roxie:
I do want to come back to the issue with media and representation, but, just very quickly, because you’ve brought it up several times throughout this interview and also I noticed reading through the collection, you centre this idea of de-centralisation, of discourse, healthcare, spaces and events in the UK because, of course, everything is very London-based, and you mentioned this idea that its easier for everyone to get to, you mentioned living in Belfast, Brighton – the feeling that you had to move to London. So, first, do you see this changing any time soon? And, regardless, how you think this can be accomplished? Do you feel like it’s a necessity?
Juliet:
As more and more trans and non-binary people come out in different places, the nature of those places will change and communities will build up, you know not just in places where they are already like London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Manchester, maybe Liverpool, and Brighton. But yeah, places like Bristol, Southampton, or Newcastle, or Norwich, or Cardiff, or Belfast, you know, so places that centres regional capital I think, and to some extent are already obviously producing community support networks and infrastructure as well as actually having trans and non-binary people in them. So I think gradually that will change, the position of trans activism in the community at the moment is hard to read partly because of the pandemic, and partly because – one of the things that the pandemic has done has accelerated the medicalisation of politics, its more or less eliminated organise politics at hand with the exception of occasional waves of demos like the Black Lives Matter ones or the Kill the Bill ones, all the big demos at parliament square last summer that I went to. But mass politics at the moment and more kind of community organized politics. Still not really back I don't think. And so, you know, the media has held even more sway than usual, and the media has also been, yeah, like I said, staggeringly hostile to trans nonbinary people over the last few years and a lot of this of course is the fallout from the 2019 election. Which was, you know, really a kind of defeat not just for the left, but for the young and you know for anti-racism movements really and sort of, you know, Corbyn labour was more accommodating to trans people I think than it has been before or since. I mean it was still a very long way from perfect, but it was - it was definitely better. Yeah, so so it's hard to say how people are going to regroup, but you know, maybe people have found more online networks during the pandemic that can be transferred into, you know, physical spaces as and when it becomes more amenable.
Roxie:
Definitely that's the hope, of course. And in the context of the media discourse that we've been discussing, can you share your thoughts on institutions like the BBC or UCL choosing to end their affiliation with the Stonewall Diversity Champion scheme?
Juliet:
Yeah, I mean look, I've not actually paid as much attention to this as you might expect, partly 'cause I'm just so exhausted with all of it. And I know I've been doing this for more than a decade now, and, you know, as I said earlier, my inclinations are much more towards the arts and literature than actually to direct. Activism and this type of politics. I mean it's very obviously a product of this transphobic media backlash which you know whenever you heard people talk about the right to free speech and it's only ever the right to free speech for opinions that they like and it never ever considers the material consequences f that speech, and indeed what it's intended to do. Do the intention with this transphobic media backlash was always. To set the stage for, you know, attacks on our rights, attacks on any institution that protected us, and you know, Stonewall having moved from not including trans people too, including trans people under their umbrella in I think 2015 quite recently, uhm, you know, as a consequence, has been really at the center of this, like targeted backlash. I mean, I don't really know enough of the ins and outs of the diversity champion scheme to be honest, I'm sure it has its full its faults, but you know, the in this context, the withdrawal from institutions like the BBC and others is very much sort of, you know, an act by by those institutions to say look, you know we did not welcome you. It's very obviously intended to send that signal, and you know to say to other institutions you know, you can exclude trans people you know. that this is an acceptable way to behave.
Roxie:
Yeah, that is like a terrible state of affairs, we can say messes with the environment. We've had interviews with people who actually worked within these institutions as well, and it's had quite a negative impact on them.
Juliet:
As it's as it's meant to, yeah.
Roxie:
Exactly so moving away from the activist side to wrap things up, what artistic projects are you looking forward to this year or in the nearby future?
Juliet:
Uhm, well I'm bringing out a book called Frontlines this summer, which is a collection of my trans journalism from the 2010s and I wouldn't say drawing a line under my movement in that world, because there will always be things to say, and you know, but maybe making interventions more rarely. Yeah, largely, you know, largely, I'm teaching a lot more. I'm writing more screenplays and scripts. I might write a novel, I'm not sure yet. There's a very vague idea, and none of these things have an awful lot to do with transness, really, because I do feel like with the memoir with the Guardian series with Variations and with all the journalism I've done, you know, I've said the bulk of what I need to say about that. Uh, so all of these other things I'm writing are to do a lot with more direct politics. I've been quite interested in the work of Trevor Griffiths recently who does a lot of quite directly political playwriting from a sort of left perspective, but I'm still trying to find new direction as well, partly because of yeah, coming to the end of this big cycle of trans writing, and partly because there haven’t really been new directions politically since the last election largely because of the pandemic. So, it's hard to know what I'm plugged into at the moment, but yeah, moving back towards the arts, I think for the time being and sort of cultural journalism and an interest again in more experimental forms of art, literature and films, so we'll see how that manifest.
Roxie:
Oh, we are so looking forward to that potential novel, to those new projects in filmmaking. So, lots of things to look forward to. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Juliet:
Ah, thanks for having me.
Roxie:
Our 2nd guest is Ben Miller, historian, writer and doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has taught on queer history, literature, and visual cultures at the Humboldt Universität and the new Center for Research and Practice. He is also co-host of Bad Gay podcast with Huw Lemmey, which looks at complicated queer people through history to provide a more nuanced representation of queer history and what it means to be a bad gay. In addition to the podcast, Ben and Hugh are authors of the forthcoming Bad Gays: A Homosexual History which will be published by Verso later this year.
Hi Ben, thank you for being here.
Ben:
Hi thanks so much for having me, Roxana.
Roxie:
How are you?
Ben:
I'm doing OK. We had rare three days in a row of sun in wintry Berlin, and so I feel like my batteries are somehow starting to reach out.
Roxie:
That's amazing, here it’s been rain and more rain with some chilling wind for change.
Ben:
It's the gray that gets me, I just I feel like turning into a mushroom, but...
Roxie:
(laughter) There are worse things to be.
Ben:
I suppose.
Roxie:
Speaking of which, we might say you're notorious for your role on the very fabulous podcast Bad Gays. Now in its third season with a book forthcoming, which I'm sure we'll get to later. Can you tell us a bit about your origin story?
Ben:
Sure, notorious, God, you make me sound like I'm wanted in seven states. Uhm, I don't think the feds are onto me yet, but yeah, so Bad Gays. We're now in our fifth season and we started out a few years ago. It was actually the idea originally of my co-host who's a wonderful writer and friend named Huw Lemmey and it was the result of nine hours of conversation in Barcelona that was supposed to be one coffee, but then it was actually the first time we'd ever met and then we just couldn't stop talking and then decided to see if the idea was anything and - and I think at the beginning we thought we were making it for four people, and then have been enormously gratified and surprised and humbled by how many people the show seems to speak to and the concept seems to speak to and the reaction that we've gotten from people about the work that we do. Both of us. I think it had the experience of trying to do various kinds of queer work in mainstream media outlets. I've always liked working also outside of academia, and Huw is not an academic. And both of us had the experience of being told that people needed everything to be at this kind of very basic 101 level, that if you went deeper than that or if you went to a more interesting place than that immediately, people wouldn't go there with you and people wouldn't follow and we had a slightly different bet, which was that we thought that there was an audience that was ready for a more complicated and a more nuanced conversation and a conversation where while we don't use, I mean it's not a, it's not a show by and for academics it's a show addressed to a popular audience and not to any specific academic debates, we also don't feel the need to define every single thing or to really spell everything out we are speaking to an audience that has some familiar with queer lives and prehistory, and then bringing them into the stories of these really fascinating people. So that's kind of the philosophy behind the show and, and why I think it's worked, 'cause I think there are just a lot of people who are really ready to be spoken to and to engage with a queer media that treats them like grown-ups.
Roxie:
That's fantastic. Sure, that's what drew me in at the beginning. And also, this idea of speaking about evil and complicated people and complicating discourse. And on that, why and what specifically do you think is overlooked in conventional representations of queer history? And what do you see as conventional representations or like more mainstream representations?
Ben:
Well, I think it's really important to say that you know bad gays is not blazingly original, you know. The first person to ever go there, the first, the first show to ever go there thing right bad gays sits upon and forms a part of a conversation that's as old as queerness itself about what our history is and how we can think about it. But what we both noticed was that the complexity of that conversation is in the very mainstream, often overshadowed by a kind of simplistic form of representation that doesn't account for the full complexity of queer lives, and actually doesn't do a very good job of telling us how what we think of as queer came to exist. For various reasons that make a lot of sense historically, the version of Queer History where we are all Born This Way, and where there's some relatively stable, perhaps genetically oriented, you know, gay gene or lesbian gene or transgene, and you know the in the bad old days we were oppressed, and we were pushed down and pushed out and we had to hide and now we're out and now we're here and now we get married and period. That story has a lot of enormous appeal and makes made sense - I mean, I, I don't, it's not a strategy I would have ever used or agreed with, but I think you can understand how it made sense to some people as a strategy for combating medicalization for combating sodomy laws and having this sort of rights struggle. But that story is very limited, and it's also untrue. There have been a lot of different historical configurations of sexual identity and gender, most of them bear very little resemblance to what we do now, whether we're talking about queer people now or straight people now and, so what’s interesting to us is to think about how do we tell the story about how what we think of as homosexuality came to be through the story of some really interesting and complicated and evil people and the word complicated is in there for a reason. I mean this is not - neither one of us wanted to make a show where we tried to sort of take famous and well-known people and knock them off their pedestal. Uhm, you know, this is not a ‘your faves are problematic - the gay version’ of the podcast. And the goal instead was to think about what is having this conversation now contribute to our understanding of the actual version of the evolution of queer identities in queer people, which is a history of struggle, which is a history of contestation. And which is a history in which the bad, I think has to have as much of place as the good in terms of how we tell it.
Roxie:
Yeah, that makes total sense. You have had some episodes that for me have been like ‘your faves are problematic’, though I have to say.
Ben:
Well, we do some of it, but it's a - it's a mix, right? Just like for any given season, we have a limit on the number of serial killers because we don't want to turn into a true crime podcast. So, we have to - it's all about balance. Sometimes it's ‘your faves are problematic.’ Sometimes it's you've never heard of this person, and they tell us something really interesting about queer history.
Sometimes it's this person you know died in, shame someone like Roger Casement. This person died in shame, but actually we think they were pretty great. And sometimes it’s, yeah, your fave is problematic.
Roxie:
Yeah, that on that topic, in your early episodes you actually mentioned that you would focus on men because - and I quote love this quote - ‘since men are definitionally the most bad’, but then you introduced the likes of Gertrude Stein, my problematic fave and then Radcliffe Hall as well. And you mentioned like other people who might identify it differently. So, what prompted you to open the pool of bad gays?
Ben:
Yeah, it's my as my friend, the artist Sholem Crystal likes to say, ‘homosexual men are just men but worse.’ Originally when we started when we started making the show, there were two reasons why we why we made the decisions that we made at the beginning around who was included in our remit. One reason was that we thought in order to build trust with an audience, we wanted to start by staying within our own wheelhouse. We didn't want to necessarily debut or go out there making a show in which you have two sister entered white men talking about how shitty individual women are or people of color or transfer. And, and we also thought this was a joke that I made then, which I somewhat regret about men being definitionally worse. We thought the ethics of representation in anything about the lives of heroes or the lives of some sort of righteous people were very obvious. You could not possibly make a show of called the 10 greatest heroes of Queer History and have them all be white men, but we thought that because of the kinds of people we were talking about that in some way, perhaps the ethics of representation would go the other way, and the reason that we changed is because we heard from people - we heard from people who were lesbian or trans, or nonbinary, or all of the above who wrote to us and said: We actually do want to be part of these stories. We actually do want to be represented in these conversations that you're having, and we actually, and this is the - I mean the nicest part of all of it for me to hear - I mean, criticism is great, and we change and respond to criticism. But there was a compliment implied contained in that criticism, which is, we trust you to tell these stories. Right? Uhm, and that's not a trust that that either you or I take lightly and. We work on it a lot, but you know. So that was that was wonderful to hear and then that that message came through loud and clear and so we sort of - we've changed the remit of the show. The book we have decided to really focus on telling the story of the evolution of the white gay men. How the white gay man happened and why it didn't work and what we should do instead. And so, the book is whiter and maler than the show is now. And that's a decision that we made that people could agree with or disagree with. As for the future of the show, we have now achieved rough gender parity in our new seasons, but we are still a Europe focused show. We are still a show that is based in the versions of queer history with which you and I have the great greatest deal of familiarity. So, we get a lot of stuff about Britain, we get a lot of stuff about the US we get a lot of stuff about Germany. As we move forward, we're really trying to figure out how as this thing continues, we can start to get more kinds of - more different kinds of stories on the show, which is overdue, and that's going to look like a few different things. It's going to look one of the main things it's going to look like I think, is, uhm, paying folks to come on in during guest episodes who have done the research, who have done the work, who were already familiar with characters that that we might not even, we might not even know to begin to start talking about and narrate some of those stories and tell some of those stories and share some of those stories using our platform. So so more to come on that front...
Roxie:
Oh my God that is so exciting not only as a fan of the show, but also personally excited from as a queer person from Latin America, I just can't wait. So, moving on from the podcast to your more academic work, which similarly problematizes conventional associations of queer liberation with progressive politics, and draws attention to this kind of ideological primitivism present in queer representation, could you tell us a little more about your academic research? How did you become interested in that?
Ben:
Yep, I'm working on a PhD now with 12 wonderful colleagues at the at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie University of Berlin. And the subject of my work there is primitivism and the creation of the white gay identity figure from about the 1919 German Revolution until about the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s and I decided to focus on that because I kept seeing sources where this strange kind of primitivist ideation was taking place in similar ways across large gaps of space and time, and, and that seemed interesting to me, and it also seems to me that a lot of the work about this had tended to focus on one particular national or national colonial space and seeing it in US contexts in the 1970s, in some of the same ways, using some of the same sources that I was then seeing it in Weimar Berlin context of the 1920s seemed to open up a way of thinking about it and analyzing it and figuring out the relationship that it has to ideas in gay liberation that are maybe very important to a lot of us. That just seemed like an interesting project to me. I don't know that - I think the PhD project is as much about traveling the distinction between queer liberation or the association between pre liberation and progressive politics as much as it is about looking at the ways that progressive politics and incredibly retrograde and violent and haunted ways of thinking and feeling and identifying can exist together in the same kind of political and temporal space. I mean it's like this, then that's not my observation. There's a, there's that wonderful book from a couple years ago by Kaji Amin called disturbing Attachments in Genet and he points to the way that oftentimes the Genesis story from colonial figure through this kind of desire for the racialized other through to this kind of model for a certain kind of queer political solidarity is often told in exactly that way that you you start here and then there's this middle point and then you you go to the end to the good place you get through that to get to something else and and that in fact it's you you have to think about it all is happening at the same time and all - the particular version of the politics the solidarity that Genet is espousing are dependent upon this colonial subject formation, and they include this, this very haunted mode of self-identification and so trying to untie that knot, uhm, seemed interesting to me. I don't want to talk too much more about it because it's not done and I don't want to somehow come across this again in a year and a half and think Oh God, what absolute bullshit were you talking because you were in the middle of writing it.
Roxie:
That is completely understandable, but on the topic of collaboration. Also, understanding that your work is so nestled in this idea of identity and community, right? But your work has also brought you into a myriad of creative collaborations with various artists, amongst which is your recent work with A A Bronson on A Public Apology to Siksika Nation. Could you tell us what brought you to that project? And also, just how you feel about collaborative work, of which you do so much?
Ben:
I really enjoy collaborating with people and I really enjoy collaborating with people who aren't historians. I mean I really like collaborating with historians to under the like historians. I was just at a three-day program retreat with my colleagues. I adore all of my colleagues. I adore their projects. I learned so much from them. I also really like working with and for people who are potentially asking similar kinds of questions that historians ask, but answering them in very different ways, 'cause I think you can learn something from that. And from very different ways of approaching certain problems of the past. And the specific project that you're talking about, this ongoing Public Apology to Siksika Nation, maybe I'll just talk a little bit about that, so people know where what we're going on about. The Canadian media and performance artist, A.A. Bronson who now lives in Berlin and was part of the art collective General Idea from the 1960s until the death by AIDS related illness of the other two members of that three person collective in the in the late 1990s, he had discovered during a period of a family research, or he had already had always known, I think, but sort of come back to in the past several years that his great grandfather, the Reverend JMW Timbs had been sent by the Church of England after the signing of treaty seven with the indigenous peoples of what we call Canada to run the first Anglican missionary on the Siksika Nation, which is located in what we now call Alberta, about 60 miles east of Calgary. He then, working on this, discovered that there was another living queer performance artist named Adrian Stimson who lives on Siksika and whose great great grandfather was one of the chiefs at the time that A.A.’s great grandfather was sent to be the missionary. Adrian great great grandfathers name was Old Son. And there had always been this kind of family story about there being some kind of uprising and Timms had run away. And so A.A. wanted to begin to address what might have gone on there and to figure out the real story and to apologize for his family’s role and for his role in the settler colonization of Canada and what we discovered is a story that is, I think, familiar, given the number of horrifying mass graves that have been found near residential schools in Canada in the past in the past few years, which was that this school like many others, was violently abusive, in addition to being part of a dispossessive process by which, you know, at the very least, a cultural genocide was being committed. And a cultural genocide being committed on top of a on top of a genocide. And several children had died and there had been a sort of minor revolution, and that his great grandfather had been forced to flee, so the work itself that was created from that - there's a body of work that was created by Adrian Stimson, who himself is a residential school survivor and whose father was a residential school survivor and who has many friends who are residential school survivors, and it was worked a bit on that. And and on those experiences, and with those experiences. And then there was a book that that that A.A. created with a short essay by me about the history and a timeline of the events. And then also the text of his apology which he delivered at the 2019 Toronto Biennial to Adrian into a group of community leaders who were who were invited for the event, and there's ongoing plans to do more with this work, but COVID, COVID disturbed the possibility of return, at least until this point. But, for now people can people can Google it and they can look online. I think these texts are available.
The book is being shown right now in an exhibit in Edmonton, Alberta, and is also available in the US from Mitchell Innes and Nash and in Europe from Esther Schipper so.
Roxie:
That's wonderful, we'll make sure to share links as well so people can access it. Yes, and well, finally, I really want to ask you about your essay time is a queer thing which you wrote in 2018 and there you mentioned this idea of imprisoning nostalgia of contemporary queer culture, which is very interesting. You mentioned also that it is something sticky, with others are to remain ignorant of the passage of time. To return to some idealized 1970s of the imagination which results in too much, not in too much engagement with history but too little. Do you think this is still the case? Do you see a way forward and also, do you see that your work has, and your collaborative work has any impact on challenging those ideas of nostalgia, which seems to be the default mode?
Ben:
I would say not only of queer culture, but arguably all popular culture and maybe not just popular culture. Oh God, it's weird to hear things quoted back to you, but you wrote 4 years ago.
Roxie:
I'm, I'm sure.
Ben:
All I could have meant. Yeah, no sure - I'm happy to, I'm happy to speak to this a bit and and, thank you for having somehow found and read that. Yeah, I think that there is a real well, you know, Carolyn Dinshaw called it a queer desire for history, and I think that as I said there. The feeling that certain things are lost or gone or inaccessible. Uhm, or things being lost or gone or inaccessible leads people too long for them in ways that aren't necessarily bad. I mean, I don't, I think nostalgia has its uses and it's also to be against nostalgia would be to be like would be like being against air or something. I mean it's too it's too much, it's too much of a feature of of of people as we currently are or people as we have currently been made to be, but uhm, I guess what I was trying to get at in that essay is that reduce the conversation about any element of the queer past to either rejection or full embrace is not adequate and that. Especially the things that we like, and especially the things that move us, and especially these documents or images or ideas or archives by which we are moved should be the site of kind of critical love, I guess. Uhm, that we owe it to them, and we owe it to ourselves to think. And somewhat mercilessly about the things that we're moved by and and that and that that will actually potentially make us closer to them and make us better to better able to, to communicate and to honor what is, uhm, or still active or vibrant or living about them. I guess that's what I think I meant.
Roxie:
That is very moving, especially to hear in these times. On the topic of temporality and moving forward in regard to queer history and the community, how do you see UCL and a broader academic decision for many institutions to move away from Stonewall and the champions diversity program.
Ben:
Well, as someone who believes quite a lot in academic freedom and in free speech, I think it is really disheartening and vile to see these worthy ideas and concepts disfigured and deployed by bigots to push an agenda that is absolutely diametrically opposed to any of the many contributions of feminism and queer and gay and lesbian history to our contemporary moment. It, for some reason – and I know there are people who think about this and write about this and study this – has effloresced in the UK recently to a great deal. This horrifying anti trans backlash, and I think it’s important to remember that the people who are funding this backlash and the people who are engineering this backlash, no matter how much they may pretend to the contrary and no matter how many people they may be able to recruit to say otherwise, you may only look at where the money is coming from and where it is going, and the direction that the ideas are flowing from and what the character of the ideas is at the top of the flow to realize that the goal is nothing less than the complete rollback of the entire feminist and queer feminist project, up to and including the rollback of abortion rights, the rollback of the work that was done – the incomplete work that was done for sexual liberation in the 70s and 80s, up to and including the rollback of various legal protections that gay men and lesbians have managed to acquire over the tears – at what cost. And its just important to frame decisions like UCL in that way, and to think about those decisions, not as stands for academic freedom or as taking part in some kind of vibrant debate about the relationship between trans people and gay and lesbian people and feminisms, or as taking some kind of gold stand as some trans activist overreach, but instead as capitulating to or collaborating with growing far right backlash that instead has every single person whom might be vulnerable to it in its crosshairs. So that’s what I think about that. And I think its just profoundly disappointing that an institution like UCL would decide to collaborate with that under the kind of pressure it’s been put under.
Roxie:
Thank you so much for your time and joining us, and it’s been a great time.
Ben:
Thank you so much for having me on.