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00:35:43.660and we're back yeah and that's the sort of thing like when I'm reading about queer history to wrap
00:35:49.180my head around because you know I grew up in the 20th century and it's the 21st century and it's
00:35:53.280kind of like where it's like you're gay or you're straight or you're trans or you're cis and it's
00:35:57.240kind of these are the categories and so to try to apply that especially like we're talking about
00:36:01.200the Tudor era but if you look at like the ancient Greeks or like the ancient Romans it's like
00:36:04.780that's like it's like you have an affair like you're sleeping with a man you're sleeping with
00:36:08.960a woman and it's not like that makes you bisexual that makes you gay it's like that's just kind of
00:36:12.900what's up like so the tutors are a bit more in that direction where it's not this is not your
00:36:17.520identity this is just what you happen to be doing today yeah 100 um and um and so yeah like i say
00:36:24.760they have this word ganymede um which basically means a bottom um in early modern english or
00:36:31.180french um but that is just about what you're doing it doesn't mean that like you're a specific
00:36:37.920type of person yeah as for marlowe's own sexuality like yeah i think all of those speak to what marlowe
00:36:45.080was thinking but we also have a little piece of suspect information um from a guy called richard
00:36:51.380baines who was like a fellow spy who shared a room with marlowe and he accuses marlowe of saying
00:36:59.020that um jesus and saint john were what's the phrase and jesus used saint john as the sinners
00:37:06.480of sodom um and that all who love not boys and tobacco are fools now whether he said these
00:37:13.760things like who can say but i do think that given all of the stuff we read in his plays and
00:37:21.160it's poetry like not implausible yeah it's it's such a it's a to be kind of to prove something
00:37:29.820by the absence of something else is what a lot of are you sorry your video is loading but you
00:37:36.460can still hear me okay but yeah but to just be like well we all we have are the plays and i think
00:37:41.500the plays are quite significant and show what he was thinking where we're like well we don't know
00:37:46.420what was he it's like well why can't we just assume that he was like it just it's weird to not
00:37:52.200for me yeah no i think you're totally right because we assume otherwise that everyone is
00:37:59.520straight until proven otherwise even if a lot of the time all the evidence we have is their written
00:38:04.320text as well and if we think about it like what is evidence that someone had sex in the past like
00:38:11.280pre-sex tapes what are we gonna do um and yeah in a way like the era in which we could be certain
00:38:21.120that someone had had sex with someone else has kind of been a gaunt like we're in the age of
00:38:25.340um ai and deepfakes now so we no longer have that certainty like that period where we could be
00:38:32.340certain that we had evidence of one person having sex with another person was a period that we're
00:38:37.560now out of i think well it's kind of like the only way the only like in this era the only way you can
00:38:43.460prove that anyone had sex full stop is like if a woman like if a person becomes pregnant it's like
00:38:47.520well that person clearly had sex like otherwise but with who we don't know like there's yeah so
00:38:52.920but also just like sexuality is not about like you can be gay and be a virgin like it's such a
00:38:58.660to me it just makes sense to presume marlo is probably a queer man like it doesn't why would
00:39:06.040you not assume that yeah and i think honestly i think a lot of the people in the past who fought
00:39:11.080really hard against that assumption have been people who thought that that was kind of an insult
00:39:15.640like we shouldn't assume he's gay because that would say something bad about him it always comes
00:39:20.120from a homophobic place right yeah well and what about what about shakespeare because there's stuff
00:39:27.120about he wrote various sonnets and it's like who did he write the sonnets about and you know there's
00:39:31.480all these arguments but some of them do seem to be aimed romantically with men right oh yeah i mean
00:39:37.040so shakespeare yeah he publishes um his book of 154 sonnets in 1609 um 126 of those 154 are thought
00:39:47.780to be to a male accuracy um it's not a small number um so like and many of the most famous
00:39:55.220ones are to a man so like shall i compare thee to a summer's day it's to a man um the clearest one
00:40:01.620i think i mean there's lots that are like sweet boy lovely boy it's so beautiful um but i think
00:40:07.240the clearest and queerest one is sonic 20 which is the one that starts um a woman's face with
00:40:13.100nature's own hand painted hast thou the master mistress of my passion um which is incredibly
00:40:18.480trans as well as incredibly gay um it's got this sort of complicated metaphor where it's like1.00
00:40:23.360nature thought you were so hot that she gave you a penis and then he says that penis is to my1.00
00:40:31.820purpose nothing which could mean like it's kind of annoying that you've got a penis because like0.99
00:40:39.820it means i can't marry you but nothing also means a vulva in early modern english so it could also0.99
00:40:47.700mean like i will treat your penis as if it were a vulva which is very trans um0.99
00:40:53.780all these words all these words have these meanings that are0.99
00:40:59.120the to die and nothing okay it's a word just means something completely different
00:41:04.500noted yeah yeah um and i mean the more you think about nothing as um slang for vulva the more0.99
00:41:13.040misogynistic it is like thing is penis nothing is vulva that's how you're defined by your0.99
00:41:17.320so a penis um but um but yeah it like there's a lot of there's a lot of sly I guess to write0.99
00:41:27.080about sex because then you always have plausible deniability that maybe you were writing about sex0.99
00:41:32.520true you know and this just reminds me so much of the Marie Maitland poems as well where it's
00:41:38.600just like oh it's just poems it's just words like you could just be like oh I was just drawing from
00:41:42.360metaphor from something else like that wasn't my own like yeah the plausible deniability
00:41:48.180yeah no absolutely um so yeah shakespeare i mean similarly to marlowe the texts are what we have
00:41:59.120as evidence um but i think something else we know about shakespeare is the amount of time he spent
00:42:04.660on purpose living away from his wife um and sure he had the really good excuse of like my work is
00:42:12.740in london you live in the midlands um i need to be in london where the theaters are um but
00:42:19.240he was moving in circles where all of these um younger men were passing as women on the stage
00:42:29.360and where there's been i was talking a little bit about this earlier but just to say a little bit
00:42:34.200more the other historian who's done really interesting work on like the gender swapping
00:42:38.400on um at the early modern stage is simone chess um and she's found that like people who played
00:42:45.640women's roles on the stage they could sort of never go back to being normative straight men
00:42:50.780on the stage afterwards like they were always seen as kind of queer coded even when they'd like
00:42:55.200past puberty um they were given like the queer coded adult male roles so what that means is
00:43:01.100basically shakespeare was moving in a very queer world in london and he was spending a lot of time0.94
00:43:05.320away from this what like today if you think about the the world of theater like it's such a queer0.75
00:43:13.040world like that's just who is drawn to that lifestyle is it tends to be a lot of people
00:43:18.440artistic people which is a lot of queer people so it's just that's where he chose to spend his
00:43:23.780time i think is also but also those theaters are in the region where the brothels and things are
00:43:31.000happening it's just kind of like this is it's kind of the cool part of london yeah no definitely um
00:43:38.240and so it's a world also where because you're in the red light district effectively like
00:43:44.040people's threshold for sexual morality changes like i guess the overton window for sexual
00:43:50.340behavior like shifts a bit when you're in that environment and that would make sense too if
00:43:55.080those are the people going to the plays you want to have jokes that they'll find funny if these
00:43:59.560the people living in this neighborhood and this is kind of what they're experiencing
00:44:03.300yeah no absolutely so yeah i think given that context about shakespeare's life and given the
00:44:11.580stuff that he wrote um i don't think that you write 126 sonnets to someone you call a lovely boy
00:44:18.220and remain completely straight i don't think that's something that you do
00:44:22.080something else i'm curious to get your your take on is if we're talking about like the
00:44:29.980the tudor era as a whole like we get into the reign of elizabeth the first who famously doesn't
00:44:35.100marry and she has a very famous speech where she's like i might look like a woman but i have
00:44:39.820the heart of a man like just in terms of gender challenge and like what what is your body and
00:44:46.360who are you on the inside like what do you think about that her presentation i mean i think this
00:44:51.580is really interesting i am i have been cancelled in the daily telegraph for saying this before
00:44:55.320um but i don't think the daily telegraph listened to a podcast so fingers crossed it'll be all right
00:45:02.440um but yeah i mean i think um i think that this is trans history and when i say that i don't mean
00:45:10.000that elizabeth the first like identified as a man but i do mean that um power and authority in this
00:45:17.280period or male coded and so when elizabeth says i have the body of a weakened people woman but i
00:45:21.960have the heart and stomach of a king um which you may or may not have said in those exact words
00:45:25.800because it's a speech that's published like decades or after she said it but um still when
00:45:31.220she says something like that and when she refers to herself as a prince rather than a queen
00:45:35.000um she is saying um i am taking on these male coded attributes um i can be male despite my body
00:45:44.960again like the gender is separable from the body and is kind of something that you can put on and
00:45:50.360off um as it becomes politically like expedient well and i think that's why we've talked in this
00:45:56.880podcast before and you talk about in your book before we were trans just kind of like when we're
00:46:00.800talking trans history it's it's an expansive thing and it's just kind of people who are well how would
00:46:06.220you describe it just people who are living um not within strictly prescribed gender presentation
00:46:12.260roles like because there's like on the one hand you have like a woman who might put on trousers
00:46:18.260to escape and then run away but she's just in disguise and there's nothing there's something0.98
00:46:24.720transgressive about that in that era and then you've got somebody who lives as another gender
00:46:28.760like it's it's a whole it's a whole thing like it's not just trans is not just one thing can
00:46:33.840you talk about that a bit yeah i mean i wrote before you're trans exactly to kind of tackle
00:46:38.800these cases where like a lot of the time you know that woman who puts on trousers we have no idea
00:46:43.600what's going through her head right or their head or his head or whatever um and i think that it's
00:46:48.580helpful to define trans history as any history that shows us that we can separate gender from
00:46:54.100the body because that shows us trans ways of thinking um but doesn't require us to label
00:46:59.540individuals who i wouldn't want to from an ethical perspective label unless i knew um how they were
00:47:06.760thinking of themselves so i think that for me that distinction between trans history which shows us
00:47:11.840that we've always been able to think in trans ways and conceive of transness and trans people
00:47:18.080which are people who use the word trans about themselves i think that's a really important
00:47:21.880distinction yeah and so when we're talking about it's i think jen manion in her book talks about
00:47:27.440like transing three where it's just kind of like here's a word that we can just use as an overarching
00:47:32.220thing for just this whole situation we're not like you said like we're not diagnosing somebody
00:47:38.600as like queer or as trans in the past but we're just saying like this is the umbrella and all
00:47:43.340kinds of experiences fit within this but yeah like I think because like queer history and trans
00:47:50.400history is still to me something I'm learning more about all the time and so people listening
00:47:56.540i think it's good just to introduce them to it's a whole umbrella of experiences and we're looking
00:48:02.520at eras and times where people didn't define themselves as we do now so you just kind of
00:48:06.680i try to be just like as open as possible to like calling something like elizabeth's speech like
00:48:11.760yeah that's queer history that's trans history not to say that she's a trans person but like
00:48:15.320she's challenging what is gender and that's kind of that's trans right yeah i think so absolutely
00:48:21.880And I think also what is really cool about this kind of way of looking at history is that you can hold multiple possibilities alongside each other.
00:48:31.320So, you know, saying that we think that this speech by Elizabeth I is trans history does not also preclude thinking about Elizabeth I simultaneously in lots and lots of different ways.
00:48:44.240And the same with all these people that we're talking about in terms of sexuality.
00:48:47.180we can understand their sexuality in lots of different ways simultaneously and the important
00:48:53.100thing is raising the queer possibility especially because living in a heteronormative society
00:48:57.740if we don't name that possibility it's not going to like naturally occur to people
00:49:01.720yeah and it's right like what i said and then what you said about like you know the the woman
00:49:06.140and the his a woman putting on trousers in history where it's like i'm thinking especially there's
00:49:12.140some movies some historical movies from like the 1940s and 50s where it's just like this actress
00:49:16.820looks gorgeous in trousers let's have her let's it so it's like on the one hand so that character
00:49:22.280is portrayed as like ultra feminine very beautiful so much makeup hair done but it's like oh but it's
00:49:26.400a way that you can have an actress in trousers in a film so like that sort of thing but versus
00:49:32.120like why would women do this in history and this is also like if we can talk about this a bit like
00:49:36.780this was an era where there's this sumptuary laws and stuff it's like it's illegal to dress0.63
00:49:42.420fancier than how wealthy you are and i think it's also wearing trousers that's why people do this
00:49:51.020shakespeare plays it's like well if you're wearing trousers and people just assume you're a man
00:49:53.800because only men wear trousers like the way you dress was so prescriptive then and i think that's
00:49:58.700interesting yeah absolutely um and there are you know to the extent that as you say there are laws
00:50:05.580about um who can wear what and there are particularly like hats with a kind of nexus of
00:50:11.700identity um in lots of ways they are the sign of class they are the sign of gender um so when you
00:50:17.740get people wearing um clothes of the quote-unquote wrong gender then um and i've read about this in
00:50:23.700other places like to wear those clothes is to transform yourself is to change your sex um in a
00:50:29.960really literal sense because sex in this period is this huge baggy term that means not only your
00:50:35.380body but also the way who you are and how you live in society and how you dress and the friends you
00:50:41.260haven't um it's it's closer to what we see as gender today but i think even wider than that
00:50:46.860actually well and this is where i find it like i find it really interesting to look back for
00:50:53.400instance mary queen of scots when she was in scotland um being the queen she and her friends
00:50:59.840would like disguise themselves as men with like fake mustaches sometimes and go walking down the
00:51:04.240street and be like oh we're young men don't worry about it where it's like that was really
00:51:08.840transgressive for the time yeah um and the kind of thing that you could probably only get away with
00:51:14.340if you were in an incredible position of power yeah it's it's interesting but because then like
00:51:20.980this leads to and we don't need to get into this too much but uh my cream scott's son james who
00:51:28.940well first of all like you've done like there's this plaque um can you just explain sort of the
00:51:34.040background of that and kind of his queer identity as it's seen yeah so i've been really um privileged
00:51:40.140to be able to work on this recently um there's a museum in london um the queen's house which was
00:51:47.640um an of denmark's palace um that james built for her to say sorry for shouting at her when she shot
00:51:55.200his dog um which is a an interesting microcosm of an interesting relationship um but in that
00:52:03.880house they have a lot of portraits and two of the portraits they have a one of james um so this is
00:52:07.800james the sixth of scotland who becomes since the first of england um and one of the man he called
00:52:13.560his wife george billiers um the duke of buckingham um and they the curator at the queen's house
00:52:20.680recently moved those portraits to face each other to be opposite each other and to celebrate that
00:52:24.760they wanted a new label that was explicitly queer and so i did some work with them um
00:52:29.880to come up with a label that was um explicitly queer but only said stuff that we could definitely
00:52:38.860footnote because as we've talked about like there is no such thing as evidence for um
00:52:43.780sex in the past like anna of denmark had kids that we know that means she had sex with someone
00:52:49.060we do not know that that someone was james there is as much evidence that james had sex with anna0.64
00:52:53.640Denmark as there is that he had sex with these men um so um so we wanted to only say things that
00:53:00.680we could but no um but plenty thankfully there were plenty of those because James wrote quite
00:53:04.920a lot of letters and so we could say he had two people he called wife that one was out of Denmark
00:53:10.080the other was George Villiers we could say they shared a bed we could say they attracted attention
00:53:14.360with their kisses and embraces and love and so we were able to you know essentially say
00:53:19.660these two men were in a relationship but without actually saying it um and those letters they are
00:53:27.620i think very explicit um james kind of he often signs his letters your dear dad um which i think
00:53:33.700we should read his daddy um and he says that he feels like a widow when he's apart from billiards
00:53:42.760um there's one letter where he's like um meet me at two o'clock the next day but for god's sake let
00:53:50.040no creature see this letter um and there's um there's another letter where they talk about
00:53:56.660sharing a bed there's another one where they talk about surfeiting like overflowing by means of a
00:54:02.720noble hound quote-unquote i think that that is about a hound job um so that yeah there is actually
00:54:12.120lots and lots of stuff in the letters which enables you to be pretty explicit while still
00:54:16.580um being able to get it past the higher ups of the museum by footnoting absolutely everything
00:54:20.620i've been doing well i'm just in the midst of researching um my next book is going to be about
00:54:26.620anna of denmark so i've been reading about james a bunch oh it's really it's so interesting but
00:54:31.380i'm just like oh i have to read about james like if i hate henry the eighth i'm just like oh god
00:54:36.460damn it james but he's at least got some like various traumas where i'm like i have some
00:54:41.480sympathy for him like he survived so many assassination attempts before the age of 100.96
00:54:46.440like he went through a lot but i did find it i find it funny just in the context of how
00:54:51.040his queer identity is being more and more sort of recognized that you see the letters about him as a
00:54:56.160young teenage boy and people are like oh he's so christian he's so he's never lusting after women
00:55:02.340he never gets crushes on women like what a good christian young man this is where it's like
00:55:09.240i think i know why he's not lusting after women and i don't think it's because he's chased
00:55:15.940so like at what point at what point people realize like oh like the rumors do pivot
00:55:22.040at first like oh he's such a godly young man to being like why isn't he married like
00:55:26.860why is he so close to this man and then this man and then this man
00:55:32.380yeah all he does is just spend time with his school friend
00:55:36.460hmm yeah there's there's a lot of weirdness there but um in the context of james i've done there's
00:55:44.600an episode from a few weeks ago with the women from witches of scotland so we were talking about
00:55:49.660the scottish witch hunts and stuff and that's where i encountered the name christian caddell
00:55:54.300which i mentioned to you had you ever come across i think you said you hadn't come across them
00:55:58.720no um this is a cool story um and when i was like i was looking for academic sources um on this
00:56:05.620story and found nothing like the the information is out there but not in no one seems to have
00:56:13.280analyzed this from an academic perspective as far as i could tell in my search in advance of
00:56:18.740this podcast so it's pretty cool there's some work to be done i think so this is i mean you
00:56:24.720know the story um christine caddell is a witch pricker um so a witch finder by means of poking
00:56:32.440with a pin who goes on when as a witch pricker under the name of john dixon and this is a very
00:56:40.760well-paid job um you get six fillings a day you get six pounds per witch and also handy thing
00:56:47.700about being a witch pricker is it exempts you from potential witchcraft accusations so lots0.99
00:56:52.760and lots of motivations to live as a man for um this purpose so you can't do it as a woman like
00:56:57.720you have to be a man to be witch pricker so lots of motivations that are not gender related but i
00:57:03.480think still trans history because again this is showing us that this person um can understand
00:57:07.400their gender as separate from their body um for this temporary period um and i also think it's
00:57:14.020interesting that we don't know what happened to them like they were you know they had a good a
00:57:17.820good like year or two of being a successful male witch pricker and then they accused the wrong guy
00:57:22.300um and the tables turned they got accused of witchcraft himself and they weren't executed
00:57:56.960i like finding just kind of people who do strange and interesting things especially
00:58:00.420kind of like strange schemey things where it's like so in terms of trans history like why not
00:58:05.540you know trans or gender in order to like be a witch pricker like just to pursue
00:58:11.240villainy like okay of all the jobs you could do but like it's super well paid i guess
00:58:17.500and and you're right it does protect you from being accused yourself until
00:58:21.200until the tables turn but yeah just it's sort of i don't yeah i don't know you know what what
00:58:27.180would make someone make that decision is fascinating to me there's so many stories
00:58:30.840i come across i'm like make a movie of that somebody that's interesting i would love someone
00:58:36.340to make a movie of it but i would what i wouldn't want is for them to give christian or john like
00:58:41.760some deep trauma in their past that means they like just have to begin you know some people are
00:58:46.120just bad people you know some people are just scheming and they're like i could make a quick0.89
00:58:50.160but by fucking over other women but by just like being exactly exactly and this is like0.79
00:58:56.120listeners if you scroll back like a few years ago i did a series a three-part series on0.98
00:59:01.520catalina de arauzo aka antonio de arauzo who just like transgender in order to
00:59:06.940become a conquistador and just like murder so many people in south america yeah again um if0.82
00:59:15.360there's money in colonialism i'm gonna get into colonialism and i feel like yeah you know very
00:59:19.740don't let your gender get in the way of like why should the cis men get to do all the conquistadori
00:59:25.180i'm gonna go too um so it's and that's the thing like i i don't know i'm hoping i'm hoping like in
00:59:32.460my in my podcast like when i'm including trans history i want to have these like fun you know
00:59:37.040quote-unquote fun but just like these kind of conniving like we did the episode about
00:59:41.840elagabalist just like weirdos just like people who are like the public universal friend like
00:59:47.100just strange things like because those are the stories i tell about cis people also and about
00:59:52.600straight people it's just like i like talking about this this isn't a podcast for like oh
00:59:56.640heroes of the past like there's other podcasts for that so i don't want to say like
01:00:01.080the only queer history that there is is these like strange villains um i think that would be0.54
01:00:08.040a dangerous precedent to set but i'll just say on this podcast everyone is a strange villain
01:00:12.160and i want to include queer people too yeah queer people get to be strange villains as well like i
01:00:17.680do think please liberation doesn't involve everyone having to be worthy and inspirational0.70
01:00:23.020liberation um involves allowing people to be boring allowing people to be ridiculous and0.95
01:00:28.380allowing people to be schemey bastards yeah exactly exactly and there's so many there's so0.98
01:00:35.420many people just like especially non-royals who were queer and we just don't know about them0.90
01:00:40.180because they were never arrested there was never a scandal like they just and this is again like
01:00:44.100jen mannion's book female husbands gets into this where it's just like how many people are just
01:00:47.820living these lives and we don't know because it was never a problem like yeah because actually
01:00:53.260success for a queer person and for much of history has been flying under the radar and not having0.56
01:00:58.780anyone realize you are yeah well and it's like when you're looking at any sort of non-royal person
01:01:05.320i did an episode with marina kaufman about black tutors and it's like you only hear about them when
01:01:09.680it's like here's a court case somebody was testifying so it's like but that's not everybody
01:01:14.160it's just those are the only times that you come across these names of anybody who's not rich or
01:01:19.720noble yeah that's so true um and it means that we've got to remember that the evidence we have
01:01:27.500is really really scanty for all we know like half the witch prickers were assigned to female in bed
01:01:32.480Yeah, I know. Maybe they all were. Who knows? But we only know Christian is the one who was caught. So, so Kit, I want to make sure everybody knows you've got, you're taking part in a podcast series. I don't know when that's starting. This episode is coming out in like September-ish. So if you want to let people know where they can follow you and keep up with all of your activities.0.99
01:01:56.000oh thank you so much yeah i think possibly the first episode um of the new podcast that i'm
01:02:02.000taking part in should be out by the time this airs um if you follow me on instagram at kam writer
01:02:07.760that's the best place to find out everything um or else off mailing list um which you can
01:02:11.940subscribe to on my website um and look out for the podcast time traveling queers which is a0.89
01:02:17.060brilliant silly romp through queer history presented by a time traveling drag king cab0.89
01:02:22.920driver you can listen to it you can also watch it look out for the giant fluffy dice look out for0.97
01:02:28.320the poppers air freshener it's really fun it's really silly it's really doctor who coded um and
01:02:34.840i think you'll have a great time if you enjoy the scheminess of the people on burger history i think
01:02:39.580you'll enjoy the ridiculous session of people on time traveling quiz as well exactly i'm i'm always
01:02:44.600in favor of more queer history and i'm always in favor of more history that's just having fun and
01:02:48.340not just being like, here's a hero and what they did.1.00