Queer Georgians

How did the Georgians discuss sexuality? And how, and why, did they regulate it? In this episode, Kate talks to Dr Anthony Delaney about his new book 'Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers'. Listen to find out the truth about the Chevalier D'Eon: soldier, spy ... and transgender trailblazer? Anthony hosts our sister podcast, After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, with Dr Maddy Pelling. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. And we do like to get a bit spicy around here. So in the interest of safety and public decency, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty ways of living, adult subjects and you to be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning, because if you keep listening and you get upset, well, fair do's, we did try to let you know. Right, on with the show.

• 1:49Kate Lister?

  Hello, betwixters. You're joining me in the year 1787 at Carlton House, and we are watching a fencing match. Quite a big crowd has gathered, actually. The two contestants are Monsieur de Saint George and Mademoiselle la Chevillier de Yon. There's nothing too surprising in a fencing match happening at this point, except that the chevalier is a woman. Or are they? Is that a woman dressed as a man? Is it a man dressed as a woman? Is it a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman? Nobody is very sure. And mystery about the chevalier's gender has been circulating for a very, very long time. But just who was this person? Why are they dressed as a woman, dressed as a man, dressed as a woman, dressed as a man?

• 2:34Kate Lister?

  What brought them to this place? What is the truth about their identity? And what is their legacy today? Well, I am about ready to find out if you are.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  What do you call him, Anne?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Oh, money, of course.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

• 3:19Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. The Georgians may not use the words that we do today to talk about gender and sexuality, but that certainly doesn't mean that gender queer people didn't exist at the time, because they most definitely did. And today I am joined by the magnificent Dr Anthony Delaney, co-host of our sister podcast After Dark, to talk about his new book, Queer Georgians. Oh, yes, that's right. We are going to explore what it meant to be queer in Georgian Britain. How did they talk about their sexuality? How did they talk about what we would call queerness today? And what kind of lives did queer people live? So of course, we're going to be talking about the Chevalier d'Éon,

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  a French soldier turned diplomat and spy, and somebody who is someone who is still known today for their gender fluidity. But as always, there is more to this story than meets the eye. Shall we do it? Let's do it.

• 4:21Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Anthony Delaney. How are you doing?

• 4:28Speaker 06

  I'm good, Dr. Kate Lister. How are you?

• 4:31Kate Lister?

  Oh, I'm probably doing a bit better than you as the time of recording it is one week and minus one day to your book launch. How are you feeling?

• 4:39Speaker 06

  Um, overwhelmed, a little bit sick to my stomach. No, actually quite sick to my stomach. I've had a tummy bug for the last couple of days, so that's being glamorous. But yeah, no, it's good. Look, it's just gonna happen now, isn't it? And it's one of those things. It's weird because it feels like really close and at the same time, there's still a big old stretch of time to go. But it's exciting and it's good. And it's good to get all of these things out into the world. So I'm not, you know, holding them to myself. So no, it's good. It's good.

• 5:03Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it's, it's that slightly vulnerable moment of like the sort of feeling of like, oh, I could still back out. Not really. But you sort of have this odd thought that somehow you could.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  And we were saying this during the week, just separately to us, something else like, I am actually really antisocial. I don't like to go places. And I have to go a lot of places to promote this book. And like, please come, don't not come, just because I'm saying that. Like, it'll make it easier if you are there, if you're listening to this.

• 5:30Kate Lister?

  It'll be worse, the irony of it, but it'd be much worse if nobody's there to see him.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  So much worse. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:37Kate Lister?

  No, you have to be very sociable. And you have to do the thing that a lot of people aren't very good at. You have to push yourself forward.

• 5:42Speaker 06

  I know. But like, I just, it's awkward, right? But that, that is the world of books now. And that is a nonfiction as well. Like, it's a tough old game, right? And it's only getting tougher. So it's like, we just, we just have to have no shame and go, listen, I think I did this thing. And I quite liked the thing. And I'd like you to read the thing. So maybe you should read the thing. And it's, and hence me infiltrating your podcast as if I don't have one of my own.

• 6:05Kate Lister?

  Well, we're really pleased to have you. Before we even start talking about the book, I'm gonna give it the full title. I have it here.

• 6:11Speaker 06

  Go on.

• 6:12Kate Lister?

  Queer Jordans. Jordans, the fuck, queer, who's queer Jordan?

• 6:17Speaker 06

  I play a character called Jordan, not Harry Wild, so it's me. I'm queer Jordan.

• 6:21Kate Lister?

  You're queer Jordan. Oh, help, fucking, what on earth was that? It's, it's rather late in the day. Queer Georgians, Kate, honestly, mad twat. Right, but the thing I want to talk to you about first of all, before we even get into this, the dedication, Anthony Delaney, for Paul O'Grady, Hellraiser, Trailblazer, History Maker friend. I'm sorry, when did you know Paul O'Grady?

• 6:43Speaker 06

  So I met Paul in 2011. I was fresh out of drama school. I had, I was doing this, a very small little play with himself and Celia Imrie and one of my friends, Hermione Gulliford, and just the most camp cast that you have ever come across in your entire life. And Paul was there. I didn't even know, I did not, we didn't announce him as part of the cast and I turned up to rehearsal on day one and I was late. Cardinal sin, tubes in London, don't ever, don't ever rely on them. And I turned up and I was like, why am I hearing Paul O'Grady on the other side of this table? That's not possible. But there he was and it was just, and he was like an unofficial page boy at my wedding and he, we, we hung out and I gave him history books. The last history book I gave him before he died was a history of Newgate Prison. So he was reading that at some point.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  So, and I saw him, I was very, very lucky. I saw him the Thursday before he died and he was in great form. He'd just come off stage after playing Mrs. Hannigan in Annie and he was up to high dough. And listen, I was, I was editing this at the time. I was editing Queer Georgians, you know, coming to the end of a first draft or whatever. And when I got the news that Paul had passed and I went, I happened to know a little slice of queer history, like in real life. And there was nobody else then after that thought came into my head that I was like, right, it's his book. And yeah, so I hope somewhere he'd be absolutely laughing his socks off at having a queer history book dedicated to him. But yeah, it's a great thing.

• 8:05Kate Lister?

  Genuinely quite starstruck like through you, he was such a hero of mine. I've watched everything Lily Savage ever did and just, I mean, wow, what an absolute icon of a human being.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  Totally. And that's the word, isn't it? It's icon. And I remember I was going to my first meeting at Penguin and I was coming out the tube at Vauxhall. And, you know, the dedication was all set and everything. And it was my first meeting after I'd written the book, you know, just to say, talk about what we're going to do in publicity. Coming up the tube out of Vauxhall and there was a life-size cutout of Lily Savage just before I walked out of the tube into the Penguin offices. And I went to myself, right, she's there, she's overseeing it. And, and listen, it's just an absolute gift of a, of a person to know. And I think really importantly, actually, and this has only occurred to me in the last few, few weeks and months, as I'm talking about this a little bit more.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  Really important for queer people to know the generation before them and to be having that conversation about what that has looked like for them and what it looks like for us and what it looks like for the generation coming up behind us. I think it's, it's important to keep that kind of conversation going to, to know where we are in the world and how it's changing all the time. So, yeah, an absolute gift of a, of a person for everybody, even those who didn't know him personally, but watched him on TV or whatever, like just a dream.

• 9:16Kate Lister?

  I'm gonna have to pick this up with you over a pint somewhere because I can't do an entire podcast episode on how did you know Paul.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  Although I bet you feel like your number one.

• 9:25Kate Lister?

  I bet it would be. People are gonna write in now, but no, no, no, that's what we wanted. But let's talk about queer Jordans and then we'll talk about queer Georgians. Because this, this is a fabulous book, Anthony. Now, what made you want to write about queer Georgians? And you can't just say because they're cool.

• 9:41Speaker 06

  Do you know what? And some of them are quite cool, actually, but no, and I'm the least cool person. So that's not.

• 9:45Kate Lister?

  Some of them are assholes, but like.

• 9:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think I was really keen to kind of, to show that. I think what it was, was I was really interested in some of the same questions that the Georgians were asking about gender and sexuality. I, I became really aware of that we're asking today. The only difference, well, not the only difference, but like one of the main differences is the Georgians weren't as mad about getting answers to those questions as we are. They were far more concerned with like just exploring what the. stupid questions were in all their messiness and all their whatever. Now, that's not to say I don't want to over egg the pudding there and say like, oh, they were really tolerant and that we've got more conservatives. They were literally killing men for having sex with other men. So this, you know, like, that's the reality of what's going on here.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  But it's not until we kind of come into the 19th century that we start to get this idea of classifications and identity classifiers. And it's there that you start to, people really start to demand answers. Who are you? What are you? What makes you a man? What makes you a woman? And we're still grappling with those questions today in some really kind of uncouth and unseemly ways. I don't know why we feel the need to tear these people apart to get answers to very simple binary questions. The Georgians weren't so concerned with that in the same way that we are, although they had some fairly despicable approaches to some of these ideas of gender and sexuality themselves.

• 11:03Kate Lister?

  Well, how do you define the Georgian period? Because this is a slippery one for, for historians, but for the purpose of this book, how do you define that?

• 11:11Speaker 06

  I kept it pretty tight in terms of like, I went from 17, well, the book starts in 1726 and goes to 1836. So for me, the Georgian period runs from 1714, when George the First comes to the throne, and then ends in 1837, when Victoria comes to the throne. I include William IV in that time span. Why? Sure, listen, I don't know anything about the man, to be perfectly honest, other than he was on the throne. I don't think many people do. But that's where my, I draw my, my time period. So yeah, so we're going mostly in the 1700s and then into the first little glimpse of the, the 1800s as well.

• 11:45Kate Lister?

  Okay, so I'm gonna do my, my best whiny voice now and I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, what are you lying about? Gay? They're not gay. They're coming gay. It's a, they're not gay. We didn't say gay. That's modern.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, do you know what? It is very good. Very good. Um, the thing for me with this is, right? You can't call people queer in the 18th century because they, they would never have identified themselves as queer. First of all, that's true. Second of all, they also didn't call themselves Georgians. But Kate, as you will well know, no fecker, literally nobody has ever called me up on that.

• 12:18Kate Lister?

  No.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  As historians, we constantly use anachronistic terms. The way we understand family today is not.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  How Georgians understood the word family then. But I've also heard people talk about heterosexuality in the 18th century. Nobody questions that because we think we have this default line of of understanding what heterosexuality is. We don't need to question that, but you can't say queer. And here's the thing, you can, and you just have to get on with it. Like, we can't tongue tie these questions. Also, for some people, they don't like the word queer, especially some older members of the LGBTQIA+ community. I totally respect that, and I think that's a different thing, and that's where the and and they will call themselves gay or whatever that they might call themselves. It's not the same question. That's a self identifying mark. But queer, as you well know, has been in use in academic circles for a very, very long, since the, you know,

• 13:05Speaker 06

  60s, 70s predominantly, and even before that. But it's now, you know, obviously made its way into everyday use. And we cannot hold queer histories to a different barrier of proof than we do all the other histories. So historians constantly use anachronisms. This is anachronistic, sure, but it's a tool we have to communicate the past effectively to a large audience. And that's that's just what it is. I don't think it needs much more discussion beyond that, you know?

• 13:33Kate Lister?

  I mean, as a sex historian, could you imagine if I was only allowed to use historically accurate terminology to everyone would think I'd absolutely lost my mind entirely?

• 13:41Speaker 06

  And potentially we're being a bit offensive.

• 13:43Kate Lister?

  Yes, exactly. They would think that I I'd gone mad and was being insanely offensive for no reason. So we do change the way we talk about these things. But just as, you know, underneath all that whining, how did the Georgians understand what we might now call a queer sexuality?

• 13:59Speaker 06

  I'll I'll come at it from the the the side of gender first. I think that'll give us a way in to look at the the sexuality side. They had this idea of the third sex, and they knew that there was men, they knew that there was women, and they knew that there was something else in between. They weren't quite sure how that would come together or what that actually meant, but they knew that it wasn't binary. People were identified within those categories. One of the people in Queer Georgians, John Lord Harvey, he was identified as being a member of the the third sex. And Lady Mary Wirtley Montague commented at the time that there was Men, women and Harveys. And so there is this idea definitely that this is not a binary

• 14:40Speaker 06

  thing. That is just taken for granted in the 18th century. So then in terms of sexuality, it's approached in a similar way that it's not one or the other. It can be a long spectrum of experience. But again, I don't want it to sound like that spectrum was tolerated necessarily because for men who had sex with men particularly, that could and did cost them their lives. But certainly there was an idea that, you know, you'll see in Queer Georgians that some men who go to trial for sodomy and having sex with other men, they bring into their defence, but I was married or I had a child. It is a way for them to try and convince people that, well, this couldn't have

• 15:23Speaker 06

  happened because I also have sex over here. But it's also part of that conversation that we have today about the erasure of bi-identities. I mean, the 18th century is filled with that. So it's not as binary, it's not as rigid, it's not as classified. The identity markers, they don't understand, they wouldn't have understood in the same way as we do today. So it feels like it is a more, without trying to overemphasise the tolerance, once again, I know I keep saying that, but it is important, I think. It seems like a more fluid time in terms of gender and sexuality in some ways.

• 15:57Kate Lister?

  The fact that they understood there was gender variance and a kind of a movement between what we might now say is a binary is not the same thing as saying that it was tolerated. Those are two different conversations to be had. In fact, the fact that they didn't tolerate it shows you quite definitively that they were certainly aware of these cultures and these preferences.

• 16:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, one of the things to bear in mind, and you will see this throughout the book, is that women tend to be far more aligned with the possibilities of gender and sexuality variation than men are. And I think one of the reasons for that is what so much boils down to is power. So if you think about it, you have, women were allowed to live together, even if they weren't same-sex attracted. It was actually very encouraged.

• 16:42Kate Lister?

  We were shagging one another and they didn't know.

• 16:44Speaker 06

  Well, exactly, but it gave this possibility, right, that that people, women who were having sex with women were able to do that behind closed doors. And it feeds into the misogyny that's associated with women at this time in terms of women are associated with the domestic space. So it's not unusual if you see women at home. Men weren't allowed to do that because A, men weren't associated with the domestic space in the same way, although the figure of the cop queen, which is an 18th century other type of man who has sex with men as opposed to the molly or alongside the molly, I suppose, definitely existed. But here's the thing, here's the real crux of this, I think, anyway. We have examples in the book of, say, John Lord Harvey and Stephen Fox, who goes on to be Lord Holland. These are two really important, influential, rich politicians, men, MPs, courtiers.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Those two households coming together, can you imagine what that would, that is a big block of power. So you can't allow that to happen. Like, the other men in power have to make sure that that is stopped and that that is shamed. And this is pre the 1753 Marriage Act, when, you know, the different ways in which people come together is not as formulated as it is post 1753 Marriage Act. So, you know, you can marry somebody just by declaring your devotion to them in front of any witness. It doesn't have to be a member of the clergy before that. And mollies and men who have sex with men are employing this language and these devices. You cannot let elite men do that in this time because that power block is going to be too influential. It'll literally change the map of the country if that happens, or it has the potential to at least.

• 18:12Speaker 06

  So that's my theory on why men are legislated against at this time and their lives are forfeited, but women are not. That's one of the many ways in which that women kind of go under the radar at this time.

• 18:25Kate Lister?

  I think as well that that, I think you're absolutely right with that, but I think also it's about penises. I think it's about this, and you can trace this.

• 18:32Speaker 06

  It's most things about penises when it comes down to it.

• 18:35Kate Lister?

  In fact, money, power, penises, it's all the same.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:38Kate Lister?

  I think whenever you look back through history, you get a recognition of same-sex behaviour throughout all of history because it's always been there. But weirdly, what you get, even in cultures where, like, we think that they were really tolerant, is you get this stigma around, it's always focused on the men, and it's a stigma around the one who's being penetrated, the one doing the penetrating, fine. So it's the one who has to be the girl. So I think a lot of this is actually, it's fear of power, what you said, but also it's a misogyny because that's the threat that the gay man poses to the heterosexual man that the gay woman doesn't pose to him.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I mean, it's it's why it proves so volatile and so full of hatred as well. Because if it was purely just power, you would see it being fought in a different way. But actually, it's sneered at. It's quite snidey. It's quite insidious, the way the attacks are fanned out against men who have sex with other men. And that feeds into then women who, and you'll know far more about this than I will, but like, women whose reputation is somehow sullied through the sex act or through their association with sex.

• 19:45Kate Lister?

  Through the penis.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  Whatever it is, through the penis. So it's like, there is a lot of different things happening here that set this particular time period up to be fairly volatile time, if you're looking at same-sex attraction for either men or women.

• 19:57Kate Lister?

  Yeah. What's a cock queen? Tell us what that is.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  So a cock queen was, well, this is how I kind of started things with the PhD. I was reading, I was reading, I was reading, and I was like, the mollies, the mollies, the mollies. And people think they know what mollies are, by the way, but they don't necessarily, you know, I think people have this idea of, yeah, they have this idea of, you know, they're like really fancy elite man, and he's got very white powdered face, and he's got like a beauty spot. That's what people think a molly is, but that's just a general elite man in the 18th century.

• 20:25Kate Lister?

  That's a macaroni.

• 20:26Speaker 06

  That's just a macaroni, and those are different things. Macaronis are having sex with women. That is one of the defining features of a macaroni. Whereas the molly is usually working class, so he's not going to have that finery, and he won't have that beauty spot. And yes, he's having, he's explicitly having sex with other men, whereas the macaroni is not. Now, the cock queen, on the other hand, is another man who's explicitly having sex with other men in the 18th century. That's what they say, that's contemporaries saying that. But the cock queen is found in more domestic spaces and can be of different social classes. So it's not just a working class figure. So the molly tends to be in taverns, tends to be in alleyways, tends to be in cruising grounds.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  The cock queen is keeping home, often with another man, fairly good at the old baking and the cooking and all that kind of thing, very effeminate.

• 21:14Kate Lister?

  Oh, I know some of them.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  I'm one of them. Well, apart from the fact, apart from the fact that I can't cook, I'm shit at keeping house, but I just, you know, I like to be in my house.

• 21:23Kate Lister?

  Don't listen to it at all.

• 21:25Speaker 06

  But it's a more domesticated association than the Molly is. The Molly doesn't occupy a domestic space, the cock queen does. So it comes from cot, meaning house, and queen, meaning woman. So it's, it's also doing that thing that you said about bringing misogyny into it, going, you've become a woman. God, what a terrible thing to do.

• 21:42Kate Lister?

  What an awful thing.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Could you think of anything worse?

• 21:45Kate Lister?

  No.

• 21:45Speaker 06

  And I just, I just found that, so during my PhD that I stumbled across this reference to the cock queen and I was like, what on earth is that? I couldn't find it anywhere else in any of the reference books. It just wasn't, there was no explanation available. And so I went back to the primary source material and there's a shitload, for want of a better word, of material on the cock queen, like a whole PhD's worth, basically. And that's what I, I researched for those three years. So he is a fascinating, fascinating figure. And, and to me, in the PhD, this is kind of one of the conclusions, queer men, same-sex attracted men, I think, have given us the formulation of how we understand home today. And they did that in the 18th century. It was a set of cock queens who did that in the 18th century.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  They set how we understand home today. And actually, if you think about it, in some ways, that's not all that surprising. But, you know, same-sex attracted men, queer men are often tastemakers when it comes to domestic space, even now. So it's like, you know, it was certainly there in the 18th century as well. So that's what the cock queen is.

• 22:43Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  I love a cock queen.

• 22:45Kate Lister?

  I love a cock queen. I, do you know, I was talking to my mum about this just the other day. I was like, I just, I'm so sorry, heterosexual men, I don't think you're going to be upset by this statement, but I just don't want to be with them. But I could see myself being in a lavender marriage with a nice gay man.

• 22:58Speaker 06

  Well, at the, in the 18th century, there was guidebooks for people who were getting married, women who were getting married. And they were like, don't marry a cock queen. So they would have, they would have gone against your, your instinct there. Do not marry a cock queen because what he's going to do to you is he's going to pickle you, is what they, they, they referred to it as. Basically, preserve you in a way that a wife shouldn't be preserved, i.e. you're not going to be having sex, you're not going to be having children, and he's going to be in charge of the house. So he's going to pickle you in that domestic sphere. So there were warnings to women. But I just think like, some women were probably like, I'm going to grab myself a cock queen because could I be bothered?

• 23:34Kate Lister?

  I know. Give me a good pickling, quite frankly.

• 23:40Kate Lister?

  But that's fascinating. So it permeated into culture that much because a lot of the time when we're looking at history, because of the nature of the sources that are left to us, we're often looking at rich people's history because they're the ones that could read and they're the ones who made it into the court records. And it's just skewed the bias that way. But if there are sort of manuals out there, again, I suppose the stuff that people would have been reading, but that suggests that this awareness was all layers of society. Everybody knew what was going on. This wasn't like rich macaronis, although they weren't doing it that.

• 24:13Speaker 06

  No, no, this wasn't rich macaronis. This was, it could have been, cock queens could have been, like I said, John Lord Harvey as a cock queen, but they were also my, the first ever cock queen I encountered, who was identified as a cock queen in the 18th century, was from a little Welsh mining town. And he ran a house for his, the way they put it was, this one man had a house with his wife and his family, and then he had another house. And this cock queen ran that house for him.

• 24:40Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 24:40Speaker 06

  And so, yeah, it was like, there was almost two separate families that this other guy had. The Welsh cock queen that I encountered first, it was a working class cock queen and, you know, was making bag puddings. And you'll, you'll find an awful lot of ballads talking about cock queens, which is again, is very working class because they were not meant to be written down necessarily. They're meant to be heard in the taverns and the, you know, in public spaces like that drinking culture. And so the cock queen, unlike the Molly, transcends those social classes, but is very much still present in, in working class culture.

• 25:14Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Anthony and the Chevalier after this break.

• 25:27Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 26:10Kate Lister?

  Now, one of the, there's lots of very, very interesting figures in this book, stuffed full of them. But the one that we're here to talk about today is probably, well, you do a lot of revising and a lot of reassessing, but I think probably one of the most dramatic reassessments you do is on the Chevalier de Dion. I knew I was going to fuck that up. How do I say it?

• 26:31Speaker 06

  No, you did. You said it. The Chevalier, I say the Chevalier de Dion, that's what I say.

• 26:35Kate Lister?

  Chevalier de Dion.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  But as I said to Kate before I did this, I also failed my first year French exam. So who knows? Somebody will write in. I'm sure you've got listeners in France. So yeah, the Chevalier, it's, do you know what? This is one of those things that kind of upset me a little bit when I was doing, because I thought-

• 26:49Kate Lister?

  You didn't want to do it, did you?

• 26:50Speaker 06

  No, I thought I was going in writing like a triumphant trans history. And I was like, oh, you know, this is going to be this. And those are in the book, actually. It probably, my favorite chapter is the final one, and that's Mary Jones. And I see that as a triumphant, what we would now term trans history. But this one is what I thought I was, you know, people may have heard of the Chevalier de Dion. It's the kind of, you know, if you Google her, she's the BBC proto-trans fencing 18th century celebrity. And that is how she sold.

• 27:18Kate Lister?

  The very famous portrait of the Chevalier?

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a very famous portrait of the Chevalier at the National Portrait Gallery, where you and I will be in a couple of days' time chatting about this thing again. But there's an, and also another really famous picture of the Chevalier, who was fencing in front of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, against the Chevalier Saint George. And she's dressed in her female attire. And it's, you know, it's supposed to be this spectacle of, oh, my gosh, a woman, or somebody who is not gender bound, fencing in a dress was the scandal of the time. It's just not what I found. And, you know, what we have, once we find what we find in the primary source material in the archive, we have to go with that, or else we're not doing our jobs as

• 28:00Speaker 06

  historians. But actually, then, I was like, you know what? This is so messy and so brilliantly queer. It's no less important. And actually, I think it's more important that we acknowledge he viewed himself. And by the way, I will be- Switching pronouns because he referred to himself with female pronouns fifty five percent of the time and male pronouns forty five percent of the time. So I just follow his lead. I just do whatever she did and that's what I do. So that that's the the thing for the way I work it. So I I switch between the two as she did. So yeah, it was a it was a different it was a different history than I thought I was going to encounter.

• 28:34Kate Lister?

  So who is the Chevalier D'Eon then?

• 28:37Speaker 06

  Well, Charles Dion de Beaumont was born in France, in Tuner, in seventeen twenty eight, and he is born into, I suppose, modest privilege. His family are a law family. They have a nice country seat. He goes on to study law himself, and he's actually quite brilliant, like very smart when it comes to arguments. He can be quite, you know, underhand, but in a good way. And it's not long, he's about twenty eight years old in seventeen fifty six, when he comes to the attention of Louis the fifteenth now, the the King of France. And the way he comes to the attention of Louis the fifteenth is through his secret service. And the the King's Secret Service

• 29:20Speaker 06

  is known as the Secret du Roy. And so that means the secret of the king or the king's secret. And this is Louis's spy channel. And it's a difficult thing for people, even at the time, to reconcile because Louis might, say you're in the cabinet, right? You're in the French cabinet, you're part of the legitimate government. Louis one day might say to you, now, Kate, I want you to do X, Y, and Z. But then if he come to me as a member of the secret and say, now, I told Kate this, but actually, I need you to do A, B, C instead. She's not going to know that's happening, but you're the only. So the secret were really, really powerful, and they were kind of doing the whole channel of power thing, but behind the scenes. So often, it was said that Louis was issuing orders to his right hand and then contradicting them with his left hand, basically. So he was,

• 30:05Speaker 06

  he was setting up this kind of power dynamic. One of Charles' first major appointments is as the secretary to the French ambassador in Russia. So it's a diplomatic role. He goes over there in the seventeen fifties. What they're trying to do at this time is to negotiate for a peace to the War and this is a global conflict that's bringing in kind of all the superpowers of the time, mainly France and Britain. And they're really trying to find out like who is doing what in terms of their foreign territories. So this is going on beside his role in Russia as well. And who owns what foreign territories? Because you know, they're all trying to take over bloody everything and they're trying to ruin everybody's lives as if nobody ever lived in all these countries. So France and Britain are scurrying around for these pieces of land.

• 30:50Speaker 06

  Diplomacy fails. So in 1760, Charles, because he's not the Chevalier yet, Charles goes to war and he becomes a captain of the Dragoons. And just as he was an amazing diplomat, he was an amazing captain of the Dragoons. And he really was like, really, the men loved him. The leaders were really delighted with what he was doing. He was a smart, smart cookie. And once that kind of peters out, because you know, war is expensive, everybody wants peace. 1761, then they send him to London as part of a peace envoy, led by the the French do, led by the Duke de Nivernay. So he's taken from Russia, taken to London as part of this peace envoy. And we want a peace process. And it comes, there is a peace agreed, it's called the Treaty of Paris. And you know, it's

• 31:35Speaker 06

  good for for Charles, because he gets to deliver the terms of this to the king in person. So you know, it's a big deal for him. He's really starting to to cement his place. But the French don't come out the best in this peace deal. They have lost a lot of their land in North America to the British, and they have given up a lot of their trading routes in India. So this is how we see Charles on the the stage first. You know, he's all over the place, doing a lot of important stuff. But after the king feels a little bit slighted by this peace deal, he says, right, Charles, you're going back to England, you're going to continue there as the secretary, and you are going to be my spy. I want you to keep gathering intelligence. And my plan as

• 32:19Speaker 06

  the French king is that I am going to invade Britain.

• 32:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I'm going to show them that they should have given us better terms. And Charles says, yeah, absolutely fine. I've I've got this. And off he goes. And then he takes up his his official position as secretary to a man named Nivernay, and he's the the real ambassador. But all the while, he's kind of gathering this information behind the scenes.

• 32:42Kate Lister?

  Okay, so he's a very good spy, at this point at least.

• 32:46Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 32:47Kate Lister?

  He's a good fencer, he's a good diplomat, he's a good person to have around. Was he living as a woman, identifying as a woman? Any hints at this point that you have found?

• 32:59Speaker 06

  I'm gonna say no. There is a rumor that later starts that says yes, but I found no primary source material contemporary to this time to show that he was. Later on, it's said that he was in Russia, that he had appeared as a woman. But for me, from material at the time, I haven't found anything. And I would caveat the material that does come out later because it says he appeared at court a couple of times as a woman. But 18th century masquerades, men would often appear as women and it didn't mean it was part of their gender nonconformity, it was just an expression. Now, I'm not even saying we don't even know that it was at a masquerade or if it even happened. My instinct is it probably never happened. And if it did, it was probably in the context of some kind of masquerade, some kind of celebration.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  But there is no contemporaneous evidence at this point in his story that he wants to or has attempted to live as a woman.

• 33:52Kate Lister?

  So where does this come from then? Because if you Google Chevalier D'Eon, you will get endless articles about how this is one of the earliest recorded trans people that we have in history, that this is somebody who was gender fluid, that this was somebody who identified as a woman. Lots of people will use, only use the female pronouns. Where did this come from?

• 34:12Speaker 06

  Well, it all goes to shit, Kate. And I think that's where it comes from. We have this situation where Charles spying, he then has the ministers back in France going, what's this fellow sending home? We don't understand some of the stuff. Why is he talking about like military positions? And why is he giving us this intel? We didn't ask for this intel, but of course, the king had asked for it. And so this tension starts to come together and Nîvorne goes back to France, there's no ambassador in England. And so Dion starts to take over some of those roles, but then he's replaced by de Gersy as the official new ambassador. Well, Dion's not happy, his nose is put out a joint and he starts leaking some of the letters because he really wanted that role and he wants them to know that he's unhappy.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  So he leaks some of his letters.

• 34:59Kate Lister?

  So not a great spy now.

• 35:01Speaker 06

  Now not a great spy.

• 35:02Kate Lister?

  No.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  And he leaks the letters from the French government to the British government. And he doesn't give the big ones. He just like, he makes them look foolish. He doesn't say there's an invasion planned and he also keeps everything back that implicates the king, but he makes some of the ministers look like fools. France is not happy with this. They stop his payments, so he, he starts to lose all money. But England is loving him. They're going, oh my God, look at this.

• 35:27Kate Lister?

  I bet.

• 35:27Speaker 06

  He's a hero. Yeah, yeah, they're just so, so happy with him. And they're like, we're going to keep you, we're, we're going to celebrate you. He moves out of court because now he's not got an official position. He lives at 38 Brewer Street in Soho, the queerest address of all. But he starts falling into debt really, really quickly. And he continues to make the French look absurd in so many different ways. One of which he says, I want the equivalent in today's money of eight million pounds for the rest of my letters, or else I'm going to keep leaking these things that are going to undermine your authority.

• 35:58Kate Lister?

  He says that to the French king?

• 35:59Speaker 06

  He says that to the French king.

• 36:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's a risky game.

• 36:02Speaker 06

  It is. And, and de Gersy, the diplomat, takes him to trial for this. He says, no, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to sue you for liable. Dion is found guilty. And there's even a rumor that de Gersy hires a hitman to kill Dion at this time. And I know this is all coming back to your question, where do these rumors start from? And this is when we start to see that it's really important that the secret de Roy, don't forget about them, they're the spies, that they start to be called back into being a little bit. And Louis XV says, hold on, this is making us look like idiots. He recalls de Gersy, who's the, the ambassador. And he says, right, Charles, Dion, come back into the fold. We'll pay you again.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  You, you need to be our spy again. Everything's going to be fine. And Charles says, well, I will, but now I want 23 million, the equivalent of 23 million pounds.

• 36:56Kate Lister?

  Why would they want him to be a spy? He's a shit spy.

• 37:00Speaker 06

  He's a shit spy, but they think, I think they think they can control him if he's within their, you know, and he's in so much debt that he's desperate for money.

• 37:07Kate Lister?

  And they just want to stop publishing stuff.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  They just want him to stop because they also know what's in there. That what they know is that he has letters saying, we're going to invade Britain. That cannot, I mean, you know, the wars, the war is back on if that happens. So it's about this point in 1769 that rumours start to circulate that the Chevalier D'Eon was born a woman, not that he wants to live as a woman, but that he was born a woman. And that in order to hold on to his family's land, he presented as male throughout his life, but had been born female and they had duped the system, basically. So this is when the first archival evidence is in 1769. And that's also when you get the rumours about, about him appearing as a woman in Russia as well, by the way. So it's, you know, it, it all happens around this time.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  And yeah, I, I think it is my theory, based on the archival evidence, it's my theory that that's not a coincidence, that those rumours are purposely planted at this time.

• 38:04Kate Lister?

  That makes sense to me that, because that, that's a smear campaign, basically. And it's one of the oldest tricks in the book is that you discredit somebody. So therefore whatever they say is going to be questionable from that point onward. But didn't the Chevalier start to inhabit some of that themselves? Or did none of that ever happen? Cause you said in, in their memoirs, they, they refer to themselves 55% of the time with female pronouns. Why are they doing that if it was all a big smear campaign?

• 38:30Speaker 06

  So the Chevalier at this point is still in England. At this point in the story, he has never appeared in female clothing, never.

• 38:38Kate Lister?

  Never.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  We are now up to, let's say, 1771, it's starting to spread like wildfire, still presenting as a man, he's still refusing this as slander. This does not happen. He's saying this did not happen. We know that by 1772, there are.

• 38:56Speaker 06

  Bets laid on the stock exchange for up to about eight and a half million pounds in today's money detailing the Chevalier's true sex. So people are placing bets about what the true sex of the Chevalier is. This will be relevant later. The first person to start that betting system is a Frenchman, by the way, and I think that is crucial. But here's what the Chevalier has to say himself at this time, right? He admits that he's mortified by these rumours. And he says, and these are his words, and they've been overlooked, I think, so let's delve back into them. He says that he's mortified to be as nature still made me. And by that, he means a virgin. He hasn't had sex.

• 39:37Speaker 06

  And they, he says this to de Broglie, who's part of the Secret du Roy. So he's saying this to the spymaster, basically. And he says that because of that, my friends, and I think that's key, my friends have given the idea that because of his being a virgin, they have imagining in their innocence that I was of the female sex. Because, you know, that virtuous virgin thing is far more womanly in the 18th century than it is, than it is seen to be man. So they're saying, well, if you're a virgin. And I think this is important too. He says, he has no temptation whatsoever to sexual indulgence with either sex. And

• 40:18Speaker 06

  if that's the case, if we were to identify that as what we would now term ace or asexual, this predates what we thought the earliest archival reference to asexuality is by over a century. So that is who I think the Chevalier is, is a, what we would now term asexual person who is basically blackmailed because of his queerness, but not in the way that we thought.

• 40:41Kate Lister?

  So do you think that the narrative that the Chevalier identified and lived as a woman was just basically a smear campaign?

• 40:48Speaker 06

  Yes, but it gets more complicated. Sorry. Because eventually he is, there's a trial in London to determine his sex. I know that sounds gross because it is.

• 41:00Kate Lister?

  Why would you need a trial for that? I mean, really?

• 41:03Speaker 06

  Well, they excused it because so many people had placed bets. They wanted their money settled.

• 41:07Kate Lister?

  Still crap, but okay.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  It's still crap. So it wasn't necessarily his, his gender and sex wasn't on trial. The money was on trial, but as a result, they had to solve the gender and sex thing. And so what you get is you get Monsieur Jacques, Monsieur Legoux, and Monsieur de Morand, and they are coming into London. They, they come to the court of the King's Bench at Guildhall in front of the Judge, Lord Mansfield, and they lie. We know they are lying. They're saying, I've had sex with her. She's a woman. She told me she's a woman. One of them, Legoux is a doctor, and he says, oh, yeah, no, I've been treating her for female maladies for quite a long time. This is definitely a woman. Keep in mind, they're all French. So the Chevalier, he's ruined, you know, he's so ruined in English society. He has no choice but to go, okay, I'll come back. And by the

• 41:51Speaker 06

  way, the King in, in France is calling him back the entire time because now Louis XV has died, Louis XVI is on the throne, and he abolishes the Secrétariat. He does not want a spy system happening. It's very weird to him. It feels really medieval. He wants something far more upfront and political. And so he is recalling the Chevalier. He's like, come back, come back, come back. And he, the Chevalier won't. But after this awful thing that happens to his, to his kind of, his reputation after the trial, he feels he has to go back. But the condition of Louis XVI is that if he sets foot back in France, which he's telling him he has to, he must reassume the dress of his birth, i.e. dress like a woman. So it is the King's order that the Chevalier dresses as a woman when he comes back into France. And the Chevalier

• 42:36Speaker 06

  leaving goes, oh, he won't make me do that. I'll still go to France. He's not going to make me do that once I get back. But he does make the Chevalier do that.

• 42:49Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Anthony and the Chevalier after this break.

• 43:02Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them, and he really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 43:45Kate Lister?

  Wouldn't this have all been very easily resolved if the Chevalier just dropped the pantalines and went, behold, a penis? I know that today we have different discussions, but that in the 18th century would have been, oh, that's not a woman, definitely.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  Well, let me tell you, Kay, that was supposed to have happened. There were two official reports that came out that the French government undertook to say he had been, yep, to say that he had been looked at by members of the French court, by medical professions in the French court, and that they can absolutely determine that he had been born female. We know that this is not true and you'll see how we know this at the end of the story, but it is categorically untrue. He was not born female. And so, you know, you're talking about the smear campaign, they are determined. So this is why we have the image of the Chevalier in female dress, because yes, once he gets to France, he is made to adopt female dress. And he fights against it, he says, please don't make me do this, I don't want to dress in female dress.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  So he comes home, dresses in his male attire, gets arrested for two weeks for doing so, and then in order to come back into society, has to adopt female dress. That is where that starts. So it's not until somewhere between 1777 and 1784 that the Chevalier first, and he's in his, you know, almost 50 by this stage, and that's when he first adopts female dress, not because he wants to, because he's forced to by the French crown.

• 45:06Kate Lister?

  Why did Louis the Sixteenth do that? Just a slow day at court? Or like, what, was he in, was he in the habits of making people put on fancy dress to come and see him?

• 45:16Speaker 06

  No, but I think it feeds into the same thing the entire time. This is a dangerous and a volatile person. We need to discredit her.

• 45:24Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  Because now she's appearing as female quite a lot. So we need to discredit her and we need to make it seem that A, either people need to believe that either A, she's a woman outright, was biologically a woman, so you shouldn't be listening to her anyway, or B, at least cast doubt over what's going on. And they really successfully do that because we're still confused about it today.

• 45:46Kate Lister?

  Yeah, jobs are good, lads.

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:48Kate Lister?

  How does this, how does the story end then? Does the Chevalier, is like forced to live as a woman in public for the rest of their lives?

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Kind of. I mean, that's, the Chevalier, she does come back to England in seventeen eighty five because she can't bear to be living as female at the court in France. And she thinks that when she comes back to England, she'll be able to reassume male attire. Now, there's always been the idea that from that point onwards, she lives as a woman. And that's supported by that portrait I referred to earlier of her fencing in female attire. And I had just assumed that that was a given. But when I looked into the advertisements that were advertising the fencing matches that she was doing all throughout the country, she appears in male clothing during those fencing matches. Now, not the first one in front of the Prince

• 46:38Speaker 06

  of Wales at the time, future George the Fourth. We know she was in female attire then. But the rest of the time, as far as I can see, or at least a very high proportion of the time, I have documentary evidence in the book that says she was appearing in male attire. But get this, there was a reason for that. And it was because it was, people had believed so strongly that she was born female, that now they thought they were seeing a female dressing in male attire. So that was also sellable. She had no money. It's marketing. She was broke and she had to feed into this marketing too. And so even in her memoirs, which by the way, are mostly fiction.

• 47:16Speaker 06

  She says, yeah, I was. I was born a woman and this is how I was discovered. I fell off my horse on London Bridge one day and I got speared in the groin and I had to be attended to by a doctor and there was blood trickling down the street. Never happened. Never happened.

• 47:30Kate Lister?

  No, that didn't happen.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  No, but she's trying to survive. At this point in her life, she is trying to survive. She's living on New Millman Street with a widow called Mrs. Mary Cole, a naval widow. And actually, I'd be really interested to know a little bit more about that relationship. That's one of the things I didn't get around to in that chapter, was to really establish what's happening there. But.

• 47:49Kate Lister?

  Navy widow, that sometimes crops up as a euphemism for a sex worker sometimes.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  Yes, and it's, but here's, we're getting into territory where they're having to be pushed to the outer limits of society. So it would make sense that that could be happening. So I'm intrigued to know what that might be. So she's basically eking out a living, but we know for a fact that also people back in England understand her as a woman now. I think it's fair to say that.

• 48:14Kate Lister?

  That's the brand.

• 48:15Speaker 06

  That's the brand. And she refers to herself as a woman at this time. And that's what's happening. And she's fencing to make a living, but she doesn't get away that easily because she gets injured and she can't fence anymore. And she really kind of just, you know, goes into poverty at this point and she can't make a living for herself. And she just, you know, it's really, really, a really sad end. And we know that, to come back to my earlier point, that she wasn't born female because finally, when she does die on this 21st of March, 1810, there is a long awaited autopsy. And I have seen the imagery that's produced from this autopsy. And I don't include it in the book because I just think it feeds into some pretty nefarious things that are even happening today in terms of this fixation on genitalia.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  But it is signed off by some of the most, you know, forthright naval surgeons and medical men from the early 19th century London. And without a shadow of a doubt, I think that the words they use is that she is a perfect male. But she tells us in, you know, she tells us in her own words that she became a girl against my wishes, she says, I became a girl against my wishes. And that the gowns that were given to her by Marie Antoinette and the jewellery became her, again, her words, golden chains of my new slavery. So I think to a certain extent, because queer people, and you know, I am, as you well know, I'm one of those people, we so often are left short in our history and we're desperate

• 49:45Speaker 06

  for our history, that when we see something, we grasp onto it and we make it make sense to us without having done the primary source material research, which, you know, we know as historians, again, it's, it's human nature. We want to be defiant and we want to be triumphant and we want to find ourselves in the past.

• 50:01Kate Lister?

  You want a hero, you want a good story.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  And you want a hero, exactly. And you know what? She is a hero, just maybe not in the way that we thought she was, because she is, as so many of these queer Georgians are, she's a survivor. She survives this somehow and it's degradation after degradation often, but she comes back and she, you know, she lives to be eighty something, I think she's eighty one or something, eighty two, yeah. In those days, you know, it's, it's a good innings. And so she is a hero and maybe for ace people or asexual people, they will see a new hero in that that's, that's underrepresented. And it shows the ways in which gender and sexuality in the media, in the public eye at this time, or gender specifically and sex, is manipulated, is kind of hounded after and is, it becomes shamed.

• 50:47Speaker 06

  And I mean, you can't tell me that's not happening in our own time, you know, we see it all the time. And, you know, here we are now, twenty twenty five, still talking about this and still trying to kind of, I say in the book, we're still trying to solve the best, still trying to find out what, what's going on here. And at the, I just left, I think I finished the chapter as far as, so many chapters now, I can't remember, but I think I finished the chapter with her words, because I tried to get back to them, although sometimes it's hard to find the truth in them because there is so much invention. But she says, I am what I am. I declare that the intention of the Lord Creator in creating this multiplicity and this diversity of men and women on this earth has been to render them all equal in the eyes of God and His law. So I think we would do well, remember I said at the beginning, we could do well to

• 51:31Speaker 06

  remember the ways in which they're questioning, but not demanding answers in the same way. And it just comes down to what she says, I am what I am. We don't need to satisfy our curiosity. She is what she is. And to me, she's remarkable and she's still history making and she's still a history, you know, someone we need to look back at. She's still queer in so many different ways. As we said, it was not necessarily the history that I, I thought I was going to encounter. So there you are now, Dr. Kate Lister. There's a little bit of the Chevalier.

• 51:59Kate Lister?

  And that's just one story in the book, everybody. That's just one amongst many. But before I let you go, and I'm going to see you again next week, but before I let you go, who's your favorite? That's a horrible question. I shouldn't ask that because I got a real sense of when, when I was reading it is you kept encountering people, there was just, you'd never said explicitly, but there was just this like, oh, they're a dickhead. Oh, no.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, there's a few dickheads.

• 52:24Kate Lister?

  Do you have any that you were like, yes, you.

• 52:26Speaker 06

  And Lister, and Lister, and Lister, dickhead.

• 52:28Kate Lister?

  And Lister dickhead.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  My favorite though is, is a kind of a celebratory trans history as final chapter takes place in New York in 1836. And it's the brilliant Mary Jones. We've just done an episode on her on After Dark. So you could, you can shoot in there to listen to all the different ins and outs of her life, but she's a black trans woman, black trans sex worker in 1836. And she is amazing. She does not take no for an answer. And to such an extent that people at the time just have to say, we don't know why she keeps coming back in dresses. We don't know why she keeps presenting as a woman, but whatever it is, even incarceration can't stop nature because nature is taking its course with her. She is who she is again. Now they treat her terribly.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  Again, don't get me wrong, but with Mary, one of the things we leave her in, in that chapter is the very end of the book. So we leave her in the whole book, walking down one of her beats and she is. Dressed in fine, I don't know, she must have spent all her money on clothes because she had the best clothes at the time. She had the best wigs. She was just brilliant. And she, we leave her walking down the road after about 12 arrests in a very short space of time. The thing about her is she gets back up every single time. And that sometimes is all it takes to make history, persevere. And it's terrible to have to ask people to do that. And nobody, only Mary asked Mary to do that. But boy, did she do it. So she,

• 53:55Speaker 06

  I genuinely thought this, sometimes when I'm having a shit day and I'm like, I can't be bothered with this today. I'll go, Mary Jones got back up every bloody time. And, you know, there's something in that. And she is my, my queero, my queer hero. From, they're all, you know, to certain extents, they all have different heroic elements, I think. Because I wanted this book to be very joyful. And I think overall it is. But she's my one.

• 54:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, Anthony, you've been marvelous. I knew you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work, or if they just want to listen to more of you, where can they find you?

• 54:30Speaker 06

  Well, sure. Look, go over to the After Dark feed and you'll find me on there with Maddy Pelling. And we present all the spooky, oaky history bits coming up to this time of year.

• 54:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, you're in your element, aren't you?

• 54:40Speaker 06

  I know, we're coming into it, aren't we? We're coming into our powers now. We've been depleted for the last few months. And so, yeah, you can find me there, Anthony Delaney History for my socials, and of course, Queer Georgians, A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers and Homemakers. By the time this is out, we'll be out now.

• 54:55Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Will you come back again and talk to us about more naughtiness?

• 54:58Speaker 06

  No, this is it.

• 55:01Speaker 06

  This is the end of this crossover. So, no, of course I will. Actually, really to have you on, you've only done one After Dark, haven't you?

• 55:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Have I done any After Dark?

• 55:10Speaker 06

  Wait, have you done any After Dark?

• 55:12Kate Lister?

  No, we just got drunk in the pub. No one was recording that.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Oh, lads, how have we let that slip?

• 55:18Kate Lister?

  I know.

• 55:18Speaker 06

  Everyone else has been on.

• 55:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, we'll sort that one out.

• 55:21Speaker 06

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:22Kate Lister?

  We'll sort that out. Until next time, gorgeous.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  And you love, see you next week.

• 55:31Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Anthony for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we continue in our endless search for history's biggest fuckboy and we will be meeting the naughtiest pope. Not in the same episode, or perhaps it should be. But if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, with History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.