Morbid Mondays - Episode 34 - Be Gay Do Crimes

Happy pride month everyone! Today Katy and I share a brief history of the where and when anti-gay laws started and why. We also go through some of the notable changes in history. Fair warning. We are painting with a very broad brush. It turns out covering most of human history in two hours is pretty tough.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey.

SPEAKER_06 0:03

We've done the pre-show twice now.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

I know. We've just talked and I just deleted everything because I started talking some mad shit. So focus. All that good stuff. Here's what we're yes, greetings. Hello. Welcome to or welcome back to Morbid Mondays, your unhinged source. We are unhinged. Very for what the fuck moments throughout history. We will take turns where we will take turns. I have a stutter. Uh giving you a weekly tour of all the gross, gory, and downright odd moments in history. We're your hosts. I'm Brian.

SPEAKER_05 0:38

I'm Katie.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Let's get into it. So the reason why we're avoiding things so hard is because it's my turn. It's also June, and I just got back uh from preparing quite a bit for Pride. Because I was with a booth of friends uh down where we live, uh doing uh cool stuff at a pride place around mutual aid.

SPEAKER_06 0:59

I missed my entire crochet deadline for this one that cardigan was supposed to be ready for pride, and it absolutely was not.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Oh man, is that what you've been like going on? Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:09

Frantically crocheting on.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

I see. Yeah, you could it was so damn hot. It was absolutely not. Lot of fun. Lot of fun though. I mean, it always, it's always a fucking blast.

SPEAKER_06 1:20

Oh yeah. I love the sense of community. Yeah, I love that. Like there are you, you, you're it's listen, listen, for those that have never been to a Pride anything, go to a Pride event and you will never meet an actual stranger there. Like you could turn to a rando that you've just walked up on and ask them a question and they will answer you like you, they are your best friend.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yeah. And and seriously, like as a as a pretty normy looking person, right? Like I I have, I definitely have. If you met me out in the world, I I I get this all the time where people just start talking like right-leaning talking points to me because of kind of how I look, right? White guy, glasses, fading hairline. So like I wear a lot of flannel.

SPEAKER_06 2:03

So like you know, whereas I look like a poison frog, hot pink hair, nose ring.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

I'm gonna I'm gonna dye my uh if I did if if this wouldn't if I had a better hairline, I would dye it. Uh like it just looks kind of silly when you have uh, but at some point I'm getting piercings or something. I gotta I gotta do something to keep that shit from happening. It's pissing me off. But I will say I say all that to say this. Like, even with that going on whole day talking to tons of people, only like one or two people look nervous to talk to me.

SPEAKER_06 2:34

Really?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, like which is great because I talked to like hundreds of people.

SPEAKER_06 2:38

I'm I'm surprised you found anybody that was nervous there.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

They were they were a young trans individual.

SPEAKER_06 2:42

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

And and I you know what I mean? Yeah. When I get excited, I have a lot of presence. So like I get it. You know, confirm. Yeah, so I'm like, and I'm so loud.

SPEAKER_06 2:52

You have uh the charisma.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:55

He does. He does.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

I'm I'm yeah, I'm I'm I'm definitely an in-person person. Like I'm the least photogenic human being. I have to, I'm an in-person person. As opposed to a non-person in person.

SPEAKER_06 3:09

I I think we're hedging back into AI territory there in like in person.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

No. Uh so here's our here's what I'm wanted to talk about today and why we we took so much time not talking about the story. As we said in the pre-show, uh, we're gonna discuss for pride and for uh for the month of of June, which is a great month in gay history, and the Stonewall riots and or or uh goes by many, many names. The Stonewall uprising is what a lot of people prefer these days because it was part of a chain of uprisings uh that very much needed to happen. And around that event of people busting up places because they were uh serving the gay community or queer community really at large, um, I figured it would be a good time to talk about why and where and how that happened. How being uh any kind of same-sex relationship or trans or anything that nature kind of started being made illegal.

SPEAKER_06 4:12

Which is ridiculous because it's not like it's new or anything.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Literally not.

SPEAKER_06 4:17

Like queer and and homosexuality, whatever name you want to call it, has existed since the beginning of time. And it's not even like restricted to humans.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

No, pretty common in animals.

SPEAKER_06 4:30

We see it in animals.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

In fact, uh yeah, to an extreme extent, right? Many, many reptilian species can change their sex type to have children.

SPEAKER_06 4:43

Like Is it is it cuttlefish that will typically be in a male male, like uh like uh I I fucking hate to say this, but like an alpha male, kind of an omega male and a female group.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

I don't know, but I I see I see where you're going with that though, and that actually kind of touches into our conversation about early male sexuality in same-sex spaces, because the thing is like gay, lesbian, body, those those are very new terms.

SPEAKER_06 5:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

And and new ones in like in the grand, vast history of of human civilization, a couple of hundred years.

SPEAKER_06 5:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

I mean, like some of these less than a hundred. And I say that because like sexual identity wasn't really a thing, like as a social construct, isn't it is an identity.

SPEAKER_06 5:29

Yeah, and there were there was a hot second there where it really didn't fucking matter.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

No, it was basically like, and that person prefers males.

SPEAKER_06 5:36

Yeah, like we had several French kings that were like that.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah, and it it was it was also kind of assumed that you also participated in like child rearing. So you would have men or women who preferred same-sex relationships that were also married and had kids, you know, like those two things would happen at the same time.

SPEAKER_06 5:54

I don't understand. I okay, so since I was about to say I don't fucking understand, please, Brian, educate me. So let me just give you that segue real quick.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Let's start with early, early, early humanity. I mean, obviously, we don't have a lot of records from Neolithic humans, uh, but I figured it'd be a good time to talk about gender roles because gender roles are kind of where a lot of this begins. So there's a big myth, huge myth, that we all that not we all, but many, many, many people believe in to still to this day. And that is around hunters.

SPEAKER_06 6:29

Are we doing the hunter and gathering? Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Hunter-gatherer society of women would be the gatherers and menly manly men would be hunters. There is no man, no man who is not even like Eddie Hall, who is strong enough to bring down a fucking mastodon. That's not a thing. No, it takes huge groups of people to do things like this, or even to just be safe from predators. So, like, the real answer to like what would happen if a hundred human beings fought a gorilla, uh, the gorilla would run because there's a hundred human beings running at it.

SPEAKER_06 7:05

And its heart would eventually pop because humans are built to be endurance hunters.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yeah, if we're just in a cage fight, that's a different story. If we encounter a gorilla in the wild, uh, yes, that's that's what happens. We all throw rocks and sticks and like and there's a hundred of us. And that's how we used to kill Mastodon is like backing them into a fucking pit.

SPEAKER_06 7:26

You know, like backing them off a cliff.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 7:28

So there's there's a there's there's several that's the word I'm looking for here.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

Oh, like bone pits. Yeah, like we're yeah, that that you would assume are like elephant graveyards, except for the bones are all covered in the phone.

SPEAKER_06 7:40

Fossil records. Why was I struggling with that? Well, because it I've had coffee today. What's wrong with me?

SPEAKER_00 7:46

It's like a weird thing though, right? Because it's not really it's it's one of those things that's just like, and we found these bones in a mud pit because they're not really like fossils. Like fossils, like you would think of fossils, but yeah, yeah. And so, so here's the thing, right? We found, we've we know of and categorized and examined tons of graves uh that have involved a bone set, a person, and then a bunch of hunter tools that we assumed were were male. And then after now that we've studied genetics, then yeah, well, and now we have like genetics and we have um we can search for certain proteins that that are made as a byproduct of of of uh of of your genetics, and we can tell that these are female. Yes. And then that prompted scientists to go look at a bunch of other evidence.

SPEAKER_06 8:33

Like, isn't there there there I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. There's there's a tomb specifically in, I want to say Scotland, that they thought for the longest time was like a warrior chief. Like big scary dude, like there's like 15 horses and all of the weapons and crazy armor and stuff, all buried in one of those great big like burial mounds. Yeah, and then like like just in the last like five years, they ran they were doing like genetic testing and discovered it was a woman.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

There is uh some stuff around some Viking burials, and is that what it is? Maybe Saxon type burials that are that are usually like mounds. Um and then there's carn stuff, right? And so we didn't know there's there's there is a very famous Viking burial where a person's buried in a stone ship and there's armor and there's weapons and all that kind of stuff. It was kind of assumed, and then find out that it was like probably a queen. And so there's a little bit of a we don't know if this person was actually a warrior or these are the trappings of a very wealthy person. Either way, they had them. Um, you know, like they had the weapons and all that kind of stuff. It was part of their identity as is being considered a warrior. But yeah, we find this all throughout history that uh especially once you start having weapons, brute strength is not really the name of the game once you get into like bows.

SPEAKER_06 9:55

Oh yeah. Right as an archer myself, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah, like that that does matter and when you're talking about things like long bows and and clout archery and stuff like that, right? But but the thing is, is that when we think about gender roles in ancient, ancient, like Paleolithic, Neolithic groupings of early humans and hominids before that, um the thing is it you're talking about groups of people that are largely just trying to survive. We do have evidence of like Cro-Magnon people maybe killing a Neanderthal, which is the Iceman thing.

SPEAKER_06 10:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

And mostly you're looking at very, very large semi-egalitarian remember things like marriage don't exist. Everybody's kind of like you know what I mean? Like we find uh marriages, we would understand it. Yeah. You might have pairings of people in deeply connected emotional relationships, but there's no evidence to show that people had like one partner.

SPEAKER_06 10:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

That that's not really a thing. Um, not in the like caveman days, right? You don't really start getting that until you get into like agriculture. And now we're talking about people own things, vast tracts of land. Yeah, where you have houses or farm fields, who owns that? And even in the early agriculture, you've got societies that are like built around grain in which the monetary system is just grain. Like the whole community still works, all the grain goes into a big silo. What is like money is your a token that says this is worth this much of grain. Yeah. So that like you have to work together in low-tech societies, or you will die. Like, that's just how it works.

SPEAKER_06 11:37

That's how that works. There's not that's what's one of the things that I never understood about the I'm a lone wolf.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Okay, so starve to death in the woods.

SPEAKER_06 11:47

You know, like well, that's unfortunate. You're gonna die. No, that means I'm tough. No, no, that's not that's not what that means.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Yeah, and and and contrary to popular uh online belief, alpha males largely lead and serve their own community, not like that is a fucking chimpanzee thing. Alpha wolves, quote unquote, are like first in, last out. Yeah, they're they they are responsible for everything and to some degree. I mean, like it's really it's kind of a tough gig. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 12:20

Cass.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Yeah. So I'm none of that smoke. I say all this to like show the the very beginnings of some of this stuff. Of like, we don't know structures, yeah. Social structures and sexuality not really being a defined thing. Um, but here is where we start getting society and and cities and laws. What's the what's the good way to say this? A segregation of behavior, right? Like where people say, like, this is the right way to behave, or that's not okay, or or this is illegal, or whatever. Most of it has to do with the cultural or religious beliefs. Uh, and I say cultural or religious because in looking up, like, hey, when did this happen? When did when did uh being in a same-sex relationship start being not allowed? The earliest thing that I could find on record, and there there may be more because they're references, we don't have all the evidence. But in Assyria, an ancient Assyria, way, way, way, way back in the day.

SPEAKER_06 13:24

Oh shit.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, goes that far back. Yeah, super far back. But this is gonna require quite a bit of expl explanation because Exposition dump.

SPEAKER_06 13:36

Let's go!

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Yeah, I stumbled onto this because somebody, a stupid AI thing, told me because they it you can't avoid it anymore. It just shoves it in your face. It was like uh started talking about Leviticus, right? As being a thing that was like referenced at the time. Um, that that the Assyrians brought in Leviticus laws when this group of people came over or something like that. And like I read it and it sounded like it might have some guts to it, and so I traced the source, which is just Wikipedia, and then I kept looking and I was like, that's not what it said at all. Like, in fact, Assyrian civilization vastly predates uh you know, like the city of Jerusalem. So like I was just like, okay, whatever. So I started looking, right? Here's what we've got. We've got this thing called like tablet A, and it's got a bunch of uh laws in it, early laws, right? So I'm gonna read a couple of these laws. Assyria existed in the second to first millennia BCE. The period that we're talking about here is what's called middle Assyria. So it's not when they're first starting up, and it's not when they're this is before they are the Assyrian Empire. This is just Assyria, right? A grouping of city-states and not city-states, a grouping of places in northern Iraq. Some Syria, which is where that word comes from, actually, and Turkey. So this is like, I think it's it's like the 7th or 8th century, some somewhere around that, BCE. This is one of uh this is from Tablet A. This is something that we have uh during the reign of King Tigloth Hylesser the first. That's what I think. I think that's how you say that. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_06 15:18

Listen, I stumbled all over Russian names last week. It's your turn.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah. Supper. In the middle of Assyrian period. Oh, sorry, sorry, we have an exact date. 1450 through 1050. That's not a single king, that's a lot of kings.

SPEAKER_06 15:31

That's a bunch of kings.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Uh BCE. This is the time period.

SPEAKER_06 15:34

We're going into that weird bubble biblical period where people are living for a thousand years for some reason.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

And we'll read a couple of laws. Please, right? If a man to his equal, whether in private or publicly during a quarrel, everyone has intercourse with your wife. And further, I will myself bring a sworn charge against her, yet does not bring the charge and does not prove it. That man shall receive forty strokes with the rod. He shall perform the king's service for one month, he shall be branded, and he shall pay one talent of ten. That sounds like a bunch of weird Shakespearean words, and that's because a lot of this was translated by a British guy a long time ago. Here's what this means.

SPEAKER_06 16:18

Thank you. Because I'm like translating it in my head.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

And so if a man says to his equal, here's where this is why I brought up all the social stuff. Hey, bro. Even weirder than that, right? Because we're talking about ancient times, things like slaves exist.

SPEAKER_06 16:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

So by his equal, he means of social standing.

SPEAKER_06 16:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

This is not a child, this is not a captive, this is not a woman, it's another man of social standing. Of equal social standing. Equal social standing. Yeah, right. So if he's an aristocrat, the other person's an aristocrat.

SPEAKER_06 16:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Uh if he says during a fight in the streets or uh to another person, everyone has intercourse with your wife. You know, in other words, you are alleging that you're a cuck. That's exactly it. It's not that you're alleging adultery, it's alleging that this person's social standing is being diminished.

SPEAKER_06 17:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Right? That's a big thing in the ancient world.

SPEAKER_06 17:11

I spend a lot of time on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Yes. It's the it's the social standing thing, right? That's gonna come back and like Greece and Rome and everywhere else.

SPEAKER_06 17:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

The idea of it's not it's not that you're gay, it's that you're a bottom.

SPEAKER_06 17:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Right? Like, or that you're the person putting this into play. So let's let's keep going with that because this is about all that stuff about he shall receive 40 strokes with a watt, whippings with a cane.

SPEAKER_06 17:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Right? He shall perform the king's service. I have no idea what that means. I assume that means he's a debt bonded person for a while.

SPEAKER_06 17:48

Yeah, it it's what that's what it's striking me as. Like you're working like Punic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Like like uh penal colony duty, basically. Like you you are now like a prisoner that has to do stuff, semi-slavery.

SPEAKER_06 17:58

It's um um uh community service.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Yeah. You shall be branded, of course, of course it means what it means, right? Uh, and you shall pay a talent. A talent is a a a amount of something that's a monetary standard.

SPEAKER_06 18:11

It was usually done by weight.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

That's correct, yeah. And also where talon comes from, which is like a talon of silver. It's uh kind of a call to that. So, uh, and 10. This is in the bronze, this is pre-bronze age or during the start of the bronze age. So 10 is one of the things that makes bronze very valuable. Yes. So uh we keep going. We keep going, and this is in section 19. That was section 18, this is section 19 of the law. Directly below it, directly below it. Oh, also that whole thing was about a false accusation. All those things would happen if it's not true. Now, if it's true, there's a whole different other thing. And now we're in section 19.

SPEAKER_04 18:50

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

If a man secretly slandered his equal, saying everyone has him, or during a public quarrel said to him, everyone has you, and further, I will myself bring a sworn charge against you. In other words, so if you call somebody a hoe, yeah, if you're like everyone's everyone's got that booty, that's basically what he's saying.

SPEAKER_06 19:09

You are the town bicycle, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Uh, to another man specifically, of his equal status, and I'm gonna bring charges against you, right? So that should tell us, if we're looking at this, that part of this act is illegal. Otherwise, what are you bringing charges against?

SPEAKER_06 19:25

Yeah. Well, it's slander, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:28

So, like there's slander, but also if it's true, well, then you're accusing something that that's probably illegal in some sense. Otherwise, why would you know, like, why would it be true or not true? Right? Uh, and all the same stroke, except for now 50 strokes.

SPEAKER_06 19:43

So 10 more hits 10 more for being a hoe.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. Here's what in this history people are actually getting in trouble for. If a man spreads rumors in secret about his companion, the person he's sleeping with, saying everyone commits sodomy with him. This is a different translation of the same passage. Uh, they did not use the word sodomy. That that story was not around, and that's not what that story is about. I know. So uh this is an English translation. They're trying to use a common word that makes sense to most of us. Everyone commits sodomy with you, and further, I can prove the charges against you, yet he is unable to prove those chal charges, and then he gets all those punishments, right? So here's what's actually being alleged in here. Or we we think what we think is going on here is that either you're alleging that you are willingly stepping down in social situations, which is not necessarily illegal in their code, but is like heavily socially looked down upon. In other words, you might be removed from your social status. Yeah. But if you are the person who is like topping in this scenario, if you're the person who is especially a lot of scholars have looked at these laws and said that a lot of them seem to pertain. Before we go any further, trigger warnings.

SPEAKER_06 21:04

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Obviously, we're gonna be talking about really bad about that lately. Yeah. Jeez, I completely forgot.

SPEAKER_06 21:10

I missed them last week, you missed them this week.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

So obviously we're gonna be talking about sexual relations, um uh however taboo you may think those are, you know.

SPEAKER_06 21:20

There there may be some implication of of essay.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Yes, in fact, we're we're heading into that fairly quickly. In fact, it's gonna have like I'm not gonna go into any category detail with that, but it will be talked about uh in social context to the past.

SPEAKER_06 21:34

Yeah, coming at it from a historical point of view, that was uh male on mail essay was was one of the the biggest fuck you's in history.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

It is a b it's a big fuck you. In fact, the the the punishments for it are wild.

SPEAKER_06 21:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

So uh in fact, and this is probably the darkest it's gonna get is like in the next 10 minutes. Um obviously we're gonna be talking about homophobia because that's kind of what today's thing is all about. Um And which is so stupid.

SPEAKER_06 22:01

Uh why are you scared about what other people are doing in the bedroom?

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah. All kinds of phobias, really, transphobia, all that kind of stuff. Um, and then a lot of the social context of the past that might be a little upsetting to a lot of people. So that that's a uh that's a thing, right? We're talking our goal, our our thing today is the wins, the whys, the hows uh of like where we are today as far as discrimination uh against LGBTQ, not so much um a little bit of the eye, you know what I mean? There's a couple of cultures that deal with that. Uh but but for the most part, it we're going to be talking about like queer relationships, and with that, uh let's uh keep going with this. So one of the things that gets alleged in this criminal code is and the punishment for it, is that if you were to um if you were to initiate sexual contact with a with a another man as a man, specifically in this way, which we can say is like buggery, right? Like specifically if you are talking about busting out of Victorian terms. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 23:12

I'm so proud of you.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

So we're gonna because that's gonna come back up, right? So the the the word for sodomy in most of these cases will be buggery, um, because the thing that's happening here is that if you top uh another person in that way, because we break from this for a second, no one talks about like kissing or being in emotional relationships or anything like that. They're mostly talking about sexual domination because at this point they don't really have a concept of like a gay relationship or a gay identity. They're talking explicitly about top and bottom, and for them that means male, female, right? Like they look at the female position in in sexuality as being subservient or lesser. So if there's two men, whoever's on the bottom is essentially lowering themselves from their social status, or the person on top is forcing the lowering of that social status. And that is dangerous to the status quo. Because imagine if you could make a king not a king.

SPEAKER_06 24:19

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Or a lord no longer a lord, you are challenging the social hierarchy, and mostly that is patriarchal. And that's why we talked about all that women hunter stuff earlier, because we are entering into the age of patriarchy. So, like, uh people, most of the people who'd be listening to this already know what the fuck that is.

SPEAKER_06 24:40

And for the record, fuck the patriarchy. Yeah, it's it doesn't hurting all of the dudes too.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

Yeah. In fact, when you when you look at cultures that have a little more patriarchal or even flex, you get a lot more freedom and like art and shit like like if you look at like Heian period Japan, where there's a lot more there's a lot more same-sex relationships, quite frankly. Uh, and there's there's a lot more women in in in things of like art and power, and sometimes they're warriors, and it's like the most artistic period in Japanese history. Like half of the plays, half of the writing, the you know, Monokatari, uh that's hard for me to say right now. Thank you. Yeah. Um but the the yeah, Heike Monokatari, I think. There you go. Yeah, um, is like all these cool classic works, all this kind of stuff comes from that time period. When you get into stuff like this where like the guy is the patterfamilius and he can do whatever he wants all the time, things get really fucking weird really fast. Because women are not mentioned this at all. Oh that that's a common theme. Like when you look at like uh queer history laws, it's women are rarely ever mentioned because nobody cares if two girls are kissing.

SPEAKER_06 25:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

They care if they care heavily about like social status and whatever men are doing, and they care a lot if another man is touching your wife.

SPEAKER_06 26:08

The repression is loud.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Yeah, yeah. It's because they're they're looking at women and they're looking at anyone who is on bottom is like property. Right? Like that's kind of how that goes. Even when we look at like early legal codes, things like Leviticus in the Old Testament, women are more or less considered property. And so treating another man like that puts them in the role of property, which from their social hierarchy, a free man is like now a slave, right? You're treating him like a slave. The the the punishment for this, for being the like uh especially if it's forced, is castration.

SPEAKER_06 26:50

Yep. So you are now no longer a man.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

And here's the logic behind this. It's a little bit like Hannah Rabbi's like eye for an eye, right?

SPEAKER_06 26:59

So if you if you cause some act weird that Hammurabi has come up like twice this week. It's only happened twice, but it's weird that it's happened twice now.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah. So you know the whole thing of like, you know, if you cause an accent, take someone's eye, your eye gets taken. So the idea behind this kind of law, and this is before that, the idea is the crime, the punishment has to fit the crime in some way. You are reducing a man in status, you get reduced in status. Forever. Yeah, here's the because that's the thing, the other guy is reduced forever. Yeah. If it gets brought to public that they are a willing participant as a bottom, that's what's going on now. Everybody will look at them as lesser. So castration's the thing. Some interpretations mention that like um we will let him be known, right? Means that like the guy's gonna get essayed because they perceive what he did to the other person as a violation as a violation. Whether or not it was or not, seems to be what a lot of scholars think about this. There's a lot of debate over whether these laws explicitly deal with rape or not. So, like, I say, like, we I don't know, right? This is above my pay grade. This is something for for people with like doctorates in ancient history to debate with.

SPEAKER_06 28:27

We are armchair historians, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:29

I read a lot that I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 28:32

I wind up on weird places on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Yeah, I'm I'm not translating cuneiform for anyone, you know what I mean? Like that's that's so so that's what's going on here. Fast forward, we're gonna fast forward a lot.

SPEAKER_06 28:44

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

Uh, a couple hundred years actually. So, uh, into early the rise of early Abrahamic religions. Now, Semitic cultures used to be incredibly wide and varied. They had multiple gods over a very large amount of land stretching all the way from like Saudi Arabia to what is now like Palestine and a little further north.

SPEAKER_06 29:05

And canonically, God had a wife.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yeah, that's right. Uh Asherah, in fact. Uh so like you've got El and the Elohim, and there's like the religious landscape is very unique, and so you have more than one god, but you do have hierarchy in the way that like Zeus is top dog, and there's other gods, and there's other big gods, and sometimes they fight, but Zeus is still on top. Um, it's very similar to that, and and uh except for something really crazy is about to happen, which is that what we now would call like Judea or Judah, that whole area of of what is the ancient Jewish culture is gonna get invaded at some point, and a lot of these cities that have various gods in a Semitic culture are going to be sacked and destroyed by Babylonians or whoever, right?

SPEAKER_06 29:55

Babylon was a good time.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yeah, it seems like it seems like there's a lot going on there. Yeah, Nebuchadnezzar's building shit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 30:06

There was a lot going on in Babylon.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

A lot, yeah. Huge, I mean, one I mean, hanging gardens, yeah, all the time. So it built on the back of big cultures and became a great culture.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:16

And uh also that's what happens to the Assyrians. The Assyrians kind of bully everyone around them into like tribute, and then eventually a culture called the Medis and the um and the Babylonians just kick the shit out of them and become the dominant culture. Um, so uh Babylon, ancient Babylon, kind of moves in, and a couple of other people move in over time, the Semitic culture is slowly kind of pushed down into uh what it more or less is today. And what I mean by that is like the real the religion gets canonized because the power gets situated in a smaller and smaller group of cities, Jerusalem becomes a big deal, uh, but even before that, we start codifying a legal code in Abrahamic religion, which is Leviticus. Uh the Levites are the people of the law and all that stuff. And a lot of people know the line in Leviticus about you should not lie with uh another man as you lie with a woman, paraphrasing there.

SPEAKER_06 31:18

That is not the translation.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Yeah, and it it means something specific, right? In their age, that does not mean uh thou shalt not love another dude. What it means is you should not sexually dominate them in the way that you would sexually dominate a woman. It's very, very specific, and that means a very specific act, which is the act of penetration. Uh and that's what the Assyrians were talking about. They weren't talking about people writing poetry together and shit. They were talking about something very, very specific.

SPEAKER_06 31:51

And they were roommate.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Yeah, yeah. Right. Which is why women aren't mentioned very much, because there's no, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_06 31:57

It's it's it's until you get to the entire island of Lesbos.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Yeah, yeah. Well, even then, like it it wasn't like, you know, you you didn't have like Victorian strap-ons in ancient Assyria. There wasn't any, you know.

SPEAKER_06 32:08

Actually, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Well, there was that.

SPEAKER_06 32:11

Um, actually.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Yeah, there were definitely dildos back then.

SPEAKER_06 32:15

But we found them.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

It's tons in Egypt. And we'll get we'll get to Egypt, right? Because we're kind of skipping over Egypt a little bit, but we're gonna go back to Egypt.

SPEAKER_06 32:24

I'm sorry, I feel like I'm like, No, no, this is a squirrel.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

This is a squirrel thought kind of conversation because like when we get to the laws of Leviticus, it does away from me. Really, you know, we're in a legal system that does treat women like property, that does talk about children as property, and we have a sexual dominance hierarchy. Moving backwards. We to uh and to show you how weird this is. My God, this episode's gonna be all over the place. People are gonna, what the fuck is happening? There's usually a narrative.

SPEAKER_06 32:59

We usually do timelines. We said, fuck it, we're doing it live.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

That's right. So I wrote this for the pride thing.

SPEAKER_06 33:04

Oh, I remember you doing your research on this because I recognized the sheet.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah. So uh so here's a here's a cool- I was present for some of this.

SPEAKER_06 33:12

Yay!

SPEAKER_00 33:12

There's here's a cool history fact about ancient Egypt to show how different societies that do not have necessarily a sexual hierarchy in this nature, how different they can be. Now, Egypt does have an amount of sexual hierarchy, uh uh and and and gender hierarchy, but that gets mixed up over their very long history. You have you have women that rule as kings, that happens multiple times. So the first recorded relationship, there were definitely relationships before this.

SPEAKER_06 33:42

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

But the first recorded relationship between two men is thought to be found all the way back in ancient Egypt. Kunumhatep and Nyun. Wow, this is hard to sell so hard to say. There's a lot of K's, a lot of H's.

SPEAKER_03 33:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Uh Nyan Knum, I think is how you say that, were royal manicurists, and that more or less means not they were fixing their nails, but that they were doing all of the things, doing all the things cosmetics, hair, yeah, washing, yeah, uh, what clothes they were gonna wear. More like a personal stylist slash everything. You know, like there was a lot going on there, right? These were high status individuals. Sorry, who royal royal manicharists whose tomb was found in the famous Sakara Valley. The tomb depicts two men in a manner usually reserved for husband and wife. Images inside the tomb depict two men with their noses touching, and their names are joined together above their tomb's entrance entrance. Now, what that name joining is is that they put their names very, very close together and they they literally can join the spellings. What the rest of the entrance says is to is is bonded in life, bonded in death. So it's like together forever, right? A lot so relationships can be complicated. The two men were both married, two women, and had children with them. Uh, what did this mean for them? We may never know. Uh, but but men in those days were expected to raise children, and the concept of gay marriage is somewhat new, right? To our current culture, anyways. One thing is for sure, the art in their tomb shares that their love for one another to the entire world. So here's the thing about these guys that I found super interesting. The nose-touching thing was the most intimate that you could depict men in ancient tomb art, right? And and they had murals and hieroglyphs. There were laws regulating what you could put on those. This is super intimate. And then on top of that, we have a ton of other information. We know who was the higher in the social status, we know who was uh and and therefore who was the bottom in the relationship, because that was dictated by social status. We know that at the time, because of songs, bits of songs and poems that we found in ancient Egypt, that sometimes uh homosexual relationships were ridiculed. But that they were also fairly common.

SPEAKER_06 36:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Like nobody like people made fun of it sometimes, but not it wasn't like crazy. In certain time periods, there might have been laws against it, some time period maybe not. Um there was a lot going on there, but we can tell by the art that and what the inscriptions and all that kind of set, all that stuff in the tomb, that one of them was the direct uh manicurist to the pharaoh himself. Oh wow, and the other one was to the court. So these were very high status individuals uh to have a tomb and these guys were like uber privileged. Yeah, they were they were wealthy. And and here's another cool thing. So I told you they were both married, right? On the inside, there was one depiction where one of the guys is not with the other one and the wife is depicted. Someone went in and destroyed that. The wife is removed from the cape from the art.

SPEAKER_06 37:00

Damn.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah, like like chiseled off. And we can only assume that someone who was their friend or maybe one of their relatives or something came in and just destroyed it. Wow. Fucking real. Yeah. So it's like the official stance, by the way, of the Egyptian government today of their archaeologists say it. And they were roommates. And I was like, really, guys? Come on.

SPEAKER_06 37:26

And they were roommates.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

I want to say it's uh uh I want to say it's Chicago, but I I watched a I there was somebody uh there was a professor that posted a bunch of slides that broke down bit by bit why that's not the case. Oh yay! And I was like, man, and it was like old school website, so like somebody got petty with this. They're bullshit. And they put the whole thing up, and it's so great. But like looking at it, it's very clear that they were in fact in a relationship that did deal with sexual dynamics, that did deal with gender dynamics. So we know that in the time in the general region, this kind of thing did exist, and that so here's here's my here's my thing about this. I have to wonder, because the old testament is kind of filled with a little bit of like, and the Egyptians were bad. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_06 38:19

Like Let my people go, yeah, you know also you suck.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Yeah, so I imagine how much like I imagine some of this might have had to do like with the laws of Leviticus, and in older, like in Old Testament stuff, when you read through uh when you read through some of the stories, a lot of them are kind of political in nature. Like uh Abraham and Isaac has a lot to do with expectations and prophecy and all that kind of stuff, but like not sacrificing your kid on the mountain and to a big flame, a lot of that has to do historically with we are Jews, not Greeks. Yeah, right? Like we're not Minoans, we're not any of that stuff, there's no human sacrifice, none of that kind of shit, right? It's a lot of this is like these stories are political in nature. So I do have to wonder how much of the laws of Leviticus are in direct answer to what might have been going on in the rest of the world at the time around just like how free relationships could be.

SPEAKER_06 39:21

Not to jump ahead or anything, but uh like it it shit like this became so taboo that like there's an entire lesbian flower uh language for the Victorians.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

Very George Georgia O'Keefe of them.

SPEAKER_06 39:37

Yeah. And like uh it there's also some that falls into like the fan language too.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_06 39:44

Um, which is like really niche shit that you may not have come across.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Uh definitely not. I will gladly hand the mic for that.

SPEAKER_06 39:52

It's it's very, it's very cool. It's it's a very like sly way to get your feelings across by like, you know, sending the girl that you like violets, which would imply that I have romantic feelings for you.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Oh, sure. Now, yeah, that part I did not know that that was also connected to like queer culture.

SPEAKER_06 40:13

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_06 40:15

It's like there were there that I remember reading, and I did I did a lot of this research a long, long, long, long, long time ago. Like I'm talking years ago. And there were instances where like a house would be avoided because they grew X number of like flowers, or not the X variety of flowers, like openly in the garden.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 40:38

And you know, the the two like best friend old spinsters.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

You didn't want to be scandalized, right, by visiting the house of the Boston marriage.

SPEAKER_06 40:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

I see.

SPEAKER_06 40:48

And uh and like the fan language thing came came came about, specifically in like female culture in general, just because, you know, once again, we're dealing with the patriarchy that has been alive and well throughout most of history.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

So before we go too far into that, yeah, that way we can I'm I when we get to that point in history that we we can stop and be like, connect, you know what I mean? So um, so here's the thing, right? Like, flash forward, we're we're past uh old Judea and all that kind of stuff. This is before the the rise of Christianity, uh, but we're gonna keep going into ancient Greece, uh Minoan civilization.

SPEAKER_06 41:29

So we're still dealing in polytheistic civilizations, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

And well, in this point, uh, specifically, like I guess in Judea, it's now we're we're moving into mono.

SPEAKER_06 41:38

Uh but in that that's a pretty good indicator of timelines as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Yeah, and then Persians are are most are are a monotheistic culture as well. They believe in huramazda, uh, which is not a car. Uh it is the uh chief deity of that joke gets made every time I say a hura Mazda, and then they go, like the car, and I'm like, no.

SPEAKER_06 41:58

I want you to know that I'm just nerdy enough that I didn't catch it until about five seconds later.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Yeah. So that's the uh that is the uh the chief deity of Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster is a person, not the main god, and is the Persian religion for the most part, right? Although Persia had a lot of that's more in the future, in the height of Greek civilization. The area had tons of different belief systems.

SPEAKER_06 42:24

This isn't one of those like brief monotheistic blips in history. No, this is a long standing, like uh the the Autan in in Egypt. You're right, like a singular generation.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Because that's that like one guy that's like, I'm the yeah, we're gonna go monotheistic, I'm the one guy.

SPEAKER_06 42:40

We're gonna worship the sun and that's it.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Yeah. No, no. Uh in fact, Zoroastrian is a current religion.

SPEAKER_06 42:46

Really?

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Yes. That's cool. Plenty of people who follow the teachings of Zoroaster. And uh I didn't know that. No, they very cool. In fact, uh Freddie Mercury's family, I believe, was Zoroastrian. Wow, yeah. So it yeah, they're very neat, actually. Zoroastrianism is a is a pretty neat religion and it's still still around. They do a really cool thing or did for a long time. I don't think they do this anymore. But one of the last things, the way that their burial works, is that you they would build these pip pillars and they would put uh the buried person on top of the pillars and expose them to birds.

SPEAKER_06 43:21

Oh, oh, oh, they still do this in in in um oh there's a place in India that does this.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Yeah, like the the towers, right? Yeah, and the idea is the last thing you do in life is like one last good deed.

SPEAKER_06 43:32

Yeah, you feed yourself back into the in into the ecosystem. Yeah. And they've built these great like stone vats.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 43:40

Like they're huge. I've seen them in space.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

The old ones were like ziggurats, right? People would put the bodies on the top. Uh they have a sacred flame thing going on.

SPEAKER_06 43:49

It's very cool. But I just learned about this, like literally yesterday.

unknown 43:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 43:53

By the way. That's why this is so fresh in my mind.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

So, um, and I may be completely wrong about the The timelines of when Zoroastrianism becomes the like the main religion of that area. But that's gonna persist like all like until the rise of Islam, it's gonna be a major player in the region. So uh Ancient Greece. Gay, very gay, but in a very, very different way.

SPEAKER_06 44:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:20

Uh, first off, many, especially Athenians, don't seem to like women very much. Uh, that's that's gonna be also a theme in history. Weird again, highly patriarchal culture. Yeah. So um, and I'm making a lot of vagities here because Greek city-states all had different cultures. But we're gonna have a over the course of ancient Greece, we're gonna have a few pit stops. So, first we'll talk about Athens. Athens and or really let's just talk about ancient, ancient Greece, right? We're talking like Homer's Day.

SPEAKER_06 44:53

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Right? So in in in the kind of Hellenistic pre-period before you get into Sparta and Thebes and Mycenaeans and all that kind of stuff, right? So they did have what was called pederasty, and that is uh that older men would have relationships with uh younger men between 12 and 18, where they would go through a kind of ritualistic uh abduction. They would go out into the woods and they would like teach them how to be a a man, right? Uh while also having a little bit of a sexual nature to it, and the boy was supposed to like not like it, or at least feign to. There there was a there was a thing about this. This also happens in Japan at at one point in the samurai period, but there's a lot of things about this. First, the father of the boy had to agree to this relationship, so he had to like know the person right off the beginning. So it's kind of implied that this is kind of like a mentor-mentee relationship where you're kind of like also learning about the birds and the bees and such all at the same time. It's very strange, and uh, and and not to like not ancient cultures or anything like that, but obviously it it's not super healthy, yeah. And uh, and it doesn't seem to be like the kid has any say in this, it just you know like so with these relationships, um, this is gonna this period in time is is not really gonna last super long because in as like ancient society moves on, ancient Greece moves on, you do have the rise of like you know, philosophy and all that other kind of stuff. Like, some people don't like this at all that that are gonna buck up against this. I'm making a lot of general really vague generalities because we we're dealing with a lot of time.

SPEAKER_06 46:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Uh, but in this time period, for instance, at the end of this time period, this is where Alexander the Great exists, right? After Sparta, and they have their egogi stuff, and Athens has their stuff. In Thebes, gay men live very openly in pairs that are warriors called bands, and they have the band of Thebes. Um, Alexander the Great will call him, uh, will call them his first great challenge.

SPEAKER_06 47:15

Alexander the Great, who kept a gay lover.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

That's right. It it was uh they quoted this in the movie. They said uh after losing a wrestling match to Hephaistian, who's gonna be one of his generals, he was never bested, and he was never bested again except for by Hephaestian's thighs.

SPEAKER_06 47:34

Listen, who they got to pay Hephaistian, I don't blame him.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

It was Jared Leto.

SPEAKER_06 47:40

Wait, what? Yeah, you serious?

SPEAKER_00 47:42

It was Colin Farrell and Jared Leto.

SPEAKER_06 47:44

No, stop, hang on.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

So, so here's the thing, right? I love that fucking movie. Um and uh yeah, like Rosario Dawson played the his wife, Angelina Joe Lee played his mother.

SPEAKER_06 47:57

Olympia.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

Yeah, Brad Pitt played uh uh King Philip the Second.

SPEAKER_06 48:03

Jonathan Reese Myers was in this movie as Cassander? How do I not remember this?

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Sorry, not Brad Pitt, it was uh Val Kilmer.

SPEAKER_06 48:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 48:12

So, anyways, right? So we have though, we have again, we've got this thing where there's a hierarchy. Because with Hephaistian, Alexander the Great is the son of the king.

SPEAKER_06 48:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Right? Like, and he becomes the king. So, but it's not like ancient Assyria where people are saying, like, yeah, he's lesser in status or whatever, but it's not like nobody's being punished for this. Right? And and we're in the Greek period, there's not a punishment for it.

SPEAKER_06 48:41

It's like nobody cares.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Right. It it's now it's like enormous. Shocking. In fact, the word gymnasium, like the with that we get the word gymnasium, the gymnosculture of Greece, the the original word for that literally meant train naked. Because guys would go in and they would work out and they'd learn how to wrestle on buck naked. Very gay. Very gay. So, like, yeah, Greco-Roman wrestling. If you've ever watched Greco Roman wrestling and thought you are correct.

SPEAKER_06 49:09

Yeah, like I'm sorry, my mind is still blown that that was Jared Leto and I never clocked that.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

Yeah. It's it's great, right?

SPEAKER_06 49:16

I just looked him up and he does not look like Jared Leto.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

No, yeah. Well, this is one who's real young, too.

SPEAKER_06 49:22

I uh I anyway. So like moving on.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

But they would they would do all this right, they they would uh live in like different things, like in Sparta, men lived together, they didn't live with their wives, they lived together while they were in service. And the the philosophical idea around this was that they needed a culture of like manly manliness so that when they went to war they would be like prepared.

SPEAKER_06 49:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Right? Because they they really took combat very, very seriously in that city state. Uh the band of thieves was excellent in combat. No one said they weren't. I mean, like everybody who ever fought them said that they were very difficult to deal with.

SPEAKER_06 49:59

I would imagine.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

And uh because they trained in pairs. Today we call the system Battle Buddy.

SPEAKER_06 50:05

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 50:06

Right? Like they were on to something, they they understood the assignment of training, and they always had someone that was keeping them connected to this, right? And again, most of these men probably had wives, right? This is a different time. Uh moving into the Roman period, they also like really closet gay. A lot of open gay. Again, not a lot of not a lot of punishments for being gay, although laws about it. Yeah. We we get in and this is the both the case, right? They had a lot of stuff. The Romans are gonna criticize the shit out of the Greeks, mostly about the pederasty thing. Yeah, rightfully so. Boy lovers, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 50:46

Yeah, they're gonna call them all kinds of shit. Common insult you will find in anything that is that is Romans talking about the Greeks, which is why like I find the movie 300 so funny because he's like, You Athenian boy lovers.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

I was like, bro, you're doing the same thing. Same thing. Yeah, it was like you're in Sparta. That's the other thing, right? We talk about Sparta and we talk like our modern understanding of a lot of gay culture, especially from straight culture, is that like it's somehow soft or not as tough. Bro, no one invaded Thebes for a long time. You know what I mean? Like that that that those two things are not hand in hand. So moving into the Roman culture, the Romans, especially through most of their history, bar none, do not do pederasty. Yeah, there are direct laws about freemen. Now they don't say anything about people enslaved. And in backtracking through most of history, when we're dealing with enslaved people, a lot of these like prohibitions on behavior don't do not exist.

SPEAKER_06 51:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

For for men or or women.

SPEAKER_06 51:51

Well, because that that is not a person, that is property.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Exactly. Yeah. And and Rome has a very weird, they have multiple kinds of slavery. This is also true of ancient Jerusalem. Yes. They have chattel slavery, because chattel slavery does exist in the ancient world. Um, a lot of people try to pretend like that doesn't exist in the Old Testament. There are two kinds of slaves in the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_06 52:11

Let's be honest.

SPEAKER_00 52:12

Yeah, there's two cherry pick it. Chattel and debt. This is a this is a you know, most cultures at this time to the Romans, the Romans didn't give a shit about skin color at all. What they cared about is if you were Roman. If you were not Roman, you were a bar a barbarian. You know what I mean? Like only that's how they thought about the world, right? And that's how the Greeks thought about the world. They were the civilized ones, everybody else was mountain men doing stupid shit.

SPEAKER_06 52:39

Funny how that's how that's how everyone perceives themselves. If you are not us, you are below us.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

That's right. Yeah, they they called the Persians superstitious and all kinds of stuff. In the Roman period, um, when we're talking about free people, kids, off the table. We don't do that shit. Yeah. Only willing adults. Um, there are a lot of rules about uh willingness in free people. Uh there's a lot of laws about that that are very punishable. Um, but moving into famous people, this is this is another like because it's weird, right? Because we're we're kind of defining this by a central act, which is not what it is to be gay.

SPEAKER_03 53:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:18

There are people who do not have sex at all and are and are gay. So like that exists, right? We have same sex, ace relationships now.

SPEAKER_06 53:26

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 53:27

Uh, but we're defining it how they would have seen it, which is that like male, male, female, female is fine. Penetration is the thing that they're focused on. So when we go to ancient Rome, um, we have people like Emperor Hadrian, who made statues of his lover, went deeply, deeply depressed when he died. Yep. I mean, like, Roman history is filled full of male-male couples. Roman history is filled full of in Greek history. We didn't even touch on Sappho.

SPEAKER_06 54:01

Oh, true.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

You know what I mean? Like Sappho, who may have been writing in kind of a third person kind of way, but Sappho taught a school that was basically like a finishing school for women about to be married.

SPEAKER_06 54:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 54:13

She wrote Aphrodite, like in one of her poems, she's talking to Aphrodite to help her woo another woman. Like, very direct. You know what I mean? Like, and they were roommates. Like, you still see that with no, they fucking. Yeah, like she was very clearly down bad for this woman.

SPEAKER_06 54:30

And like honestly, sis, get it.

SPEAKER_00 54:32

You know what I mean? Like, you're just like, all right, okay. And then the people still do this thing where they're like, well, that's not really what she meant.

SPEAKER_06 54:39

I was like, I'm pretty sure that's no, that's that listen, listen, like the like those particular psalms in the Bible, they fucking yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

You have the legs of a gazelle. It's like, yeah, he's he's saying she got long, nice legs. That's what he's saying. Uh so so Gasp. Yeah. So here's where I'm gonna get a little tricky. This is where a lot of people will say Chris the rise of Christianity sees homosexual relationships be very unpopular in Rome. It actually starts before then.

SPEAKER_04 55:11

Really?

SPEAKER_00 55:12

Christianity has this kind of slow move into Rome. By the time Constantine the Great accepts Christianity, it is already a very large amount. There's a very large amount of Romans who are Christian, right? It moves in, it just moves in, right? But the f the the some of the the ways of seeing things have already kind of arrived well before that point. Because Rome isn't one religion, it's a ton of religions. A lot of them have to do with the same gods, but there's tons of cults, there's all kinds of stuff. And a lot of religions deal with like sexual purity. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 55:53

I mean, you could, but why would you want to?

SPEAKER_00 55:55

Yeah, we we are in the days where syphilis does not exist.

SPEAKER_06 55:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:59

And they have a plant that keeps you from having a baby.

SPEAKER_06 56:01

And I think it's extinct now.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

Yeah. There was this thing where somebody said they found it, and apparently that's not true, or or it doesn't do the same thing. Apidophilus, is that what it was called?

SPEAKER_06 56:13

Well, Acidophilus is uh is a pre-probiotic. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 56:18

That's uh that's the bacteria and yogurt.

SPEAKER_00 56:21

Yeah. Activia, is that what it's called? By the time that Christianity moves in, and Christianity is an Abrahamic religion. We touched on Leviticus a little while ago. That's gonna come back to teeth.

SPEAKER_06 56:33

Fresh off the print, too.

SPEAKER_00 56:35

Yeah, so they are going to take things a lot more seriously than I think the what is now the Jewish like diaspora, because by the end of the Roman, you know, at some point the Romans are gonna sack Jerusalem and kind of scatter uh the Jewish people, and their religious philosophy is gonna change heavily. Over the given years, like all the way into the Renaissance period, they're gonna reform, they're gonna go through esoteric phases, they're gonna have other books, they're gonna have a series of massive arguments that are legally based called the Talmud.

SPEAKER_06 57:10

So, like I'm passingly familiar with it.

SPEAKER_00 57:13

Judaism has to reconcile with itself. Something has gone terribly wrong. We had a holy city given to us by God, we had all these rules, and then we got our ass handed to us, right? Like uh by the like the world's biggest war machine. And you gotta you gotta come to terms with that. What does that even mean for your religion, all that kind of stuff? That's gonna change a lot of people's views on a lot of things, not necessarily to same-sex relationships, but in how hard line they are in a lot of communities.

SPEAKER_06 57:46

Why they gotta clap back against people getting down in the bedroom?

SPEAKER_00 57:50

For what? It's always a thing.

SPEAKER_06 57:51

For what?

SPEAKER_00 57:53

So moving into Rome, they don't really have that, but Christianity comes in with kind of a vague understanding of Jewish, because most of these people are not Jewish, right? Most of these people are new converts, or they've been converts to like the original Christianity, and they have all kinds of different ideas about sexuality and what the book says, and and they also don't have a Bible, they have a ton of different books because we haven't hit the Nicene Council in the very beginning of Christianity coming in, so there is no Bible, there is just a bunch of books. There are competing versions of Christianity, and we still have in this time period evidence of same-sex relationships, although now we're moving into a time period where they're definitely criticized a lot more. Again, Katie's mouthing, why? V who knows? I I mentioned all that stuff about sin and all that kind of stuff. Essentially, if you believe that what's in this book is 100% true, or at least your interpretation of this book is 100% true, then you you believe that it, especially since it's kind of explicitly worded that sexual domination of another man is a blasphemy of sorts, then you get really excited about stopping that thing.

SPEAKER_06 59:14

I maintain that some of these lawmakers got jilted by whatever dude for another guy, and it's like, all right, fine, if I can't have you, absolutely no one can have you, and now it's punishable by death.

SPEAKER_03 59:29

Hell fine.

SPEAKER_06 59:30

Yes, thank you. Thank you, Frollo, you bastard. It's giving Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I need you to calm down, sir. Ironically, this is to this day, one of the best villain songs.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

It's excellent. Yeah, it's it's such a good movie. Uh all right, so moving into the future, this is where we start seeing the first like real shit, right? From the Roman period all the way into like the medieval period. There's plenty of evidence. People writing songs, people like we've got we just got evidence of like being in love, yeah, with people of the same gender. And there's a thing that happens that like if somebody makes a joke, makes a law, criticizes someone about their sexuality, we know that it was common enough to spot, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:00:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

So we have like jokes about Edward Longshanks' son being this is during like the William Wallace era. Like, even if you've seen the movie Braveheart, there's this one son who's very, very flamboyant. Right? If you would say that about him, then it's common enough for you to make the joke.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:45

So, like, just that being in of itself, right? We also have all kinds of stuff. This is some cool stuff where we start to get into men recognizing very openly that like women have sexuality, right? The French have now a word for the female orgasm. Uh Hildegard of Bingen in the like uh medieval period, quote unquote, is going to go around giving lectures about how orgasms happen and how like this is a a person in the church, uh, and and what she thinks that is.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:18

Also, Hildegard.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:20

She's amazing, right? She's probably a genius. And then also, like, she describes them as a heat that starts in the brain, and then to because they don't have science, right? To receive the man's seed, that heat moves down in her body.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:36

This is the first time I've ever heard this.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:39

I'm like aware of it dimly, but I've never like read it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:43

It's so great. Did you get it? After this, you should look it up because it's so funny because it's like help me remember. Remember, this is supposed to be like a nun. And so she's like never had sex, quote unquote. But she's describing it's like, okay, you've you've never had right so intimately.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:58

Who are you lying to? What's her name? What's his name?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

Right. Because that's the thing. She also like describes it directly as related to a man. Now it might just be that she's smart and knows to couch in certain language. Here's what we do know though, right? Many, many gay historians will talk about this that early monasteries become a haven for homosexuals.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

Right? So like you start seeing that.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:25

Dude, special especially convents.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:29

Especially convents.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

Oh, a room with nothing but women.

unknown 1:02:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:34

Right? Let me.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:36

If you're a guy, it's like, you mean there's a whole order where you can go and there's like nothing but other dudes that aren't married and aren't having sex with women.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:44

Lay gasp.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:46

Right. Like and this becomes like we talk about this openly when we get into like the 1950s around like the movie, the recently the movie Conclave, right? There was a lot of gay men in the Catholic Church, and we just we know this for sure. It's we're we're glossing over hundreds of years, right? We're moving very, very fast.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:07

And the thing is, and the thing that gets me about this is that it's so like you know, so scandalous, so frowned upon, so illegal at some points, and yet, and yet there are there it where there are there are pockets of society where it's just kind of like accepted. That's how they are. Oh, Duke so and so's son of such and such prefers the company of men.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

Right. Mostly the the people who get away with it in Europe, at least, because mostly we're talking about Europe and and like the the Near East are the wealthy.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:40

If you have might of arms or enough money, you can live freely. If you don't, you're subject to the mob, right? Like that's just kind of how that works. Not all the time, though, because in the medieval period, in the early Renaissance, rather, we have uh we know because of historical records that there are a lot of people of nobility who are executed for same-sex relationships. Because this is where we start getting into with the rise of Christianity, we start getting into the point of like witch burnings.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:14

Which also affect gay men.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:17

And well, yeah, not all of the people that were burned as witches were women.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:21

Right. A lot of them were just dudes that got caught in bed. And like that sucks. It's horrible, but like tortures and killings, though rare, like to be honest, like execution was not as common as people think it was, but like, but it did happen.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:38

Um I did an entire episode on the Pendle Witch trials.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:42

Yeah. And moving into the Renaissance period, cities are far more densely packed, right? One of the reasons that the Renaissance even happens, never mind the Crusaders bringing back stuff, trade routes opening up, uh, new discoveries of technology, all the things that caused the Renaissance to happen. Mostly the, you know, like especially in the German high Renaissance, the printing press is a big fucking thing that's going to launch the world even further than the Renaissance. And we haven't really glossed on this, but uh, we haven't really touched on this, but I do want to go back to say that in the rest of the world, ancient China has a lot of gay people in it. Oh yeah. Are they criticized? Yes, but there's like artwork in the way period.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:24

The the uh we talked about this like two weeks ago. Cut sleeves.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:28

Oh, yeah, in Japan.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:30

Uh well, which ones? Because cut cut sleeves mean marriage in in certain in the gay. The the oh that's the that's Chinese thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:39

Yeah, that was that was Chinese because that was the emperor who loved his lover so much that he he didn't want to wake him, so he cut his sleeve.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:46

Yeah. Like romantic shit, right? The Duke of Wei had a lover. He had a wife, and there's a there's a piece of artwork where there's a woman spying on the Duke of Wei and his lover, and she's got this very mischievous smile on her face.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:00

Miss Map.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:01

It's the best, right? Because you look at that and go, Yeah, like people.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:05

This isn't new.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

This isn't new. Yeah. Things like we have these conversations about things like polygamory. That is not new.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:13

No, not at all. Yeah, like we look at any, any and all ancient cultures.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

Yeah, at some point you develop a class where people are like, Yeah, we're married and don't go to anything.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:24

And and the line for most of them was don't have like kids everywhere.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:29

That was kind of that seemed to be the thing, right? But in old, old, old, like Paleolithic, Neolithic period, people just kind of had kids.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:37

There was no, you know, like you have this kind of like um um I there's a word for it, but but it's it's matriarchal culture, but it's also everyone's mother is everyone's mother, everyone's father is everyone's father, and that works very well. And so you still concept if it takes a village. Yeah, you still have this in many semi-nomadic peoples.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:59

Um in in North America and South America, same-sex relationships amongst not every uh not every nation national group, but in many nations, you have two spirit people, so we have trans people, we have uh like kind of uh non-binary or third sex people in India, uh in North America, we have same-sex relationships, we have poems in China that uh describe like same-sex relationships. We've got uh artwork in the pre-Islamic world that shows this, um, not necessarily dealing with sexual penetration, but dealing with romantic love. So, like the rest of the world's moving around. My purview is more Europe. I don't feel super free to talk about other cultures that I don't know a lot about. You know, like so I get you. I let them do their thing. Also, though, this is right around this time uh when we start getting into like the Renaissance period where we we've already established that we have had the rise of Islam, uh, and Islam does have a lot of rules. It's another Abrahamic religion, it has a lot of rules about this. Uh, it's going to continue to have a lot of rules about this, along with Christianity. Um post this point, now that we're like in the Renaissance, um, artists like Da Vinci are putting their boyfriends on things. Yeah, there's a lot of gay. There's a lot of gay going around, and people don't talk about it, they are aware of it.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:28

Yeah, it's it's one of those, it's again, it's it's known, it's just kind of accepted and moved on. Like it's like it's side-eyed a little bit, but that's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:36

Yeah. And unless you end up in a legal suit, yeah, you're probably not right. Things are happening.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:42

Like you can you can bring charges against someone for sodomy, yeah, but like you have to prove it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:48

You gotta prove it.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:49

And to prove it, that that means that you typically have to admit that you were the bottom.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:54

Yeah, or at least in a time period where it really matters, where you go, a lot of courts in the medieval and renaissance period are ecclesiastical. And so, like, the church is involved.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:06

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:07

This is true of like parts of Rome as well. It's like Christian Rome, is that it's ecclesiastical in nature. So you not only have the law, you have the church. When you're swearing an oath, you are swearing an oath.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:19

Yeah, you are condemning your soul if you're lying.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:21

Yeah, so people people are a little more sketchy about just throwing mud, you know? Yeah, because they really believe in like you don't just go slinging mud everywhere. We also have like courtesan culture, you know, in into the Renaissance, and things are getting a little more, let's say, exciting. So you know what I mean? Like people are are discovering how to do different things. This goes all the way back to the medieval period, but like, you know, things like Cunalingus are gonna be a thing in like medieval and renaissance Europe and France and everywhere else. So things are are are becoming more modern ever so slowly because we're dealing with hundreds of years. Post-Renaissance, the age of exploration, this is where we have another blurb.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:09

Let's start by saying that when uh Christabel Columbo or Christopher Columbus, for most of us Americans, real piece of shit, yes, uh, shows up in America, uh, he, South America, and uh what he calls the West Indies or what we would call the Bahamas and all the Caribbean islands, they describe that people are a lot more free.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:31

Right? Because they're not dealing with Abrahamic religions, they're not dealing with the Western societal culture or Eastern or Mid Eastern uh societal culture, and so they're people have some same-sex relationships. People have like what we would describe as multifamily relationships. Um everybody's it's it's it's a village, right? People people do have some semblance of like a marriage, but they are also a lot more free about that. So um, and we don't know how much is just his like slander, we don't really know, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:11:05

But considering how much of a piece of shit he was, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

He's a real fucking monster. So, but when they move into South America, um uh around you know the the empires that exist in those spaces, they have more codified laws, all that kind of stuff. People are a lot more serious about like property lines, but still just a different society. You've got uh women who are in power as far as religious figures, you've got you know, all that kind of stuff, right? And sometimes they don't even know how to deal with this, they're rewriting back in ways that we don't really know if they're true or not because they may not recognize what they're seeing. But I'm gonna read something real quick. Um, this is about well, I'll just read it. LGBTQ people have always been around because of the laws and beliefs of the past, many queer people hid their relationships. This means that a lot of queer history is either lost or hidden. Unfortunately, that's very true, right? The first laws regulating queer people in America appear in Dale's Code, a collection of laws enforced at Jamestown Colony between 1610 and 1618. These codes were largely a copy of English laws at the time. So think about like if those laws are in a colony, but we can kind of pull from that, and also because we have the records, that these laws also existed. What were called like anti-buggery laws already existed in England and in most of Europe. So if you have a law against something, it is happening. Right? I'm saying all this shit because there are people who to this day right now in the world who are going like, well, it's because society's gotten so free, that's why we have more gay people. No, no, no, no, they've been here since the beginning. Yep, you've just been trying to kill them the whole time. But probably 10% of the human population at any time is gay, bi, trans, lesbian, something.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:03

Right? Never mind Q, right? Right, yes. Getting into alternative sexualities, and that's where really gonna move into your ballowic. Yeah, yeah. Because when we get into like England in the Victorian age. Oh boy. Or really in the Western expansion period. Oh boy. And and any time where we start getting into things like BDSM or or any like uh alternative sex, well, any alternative sexuality at all, right? Like, definitely ace people have always existed. Oh, yeah. That shit is crazy when people say that ace people don't exist. You're just like, yeah, but it's not doing something. Like don't do things have always existed. Like, that's crazy. It's a crazy thing to think that this stuff is has not existed.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:46

I maintain that like monasteries were founded by ace people.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:50

Yeah. I leave the game. Fuck this. Especially if literally, fuck this shit. I'm out. Especially if you're a young ace woman. Yeah, fuck this. I'm out. I don't mean for me.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:04

The marriage games. No, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:07

I would like to go live in a stone building where no one will bother me and I will make lace until I'm blind.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:12

Yep. A room where all I do is sit around and read books.

unknown 1:14:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:18

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know two ace people, that is their damn dream. Live in a castle and read books. Like that's you know, like that's the thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:27

I don't necessarily want to go blind, go, go blind, but I do want to make lace.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:32

Proper lighting, please.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:34

So right. So where were we? Anyways. We were in uh just leaving the Renaissance period. Leaving the Renaissance. Right, age of exploration. Yes. Um, you've got all of these, um all of these exciting uh religious radicals that are going all over the place. And this is where we start really entering into, I would say, is a true like extremist period in religions, right? Because like religion in itself is well, I mean, if we're moving into the colonies. Yeah. And we we've got uh in Europe, we've got like the Huguenot movements and all that other stuff that people are gonna go really crazy about.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:11

There's gonna be killings, nut bars that founded over here.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:15

Yeah, there's a lot of real crazy folks.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:17

Like, damn.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

The Quakers used to run into towns screaming. The Quakers are the best, dude.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:24

Quakers are so chill now.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:25

Yeah, for for people who used to run into towns like Puritan towns, banging pots and pans and screaming gospels. It used to be so wild.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:33

Dude, I had I spent the longest time with beef against the Puritans. And I don't get me wrong, I still there's still a lot of beef there. But like, god damn.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:47

Y'all were so so repressed.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

And what's what's crazy, like, even why are you frightened of an orgasm? Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:54

Why are you scared?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

The whole thing is so the whole thing, and then you see in a lot of like artwork and writing from the time that they seem to be very, very worried. Because this is really kind of where like racism starts, because we've got slavery, right? We've got slavery that's come back in a very specific kind of way. Uh, as we move even further past this and we start getting into like the transcontinental, like the triangle, the slave trade triangle to West Africa, uh, and what constitutes slavery is no longer people who are indebted in your society or people who are born into your society, but a very specific group of people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:35

And that is wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:37

Yeah. Terrible and horrible. Uh, and you start seeing writing that's like when you deal with alternate sexualities of any form, that's not like the quote unquote norm, right? That's when you start seeing people like blame other people for it. Right? This it's a foreign influence or it's and people start to treat it as though it is instead of being sinful or just not allowed by God, that it's somehow like dirty or animalistic. And so it it and this is always the case that the people who are like the loudest decriers of a lot of things are often also doing it.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:13

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:13

Right. So we we see this with like prostitution laws.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:16

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:18

And so, you know, and then we know what's going on by some of these laws where people say, like, well, you can't sleep with black women. There's like, well, then people are sleeping with black women, right? Like, that's what's going on here. And probably not willingly. Yeah. So, uh, but that in the same time period of like early American colonies, they're also trying to make laws against like uh dealing with uh native indigenous people. Like, you're not allowed to marry them, you're not allowed to go off, you know, like all that kind of stuff. Yeah, because it's a better deal, quite frankly, for many people in society, integrating into a tribal nation is a better deal. You're not an indentured bondsman, you don't have to, you know, dress in this weird organized religion drives me crazy.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:04

And it always has. Like, even as the kid in Sunday school, my uncle teaching the class, my family very big in the church, I'm just irritated the whole time because like I'm seven, eight, nine, ten already clocking the hypocrisy.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:22

Yeah, exactly, right? And so uh, but but moving on, this is where we start getting good news. Yes, we've passed the hump. Because they never did.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:33

Uh then that was part of the fucking problem. So Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:38

Yeah, my God.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:39

Uh please go get laid.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:42

For real. You know, we had little brief offshoots of like guys that were, you know, that people were just having sex, like the early, like like ecstatic. We talked about this with Rasputin. Yeah. Right? You had like the flagellants, but the problem with them is they were also like also usually crazy anti-Semitic. Like the flagellant movement in Germany, they they were a little more free with things, to the point, but also to the point to where like the crown sent in knights to kill them all. Because they were becoming a bit of a nuisance. But um going into past this period, right? Where where the colonies start to become a thing, getting new ideas uh to them.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:26

Thinking, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:27

Sorry, the age of enlightenment has started to move around. People got fancy ideas. Uh, Benjamin Franklin is he's fucking oh yes, he you know, look oh yes, him. You know, like people are people are moving around. This kind of imperial age and then the age of enlightenment is gonna happen later, is way more free. You know this from like uh from French stuff, definitely. Yes, yeah, men have male lovers, women have lovers, everybody people are having lovers, and it's in tabloids, uh, which might be gossip, but probably it's true enough, right? That that this is more in the open. People are more. In fact, from this time period, there's a spy that's gonna work for the French crown, whose name is escaping at the moment, but you can definitely look this up. They had themselves legally, as part of their payment for their service to the crown, declared a woman. They were born male. This is one of our first things of legal transition. Wow. This is gonna happen during the French crown, right? This is like like around the Sun King's time. Oh, right, yeah, early. Early.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:37

Louis was getting up to some shit too.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:39

He was also getting up to some shit.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:41

Louis and his brother both. His brother who regularly wore dresses.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:44

Yep. And like that's the thing, right? Like, we're we're getting into a time to where people are kind of romantic.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:51

In that they're they're writing, like they're writing novels for the first time. Like they're writing things that are not strictly like fact-based writing. Yeah. We have music that is designed to make you feel something other than just faith. We have something like books that are like um in France. We we have penny gossip columns.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:10

We we've got all that good shit, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:21:12

We're coming up on the penny dreadfuls.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:13

Right. And and really neat stuff. We've we've got philosophy that is questioning the nature of things. We have things like pantheism that are coming about, where maybe just the universe in and of itself is divine, and we don't necessarily need a godhead figure. That kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:30

Blasphemy.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:30

Yeah, um real fucking get 'em. You're right.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:34

Like so, but uh heresy.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:39

Yeah. Um in the 1700s, things are really fucking shaking, and people are starting to, they still have buggery laws and all that kind of stuff, but people are starting to not care as much. Yes. They're just kind of ignoring it.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:53

Like the buggery laws kind of stay in effect as a way to take someone down a peg.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:00

Like it becomes less uh social death, or in some cases, actual death.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:07

And more along the lines of like it's it can be used to kind of like publicly shame you for a bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:12

Yeah, it it is on par with someone who abandons their wife.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

It's like you're gonna have to leave town now. You know, right? Like that's more or less what you might be jailed or fined, and unfortunately, in many parts of the world, still killed.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:26

Um, but we're we're getting better when we get into around Napoleon's time. We have the Napoleonic Codes of Law, and the Napoleonic Codes of Law don't have anything about same-sex relationships, and this gets kind of exported um because Napoleon gets kind of slandered a bit, right? Because most of our history is from the British point of view, yes. So, like Napoleon was definitely a dictator, right? But as when you compare him to King's.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:57

And a slandering motherfucker.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:59

Yeah, he's a lot wilder than but also when you compare him to like many of the kings of the day on par, if not better. Yeah, right. So when you when getting into that, that's a big deal. The the Napoleonic code thing going around and not really having a lot of criminality for same-sex relationships, and that code getting exported as he his empire moves around, but also as just a good codified rule of law is passed around. All across Europe you start seeing people kind of ignore this. It might be a regional thing, but it's not like it's not what it was. And mainly it this happens because we've entered an age where the church does not have that much power. Over across the pond in America, at some point we're gonna hit the westward expansion, and that's when we really get a lot of stuff going down during and post-civil war. You have a lot of men headed out, moving across the plains, sometimes with their family, but mostly like in the cattle culture, just men, right? You've got a bunch of just dudes, and that is appealing to a lot of other just dudes.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:09

And they made they made a whole movie about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:12

That's right. So you start having dance halls, for instance, that are just men. And we have photos of this. We have like tent-type photos of men just dancing with other men. They're bored. Uh, but the thing that many, many gay historians, queer historians have noted is that like, yeah, if you're a if you're a gay man in this time period and somebody told you that there were whole towns, again, like the church thing, whole towns, no women. It's like, hmm, mm-hmm You know, like this is a prime opportunity, right? Like, and I don't mean that in any kind of like predatory sense. I'm just saying that that being gay is way more common. And if you are gay and you know what to look for, you know this, right? Like, and so you and other men like go out, right? And then we start having uh cowboy like marriages. We have people who share property, we have photos where guys guys are taking photos together, um, that that are definitely in long-standing stable relationships. This is also where we get a lot of early trans women that are going out into properties like uh Oklahoma and a couple other places in the in in the kind of like mid-expansion period, living as women their whole lives. Uh in the West Coast, we'll have famous people like Charlie Parker, who are stagecoach drivers and fucking fight people and where, you know, like drink all the time. And and they won't even know that that some of these people are trans until they die. They'll live their entire lives very open and very free. There are laws against this.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:44

That that autopsy, though. Yeah. Shocking.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:47

And like a couple of these people get fined and thrown in jail, and they're like, we're gonna put you in solitary unless you wear your proper clothing, and they're like, fuck you, I'll go to solitary. And it's treated as kind of like a curiosity in the newspapers. You know, like when people get arrested for this, they're like, ah, that lady's wearing pants. You know what I mean? Like, that's how they that's how they look at it. It's kind of like funny to a degree, but it doesn't really seem to fucking matter to any, you know, like the there's laws about it, the cops care. Doesn't seem like anybody else gives a shit. You know, like it's that's just how it's what's going on. Uh, this is this time period we also have women who are um becoming academic in the 1800s as they move in. They prefer not to get married and to pursue their careers. And many women, uh, this lifestyle very much appeals to because women are getting together and they're renting a house and they're owning property together. This will be referred to as a Boston marriage. Um and young women who like are getting their eyes opened for the first time, right? They're looking up and they're going, like, oh, you mean this is now fully possible. I can pursue a career, I can live with another woman, we can own property and have a life together. You mentioned this earlier with the flowers.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:04

Right? This will become a a thing. So common that sometimes around uh school towns that some people call this a Harvard marriage.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:13

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:14

So like that's it's everywhere. Later on, it's gonna be a fucking gay panic about about about this where people are gonna, oh no, my daughters, you know, like the the thing especially about the the Harvard slash Boston marriage is that because there's no like kids involved, you know what I mean? Like it the the panics are kind of short-lived. So but like, you know, like oh no, your oh no, your daughter's gonna go teach at Yale or something. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_06 1:27:43

Oh no, your daughter's living with another woman.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:45

Yeah, that it it becomes a panic for a little while, and there's ordinance passes about all this kind of stuff, but we're approaching the mid 1800s, and like from the 1800s to the 1900s, you have burlesque. shows and you have cities, big cities popping up. And with that it comes pocket communities where people can find each other. And this is true in Europe as well. You start having salons that very much cater to you know like to people who might be looking for something outside of a straight relationship. You have um moving into the 1800s I I I mentioned this I was going to pass the mic to you about all the stuff that happens in Victorian England.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:32

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:34

She's eating chips.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:35

Mouth full of Cheetos mouth full of fucking Cheetos.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:38

It's not easy being cheesy guys.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:40

I'm hungry. I spent all morning prepping for dinner and then forgot to eat. Alright so in the 1800s specifically in England it gay culture is kind of this weirdly sort of ignored and accepted thing. Like it's kind of everybody like just kind of looks the other way. Like it is it's like you'll find it a lot especially in like high profile marriages where like so and so's son prefers the company of men but he's gotten married to his a lavender marriage.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

A lavender marriage right and he by the flower code that you were talking about earlier.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:17

I'll have to check on that one. I only I only know a few of the flower code things. I just thought it was super cool. He and his his friend will often go on trips and such leaving his wife with every luxury and her own goddamn time. Yeah it was it was kind of it was kind of sought after like you you would see it a lot in uh in like the courtship phase I guess like where the where the potential husband and wife pair would meet and talk.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:50

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:51

And there there are recorded instances where like she would ask kind of probing questions about his friends trying to ascertain if he's got one of those friends.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:02

I can see that though because that would offer a lot of freedom. Yes. In a in a time period where women still could not really own a lot or like a lot of times own bank accounts or anything like that.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:12

A lot of financial freedom comes from having house all to yourself and and uh and often there there are there are I I wanna I don't want to say a lot of recorded instances, but there are many recorded instances of these being like almost ideal matches. Like cause you would you would get to be friends with your husband.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:35

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:35

As opposed to just being his wife.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:38

This is a uh I guess not so much in a in a strictly gay lesbian way but like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and Yeah. I mean they were all the the whole I mean all of them and the butler and everyone.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:53

I mean like I don't know it's it became this sort of like unspoken thing of oh is your husband and then you know you could proudly say oh he and his friend right and meaning that you had all of the freedom and financial backing in the world to do whatever the hell you wanted.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:15

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:16

Okay, I say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:16

I'm generalizing but if you were from an upper class family where this person had money you didn't have a ton of kids you now had like a nightlife.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:25

Yeah. And like I I can only imagine how awkward some of those situations had to be when like it was time to produce an heir for the family.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:36

Yeah no joke because you're gonna have to or else especially in a kingdom where that it could go back to the crown or or to a tax collector or whatever.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:46

Yeah. And like I I we've seen historically that like you know most of these couples figured it out somehow. Yeah sure somehow bottles of brandy probably bottles of brandy probably threesomes yeah maybe foursomes I guess or they just had a stud. Yeah uh it it's it's it's one of those things that was common enough that it wasn't talked about so it's kind of a mystery now. So you know and then from there like women have to always women have to be a little more like on the DL about it like sly.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:23

So that's that's that's not how flower languages came about but they definitely used the flower language because like you you could send a bouquet to someone and it would be looking at the flowers you would be able to tell them I'm so sorry for your loss or this is my these are my sympathies for you or I'm thinking about you. You could it could it could be a perfectly platonic flower arrangement being sent to the ex person and nobody would think anything about it. Because you're you're being social.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:57

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:58

However you send us a particular combination of flowers and people that are in the know that you're down bad for that person. And hopefully if you're lucky that person understands that you are down bad for them.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:14

You know what I like too that you you touched on this on platonic relationships and I can't even r believe I didn't think to remember that. But that the Greeks had a bunch of different kind of love.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:26

And that in the time period of like Victorian England they were like fucking really into classical restoration. And you start getting that like romance period.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:36

Well that and that that that's something that's always fascinated me especially with like human cultures in general is that there are there are romantic loves and there are platonic loves. And we see a lot in English ooh look at me using my degree we see a lot in in English literature where you will have language that to us to our modern ear sounds romantic between party A and party B. And you re you re you'll read like a letter to them or something they have written in their honor for them and you'll think are y'all fucking right like the the use of words like darling and my my lovely heart and stuff like that mine own darling is is is a common one and that that is that is largely used romantically but it can also be exchanged platonically. And but they have a lot of that flowery romantic language thrown in there especially with letters.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:36

Right. I mean even you see this with soldiers a lot because they're take note men were not like afraid to tell each other that they loved them. Yes.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:46

That was like a common thing where it just like I do appreciate that that's something in our friend group that like I have noticed that the majority of the people in our friend group are dudes.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:56

And I have heard I love you man thrown so casually across the room. So I appre I I want to I want to shout out to our particular friend group and I appreciate you guys being like particularly cool about that. Now granted that that I love you man will also be accompanied with a great big middle finger in your face dudes will be dudes.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:18

But also especially like because we we do a lot of stuff like we fence and we yeah role play together as far as like D D and stuff like that. And uh well that could have gone to a joke really fast.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:30

I'm so glad that you clarified on that because I was gonna I was gonna let it hang for some you just went and I was like not like that do you now no we uh but there's like video there's video game nights in our in our particular circle of friends like Wednesday nights specifically our Helldivers night. Yeah and uh I like to not not to beat a dead horse or anything but I will hear these guys on Discord while I'm playing Minecraft and they're just in the game. They are role playing in the game. It's it's really funny. But like you know at the like somebody will blow somebody else up and like ah fuck you asshole I love you and it's great. How did we get here?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:16

Uh we were flower language we were talking about flower language and about all the cool Victorian fan code.

SPEAKER_06 1:36:23

So women in particular could communicate across rooms with a fan by holding it different ways at various angles snapping one shut or opening one at particular times in the conversation and it was literal code that like you could either be talking to your girlfriend or you could be talking to your girlfriends like across the goddamn room.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:49

I a hundred percent like you want to hear something really funny. Yes so there are some we do have some information about men doing this. That's so awesome so specifically naval men. Oh yeah that tracks flags yep yeah like that there they have their own sense or flash code you know where you take the lantern and not Morris code but their own personal you know like whatever they're used to signaling about stuff. But that like um card sharks and shit will do this. And they hit they have a kind of language and and like it's it's great. It's so awesome.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:23

The Victorian period is so not only repressed but it's also very very cool in the ways that people found to get around it.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:32

I'm all over the place as is my accent um sometimes she just breaks out say occasionally yes uh but it I don't know there was there the Regency period got really really really really repressed like oddly more so than like the Victorian stuff because I one of the things that I I I remember reading about Victorian England is that this is kind of like the rise of queer culture where you start just having different stuff like fetishes become a thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:07

Yes and also it was one of the last period last time periods where where men could like dress flamboyantly without catching an eyebrow. The dandies yeah yeah and you know and that that breaks my heart because one motherfucker is responsible for all of men's fashion being so boring and forever.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:26

And he didn't even try.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:27

Yeah he didn't even do it on purpose.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:30

He was just like a man should like his very specific style of man who he meant in a specific social class and place.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:38

So boring so austere so dull yeah I would love to give men puce back.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:45

Also quick side note because we were in the 1800s Abraham Lincoln probably gay oh yeah oh yeah at the very least bisexual for real and and one other president as well uh so like that that's a whole that's a whole thing right again way more common than people keep saying like it's it's not fucking new it it's not at all at all and then also there's no reason that you need to be frightened of it. Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:12

Some of the cool ain't no reason some of the coolest fucking people in history Alexander the Great we touched on earlier yeah I mean literally spread Greek education all over the world um one of the most badass motherfuckers to ever live yeah but but definitely like Lincoln's letters are very like and the the argument Once again talking about that flowery language where like there there is listen there is flowerly flowery language and then there is you are in love with that man.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:38

Right. Yeah like it's deeply personal it's my guy he goes down to the South and he sees slavery for the first time in person like in cat you know chattel mass farm plantation culture right and he's writing to the guy that he lived in a log cabin with and and for a long time and he's like I can't reconcile the man I know with what I saw. Like it really breaks him you know what I mean like and and sets him on the path to what he will eventually become and also his personal bodyguard slept in the same bed with him. You know like so I mean when people are like when people are when people like argue against me on that I'm like look man like sometimes you just need your your emotional support bodyguard. Yeah and and that's that's great to me. You know like this this this guy was also a prize fighter.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:32

Yeah yeah Lincoln could have knocked your ass out.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:35

Yeah and was an expert marksman signed the Emancipation proclamation drove his wife insane like well she was kind of she was already kind of girl she was the listen I hate to use hysterical but she she was an interesting person but like but he you know like some of these people are some of the coolest most interesting people and and uh I I think it's great like to to visit these histories and go like we started with here's how things kind of suck and where these dumb laws came up by the way here in America we had this dumb law about what you could do in your bedroom and a lot of states had this law all the way until the late 1900s where a uh case it was called Lawrence v.

SPEAKER_06 1:41:26

Texas I knew exactly where you were going with this the second you got started.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:30

Started in Houston Texas cops uh were called by Lawrence's ex-boyfriend who said that there was a guy in the apartment with Caddy Bitch uh got called because he was like there's a person in that apartment with a gun cops came in kicked the door in found the two guys in bed arrested them fined them then they uh then they fought it they got as they should have as they should have they lost the initial case uh but then they appealed it and then it went all the way up to the Supreme Court where it was determined that like part of the 14th and and some some different understandings of the amendments said that what happens in the privacy of their own home is their own fucking business and you should not care about that. Go away don't don't we still have laws in effect that that are that um limit the number of uh toys you can have in some places yeah it's like it it's like um I I want to say it's like uh why do you care yeah why do you care they treat it like it's drugs it's like if you have more than an inch that you know bro you know like if you have more than an ounce all of you lawmakers to Belladonna and not the poison. Not the the porn star.

SPEAKER_06 1:42:47

A porn star first of all she's gorgeous.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:50

Second of all wow but like the you know it's like the ounce of weed thing it's like more than that it's an intent to sell it's like what what do you think if I have more than six toys first of all there's a fucking there's a whole website that all of y'all just gonna stroke out if you ever see fucking bad dragon what is that a kraken that's Charlie Charlie's a horse that's a unicorn um like there's a magical Leopard they're gonna take us away people are gonna listen to this like what the fuck is wrong with these people are they high this episode?

SPEAKER_06 1:43:36

No we're both exhausted.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:38

Oh man so moving into the like the modern era right even the 1900s in 1906 uh we live in Texas right 1906 San Antonio gets its first official drag show yeah in 1906 right in New York you're gonna have the rise of uh drag entertainment you're also and this is before even ballroom culture because at this point it's different it's like vaudeville right you don't have drag as you know it today you have different culture the thing that drives me nuts about the stigma against drag is how long was all of theater predominantly male?

SPEAKER_06 1:44:18

Oh forever like Shakespeare was all men all men even playing the female parts all men yeah why are you so scared of drag now dude well because is it the sequence? They imagine it though as inherently sexual when in fact it is just cosplay it's it's you know what I mean it's expression yeah it's you think they're doing that death drop because they're trying to show off the the what their thighs right yeah they're they're way more worried about not banging their head on the way down you know or whipping the tape yeah but like I learned to do makeup from drag queens yeah like that is I maintain to this day that is why I have any level of skill at all is because I learned hard mode to start with. Yeah and all the contouring that goes into that contouring color correction there is an artistry to it that is inherent in anyone in that in in that industry like to to be in that industry for industry for it successfully for any length of time you must be the best of the best of the best of the best we're we're now into like the modern era where all of these laws are being actively fought.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:31

There's a photo that I watched at one point where it's a a um this is before transgender was really known as a term to most people so they use different they use different terms. Transsexual yeah or they would sometimes the newspapers say like a man living as a woman or something like that, right? And that that kind of persists until like the 40s. And then in 40s they still use words like transvestite or transsexual but you have I have another note Kristen Jorgensen is the most widely is most widely known as one of the first people in America to receive gender affirming surgery. From an early age Jorgensen was tormented by feelings of being a woman trapped in a man's body with the announcement of her transformation in 1952 uh she became she became an instant celebrity Jorgensen served in the U.S. Army from 1945 to 1946 uh during of course World War II Jorgensen lived comfortably on the proceeds of her lecture and nightclub circuit from royalties from her book Kristen Jorgensen a personal autobiography which was adapted into a film uh the Kristin Jorgensen story of course Kristen Jorgensen wasn't only the only famous trans woman in her day Roberta uh cowell a former race car driver who served as a fighter pilot in World War II was British yeah yeah yeah these girls are awesome right yeah uh was Britain's first woman to receive gender affirming care uh and then of course there's the very famous Dutch girl oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like the the in the Institute of Sexology that all that stuff that goes back to like the 30s because now we have science like real science like not the burgeoning science but we've got to quote Bill Nye science rules yeah we're studying for the first time uh in the 1920s early 1900s sex we're we're starting to study sociology and and and the birth of psychology will happen but still largely on men yep pretty much uh although we have a few uh cool bro moments yeah yeah so one thing is like you know of course you you we talk we kind of joke about this sometimes but women would would be told that they were hysterical sometimes right and you know where I'm going with this yes so I do not believe that men that the person who who built this machine did not understand what he was doing. I simply don't believe it we can be stupid sometimes not that stupid you know what I mean I'm having a hysterical fit I need cocaine and to go get treatment. Right and the treatment was that a doctor devised this box. It is now more or less how a dryer works it's a spinning drum inside of a box and it goes and you sit on the box and it treats hysteria. You sit on the box for between 15 and 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_06 1:48:31

Ladies and gentlemen I would like to introduce you to the first prototype Buzz stick yeah that's right I'm sorry I heard it called that the other day and I fell the fuck out and now I refuse to call them vibrators ever again.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:45

Yeah and this buzz stick this was more or less like the modern day like riding pads right like that you just straddle and they just vibrate and knock right and like that's what was going on here right like that's a hundred percent what was going on here.

SPEAKER_06 1:49:02

So like the I mean you're not entirely wrong because you you want to you want to short circuit anxiety.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:08

Yeah that like he was just like well this will help the ladies out you know what I mean and maybe his wife or his wife or a female friend or something had like direct input to this the there's a kind of joke that like he had no idea why it worked. He was just studying it scientifically I was like was he a wall what you know what I mean like I I don't we have this thing where we go like well men back then they never had sex like it was so stupid. I was just like this dude was a grown man with kids he understood what was happening.

SPEAKER_06 1:49:46

And for a long time there was also the uh the the concept slash theory of the upsuck.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:52

Oh yeah yeah yeah that's something that like goes all the way back to the medieval period is like you're more if you Want to have kids, she's more likely to get pregnant if you give her an orgasm. And I was like, way to go, bro.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:06

I'm not sure who started that rumor, but thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:09

Yeah. Unfortunately, that had a bit of a double-edged sword in it in certain legal battles, but like I think the intention was good, right? Yeah. And so uh, along with uh our our great um priest, the uh priestess no nun, that's what I'm going for that we were talking about earlier. I knew you'd get there eventually orgasm moving from the brain, Hildegard. Yeah, like she was just like, and here's how you do it.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:34

Like, you know, but you're what it is, and but you're a pure nun, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:50:39

And uh which bishop is it?

SPEAKER_06 1:50:41

Is it a cardinal? Who is it? Is it another nun?

SPEAKER_00 1:50:45

Oh yeah, yeah. And you know, like we we've got all these cool things that through throughout history that are definitely that are happening at this point and being being um being studied. We have the first gay men's groups that are all silent and all that kind of stuff, but they're popping up all over the place. Uh by the 1950s, we have like gay rights movements that are that are largely happening at like an academic level, but we have words like the word homosexual is being used for the first time. And um court cases are being fought about this, all this kind of stuff. Uh the one that Lawrence v. Texas overturned was a Georgia law, so we have that from before. Um, but of course, at some point we're gonna have Stonewall. And before even Stonewall, we have the San Francisco uprising, we have everything else. And we get this great moment in history where the shit just kind of hits the fan, right? Like we're moving into the sexual liberation period or like the sexual revolution, and people are just 60s, 70s, and 80s. Fucking tired of it. Yep. Right? Like people are just tired of it. And I I really think that part of it is because we get television and music and and books and widespread media. Right. Widespread media allows us to connect with one another and it allows people to say, Oh, I'm not alone. There's a ton of people like me. There's mailing lists, there's like advertisements in around like the aero collar days, like 1920s, of men wearing red jackets, smokers' jackets, living with other men. That's kind of like secret code that this advertisement is for gay men. Right? You've got uh one of my favorites is like women wearing like tweed jackets. You know what I mean? Just to kind of put it out there, like little mask, you know, like academic quote unquote. Yep. You know, like that's just to just to put it out there a little bit that we're that we're cool.

SPEAKER_06 1:52:45

How clever that gay culture has has had to be and has been throughout all of history to survive. Right because, like I said, this isn't new.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:56

And and as many people on TikTok would say, like, the blueprint, you know, like for modern culture in the community is black culture.

SPEAKER_06 1:53:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:05

Like, that's what it is, is that a group of people that was very used to the scrutiny, the constant aggressive scrutiny of public, um, marched that trail and they knew how to have their own communities. And that goes into ball culture, that goes into mask lesbian culture, that goes in like into fashion, into music, into like so many places that that were able to pick up on that blueprint and understand how to once people started busting things, like the Castro Hotel in San Francisco or Stonewall, where the cops would just come and bust you for for deviant behavior, right? You you start having these moments where like black culture and its incredible ability to protect itself from police and from uh authority and from authority figures of really of any form, social or whatever, uh, really gets to become like this is the fucking manual. You know, like this is how you do it. And and then from there it can branch out a little bit more, but it's such an interesting time because you have like right after Stonewall, one of the major groups that helped organize relief in the wake of Stonewall and kept the original thing going, sided with the cops the next year. And it was just like that's fucking crazy, right? But you had like the gay caucus for uh for youth and this all this this uh or uh yeah, anti-war and liberation, and then you've got like all these wonderful groups that's uh that split off. Um uh Miss Riviera, there's uh uh trans women really take the front of this.

SPEAKER_06 1:54:48

We're now at a time where I just went to a pride event in a southern Texas county, a small southern Texas county, yeah. Like, let me I cannot emphasize that enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:02

Like little bitty town. I mean little bitty town.

SPEAKER_06 1:55:06

When we were younger, like I grew up here, I back and forth all the time, always came back. There were not pride events.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:16

No, that it wouldn't have been possible. There were not. I lived in a town in in South Georgia where um one of my best friends was outed, right? It's a guy that like taught me how to skateboard. Stuff like he was outed, um, somebody caught him with his boyfriend, someone assaulted his boyfriend, he damn near murdered this dude because he was a skate punk guy, he knew how to box and he like fucked this dude up bad.

SPEAKER_06 1:55:42

As he should.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:43

Got but got arrested and all that kind of stuff just for protecting someone's life.

SPEAKER_06 1:55:49

Self-defense of another person, third party, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:52

And you know what? Like, so this is the point where I swing back because we started talking about like shitty laws and how dangerous it was for people.

SPEAKER_06 1:56:01

Um he's so organized today.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:03

Fuck, no, I'm not shit everywhere.

SPEAKER_06 1:56:06

Okay, you started out organized.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:08

I started out organized, I had a plan and then all went sorry, no, no, it was this was me. I wanted to talk about all of these different things, about like how cool and interesting LGBTQ culture is, and like how long it's gone back and and all the different changes, and that it's impossible to fit succinctly into a small amount of time.

SPEAKER_06 1:56:30

Dude, I cannot tell you how many times I've had the argument with my very, very, very religious family about how the concept of homosexuality and all of that is not new. Yeah, it's not new and it's not uncommon. Continue.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:46

Oh, so this is um this is from Human Dignity Trust. They do, they're a watchdog group that looks around for like this is a map of jurisdictions that criminalize LGBT. Now, what they mean by criminalize, you can look this up yourself. It's it's uh it's uh humandignity trust.org, and they have a list of this. Now, I'm gonna show you this map in a second. I need to explain part of it. So they China, Russia, there's a lot of places that don't have any laws, period. There's not a lot of protections, there's not a lot of China's actually changing, which is wild. It's great, right? Like that they're starting to there's countries like America that don't have that that have protections, right? Most of the most of North America, really all of North America, most of South America, because Brazil has protections, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't discrimination. That means that the law itself isn't actively cracking down. But like Russia, uh, that doesn't necessarily have dis they don't necessarily have criminalization of homosexuality or or trans identity, but because there's no protections, yeah, you know, it depends on the will of the culture, right? So if you're if you're in places like like India that doesn't have a lot of these laws, that but has a several thousand-year history of third gender spaces, uh, then you're probably okay. You're okay. However, the British colonial period introduced a lot of hatred of gay men. So like, there's that. So like, you know what I mean? So so this map isn't entirely accurate. However, I bring this up to show that like we still face a lot of shit in the world. We started this out showing that, like, and there are some places where being uh in an in an active relationship, sexual relationship, uh, penetrative relationship in like ancient Assyria had a lot of penalties that could result in death. In the medieval period, it could result in death. Any amount of gay relationship could result in death, especially for men. Through most of Western history, uh living or or dressing as the other gender could get you a lot of fines, maybe thrown in jail. Here in America, people thought you were insane, they would throw you into an asylum. That's unfortunately a very real thing. Yep. And many people died in the process, and it became like that sucks. We kind of glossed over that period because I'll be honest with you, I don't super like I don't really like talking about that. Like it kind of fucks me up a little bit.

SPEAKER_06 1:59:21

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:22

So, like today, the places that are still very, very dangerous are northern, eastern, western Africa. Not so much on the so there's a couple of places in southern Africa where it's very much illegal to be gay. Uh, and when I say criminalized, I mean criminalized. It is illegal to be gay. Um, and most of the Middle East.

SPEAKER_06 1:59:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:44

Uh many of these places there is a death penalty for being caught um in any kind of sexual act, homosexual sexual act. Uh, it's illegal to be trans. It's this is not necessarily a, let's say, like a Christian or Muslim thing, because you also have countries that are majority Islamic in which it is not fully criminalized. Now it's criminalized a little bit, but it's not like how it is in, let's say, Iran or Afghanistan. Um, and there's a couple of countries in South America that are very Catholic, that even though most of the Catholic world complete decriminalization.

SPEAKER_06 2:00:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:24

Right? Like I complete decriminalization.

SPEAKER_06 2:00:26

Re didn't didn't the Pope recently, I think it was the last Pope actually, who recently came out and said, we don't care.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:31

Yeah, it was it was Desmond Tutu is is has a very famous, the archbishop um is has a very famous saying where he was uh they said people are trying to say that being LGBT was a choice, right? And he goes, I don't know why anyone would choose to experience the amount of prejudice that comes your way, right? For for being gay. It's like that doesn't make any sense. You know, like that was his whole vibe about that. Was like no, I don't think anybody's choosing this.

SPEAKER_06 2:00:55

I have a standing theory that anybody who says being gay is a choice is choosing to be straight.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:02

Yeah, that's right. Often the most violent people angry and closeted. And so, like, but unfortunately, I'm gonna show you this map here, Katie. It's a it's a pretty big swatch.

SPEAKER_06 2:01:16

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:18

So there is a correlation between all these places, right? Because the thing is, like, Christianity and Islam and Judaism exist all over the rest of that map, and where it is gray and it is not criminalized. So, what's the real correlation? And the correlation is lack of education. That's what it is. You have there's a couple of things. There's lower standards of education in several of these places, lower economic develop development, and in conjunction to all of this, theocracy.

SPEAKER_06 2:01:47

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:48

Which is that is the religion runs the government itself, or at least has a lot of power in the government. Um and that's that's irrespective of religion. You know, like that that could not have anything to do with Abrahamic religion. They're you know very unfortunate. Um and and I just don't I don't even know what to say about that. I mean, like it's some of these places are predominantly Buddhist, which is wild to me, right? Like, or predominantly Hindi, or you know, like that's I still don't understand.

SPEAKER_06 2:02:23

I I I genuinely do not understand.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:02:28

Why do you care?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:29

Why do you care? Right. Yeah, what the fuck?

SPEAKER_06 2:02:31

Who cares if you people of of the same gender are in love? Yeah, why do you care? It's why does it matter?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:39

It's but you know Yemen, Somalia, death penalty. Like, it's wild to me that this still even exists. That in Egypt, evolving, because Egypt does have a lot of trade, has a lot of tourism, has a lot of trade, three years imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 lira.

SPEAKER_06 2:02:59

Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:00

It's the craziest thing. Like, I I we we just spent like two hours talking about all the advancements and where we came from, and like now it's protected. In America, it's protected under the law. There's anti-discrimination that's being fought by a very uh specific group of people, but for the most part, we have like legal protections, school protections, you can't be denied house, any of that kind of shit. You can get married in most states, really every state, but like nobody can tell you what to do in your own house as long as like you're not hurting anybody, but still, all around the world. That's the morbid of this Monday. And I think the only thing that's really gonna stop that is like mass activism.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:45

People should not be condemned for who they love. Yeah, there's no need for that. There, like, there's there's no there's no reason.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:56

Yeah, there isn't, other than like, I got this book that says What are you afraid of? Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:01

Why are you so jealous?

SPEAKER_00 2:04:03

It is kind of whack ass. I don't know. Like to to to to have a death penalty is crazy to me.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:11

For being in a same-sex relationship.

unknown 2:04:14

Ugh.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:15

Pisses me off.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:16

That's my up and down emotional roller coaster of this two-hour and 30-minute long episode. The longest one we've ever done.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:25

I got super lucky being bisexual. Yeah. And being like coming out, coming out to my dad was probably one of the most leak the least traumatic experiences I've ever heard about. My dad was just like, okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:41

Does she make you happy? Yeah. Okay. And that was it.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:45

She has all the coffee's a fruit basket.

SPEAKER_06 2:04:48

Right. Oh my god. It was, it was so. I don't know. I read, I read and hear all these horror stories from people that tr that that are coming clean, are trusting their parents, the people that are supposed to love and protect you no matter what. Like you, you are the genetic legacy of these people.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:11

And coming out to them and being disowned, being beaten, yeah, being thrown kicked out, thrown into like hardcore, like traumatize you straight therapies.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:26

One of those crazy ass fucking uh pray the gay away kind of things.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:30

That's the word I was looking for. Yeah, no. No, no, no religion or organization should try to tear you down.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:39

And if they are, get the fuck out. Yeah. Because you don't want anything to do with that.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:44

But this is this is why for anybody who's listening that's never heard this, this is one of those reasons why people say be gay do crimes.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:50

Yeah.

unknown 2:05:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:51

Sometimes being gay is a crime.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:53

Yeah. Like what it's but it's it's the backlash. It's yeah, you make progress, there's a backlash, but eventually you win. Like that's that's the kind of like long-standing history of this, is that eventually you win.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:08

Listen, I'm not the the largest proponent for stick it out.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:13

If you're being mistreated, get the fuck out.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:15

However, in this particular instance of of resisting the societal religious norm. Hang in there.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:26

Yeah. Yeah. Try to create community where you can. We're big on mutual aid. Um, but that's like grassroots revolution. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you you gotta go find your people. It's it's why so many LGBTQ people f like move to cities as soon as they can, because they go they go find their people, you know, like where you're safe and have network.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:50

And honestly, the internet has probably been a blessing to these communities.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:54

Yeah. So you can't fucking stop it. There's no stopping it. You know what I mean? Like it's just not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:01

We grew up in the in the birth of the digital age, I guess I should say.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:06

Because, you know, we are we are the the last generation that stayed out on the streets until the lights came on, and then like the next year had a computer.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:15

Oh yeah. So dial up noise dialogue noise.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:21

AOL chat rooms.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:23

Good God.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:24

I'm just saying the internet is not necessarily a bad thing. There's bad stuff on the internet, but the internet and the community it can bring you can be a boon. So hang in there. You're not alone.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:34

Yep. Oh man. Anyways, you ready to get out of here?

SPEAKER_06 2:07:40

Yeah, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:41

Yep. Go look up furry art. Just to piss off the people who keep trying to make it illegal.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:49

Why?

SPEAKER_00 2:07:50

Art. I don't know. I don't know. There's all kinds of shit.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:54

The entirety of 90s cartoons, anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:57

Yeah. And people wonder.

SPEAKER_06 2:08:00

Thundercats. All right. Thanks, guys. We'll catch you on the next one.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:05

Bye.