Vulgar History Podcast
Queer Tudor History
September 9, 2026
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster. I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudor era since I was a little girl. This season on the podcast, we’re talking about the notorious Tudors: who they were, the times they lived in and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time. And to be clear, when I say the Tudors, I don’t just mean the actual people of that dynasty, the royals. What is kind of commonly understood when you are reading books about this topic are the people who lived at this time are kind of known as the Tudors, like the people who lived during the reign of Queen Victoria are called the Victorians.
So, today’s episode, we’re talking about queer Tudors, but we’re not talking about members of the actual Tudor family; we’re talking about people who were just living in that time and place, mostly in England. There’s at least one Scottish example we’re going to get into as well. And when we’re talking about queer history on this podcast, my first, my go-to queer historian is one of my favourite guests, Kit Heyam.
This is, I believe, their fifth time showing up on the podcast. I always love our chats, and so when I mentioned those doing the Tudors series and would they like to come on with some examples of what was queer life like during this era, Kit jumped right in so enthusiastically with so many great examples. And so, like, I’m not going to give too much preamble. Kit is one of my favourite people to talk to, and so enjoy this chat with Kit Heyam about queer people of the Tudor era.
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Ann: So, I’m joined for the fifth time by Kit Heyam. Welcome back, Kit!
Kit: Thank you so much. This feels like a total kind of elite privilege to be back on for the fifth time. It’s really, really nice to be with you.
Ann: It’s exciting for me. I like having kind of like a go-to expert for queer history. I’m just like, “Let’s go to Kit, maybe they know something about this,” and if you don’t, you refer me to somebody else. But this is one where you’ve got some people you’re excited to talk about.
Kit: Really excited, yeah. So, like, my background is in early modern history. And can I just say, like, life achievement unlocked if I am your go-to expert for queer history. That’s awesome. But yeah, early modern history is, like, my first love. So, talking about the Tudors is really, really my bag, and I’m especially excited to be able to introduce you to one guy who I think doesn’t get enough shout-outs. Yeah, this is gonna be fab.
Ann: Well, in all the queer history episodes, I have learned there’s sort of like… There’s fun stories of just like dirtbags and messy people just, like, having a nice time and at Vulgar History, we’re all about that. But also, we don’t want to pretend like things weren’t challenging and there wasn’t like shitty, crappy stuff for queer people in history to deal with. So, can we get it out of the way: Henry VIII and his laws?
Kit: Yeah, I was thinking we should start with the bad guy. Henry VIII is really the reason that queer people, not just in Tudor times, but for centuries afterwards in England and Wales, have a terrible time. He is the first guy to criminalize sex between men in England. And that’s not because you could just do it before 1533 when he brought in the Buggery Act; it’s because what he was doing was taking it out of church control and bringing it under state control. So, in a way, like, the queers are kind of collateral damage in his Reformation process, because he kind of uses the Buggery Act as a bit of, like, a test case for what can he take away from the church without anybody reacting badly, because 1533 is, like, a significant date in the Reformation process. So, that’s the year when he’s married to Catherine of Aragon is annulled. He doesn’t pass the Act of Supremacy, where he actually breaks away from the church, until 1534. So, 1533, this is him, like, dipping his toe in the water of what can I take for myself from the church or the state?
The Buggery Act is a really good test case because… Well, for several reasons, actually. First of all, because if anyone objects to him criminalizing this, he can turn around and be like, “Why do you care? Is there something you want to tell me?” So, it’s a great thing that, like, no one can object to. And also, it is a really, really good thing to have in your arsenal when you’re trying to take control of all the monasteries, because if you accuse all of the monks of buggery, which very much was a tactic in smearing all of the monasteries, then you are able to take their stuff. It’s actually written into the Buggery Act that if you are convicted, you don’t get to pass on your possessions to your heirs or the next generation; they all go to the state. That is written in there basically for the purpose of stealing everything that he can’t get from the monasteries. So, he is criminalizing sex between men, not so much because he hates the queers as because he wants to take control of everything that the church had control of, including his money.
Ann: Well, and because the church at this point, it is, like, sex-segregated places. A monastery is all men; a convent is all women. And he’s just like, “But what if these were places I owned and I had all your things?” So, this is sort of a way to just get those properties, right? Like, that’s part of it?
Kit: Exactly. Exactly. And like, don’t get me wrong, some of them are probably… Some of those monks probably were, you know? Some of those nuns probably were. This is one of the things that you can do if you are someone who is attracted to people of your gender in the early modern period, pre-dissolution of the monasteries, is you could take holy oaths and then, like, you have a lot more proximity to those people, and you avoid having to marry someone who you’re not attracted to. So, you know, there’s queerness in those institutions, but that’s not really what Henry is bothered about.
Ann: No. And I think this is… It reminds me a bit, coming up in a few weeks, I’m going to be doing a whole series about Anne Boleyn and her situation. But it’s in terms of, like, this isn’t queer stuff, but when they alleged that she had an incestual relationship with her brother. Like, when you want to take someone down, you just kind of throw a sexual charge in there too, just as kind of like a way to just really try to ruin their name. So, I feel like this is kind of the same thing where Henry has a goal and he’s like, “Let’s just smear their name by, like, putting in a sexual thing.”
Kit: Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent the same thing. And it’s interesting, it’s like buggery in the original Buggery Act is not defined. It’s literally just “A detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast.” So, like, it’s just nebulous sexual bad stuff. And like, the first guy actually who’s not a monk to be convicted under the Buggery Act, he’s a straight man who is abusing his daughter. So, like, it’s not at all just restricted to same-sex stuff.
Ann: Oh, okay! So, buggery is just kind of like anything… If you have an enemy and you want to take them down, you can just be like, “Oh, that’s buggery. I define it as that.” Like, it’s vague. Okay.
Kit: Yeah. And I guess that kind of reflects – and this is like a useful thing, I guess, that underlies thinking about early modern queerness anyway, which I’m sure people in other episodes have talked about as well – in this period, the way they think about sex is not to divide it into straight and gay, it’s to divide it into acceptable sex, which is missionary, for babies, within marriage, and then unacceptable sex, which is literally everything else. So, you know, that massive baggy category, it does include queer stuff, but it also includes, like, the wrong position, or sex for fun, or sex outside marriage, or sex work… Anything.
Ann: Yeah. Well, because… What was I looking at? Oh, no! I was… Anyway. [laughs] I’ve been reading a lot of Tudor stuff and I know that he also had laws, he criminalized brothels. He was just kind of like, if you’re doing sex for not procreative marriage purposes, Henry VIII is just like, “Knock that off. Don’t be doing that.” He was closing brothels! Like, what do you care? But he was.
Kit: Which is absolutely wild, considering his own behaviour. [laughs]
Ann: I mean…!
Kit: If you’re doing sex for not procreative purposes, but you’re marrying, like, a 19-year-old when you’re in your sixties. No, thank you.
Ann: Yeah. And how many illegitimate children he’s having. Anyway. But he was just, I don’t know, it’s so modern, like 2026-coded, to just try and be controlling what other people are doing in the bedroom. Where it’s just like, don’t you have other things to be doing? Aren’t you the King? Are you at war? Like, why is this your preoccupation? Come on!
Kit: I know. Aren’t there rebellions in your country? [laughs] And I think, you know, part of this, a small part of this, but part of this, is genuine religious conviction. Like, Henry does think God is punishing him by not giving him a son, and so some of the Reformation, not all of it, but some of it is, like, Henry genuinely trying to do what he thinks God wants, and maybe the punishing sexual sinners is a little part of that. But it’s also massively opportunistic, obviously, in all the ways we’ve talked about.
Ann: Well, exactly. Like, he’s making money off of this. So, yeah, it’s kind of religious reasons, but also let’s make a bit of money.
But moving away from Henry VIII, who is truly the villain of this whole Tudor series. Nothing I’ve ever heard or read about him makes me not hate him. Everything he did is just odious to me. So, he’s making these laws, but people are having a nice time anyway. People are doing their own stuff. So, tell me about this poet who you’re such a fan of, Richard Barnfield.
Kit: Richard Barnfield, who really should be, like, you know, forget Shakespeare. I know we’re going to talk a little bit about Shakespeare, but when we’re talking about early modern literary bangers, we really, really should be talking more about Richard Barnfield.
So, he’s an Elizabethan poet. He was born in 1574, and in 1594, so he’s 20, he publishes this poem called The Affectionate Shepherd, and it is the most homoerotic thing that you will ever read from this period. I mean, there are many metaphors. There are metaphors of being stung by a wasp. “I’m your beehive, and you can be my bee.” There are metaphors of, “You can suck my sweet and my fair flower, which now is ripe and full of honeyberries.” And of course, when you read this in early modern print, like, ‘suck’ has a long S, which looks a lot more like an F, which I do not think is a coincidence.
It is an amazingly homoerotic poem, which is made more hilarious by the fact that just a couple of months after he publishes this poem, The Affectionate Shepherd, he publishes a collection of sonnets, which are all also homoerotic. They’re from the persona Daphnis, who is like a fictional shepherd, to an unspecified boy. So, they’re all explicitly homoerotic sonnets and have some, fascinatingly, like, obsessive homoerotic imagery. There’s one where he wishes that he was this guy’s pillow so that he could just watch him sleep, which is amazing, but creepy.
Ann: I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, but like, do you recall what now-King Charles wrote about Camilla at one time?
Kit: Yeah.
Ann: And the phone call? “I wish I was your tampon.”
Kit: I really think that Richard Barnfield, [laughs] if he’d…
Ann: I feel like, is that an influence? Like, Charles is a very well-read person. [chuckles]
Kit: Oh my god. [laughs] No. I think if there had been tampons and if Barnfield had wanted to sleep with someone who used tampons, I think he might well have used that image. [laughs]
Ann: He was just availing himself of every metaphor.
Kit: Literally.
Ann: Okay, okay. So, he wishes he was the pillow, et cetera.
I wanted to ask: his works, he’s a poet, you’re saying he’s publishing books. So, like, Shakespeare’s writing plays, and they’re performing them. Richard Barnfield, like, how many people… Who is the audience of a published work of poetry in this era? Other poets or…?
Kit: Yeah, other poets, but also the general public. So, like, sonnets are popular, and this poem, The Affectionate Shepherd, it’s written as an “imitation” of a Latin poem by the Roman poet Virgil, which was super popular. So, Virgil wrote this set of poems called the Eclogues, which are like pastoral poems. The second one of them, very gay; it’s like an unrequited love lament of a shepherd for a beautiful man. And so, Barnfield kind of styles The Affectionate Shepherd as an imitation of that.
Basically, anyone who went to grammar school – so anyone like, middle-class and above kind of thing in early modern England – they would have read that Virgil poem. So, anyone who went to grammar school is potentially buying this poem, recognizing it, saying, “Oh yeah, this is like a modern update of this poem that I read at school.” And poetry is more popular, I’d say, in the early modern period than it is today.
Ann: So, are people buying them, just like, an individual poem, like as a pamphlet? That sort of thing? It’s not like a bound book of poems. It’s like, oh! A poem! And you can just buy it.
Kit: It’s a long poem. So, like, you know, it is one poem, but it’s a book. [laughs]
Ann: Oh, okay! So, it’s a book. Okay, got it.
Kit: Yeah, yeah. Or as I say, a collection of sonnets. Yeah, what is kind of interesting about that is, like, a lot of people used this, “I’m just imitating this Roman poet Virgil,” as like, an excuse to be able to write homoerotic stuff permissibly. So, like, Marlowe did it. We might talk about Marlowe in a little bit, but if people know the poem that he wrote, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, “Come live with me, and be my love; and we will all the pleasures prove,” blah, blah, blah, blah, people take that as, like, the passionate shepherd to his female love. That is a gay poem. That is the passionate shepherd to his male love. We know that because it is, again, an imitation of that Virgil poem.
So, like, Barnfield is imitating Virgil in order to be allowed to write gay stuff, but what we find out from what he says about that poem afterwards is The Affectionate Shepherd was too gay, even for an imitation of Virgil. So, he writes this preface to his sonnet book, which comes out two months after The Affectionate Shepherd, where he’s like, “Some people accused me of writing about a shepherd being in love with a boy, a fault which I will not excuse because I never made.” So, like, he never really apologizes for it. He’s just like, “I didn’t do that. It’s actually just an imitation of Virgil’s second eclogue.” Virgil’s second eclogue is about a shepherd who loves a boy – and when I say boy, I mean, like, young man, not a child in this context. So, he’s really, really tongue-in-cheek, being like, “I wasn’t writing about love of a shepherd to a boy, I was imitating this Roman poem,” but the Roman poem is about the love of a shepherd to a boy.
Ann: But that’s interesting too, to show that he had the poem, and then we can see, like, this is the feedback he got, to the point that he wrote this preface being like, “Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa! [chuckles] You think this? Sorry you feel that way,” sort of thing.
Kit: Yeah, it is a very “Sorry you feel that way,” kind of apology. And then yeah, it’s the preface too. These sonnets, which are like, “I love this man so much, I wish I was his pillow.” So, I just, you know, he’s like, “Sorry, you feel that way. I’m going to actually continue being very gay.”
Ann: Yeah! Do you know anything, or do we know anything about him and his life at all? Or we just know these are the poems he wrote and we’re kind of, like, making some guesses about what he got up to?
Kit: There’s one other thing we know, which reinforces, I think, the idea that the poems he wrote did reflect in some way the things he got up to. So,1598, so three years after he publishes his very gay sonnets, his dad draws up legal documents to disinherit Richard. He doesn’t actually confirm those documents. He draws them up, he has it drafted, “I’m going to disinherit you,” he doesn’t actually implement it, until, in 1602, four years later, Richard’s younger brother, Robert, gets married. At that point, those disinheritance documents go into effect. There’s sort of two interpretations of that.
One is maybe “I really want to disinherit Richard, but I want to make sure that Robert’s going to have some heirs to pass on to, so I won’t implement that disinheritance until I know that Robert’s married.” The other interpretation is these disinheritance documents are like a threat, and they are, “Richard, get your act together, get married to a woman. If you don’t get married before your younger brother, you’re disinherited.” And then, when the younger brother does get married first, that disinheritance gets implemented. As far as we know, Richard never gets married.
Ann: You said, like, the poems would be read by people who went to university and stuff like that. Was Richard Barnfield, was he… What’s the lifestyle of a person in Tudor times who is able to, like, write and publish poems? Like, he’s clearly wealthy to some extent, I would presume?
Kit: Yeah. I’d think he can make a living from the dedications on his poems, and he did study law as well. We don’t know if he practiced any law, but like, he did study it, so he might be making a living from that too. He’s actually, like, it’s not just anyone who went to university. Probably anyone who went to, like, grammar school – so secondary school, high school – would have been able to read them as well. So, I don’t think he’s like, well off, well off, but he can certainly… He’s not hand-to-mouth either, you know. He’s living okay as far as we can tell.
Ann: Well, and I forget, like, he is making money off of the publications of these poems. It’s not just… It’s not just like me doing this podcast. This is like, his career.
Kit: Yeah. It’s not like publishing poetry now. [laughs]
Ann: Exactly. Where it’s just like, “Oh, that’s nice.” This is actually… The same with, like, Shakespeare is making money; he published sonnets and stuff too. When the theatres closed for plague, it’s like, “Well, I’ve got to publish something, so I’m going to write some books.” So, clearly people were buying these things.
Kit: Yeah. And what you do as well with poetry and with any publications really in this period is you also dedicate them to a powerful person in the hope that that powerful person will give you money. So, Barnfield publishes a couple of books of poetry later on, which he dedicates to powerful people, and so, like, they may have given him money as like a, “Thank you for dedicating this lovely book to me.”
Ann: Do you remember how you… Because I’ve never heard of him, and like, I’m medium aware of what’s up in Tudor era. Like, how did you come across Richard Barnfield?
Kit: I came across Richard Barnfield because I was looking for queers. Queer critics have published a fair bit on him. But when I was at university, I was custy about the queers because I was introduced to Christopher Marlowe’s play, Edward II, which we might go on to talk about a little bit more, in my first year of uni, just actually as a comparison to Shakespeare, not in its own right, just like “Read this and compare it to a Shakespeare play.” And I was, like, blown away by how explicitly queer it was. I had no idea I was going to find anything explicitly queer in that earlier period. So, when I had to write a dissertation, I was like, “I want to go back and see if there’s more here.” So, I read a few books, actually by Paul Hammond, who was the guy who became my PhD supervisor later on, about love and sex between men in early modern England, and he talked about Barnfield, and so I went and read his work cover to cover. I was like, “Why is no one talking about this man? Why is no one talking about it?”
Ann: Yeah! Well, that’s the thing I love. I love this about queer history. People like yourself are just, like, finding and unearthing these people because it’s like, finding evidence of queer lives in the past is so affirming, I think, to see your own experience, or experience like yours, reflected. So, it’s like last week in the podcast, we were talking with Ashley Douglas about Marie Maitland, and she said something similar. Like, when she read this poem, she’s like, “Oh my God, this is so sapphic. Why has nobody else noticed this before?” And it’s exciting!
Kit: Yeah. And I think what I love about Barnfield is, like, how ballsy he is about the queerness. So, like, that non-apology for writing it. The way that The Affectionate Shepherd is written, it’s like this kind of incredibly lush description of this beautiful man with golden hair, with pearls dripping down. He’s clearly really, really enjoying describing how hot he thinks men are, and yeah, I really love not only the queerness, but the real indulgence in the queerness.
Ann: Yes! Yeah. The fun.
Kit: Yeah, exactly.
Ann: So, you mentioned Christopher Marlowe, and I think we need to talk about that a bit. So, actually, two things. I know that you’ve recently written about Edward II as well. I don’t know who that is at all.
Kit: Cool.
Ann: So, Marlowe wrote a play about Edward II. Marlowe is like, I think… Well, what do we know about him, his sexuality?
Kit: Yeah. Officially, we don’t know that much. I think we know a fair bit. So yeah, Marlowe, he’s contemporary with Richard Barnfield, but he died young. He dies, like, before his thirtieth birthday.
Ann: Stabbed. Stabbed in a bar fight.
Kit: And not at all bumped off by the state due to his spying activities.
Ann: Nope! Nope. That’s not why, nope. Just random stabbing the eye in a bar.
Kit: Yeah. So, I’ll get to Edward II, but like, the first couple of things he publishes and the first things he becomes famous for are poems. I mentioned that poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, “Come live with me and be my love.” If you’ve seen it ever as, like, a shepherd addressing a shepherdess or anything like that, complete rubbish. That is a gay poem about a man.
He also wrote a well-known long poem called Hero and Leander, which is like a reworking of a classical story about a guy called Leander who drowns swimming across the water to try and see this beautiful woman, Hero. But what is hilarious about this poem is Hero is beautiful in terms of her clothes. So, like, Marlowe is much more interested in what she’s wearing; he basically doesn’t talk about what she looks like at all. Leander, on the other hand, I literally wrote this down so I could quote it: “Even as delicious meat is to the taste so was his neck in touching.” That is extraordinary homoerotic, I think. It’s like, his breast is so smooth, and his belly is so white, and he talks about the heavenly path that runs upon his back. Really, really detailed description of this guy’s naked body. [chuckles]
Ann: Yeah. And then the woman is just kind of like, “Her outfit, slayed. She looked amazing. Her makeup was great.” It’s like, [both laugh] okay, yeah.
Kit: Literally, yeah. There’s a great bit in Hero and Leander where Leander is swimming across the ocean, and the God Neptune starts to flirt with him, and Leander’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, you got me wrong. I’m not a woman.” And Neptune’s like, “I didn’t think you were a woman. That’s the whole point.” [Ann laughs]
So, there’s that, and then there’s Edward II. And yeah, I guess a quick background on Edward II for folks. He’s a 14th-century English king; my first historical love, I wrote my PhD on him. He was reputed in his lifetime and after his death to be in relationships with his male favourites. So, Marlowe writes a history play about him in about 1592, as I mentioned, really explicitly clear from the very beginning. The first scene, we have Edward’s favourite, Piers Gaveston, talking about how he can’t wait to die on Edward’s bosom, and I’m sure this has come up before in an early modern history podcast, but when we say die, we are not talking stop living, we are talking orgasm.
Ann: Okay. That has not come up!
Kit: That is what that means in the early modern context.
Ann: Thank you.
Kit: So, French term, “little death.” If you see “die” in an early modern poem, like, think they’re probably not talking about actual death.
Ann: Okay. So, this is curious to me because, like, we’re going to talk about Shakespeare in a bit because I have some questions to get your opinion on. But when we’re talking about the audiences who go to see this play, they’re all just like… Are they getting that meaning? Are they just being like, “Oh, this is a play about some gay guys. Okay, we like a play. This is fun.”
Kit: Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. They’re definitely getting that meaning. And the thing with Edward II’s narrative, by the time we get to the 16th century, is it is a really emotionally compelling narrative in lots of different ways. So, it perfectly fits what medieval and early modern readers liked as a kind of wheel of fortune structure. So, you might sometimes have seen a picture of, like, a wheel of fortune with fortune in the middle, and the king is sort of rising up clockwise on one side, and at the top of the wheel, when he’s like at the height of his power, he’s got his crown on, he’s smiling, and then he’s, like, tumbling down with his crown falling off. That’s exactly basically Edward II’s narrative structure. He’s happy, he’s in love, he gets to the height of his power, he wins battles, he wins civil wars against his own nobles and executes his own cousin, and then he manages to piss off his wife so much that she leaves the country, goes back to France where she comes from, reinvades England, and deposes him.
Ann: Wait, who is his wife? I might know her.
Kit: This is Isabella, and I bet you know her.
Ann: The She-Wolf!
Kit: Yeah!
Ann: Okay, yeah. Okay, see, my history is always just, I know the wives. The kings are all called the same thing, I’m just like, “Can’t tell them apart.” But she’s… Okay, got it.
Kit: So, she’s a badass, and this is her hapless husband. [laughs]
Ann: Okay. This is her gay husband who is just kind of having a… We’ll get to this too, later on. I have so much foreshadowing, but a bit of like a James I/VI-Anne of Denmark’s type marriage where he’s just like, having a nice time with his favourites, and she’s like, “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be the king?”
Kit: Yeah, it is a very, very similar vibe. And actually James gets compared to Edward II a lot during his lifetime, which he hates because, of course, what happened to Edward II is he got deposed and murdered, and James is like, “Excuse me. What are you threatening?” [laughs]
Ann: [laughs] So, Marlowe’s writing this play. And this is my question about Shakespearean plays. I’m just more familiar with Shakespearean plays than other playwrights of the era, like I think a lot of people are. So, this is the era where women’s roles are played by young men, right? Women are not on stage. But so many of Shakespeare’s plays have a plot line where it’s, like, the female character goes in disguise as a man, and then a man falls… There’s so much like, it’s a queer narrative of just, like, it’s a woman pretending to be a man, but being played by a man and then a man falls in love, and they think it’s a woman. So, I feel like the audiences must have had some sophisticated understanding or acceptance of gender play, like, just from watching these shows in order to get the jokes.
Kit: Yeah. I mean, there’s loads to say about this. One thing to say is they find the queerness of that funny as well. Like, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It is the best example. When Rosalind goes as a man for part of the play, the name that she picks is Ganymede. Ganymede, in the early modern period, is a word for a man who has sex with men. So, like, she picks that name, and then she’s flirting with men and, like, the audience are laughing ‘cause that’s gay. [laughs] Like, it’s very, very much a gay joke.
Yeah, I think what all of this, kind of, gender swapping in early modern theatre shows us is… Well, it shows us several things. One of them is that audiences definitely have the ability to understand gender as separable from bodies, and obviously, like, that’s an important point for understanding how they could comprehend transness in a period before we had terminology around that. But also, there’s been lots of research done to show that, like, boy was kind of a different gender from man anyway. Like, the historian Will Fisher has a really good line about this. “A boy wearing a beard is as much in drag as a boy wearing a dress,” and that’s a really, I think, clear way to understand how, yes, they had a really sophisticated understanding of gender play, but also that’s complicated even further by the fact that, like, younger people are kind of differently gendered from older people in this period anyway.
So, I mean, all that means that, like, when they’re watching this play about Edward II, because you said earlier, like, “Are they cool with these sympathetic gay men?” Like, yeah. Marlowe writes Edward and his boyfriend, Piers Gaveston, he writes them like beautiful, tragic love scenes where your heart breaks for them. And then he writes Edward this really tragic, sympathetic imprisonment scene, where he’s basically being tortured in prison before he’s murdered, and then he has this awful murder scene. And like, the audience definitely go away not so much thinking that they’ve seen, like, a gay man justly punished for his sins, but thinking like, “Oh God, shit. This is a person, and I feel emotionally for this person, regardless of what they’re doing sexually,” in part because they don’t really see gay people as, like, a separate category; they just think that everyone has the capacity for gayness within them. So, it’s not like now where we have, you know, a straight person will be like, “Well, I don’t have the capacity for gayness because I’m straight.” It’s more like, everyone has the capacity to do this. It’s just that some people are better at restraining themselves from it than others.
Ann: Yeah. And that’s the sort of thing, like, when I’m reading about queer history to wrap my head around because, you know, I grew up in the 20th century, and it’s the 21st century, and it’s kind of like where it’s like, you’re gay, or you’re straight, or you’re trans, or you’re cis, and it’s kind of “These are the categories.” So, to try to apply that— Especially, like, we’re talking about the Tudor era, but if you look at the ancient Greeks or the ancient Romans, it’s like, you have an affair, you’re sleeping with a man, or you’re sleeping with a woman, and it’s not like that makes you bisexual, that makes you gay. It’s like, that’s just kind of what’s up. So, the Tudors are a bit more in that direction where this is not your identity; this is just what you happen to be doing today.
Kit: Yeah, a hundred percent. And so, yeah, like I say, they have this word Ganymede, which basically means a bottom in early modern English or French. But that is just about what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean that, like, you’re a specific type of person.
As for Marlowe’s own sexuality, yeah, I think all of those speak to what Marlowe was thinking, but we also have a little piece of suspect information from a guy called Richard Baines, who was, like, a fellow spy who shared a room with Marlowe. He accuses Marlowe of saying that Jesus and St. John were… What’s the phrase? “Jesus used St. John as the sinners of Sodom,” and “All who love not boys and tobacco are fools.” Now, whether he said these things, like, who can say? But I do think that given all of the stuff we read in his plays and his poetry, like, not implausible.
Ann: Yeah, it’s such a… To prove something by the absence of something else is what a lot of… Are you? Sorry, your video is loading, but you can still hear me? Okay. But yeah, to just be like, “Well, all we have are the plays,” and I think the plays are quite significant and show what he was thinking, where we’re like, “Well, we don’t know… Was he?” It’s like, well, why can’t we just assume that he was? It’s weird to not, for me.
Kit: Yeah. No, I think you’re totally right, because we assume otherwise that everyone is straight until proven otherwise, even if a lot of the time all the evidence we have is there, written text as well. And if we think about it, like, what is evidence that someone had sex in the past? Like, pre-sex tapes, what are we going to do? In a way, like, the era in which we could be certain that someone had had sex with someone else has kind of been and gone. We’re in the age of AI and deepfakes now, so we no longer have that certainty. That period where we could be certain that we had evidence of one person having sex with another person was a period that we’re now out of, I think.
Ann: Well, it’s kind of like, in this era, the only way you can prove that anyone had sex full stop is like if a woman becomes pregnant. It’s like, “Well, that person clearly had sex. But with who? We don’t know.” But also just, like, sexuality is not about… You can be gay and be a virgin. Like, it’s such a… To me, it just makes sense to presume Marlowe was probably a queer man. Like, why would you not assume that?
Kit: Yeah. And I do honestly, I think a lot of the people in the past who fought really hard against that assumption have been people who thought that that was kind of an insult. Like, we shouldn’t assume he’s gay because that would say something bad about him. It always comes from a homophobic place.
Ann: Right, yeah. Well, and what about Shakespeare? Because there’s stuff about… He wrote various sonnets, and it’s like, “Who did he write the sonnets about?” And, you know, there’s all these arguments, but some of them do seem to be aimed romantically towards men, right?
Kit: Oh, yeah. I mean, so Shakespeare, yeah, he publishes his book of 154 sonnets in 1609. 126 of those 154 are thought to be to a male addressee. It’s not a small number. And many of the most famous ones are to a man. So, like, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It’s to a man.
The clearest one, I think, I mean, there’s lots that are like, “Sweet boy, lovely boy. You’re so beautiful.” But I think the clearest and queerest one is Sonnet 20, which is the one that starts “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion,” which is incredibly trans as well as incredibly gay. It’s got this sort of complicated metaphor where it’s like, “Nature thought you were so hot that she gave you a penis,” and then he says, “That penis is to my purpose, nothing.” Which could mean, like, “It’s kind of annoying that you’ve got a penis because it means I can’t marry you.” But nothing also means a vulva in early modern English. So, it could also mean like, “I will treat your penis as if it were a vulva,” which is very trans.
Ann: All these words! All these words have these meanings that are… To die and nothing. Okay, it’s a word just means something completely different. Noted.
Kit: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the more you think about ‘nothing’ as slang for vulva, the more misogynistic it is. Like, ‘thing’ is penis, ‘nothing’ is vulva. That’s how you’re defined, by your absence of a penis. But yeah, like, there’s a lot of slang, I guess, to write about sex because then you always have plausible deniability that maybe you weren’t writing about sex.
Ann: True. You know, and this just reminds me so much of the Marie Maitland poems as well, where it’s just like, “Oh, it’s just poems. It’s just words.” Like, you could just be like, “Oh, I was just drawing from metaphor, from something else. That was in my own…” Yeah, the plausible deniability.
Kit: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, Shakespeare, I mean, similarly to Marlowe, the texts are what we have as evidence. But I think something else we know about Shakespeare is the amount of time he spent on purpose living away from his wife. And sure, he had the really good excuse of, like, “My work is in London. You live in the Midlands. I need to be in London where the theatres are.” But he was moving in circles where all of these younger men were passing as women on the stage and where there’s been – I was talking a little bit about this earlier, but just to say a little bit more, the other historian who’s done really interesting work on the gender swapping on the early modern stage is Simone Chess. She’s found that, like, people who played women’s roles on the stage, they could sort of never go back to being normative straight men on the stage afterwards. Like, they were always seen as kind of queer-coded; even when they’d, like, passed puberty, they were given the queer-coded adult male roles. So, what that means is, basically, Shakespeare was moving in a very queer world in London, and he was spending a lot of time away from his wife.
Ann: Well, like today, if you think about the world of theatre, it’s such a queer world. That’s just who is drawn to that lifestyle, it tends to be a lot of people, artistic people, which is a lot of queer people. So, it’s just that’s where he chose to spend his time, I think is also… But also those theatres are in the region where the brothels and things are happening. It’s just kind of like, the cool part of London.
Kit: Yeah, no, definitely. And so, it’s a world also where, because you’re in the red-light district effectively, like, people’s threshold for sexual morality changes. I guess the Overton window for sexual behaviour, like, shifts a bit when you’re in that environment.
Ann: That would make sense too, if those are the people going to the plays, you want to have jokes that they’ll find funny if these are the people living in this neighbourhood and this is kind of what they’re experiencing.
Kit: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, yeah. I think given that context about Shakespeare’s life, and given the stuff that he wrote, I don’t think that you write 126 sonnets to someone you call “a lovely boy” and remain completely straight. I don’t think that’s something that you do.
Ann: Something else I’m curious to get your take on is, if we’re talking about the Tudor era as a whole, like, we get into the reign of Elizabeth I, who famously doesn’t marry, and she has a very famous speech where she’s like, “I might look like a woman, but I have the heart of a man.” Just in terms of gender challenge and, like, what is your body, and who are you on the inside? Like, what do you think about that, her presentation?
Kit: I mean, I think this is really interesting. I have been cancelled in The Daily Telegraph for saying this before, but I don’t think The Daily Telegraph listen that much to your podcast, so [laughs] fingers crossed we’ll be all right. But yeah, I mean, I think that this is trans history. When I say that, I don’t mean that Elizabeth I identified as a man, but I do mean that power and authority in this period were male-coded. And so, when Elizabeth says, “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king,” which she may or may not have said in those exact words, because it’s a speech that’s published, like, a decade or so after she said it. But still, when she says something like that, and when she refers to herself as a prince rather than a queen, she is saying, “I am taking on these male-coded attributes. I can be male despite my body.” Again, like, the gender is separable from the body and is kind of something that you can put on and off as it becomes politically expedient.
Ann: Well, and I think that’s why we’ve talked on this podcast before, and you talk about in your book Before We Were Trans, just kind of like, when we’re talking trans history, it’s an expansive thing, and it’s just kind of people who are— Well, how would you describe it? Just people who are living not within strictly prescribed gender presentation roles? Because there’s like, on the one hand, you have a woman who might put on trousers to escape and then run away, but she’s just in disguise, and there’s nothing… There’s something transgressive about that in that era. And then, you’ve got somebody who lives as another gender. Like, it’s a whole thing. Trans is not just one thing. Can you talk about that a bit?
Kate: Yeah. I mean, I wrote Before We Were Trans exactly to kind of tackle these cases where, like, a lot of the time, you know, that woman who puts on trousers, we have no idea what’s going through her head, or their head, or his head, or whatever. I think that it’s helpful to define trans history as any history that shows us that we can separate gender from the body, because that shows us trans ways of thinking, but doesn’t require us to label individuals who I wouldn’t want to, from an ethical perspective, label unless I knew how they were thinking of themselves. So, I think that, for me, that distinction between trans history – which shows us that we’ve always been able to think in trans ways and conceive of transness – and trans people – which are people who use the word trans about themselves – I think that’s a really important distinction.
Ann: Yeah. And so, when we’re talking about… I think Jen Manion in her book talks about, like, transing, which is just kind of like, here’s a word that we can just use as an overarching thing for just this whole situation. Like you said, we’re not diagnosing somebody as queer or as trans in the past, but we’re just saying, like, this is the umbrella, and all kinds of experiences fit within this.
But yeah, like I think, because queer history and trans history is still, to me, something I’m learning more about all the time, and so people listening, I think it’s good just to introduce them to, it’s a whole umbrella of experiences. We’re looking at eras and times where people didn’t define themselves as we do now. So, I try to be just, like, as open as possible to calling something… Like Elizabeth’s speech, yeah, that’s queer history, that’s trans history. Not to say that she’s a trans person, but she’s challenging what is gender, and that’s trans, right?
Kit: Yeah, I think so, absolutely. And I think also what is really cool about this kind of way of looking at history is that you can hold multiple possibilities alongside each other. So, you know, saying that we think that this speech by Elizabeth I is trans history does not also preclude thinking about Elizabeth I simultaneously in lots and lots of different ways. The same with all these people that we’re talking about in terms of sexuality, we can understand their sexuality in lots of different ways simultaneously, and the important thing is raising the queer possibility, especially because living in a cis heteronormative society, if we don’t name that possibility, it’s not going to, like, naturally occur to people.
Ann: Yeah, well, and it’s right, what I said and then what you said about, like, you know, the woman putting on trousers in history where it’s like… I’m thinking especially there’s some movies, some historical movies from, like, the 1940s and ‘50s where it’s just like, “This actress looks gorgeous in trousers. Let’s have her…” [both chuckle] So, it’s like, on the one hand, that character’s portrayed as ultra-feminine, very beautiful, so much makeup, hair done, but it’s like, oh, but it’s the way that you can have an actress in trousers in a film. Like, that sort of thing versus, why would women do this in history?
And this is also like, if we can talk about this a bit, this was an era where there’s the sumptuary laws and stuff. It’s like, it’s illegal to dress fancier than how wealthy you are. And I think it’s also… Wearing trousers, that’s why people do this in Shakespeare plays. It’s like, well, if you’re wearing trousers, then people just assume you’re a man because only men wear trousers. Like, the way you dress was so prescriptive then, and I think that’s interesting.
Kit: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, to the extent that, as you say, there are laws about who can wear what, there are particularly, like, hats with a kind of nexus of identity in lots of ways. They are the sign of class; they are the sign of gender. So, when you get people wearing clothes of the “wrong” gender – and I’ve read about this in other places – like, to wear those clothes is to transform yourself, is to change your sex in a really literal sense, because sex in this period is this huge, baggy term that means not only your body, but also the way… who you are, and how you live in society, and how you dress, and the friends you have. It’s closer to what we see as gender today, but I think even wider than that actually.
Ann: This is where I find it… Like, I find it really interesting to look back. For instance, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was in Scotland being the queen, she and her friends would, like, disguise themselves as men with fake mustaches sometimes and go walking down the street and be like, “Oh-ho! We are young men. Don’t worry about it.” Where it’s like, that was really transgressive for the time.
Kit: Yeah. And the kind of thing that you could probably only get away with if you were in an incredible position of power. [laughs]
Ann: Yeah, it’s interesting. Well, because then, this leads to, and we don’t need to get into this too much, but Mary, Queen of Scots’s son, James, who… Well, first of all, you’ve done… There’s this plaque. Can you just explain sort of the background of that and kind of his queer identity as it’s seen?
Kit: Yeah. So, I’ve been really privileged to be able to work on this recently. There’s a museum in London, the Queen’s House, which was Anne of Denmark’s palace that James built for her to say, sorry for shouting at her when she shot his dog, which is an interesting microcosm of an interesting relationship. But in that house, they have a lot of portraits and two of the portraits, they have a one of James – so, this is James VI of Scotland, who becomes the I of England – and one of the man he called his wife, George Villiers, he Duke of Buckingham. The curator at the Queen’s House recently moved those portraits to face each other, to be opposite each other, and to celebrate that, they wanted a new label that was explicitly queer.
So, I did some work with them to come up with a label that was explicitly queer, but only said stuff that we could definitely footnote. Because as we’ve talked about, like, there is no such thing as evidence for sex in the past. Like, Anne of Denmark had kids; we know that means she had sex with someone, we do not know that that someone was James. There is as much evidence that James had sex with Anne of Denmark as there is that he had sex with these men. [laughs] So, we wanted to only say things that we could footnote. But thankfully, there were plenty of those because James wrote quite a lot of letters, and so we could say he had two people he called wife, one was Anne of Denmark, the other was George Villiers. We could say they shared a bed, we could say they attracted attention with their kisses and embraces and love. And so, we were able to, you know, essentially say these two men were in a relationship, but without actually saying it.
Those letters, they are, I think, very explicit. James kind of, he often signs his letters, “Your Dear Dad,” which I think we should read as ‘Daddy.’ He says that he feels like a widow when he’s apart from Villiers. There’s one letter where he’s “Meet me at two o’clock the next day, but for God’s sake, let no creature see this letter.” There’s another letter where they talk about sharing a bed, there’s another one where they talk about surfeiting, like overflowing, by means of a “noble hand.” I think that that is a letter about a hand job. [both laugh] So yeah, there is actually lots and lots of stuff in the letters, which enables you to be pretty explicit while still being able to get it past the higher-ups of the museum by footnoting absolutely everything.
Ann: I’ve been doing… I’m just in the midst of researching… My next book is going to be about Anne of Denmark, so I’ve been reading about James a bunch.
Kit: So exciting.
Ann: Oh, it’s really— It’s so interesting, but I’m just like, “Argh! I have to read about James.” Like, if I hate Henry VIII, I’m just like, “Oh, God damn it, James.” But he’s at least got some various traumas where I’m, like, I have some sympathy for him. Like, he survived so many assassination attempts before the age of 10. He went through a lot. But I did find it funny, just in the context of how his queer identity is being more and more recognized, that you see the letters about him as a young teenage boy, and people are like, “Oh, he’s so Christian. He’s never lusting after women. He never gets crushes on women. What a good Christian young man this is,” where it’s like, “Mm! I think I know why he’s not lusting after women, and I don’t think it’s because he’s chaste.” So, like, at what point people realize, like… The rumours do pivot. At first, like, “Oh, he’s such a godly young man,” to being like, “Why isn’t he married?”
Kit: “Why is he so close to this man, and then this man, and then this man?”
Ann: Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, all he does is just spend time with his school friend. Hmm! Yeah, there’s a lot of weirdness there. But in the context of James, there’s an episode from a few weeks ago with the women from Witches of Scotland. We were talking about the Scottish witch hunts and stuff, and that’s where I encountered the name Christian Caddell, which I mentioned to you. Had you ever come across…? I think you said you hadn’t come across them.
Kit No! And this is a cool story. I was looking for academic sources on this story and found nothing. Like, the information is out there, but no one seems to have analyzed this from an academic perspective, as far as I could tell in my search in advance of this podcast. So, it’s pretty cool. There’s some work to be done, I think.
So, this is, I mean, you know the story. Christian Caddell is a witch-pricker, so a witch-finder by means of poking with a pin, who went as a witch-pricker under the name of John Dickson. This is a very well-paid job. You get six shillings a day; you get six pounds per witch. And also, handy thing about being a witch-pricker is it exempts you from potential witchcraft accusations. So, lots and lots of motivations to live as a man for this purpose because you can’t do it as a woman. Like, you have to be a man to be a witch-pricker. So, lots of motivations that are not gender-related, but I think still trans history, because again, this is showing us that this person can understand their gender as separate from their body for this temporary period.
I also think it’s interesting that we don’t know what happened to them. Like, you know, they had a good, a good year or two of being a successful male witch-pricker, and then they accused the wrong guy and the tables turned. They got accused of witchcraft themselves, and they weren’t executed; they were banished to Barbados.
Ann: [laughs] Which in that era, I don’t know what that’s like, but to me, I’m just like, “Sure! Banish me to Barbados. I’ll have a nice hang out on the beach. It’s fine.”
Kit: [laughs] I think it’s probably worse in the 1660s.
Ann: Yeah. There wouldn’t be nice, there wouldn’t be resorts…
Kit: More malaria.
Ann: … in colonial Barbados. Yeah, quite a bit more. But yeah, it’s such an interesting story. Because for my podcast, I like finding just kind of people who do strange and interesting things, especially kind of like, strange, schemey things where it’s like… So, in terms of trans history, like why not trans your gender in order to, like, be a witch-pricker, just to pursue villainy. Like, okay!
Kit: Of all the jobs you could do. But like, it’s super well-paid, I guess.
Ann: And you’re right. It does protect you from being accused yourself until… Until the tables turn. But yeah, just sort of… I don’t know. What would make someone make that decision is fascinating to me. There’s so many stories that come across where I’m like, “Make a movie of that, somebody. This looks interesting.”
Kit: I would love someone to make a movie of it, but what I wouldn’t want is for them to give a Christian or John, like, some deep trauma in their past that means they, like, just have to— You know, some people are just bad people; some people are just schemey, and they’re like, “I could make a quick buck by fucking over other women.”
Ann: Exactly, exactly. And this is like, listeners, if you scroll back, a few years ago, I did a series, a three-part series, on Catalina de Erauso, AKA Antonio de Erauso, who just, like, transgender in order to become a conquistador and just murdered so many people in South America.
Kit: Yeah. Again, if there’s money in colonialism, I’m going to get into colonialism, and I feel like, yeah, there are very similar parallels here.
Ann: Yeah, you know, don’t let gender get in the way of, like, “Why should the cis man get to do all the conquistador-ing? I’m going to go too!”
And that’s the thing. I don’t know, I’m hoping in my podcast, when I’m including trans history, I want to have these, like, fun, you know, “fun,” but just like, these kind of conniving… We did the episode about Elagabalus, just weirdos. People, like the Public Universal Friend, like just strange things. Because those are the stories I tell about cis people also, and about straight people. It’s just like, I like talking about the… This isn’t a podcast for, like, heroes of the past. There’s other podcasts for that. So, I don’t want to say like the only queer history that there is is these like strange villains. I think that’d be a dangerous precedent to set. But I’ll just say on this podcast, everyone is a strange villain, and I want to include queer people too.
Kit: Yeah. Queer people get to be strange villains as well.
Ann: Please!
Kit: Like, I do think liberation doesn’t involve everyone having to be worthy and inspirational. Liberation involves allowing people to be boring, allowing people to be ridiculous, and allowing people to be schemey bastards.
Ann: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there’s so many people just, like, especially non-royals who were queer, and we just don’t know about them because they were never arrested, there was never a scandal. And this is again, like Jen Manion’s book, Female Husbands gets into this, where it’s just like, how many people are just living these lives and we don’t know because it was never a problem?
Kit: Yeah. Because actually, success for a queer person for much of history has been flying under the radar and not having anyone realize who you are.
Ann: Yeah. Well, and it’s like when you’re looking at any sort of non-royal person, I did an episode with Miranda Kaufmann about Black Tudors, and it’s like, you only hear about them when it’s like, here’s a court case, somebody was testifying. So, it’s like, but that’s not everybody. It’s just, those are the only times that you come across these names of anybody who’s not rich or noble.
Kit: Yeah, that’s so true. And it means that we’ve got to remember that the evidence we have is really, really scanty. For all we know, like, half the witch-prickers were assigned female at birth.
Ann: Yeah, maybe they all were! [both laugh] Who knows? But we only know Christian as one who was caught.
So, Kit, I want to make sure everybody knows you’re taking part in a podcast series. I don’t know when that’s starting. This episode is coming out in like September-ish. So, if you want to let people know where they can follow you and keep up with all of your activities.
Kit: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. I think possibly the first episode of the new podcast that I’m taking part in should be out by the time this airs. If you follow me on Instagram @KitHeyamWriter, that’s the best place to find out everything, or I also have a mailing list, which you can subscribe to on my website. And look out for the podcast, Time Travelling Queers, which is a brilliant, silly romp through queer history presented by a time-travelling drag king cab driver. You can listen to it; you can also watch it. Look out for the giant fluffy dice, look out for the poppers air freshener. It’s really fun, it’s really silly, it’s really Doctor Who-coded, and I think you’ll have a great time. If you enjoy the scheminess of the people on Vulgar History, I think you’ll enjoy the ridiculousness of people on Time Travelling Queers as well.
Ann: Exactly. I’m always in favour of more queer history, and I’m always in favour of more history that’s just having fun and not just being like, “Here’s a hero and what they did.” No! Like, tell me what’s a weirdo and their strange, bad plans. Like, that’s what excites me.
Kit: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely.
Ann: Well, thank you so much for joining me for a record-breaking, I don’t know, at least tying, fifth time. I look forward to our future collaborations, which I’m sure there will be many.
Kit: Thank you so much for having me, Ann. It’s been a blast as usual. And yeah, really hope to get to come back.
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So, if you want to keep up with Kit, their website is KitHeyam.com. Kit is a writer, an academic, a trainer, and a heritage practitioner, and there’s lots of stuff right here on the website about how you can work with them if you want to, and I think you should. You should also listen to the new podcast that Kit is a part of, The Time Travelling Queers, it’s available wherever your podcasts, either as video or as audio. It’s such a fun time, and I’m so excited to have more queer history podcasts in existence in the world. I think that it’s such an important thing to be out there celebrating and talking about.
So, this podcast is supported by advertisements, and also by people like you. And how can you support this podcast is by supporting me on my Patreon. So, Patreon is a website where you pledge some amount of money every month, and then, in exchange for that, you get some bonus stuff from me. So, if you agree to donate one dollar or more a month, then you get ad-free episodes of this podcast, like, this stops the little advertising break in the middle, or the ones at the start or the end. You also get those episodes a few days early. If you pledge six dollars or more a month, you also get bonus episodes.
So, these are things like me and my friends chatting about whatever’s on our mind. Recently, we’ve been talking about the Shakespearean play, Titus Andronicus, and why I think— Well, I’m not going to say it’s the best play ever written, but it’s my favourite play that’s ever been written. We also have a recent episode where we’re talking about A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. And coming up soon we’re going to be, we have talked about costume dramas and we will be again, but our very first episode, bonus episode on there was talking about the film Shakespeare in Love, which gets into kind of the Shakespeare and Marlowe of it all in a very hetero… Well, I was going to say Shakespeare in Love in a very heteronormative way, but it is about Shakespeare falling in love with Gwyneth Paltrow disguised as a boy. So, you know, your mileage may vary. Anyway, if you want to join my Patreon and help support this podcast that way, to help me pay for my editor and my social media helper and the transcriptionist and the whole team, you can go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter to get a free trial or to join up as a paid member.
As well, I’ve written a book, it’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen Without a Crown. You can get that anywhere you get books; your local bookstore around the corner, the major chain bookstore in your nearest mall, any online website that sells books. I’ve got a compilation of all the links at RebelOfTheRegency.com. And when I say that it’s available in all these stores, like in Canada, in the US, people are getting it in Australia, in New Zealand, people are getting it in Ireland, people are getting it in Germany, some other places in Europe. So, RebelOfTheRegency.com has links to buy in all kinds of different countries, and I appreciate your support by reading my little book.
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Anyway, I appreciate your support, and you know, you’re listening to this podcast and that’s all I could ever ask for. So, until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Learn more about Kit and his work at kitheyam.com
And listen to Kit, and other wonderful guests, on the new podcast Time Travelling Queers
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