Part One: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Robert tells Margaret Killjoy the whole story of Lawrence of Arabia, a British imperialist, hopeless romantic and asexual icon who invented the concept of modern insurgent war. Through it all we ask: was he a bastard? (4 Part Series) https://www.cliohistory.org/thomas-lawrence/lawrence/youth https://www.investigativeproject.org/4256/guest-column-the-final-death-of-lawrence-of-arabia https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/02/young-lawrence-a-portrait-of-the-legend-as-a-young-man-review https://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/i%C2%A0realize_now_that_he_was_sexless/ https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/t-e-lawrence-art-war-twenty-first-century/ https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2016/2/16/what-would-t-e-lawrence-do https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-lawrence-arabia-180951857/ https://www.tracesofevil.com/p/blog-page_24.html https://www.firstworldwar.com/features/telawrence.htm https://baklol.com/baks/Misc/Great-people-who-were-also-per-_1492/T--E--Lawrence-_18491 https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/sykes-picot-100-years-middle-east-map/index.html https://stljewishlight.org/top-story/lawrence-of-arabia-or-lawrence-of-zion/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/peter-thiel-jeff-thomas/ https://israelforever.org/programs/balfourinitiative/Implementing_Balfour_Declaration/ https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Implementing-the-Balfour-Declaration https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/manuscript-reveals-dark-side-of-lawrence-of-arabia-s-sex-life-76363.html https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Desert-Fire-T-Lawrence-ebook/dp/B006072QSG https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/22/archives/the-naked-truth-nothing-withheld-revealed-at-last-the-secret-lives.html https://www.pbs.org/lawrenceofarabia/players/dahoum.html Schneider, James. Guerrilla Leader: T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt (p. 52). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Sattin, Anthony. The Young T. E. Lawrence (pp. 34-35). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  No, okay.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  I think this is good. I think this solves all of our problems.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Anderson's dressed as Kendall Roy from Succession, and I'm very proud of this costume.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Who is a baseball, if you're watching this and you don't know what that is, Kendall Roy is a baseball player with the Dodgers.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Anderson says L to the OG.

• 2:38Robert Evans?

  He's the best, he's the best linebacker in the New York Yankees.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  The New York Lakers?

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  I just gotta say the New York Yankees, but yes, that's even better.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Killing me, killing me.

• 2:54Speaker 03

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• 4:34Robert Evans?

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• 5:08Robert Evans?

  Margaret, speaking of the Yankees, you know, that's a team for all of the rich assholes in America. But before we had the New York Yankees, we had their political equivalent, the British Empire. How do you feel about the British Empire, Magpie?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Primarily negative.

• 5:27Robert Evans?

  Primarily negative. Well, I guess that's pretty obvious because they're terrible.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:32Robert Evans?

  What do you know about probably like the most famous hero of the British Empire of the 20th century? Lawrence of Arabia.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  I know almost nothing about Lawrence of Arabia, but I'm very excited about because I'm, I've been recently really interested in learning more about the Ottoman Empire.

• 5:48Robert Evans?

  Oh, we'll be talking Ottomans. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 5:52Robert Evans?

  Lot of, lot of Ottoman shit is gonna be going down in this story. So this is, you know, maybe a slightly different kind of Behind the Bastards episode because I think like the title of this could be, was Lawrence of Arabia a bastard? And that's a complicated question. He is a guy who, the appraisals of him have gone kind of back and forth since his death in 1935 from like, oh, you know, he was this hero of the empire and a hero of the Arab people who like backed their liberation from Ottoman tyranny to he was an agent of imperialism who like betrayed and, you know, manipulated these Arabs that he claimed to care about

• 6:38Robert Evans?

  and has a lot to do with the modern fucked up state of much of the Middle East and the Muslim world, like a lot of our current, a lot of like what's going on in Gaza right now. In fact, does have a lot of direct ties to Lawrence of Arabia. And then, you know, to today, where I think there's another reappraisal going on. And you've even got some like left wing scholars who are saying, well, actually like the really critical views of this guy are not entirely fair. So it's one of those things, we'll kind of, we'll repeatedly revisit like, where do we think this guy's landing? Is this guy a bastard? Is he maybe a cool person? Or is he kind of somewhere in the middle?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Are you saying that historical people can be morally complex?

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, absolutely.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  That would destroy both of our show's concepts if that were true.

• 7:24Robert Evans?

  And it's also, he's particularly hard to judge because he was a spook, right? He's a spy. You know, he is an intelligent, and so he lies to everyone constantly, his entire life, often for good reasons. A lot of his lies are like, well, I would have tried to do the same thing in his situation, right? And then a lot of his lies are like, oh, well, I can see why that like the guilt from doing this destroyed your entire life, Lawrence. That was pretty fucked up. So he's a guy, I have always been interested in him because it was my dad's favorite movie. And I'll tell you right now, the, I rewatched late last year, the Lawrence of Arabia movie from the sixties, whenever it was, holds up. If you haven't seen it, I really do recommend watching it because it's fucking gorgeous,

• 8:09Robert Evans?

  you know? It was made in an era when if you were going to make a movie about T E Lawrence, you sent a bunch of dudes out to the desert and you blew up trains with dynamite. There was no other way to get those shots. And that's pretty cool. I think he's also really relevant because one thing we all share as Americans, you know, whether you're left or right or centrist, is this very strange and somewhat incoherent love for insurgents, even though we also find ourselves constantly fighting and losing wars to insurgents. And this all, you know, it has its roots in the kind of mythic origin of our nation, the Revolutionary War, but it also has its roots in, you know, I think at this stage,

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  we have to acknowledge that George Lucas is as much a founding father of this nation as George Washington, right? And so like, you know, it's kind of impossible to separate the. Our love of the, you know, the founding fathers and their insurgent struggle from like fucking rebel alliance, which we, we all learned about at age like four, you know? So we're going to talk about T E Lawrence this week. And, and when I brought Lawrence up in conversations, particularly with friends who are on the left, I've, I've noticed that I think the, the general, the general trend is for people to write him off as like an orientalist and imperialist and, you know, the, the British Empire's equivalent of the CIA agents who spent most of the 20th century overthrowing democratically elected governments around the world. And it's fair to view him as all of those things.

• 9:38Robert Evans?

  There's an extent to which all of those are, are accurate descriptions of the man. But he's also not someone you can ignore if you're on the left, especially if you're, if you're one of these people who has ever sat around talking about like, you know, revolution and like, could, you know, some sort of like insurgent left wing movement, you know, take power, you know, defeat the United, i- i- if any of that is shit that you care about. If you just care about, you know, what's happening over in Gaza, if you're interested at all in how asymmetric warfare can topple powerful states, right? You have to study Lawrence of Arabia because in some very important ways, he invented like how warfare works in the 21st century.

• 10:23Robert Evans?

  Like he is the guy who created and codified our modern concept of how an insurgent struggle works, right? You know? And, and that's, people are gonna be like, well, that's ridiculous. If you think of an insurgent struggle as just like some dudes who aren't regular soldiers, like ambushing imperial troops in the desert or whatever, right? Like that's been going on for, for fucking ever, right? You know, that shit was happening when the Romans were around. It happened to the Greeks, happened to fucking Alexander the Great's troops when they marched through Afghanistan, right?

• 10:56Robert Evans?

  But that's not what an act, that's not what modern insurgent warfare means. Modern insurgent warfare is a much more complicated thing that involves the use of insurgent troops alongside regular national troops in a struggle between empires that takes place.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  Over a wide geographical area, right? Yeah. Like, you know, when you look at how Vietnam won their war, it wasn't that the Vietcong just outfought the Americans in the jungles, it was that the Vietcong participated in a very complex struggle that also involved regular state forces that had the backing of other empires. And you know, that conflict took place not just as a conflict in Vietnam, but as part of a broader conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. And the way that worked was, you know, heavily informed by a lot of the theories that T E Lawrence wrote out as a result of what he's doing in the Arab Peninsula during World War One.

• 11:55Robert Evans?

  And to make that case, because I'm sure there's some people being like, what the fuck are you talking about, Robert? That's nonsense. I want to talk, go a little bit ahead of the story, right? Before we actually talk about Lawrence's life, to something that happened about a decade after he died in 1946. Now, this is a story that relates to what would become the Vietnam War, but in 1946, you know, that the Vietnam War, the Indochina Conflict, it's not really an armed struggle quite yet. It's still at this point a disagreement over the region of Asia than known as French Indochina. During the rule of Napoleon III, powerful interests in the French Navy had succeeded in pushing for military control in the region

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  that had expanded across much of modern Vietnam until their control, France's control was interrupted by Japan during World War Two. Now, if you know anything about Vietnamese history, the Vietnamese people had a long history of identifying as like, we are Vietnamese and we are not the people who are in charge of our land right now, right? Yeah. Vietnam's history has a lot of occupation by foreign powers. And the end result of that is that when Japanese occupiers took over, they met with spirited resistance. Now, one of the leaders of that resistance was a man named Vo Nhuyn Jap, who by any stretch of the imagination deserves to go down as one of the great military leaders of all time. And you could argue is probably the greatest war leader of the 20th century during-

• 13:22Robert Evans?

  His long and storied life, which ended in two thousand thirteen. I hadn't realized he'd made it so long. Jap led Vietnamese forces to victories against the Empire of Japan, France, the United States, and what you could either call a victory or at least a solid draw against China. And like, who else has that record? Who else can claim that shit? That's amazing. Yeah. Um, from nineteen forty-one to nineteen seventy-two, he was the military commander of the Viet Minh. Uh, and he orchestrated the battle of Dien bin Phu, which forced an end to French occupation of his land. Now, before Dien bin Phu in nineteen forty-six, it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that Japan and France were going to fight.

• 14:03Robert Evans?

  Right? The Vietnamese had helped to oust the Japanese occupier and there were kind of, there were negotiations taking place uh between Bo and the Viet Minh and, you know, the French political and military establishment. And there was at least some hope that maybe a conflict could be avoided. So Bo sits down in Hanoi in nineteen forty-six for a meeting with General Raoul Salon to see if there was a way to work things out peacefully in a manner, you know, Salon at least is like in a manner that still leaves France basically in charge, right? And obviously this was a doomed measure, but they don't necessarily know that at the time. One of my sources for these episodes is the excellent book Guerrilla Leader by James Schneider,

• 14:46Robert Evans?

  a professor of military theory at the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. Schneider opens his book with the story of Jap and Salon's meeting and describes it this way. Toward the end of the meeting, discussion turned towards Jap's success in resisting the Japanese occupation of Endochina since nineteen forty. Salon wanted to know the source and inspiration of Jap's success. Without hesitation, Jap reached behind his seat and withdrew from a shelf a heavy book and laid it before Salon, who recognized the author immediately. Jap gestured towards the book, saying, "My fighting gospel is T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it."

• 15:25Speaker 00

  That's cool.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that is. I mean, that's that's high praise for your book.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  Um, I I hope that one day my book, A Brief History of Vice, uh, is the is the Bible of an insurgent leader destroying French tyranny over their land, maybe in France.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  You'd be destroying something with that book.

• 15:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this has taught me to tell all have all of my troops mix tobacco in their own urine together and then make themselves vomit. A key part of modern insurgent struggle.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  One of the things that I kind of can, when you were saying earlier about how, you know, you you think of guerrilla warfare as like, wow, no, you just like jump some people in the woods.

• 16:02Robert Evans?

  You just beat them up in this in the forest. Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And like, because that's the way that most movies are sort of representing guerrilla warfare, because, you know, that's the sexy part of a guerrilla struggle or whatever, right?

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  And realizing that there's this like lineage of development of how, like, just like how technology develops, so do tactics and organizational strategies.

• 16:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  And, yeah, so realizing that, like, because you'll read about, uh, the social democrat nihilist from Russia, Stepniak, uh, wrote a book on guerrilla warfare from his time fighting, I actually think fighting the Ottoman Empire, but I can't remember.

• 16:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  You know, but that was in the.

• 16:39Robert Evans?

  They helped a lot of people figure that one out. Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, uh, you know, but it's like, but then that's that's not the one that people are using. And then you, you know, you fast forward to after World War II, I know a lot of people were writing like, gee, how do partisans work, you know?

• 16:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  And so it just it really interests me that there's development also of just like literally, how do you organize this stuff?

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and because there had to be, right? Especially because the conflicts of the 20th century are so much wider in scope and more complex and able to be because of the level of development that exists, right? So you need new theories of how to actually wield, you know, modern insurgent, the story of modern insurgent struggle and the kind of stuff Giapp was doing, because Giapp is not just a line level guy, right? He is thinking about grander strategy, is how do you wield insurgents as a? Weapon in concert with the other weapons of a modern state. Totally. That that's that's the question. And that's what Lawrence is kind of in a a formative scholar on.

• 17:46Robert Evans?

  Now, at the point in 1946 that Giapp is showing off his copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in this meeting. T E Lawrence is still very famous, right? He becomes a celebrity as a result of what he does in the Middle East. That's why there's a fucking movie about him, right? And he was famous primarily as this guy who had helped the Allies win crucial victories over the Ottomans by welding these Arab bandits into an effective force.

• 18:11Robert Evans?

  This is as well like partially inaccurate description of his accomplishments, but Giapp understood better than Salon what Lawrence had really done. And as a result, Lawrence is kind of puzzled when he hears that Giapp has this copy of Lawrence's book because Salon is like, well, this is just a guy who like taught some some desert Arabs how to ambush trains, right? That has nothing to do with with fighting the Japanese in Vietnam. Why would you consider this relevant? And I'm going to continue with another passage from Schneider's book. Ah, Giapp replied, is that your assessment of Lawrence? Salon nodded a casual affirmation. Of course, then you have missed the whole point of Lawrence, said Giapp. He is less about fighting a guerrilla war than leading one.

• 18:53Robert Evans?

  And leadership, Giapp emphasized, is applicable in any context, desert or jungle, military or civil. And so if you're someone who might be inclined to ignore or dismiss Lawrence as just another like imperialist proto CIA guy appropriating, you know, a local culture. I would encourage you to consider there's something worth finding in what Giapp saw in the man, right? And it's worth studying anyone whose work was a critical part of the strategy that led Vietnam to victory over the United States. Because in a lot of ways, that gave us the 21st century, right? You kind of have to study a guy who can do that. And I will say one of like the through lines of this story will be reading some quotes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

• 19:39Robert Evans?

  One of the things that makes Lawrence a powerful insurgent leader, which is part of why I like the story, is that he's an excellent writer. He's just an actually incredibly talented, beautiful prose. And that's a big part of why he is an influential military theorist. And I kind of like that.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  That's cool. I want to read Seven Pillars now.

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  It's great. Yeah, it is. It's actually very, very good. And as now historians have gone back and forth on this, but like modern historiography will agree, generally accurate. As we'll talk about, there's a couple of areas where Lawrence probably lied, or at least may have lied, but generally accurate to what happened. So Schneider's book makes a pretty good case for Lawrence as like the father of modern insurgent warfare. My main issue with his book is that he focuses on like the how and a lot of just kind of the military nuts and bolts. And as a result, his story leaves out something that the 1962 movie leaves out, which is why would a guy born into like the comfortable upper middle class of life in the British Empire

• 20:45Robert Evans?

  choose to become, you know, a leader, not the leader, of an Arab revolt against Ottoman power? Right? How do we get there? And that's the story we're going to tell today. Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on August 16th, 1888.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Do you want to take an ad before this section?

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  Sure. You know who else was born on August 16th, 1888 in the United Kingdom? Probably not our sponsors because they're probably Donald Trump again.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  There's a good chance.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  I miss the gambling ads.

• 21:19Robert Evans?

  I miss them too. Oh, chumba.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Maybe not by the time this comes out.

• 21:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  No, then it'll be an ad for guerrilla warfare.

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, guerrilla warfare. Disappointed about the election results? You know, one way or the other, a lot of people are going to be thinking about guerrilla warfare in the wake of this election coming up in a couple of days. So that's part of why I wrote these episodes.

• 21:46Speaker 04

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• 22:47Robert Evans?

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• 23:30Robert Evans?

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• 23:53Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Lawrence was born in maybe the most ridiculously named region of of Great Britain, Trinadog, Trimadog Carnavonshire, Wales, which I know I've pronounced wrong. I don't like, fuck you people. Look at that. Trimadog? What does that even mean? That sounds like me- that sounds like medicine for fleas. Or like, if your dog's too fat, you give it trimadog, right?

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Is this just like the combination of English and Welsh?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Excuse me, do not, do not body shame dogs. Excuse me.

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  I'm not. I'm just saying, if you were selling that medicine, like if you're selling dog Ozimbic, you call it trimadog. Dog Ozimbic has to be a thing, right? There's no way that's not coming.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  I really hope not, but you're probably right.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  There's no way, there's no way that's not gonna, there's no way that, there's no way there aren't people who are already shooting Ozimbic into their cloned dogs. That's definitely happening.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Drugs just go both directions real quick now. Like, horse drugs for humans.

• 24:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Human drugs for dogs.

• 24:59Robert Evans?

  You came over the other day and we're talking about how like Rintra's on Trazadone and hey, so am I. We're Traza buddies.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Oh no, it made it great when I was, I was in a place that was up, never mind. I wanna, I don't wanna tell you anything about how I acquired some, I've always gone through the proper channels to get Trazadone for my dog.

• 25:16Robert Evans?

  I love the proper channels, Margaret. Speaking of the proper channels, Lawrence comes from a line of people who did things through the proper channels. His father was not born a Lawrence. He was instead born a member of the landed nobility, Sir Thomas Chapman. Now Lawrence's, his family, like Lawrence's ancestors are the literal Irish landlords responsible for like so much of that island's misery. Like when you read about like those like absentee, like that's Lawrence's people, right? That's the line he comes from. So Lawrence's dad's family, the Chapmans, they send Sir Thomas Lawrence to Eton where he is abused and molested into being a proper young inheritor of the empire. And he was

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  by all accounts, a normal boy of the, the landed nobility until he marries someone who was like a bad match for him, which is not unusual in his social class, but he is not capable of being happy in like a loveless marriage. And also, you know.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  He's a romantic.

• 26:20Robert Evans?

  He's a romantic and his bride only gives him daughters, right? So he's like also not thrilled about that. So like miniman of his social standing, he picks up a mistress and he brings her to Dublin, where she gets pregnant with his child. This child comes out a boy, which is what he had wanted, and he makes the incredibly questionable decision to give his bastard child his name, right?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Hell, yeah.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Now, it's hard, that's not, if you're trying to keep this on the down low, which you're supposed to do, that's a bad way to do it. This does not lead to a sustainable situation with his other legal family, and everything falls apart for Sir Thomas. And one of the things like, there's, there's this fucked up old timey stuff.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Wait, this is dad or is this?

• 27:05Robert Evans?

  This is dad. Sir Thomas is Lawrence of Arabia's dad.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Lawrence is the bastard.

• 27:10Robert Evans?

  Sorry, go ahead. Lawrence is a bastard, right? So Sir Thomas, what's interesting about him to me, because up until this like, oh, he's not happy that his married, his legal wife only gave him daughters, so he like has a mistress and a secret family. That's not weird. What's weird is that when this gets exposed and his life falls apart, he's just like, fuck it, I don't want to be a nobleman anymore. I have no attraction to this social circle. So he makes a deal with his wife. You get all the land. You get nearly all of the income. I'm going to keep, keep a small portion of the income, so I don't have to ever work a job, but you get like 90% of everything, right? And I'm just not going to be a Chapman anymore. I'm going to disappear and live under a new name and raise my bastard son and live with

• 27:55Robert Evans?

  my mistress who I actually love. Is that cool with you? And his wife is like, sure.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  That's a good deal.

• 28:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Now you don't have to have a husband.

• 28:04Robert Evans?

  That seems like a pretty good deal, given that this is the 1880s.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:10Robert Evans?

  So, uh, yeah, they do this and Sir John moves out of Ireland to Wales and he takes up a new name with his still a mistress, never legally a wife, uh, and they become known as Mr. And Mrs. Thomas Lawrence, even though, again, they're never legally married. So that's where Lawrence's name comes from. It's not his real name. It's the name his dad picks after abandoning his life as a member of the landed nobility, uh, to go live with his mistress in Wales, um, as we all hope to do one day. Uh, so T E Lawrence was their second son. Uh, he was born in Trimadoc, not long after Thomas's old life fell apart. Now, his dad is racked with guilt over what happened, right? He does seem to feel bad about a lot

• 28:54Robert Evans?

  of aspects of this. Um,

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, but his daughters aren't super excited about it.

• 28:59Robert Evans?

  I bet his daughters aren't thrilled, but, uh, yeah, Lawrence's mother, Sarah Lawrence, uh, which is very funny that that's her name, um, was the self, herself, the child of an unwed illegitimate union. So she actually doesn't feel bad about this at all. And she is by far the domineering force in the relationship. Like, you get the feeling Lawrence's dad is kind of a sad sack and his mom was like, shut the fuck up. Like, you don't have to work, uh, like, go to, like, chill the fuck out. There's nothing wrong with the fact that we we're not married and having kids. Like, go fuck yourself.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Is she Irish or she English?

• 29:35Robert Evans?

  I think she's English. Uh, her name is Sarah Lawrence, which does sound like an English name.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:40Robert Evans?

  Uh, Lawrence would later write that his mom saw their father as, quote, "her trophy of power." Lawrence has some mom issues, but also I don't see any reason why this is necessarily wrong. Uh, he describes her as a very controlling woman and his father as like kind of a mild person. Um, now, one of the things that's really unique about Lawrence's dad, he is in a very, I mean, not just a rarity for the age, but he's almost a singular figure in that he is an attentive, full-time father, right? He never has to work and he has no social obligations to keep up. So he pours all of his interest into being there all of the time to raise his kids. Which like, doesn't happen.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  No, but it's like certain people's dreams. Yeah, like, stay-at-home dad, like,

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Money's taken care of by inheritance or whatever.

• 30:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he is living a lot of people's dreams. And it's just so interesting to me that like, Lawrence is like the one guy in Victorian England who's raised by like, a responsible dad. At least responsible to his sons. In the wonderful book, The Young T E Lawrence, biographer Anthony Satin writes that Lawrence and his four brothers never, quote, "had an unhappy or even an unsettled life. They moved more often in their first few years than most families moved in a lifetime, but they were close-knit and well-loved." Now, from an early age, their parents don't inform them of their actual lineage of like, all, everything that went down with dad

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  before they became Lorences. But from an early age, T E and his brother Ned, they're very smart kids. And they, they have inklings that they might be bastards, although they think for a very different reason, right? They think that like, basically, there was cheating going on between their parents, as opposed to the real story, right?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  They think their dad isn't their dad.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they think their dad isn't their dad. Now, this, this is, this is something that like, is a trauma to a degree for young Thomas, because he and his family, they're very religious. They're raised incredibly strictly in the church, and sex out of wedlock is a big deal. The guilt his father felt, which eventually compelled him to reveal the truth to his sons in a deathbed letter, may have bled over to them in some way. Whatever the truth, Lawrence wrote himself about being dogged by a peculiar sense of worthlessness his whole life, right? This is, the way this manifests is he always kinds of thinks, "I'm just a piece of shit." Like, "I don't belong anywhere. I'm a bad person. I, I come from nothing. You know, I don't deserve anything."

• 32:20Robert Evans?

  This is like, he's, he's got imposter syndrome his whole life, despite the fact that he is, he is not just a smart kid. He is clearly a genius. And when I say a genius, I mean that as a small boy, he develops a scholarly fascination and like a professional scholarly level of knowledge of medieval art history. Uh, in order to indulge this knowledge, he would travel around on foot and through bicycle to different historic sites, either on his own or with a small group of friends to, his hobby is to make rubbings of brass reliefs of crusaders and kings from various tombs and churches.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, like a normal kid.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Like a normal kid. Yeah. Just a normal kid. Um, now this is even for the day, a nerdy hobby, right? Kids are, you know, reading fucking, uh, at least kids of this level of wealth are reading like fucking the Iliad in grade school. But this is nerdy for that day, right?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  He's trying to do original research on the Iliad.

• 33:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's doing like original historiography. And Lawrence takes the nerdiness up a notch by developing an obsession with fidelity and completion that modern day like nerd collectors will recognize. This is a kid who in the modern era probably would have gotten way too into like Warhammer or something, right? Uh, and I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's biography. It was typical of Lawrence that his interests should become obsessive. His principal collaborator, his childhood friend Cyril Beeson, known by his school nickname of Scroggs, remembered that it was no collector's hobby. There were experiments in the technique of rubbing with different grades of heel ball, a mix of lampblack and wax and paper,

• 34:00Robert Evans?

  assisted by friendly advice from shoemakers and paper hangers who shop supplied our raw materials. Another school friend described the outings as a ransacking. Nothing stood in Lawrence's way, so if brasses were hidden behind some pews, Lawrence, already ruthless, made short work of the obstruction. And I still hear the splintering woodwork and his short laugh almost sinister to my timorous ears. So he's, he's both like, he will destroy any, like, he didn't give a fuck about those pews. He will break and damage church property to get to these goddamn reliefs that he's going to do rubbings on.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  This is such a perfect British Orientalist style thing to get into. Like, I'm going to find the history, even if I have to destroy everything between me and it.

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I will kill him. Yeah, exactly. He's, he is fucking child tomb raider.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:51Robert Evans?

  Now Lawrence is, despite his brilliance, an uneven student. When he was interested in a type, I think today, I don't know what kind of neurodivergent he would be diagnosed as, but made probably all of them, right? One thing that is written about him is that if he was interested in a topic, he would be, he would be so far beyond every other student in the class in that topic. He'd be like at the teacher's level, right? And if he wasn't interested in something, he couldn't do the work at all. He was completely non-functional, right?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  I can identify with this pretty hard.

• 35:24Robert Evans?

  You're going to identify very hard with the next thing we talk about here because he is, the way to look at him, he is an early iconoclastic example of a nerd, right? He is a proto geek, right? And he is, I even wrote this in the script, not dissimilar in some ways to our guest for these episodes, Margaret Killjoy. And let me make that case now. At age 15, Lawrence leads his friends on raids through Oxford's libraries to learn the secrets of how to make chainmail and other medieval arms and armor for themselves.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is literally what I was doing when I was 15.

• 36:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Our school had to ban us from making chainmail.

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is what Lawrence is doing as a kid. He's like the very first generation of Western kid doing this, right? They're making their own chainmail, their own weapon. They're teaching themselves how to fight by reading medieval manuals. They learn how to speak appropriate Old English and draw heraldry from memory. Like this, this kid's soul is a Ren Faire.

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  And Lawrence is one of those kids. His interest in medieval history is always married with this deep care for the fine details, for fidelity. One of his hobbies, he starts a hobby of like buying shards of pottery from excavations in the city, right? People will be doing construction and they will, they will turn up some old pottery shards. And his hobby is to like buy them and meticulously glue them back together. And he is so good at this as a teenage boy, that local Oxford museums still keep and display pieces that he rebuilt from like the Roman era. Like he's that, that level of skill that like even today, his work as a child is recognized as like, pretty good. He was pretty good at that.

• 37:10Robert Evans?

  So they had made the case, very bright kid, probably, probably fair to call him a genius.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, the kind of person who's gonna do something really good or really terrible, or as you've pointed out, somehow both.

• 37:21Robert Evans?

  Somehow both, certainly significant.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:24Robert Evans?

  Now, for his own part, Lawrence described his education at Oxford High School with the words, "very little, very reluctantly, and very badly," right? That's how he talks about his, like, the end of his primary school education.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:38Robert Evans?

  We can intuit from some details that we do have that he was the recipient of a fair amount of bullying, as you would guess from a child who is gluing together pottery shards.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  At like, the most infamous bully academies in history.

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  At the school for making psychopaths, yes.

• 37:58Robert Evans?

  He develops as a child a hatred for bullies that is going to be with him his entire life, and that at age 16 spurs him into some disastrous action. In this particularly notable incident, one of his friends is being picked on by an older kid, and Lawrence intervenes. But he is a, he is not a large boy, right? This other kid is much bigger. Lawrence intervenes because it's the right thing to do, and the fight goes so badly that his leg is broken enough that he misses a semester in school, right? Like, he is, like, rendered an invalid for months because of how badly this kid beats the shit out of him. His mother is convinced that the injury stops him from growing into what should have been his full height, although that's probably just not biologically true.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:39Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna quote again from Satin's book here. "The injury exacerbated Lawrence's reluctance to join in. His eldest brother, Bob, remembered that he was good at gymnastics and took part in games in the playground. But Ned admitted that, 'I've never, since I was able to think, played any game through to the end. At school, they used to stick me in football or cricket teams, and I would always trickle away from the field before the match ended. The obvious reason might have been physical, but Lawrence later thought there were other, more complex issues behind his avoidance of team sports. Because they were organized, because they had rules, because they had results." I find that so interesting.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  I identify with this.

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  I so I identify with this kid so hard that I'm worried.

• 39:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's hard not to. Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:25Robert Evans?

  So Schneider, who's not as detailed as Satin when it comes to dissecting Lawrence's personality in life, posits that Lawrence's detaste for organized sports has something to do with the fact that he preferred to lead rather than follow. Now, I think that's probably him working backwards and maybe an error. The quote from Lawrence that Satin presents is a more interesting explanation. They're organized, they have rules, and those rules aren't my rules, right? I don't understand why things are doing this this way, and I don't like just saying, well, this is the way things are done.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  In the summer of 1905, Lawrence cycled to France with his father. This was not his first taste of freedom. Again, he traveled extensively across the UK on foot and by bike, motivated partly by a desire to get away from his mom. But the trip to France awakened something in him, and for the next several years, he feels this obsession with like, I need to get out there, I need to travel. But unfortunately, he's got to go to college. He attends Jesus College at Oxford. Oxford is, well, people talk about it as Oxford, but it's actually like five colleges, and Jesus is one of them, right?

• 40:28Speaker 00

  I didn't know there was a college called Jesus.

• 40:30Robert Evans?

  There's Jesus College, yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  It's a seminary, or is it just called Jesus?

• 40:34Robert Evans?

  It's just called Jesus. I mean, maybe they have a seminary degree, but that's not what he's doing. He's getting an undergraduate degree, he's a history dude, and he hates college. He hates it even more than high school. He hates his undergraduate college. So he has to find outside ways to stimulate himself. And so in 1906, at age 18, he takes himself alone on a 2,400 mile cycling trip through France and to the Greek coast. Now, this is-

• 41:01Speaker 00

  France doesn't touch Greece. That's a long-

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  That's a long bicycle trip.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:07Robert Evans?

  And this is, I think this is his equivalent of, if we're going back to the Margaret comparisons- Like being a train kid, right? Because he is, he, he takes this, this is not just about seeing, you know, France. It's not just about cycling. It is an exercise in aestheticism. Lawrence wants to see how tough he is. Part of the, the goal is he, he eats as little as possible because he wants to explore how little food can take me, can I live on while I going this distance, right? And there's also this intellectual dimension to it. He spends the entire visit, he goes through every medieval church and castle on this route through France to Greece, and he analyzes the architecture in exhausting detail. And Schneider makes a supposition here that I think is well founded, which is that he thinks

• 41:50Robert Evans?

  this journey is integral to Lawrence's growth into an insurgent leader because it demanded and it, it cultured him in physical toughness. And he's also pay, it's training him how to pay close surgical attention to his environment. And I, I have trouble like arguing with that, that contention here.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  I mean, it's like, it's, it's a little bit reading backwards, but it's also not wrong.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not necessarily wrong. Now, when you string too many details together like that in a podcast, it can make the man, Lawrence, seem kind of like an automaton of history rather than a teenage boy. So one thing I value Saturn for is he includes details from this trip like that Lawrence, while he's, you know, starving himself and biking thousands of miles and taking meticulous historical notes about all these castles and churches and stuff. He's writing his mom letters constantly telling her that he's not going to tell her any details about his journey. All I'm going to tell you, mom, is descriptions of the buildings that I've seen. And he does this so many times that you have to conclude this is him kind of sticking back at his mom because she's so controlling. Like, fuck you, mom, you don't own me. I'm not going to tell you anything about my trip.

• 42:56Robert Evans?

  I'm just going to describe these buildings to you. Like, he's being a little shit. Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  He also probably like fell in love like three separate times on that trip.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes, you have, well, maybe not, Margaret. We're going to talk about that. Uh, this Lawrence of Arabia may low key be our first behind the bastards ace icon.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 43:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but well, we're building to that. Um, or he's a pedophile. One of the, one of the two, Margaret.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  All right, well, let's hope for ace.

• 43:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Lawrence's journey ends on the Greek coast with a miserable case of malaria. He is also just sick constantly, which I think is just unavoidable if you travel in this period of time. Like, if you are a world traveler in the late Victorian era, you are dying of fucking typhus or malaria or something 80% of your waking hours.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  But while he's kind of trying to survive malaria, he gets a view across the Aegean of distant Turkey, and this ignites something in him. Later, he would write, "I felt that at last I had reached the way to the south and all the glorious east. Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tir, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete, they were all there and all within reach of me. I fancy I now know better than Keats what Cortez felt like, silent upon a peak in Darien. Oh, I must get down here, farther out, again. Really, this getting to the sea has almost overturned my mental balance. I would accept a passage for Greece tomorrow." So he's just, the fact that he has to go back to school, go back to England, so close

• 44:29Robert Evans?

  to this, this world that he's just been reading about, all of his classical education and like the Crusades and whatnot, it's like a wound in his soul that he can't just keep traveling.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  It's like, I think for, I think for a lot of the Victorian, especially English, it's kind of like reaching the world of fairy. Like, in the Orientalist mind, you're like, "Oh, I've discovered the place where none of the rules make sense, and I don't belong in this world, so here's this other world." You know, like Byron and all those people were like obsessed with the Near East for that reason, you know?

• 45:03Robert Evans?

  And if you were a nerd in this period, there's not Tolkien to fall into, there's certainly not like Star Wars, but you have classic history and medieval history, right? And so this is for him, like if someone today, if you were to just stumble into Middle Earth, like, right? Like, that's how he feels about it. And like, that is Orientalism, right? Like, that's a factor in Orientalism. But it's also, when you think about it from the perspective not of someone of power, but of this like boy who's just been, has this obsessive interest in the history of this era, area, there's a degree that you have to be kind of sympathetic to at this stage, where it's like, well, yeah, of course he felt this way.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Because Orientalism is really complex because you have both the like Orientalists like, "Oh, we're gonna go over there and steal all your mummies and smoke them." And that's like coming from like power and we're gonna steal all your stuff.

• 45:53Robert Evans?

  I would smoke a mummy. I would smoke a mummy, Margaret.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, no fair. But there's also just this like, well, that's, there's this also kind of putting on a pedestal, which is also not always great. But there's like, like there's a weeaboo-ness to it.

• 46:05Robert Evans?

  No, no, it's problematic too. But yeah, it's, and he's from the weeaboo side of things, right? Now, once he becomes a graduate student, his enjoyment of school improves markedly. Because the pedagogical style in that part of Oxford, once you hit your graduate era, instead of just being like, "You have to learn and memorize these things we say," which is just torture for Lawrence, it's like, "Hey, what are you interested in? Our job as your advisors is to find the areas of interest you're in and like figure out by working with you ways that you can contribute to academia, that you can move." And like that Lawrence excels in, right? Once, once that's what school is, he does very well. So Lawrence and his advisor talk themselves into an idea for how he might combine his desire to travel further east,

• 46:49Robert Evans?

  which had been sparked by his first vision of the Greek shoreline and his obsessive interest in medieval architecture. A major debate at the time centered around the presence of castles built by European crusaders in the Middle East that had structures in common with some of the structures seen in classical medieval European castles. And the question was, "Does this mean that Europeans introduced certain architectural methods to the Arab world? Or was it the reverse? Crusaders learned local techniques from, you know, local people in, you know, the Arab world during the Crusades and then took them home with them, right? And so medieval castles are actually in large part an example of knowledge transfer

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  from the Muslim world to the West, right?

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  Which is, I think largely true. It's agreed. Obviously, like this is the kind of thing that's more complicated than we're going to exhaustively like tease out in an episode of Behind the Bastards, a podcast by two people who don't know much about medieval architecture. But Lawrence, it's, I think the agreement- Is that he was on to something here, right? And obviously, he's not the one who started this idea. Other people have proposed it, but he's going to actually contribute significantly to like history, historiological debate in this measure, right? So Satin writes, quote, Lawrence decided to take a broader view of the topic and to question whether the skill to build a castle, not just a pointy arch, had come from the east. The accepted view, championed at that time by Charles Oman, professor of history at Oxford,

• 48:20Robert Evans?

  was that the Europeans marched east with hardly any understanding of fortifications and learned from the Byzantines how to build the magnificent castles they have left in the Levant. According to Oman, much of what Lawrence had admired in France had its origins elsewhere. But neither Oman nor any of the others, nor any of the other scholars who had written about this period had traveled to Syria and Palestine to see the buildings, relying instead on historical documents for evidence to support their theories. Now, this is something that's going to be a thing for Lawrence's whole working life, which is that he's willing to go places other people of his status aren't, and he always prefers to do the most difficult, dangerous version of any task set before him, right? He is not someone who is like comfortable making inferences or assumptions

• 49:04Robert Evans?

  without actually getting his hands dirty. So he decides, I'm going to go to the Middle East to take part. Specifically, I'm going to go to Turkey to take part in, you know, a dig in some of these classical ruins. And I'm going to start that before I go over to Turkey. I'm going to do a walking tour of Syria. Now, he is warned ahead of time, no one, no European does this, right? It's too hot, it's too dangerous, you need a guide and servants to carry your luggage and whatnot. And Lawrence is like, no, I'm just going to walk on my own, right? I'm going to carry my own shit and like, I'm gonna, I'm going to invent backpacking as a hobby.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. What years are we talking about here?

• 49:47Robert Evans?

  We are talking 1906.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so he says he's gonna do this and his, yeah, his advisor is like Europeans don't walk in Syria and Lawrence's response is, well, I do, which hard not to like this guy.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  I know.

• 50:03Robert Evans?

  So he takes his first steps into the Arab world during a fascinating time in relations between his country and the, and again, when I say the Arab world, Syria is the Arab world, obviously, Turkey is not, Turks are not Arabs. I want to be clear that I'm not like conflating the two. I'm gonna be using a lot of terms that like, because he travels extensively in the Middle East, he travels extensively in the Near East, which is more accurate to call Turkey. Yeah, and he travels, he spends a lot of time both on the Arab Peninsula and in modern day Syria and Iraq, right? That's all of his like stomping grounds. But at this stage, he's kind of walking through Syria, going through the Holy Land and getting to like, kind of the Ottoman heartland, right? Like, that's the, that's

• 50:45Robert Evans?

  the gist of this trip. And he takes this during a fascinating time in relations between his country and the Ottoman Empire, which was well in decline by the mid 1800s, riven by unrest, and constantly picked at by expansionist czars and quarrelsome Serbs. By 1854, Great Britain had actually come into the Crimean War on the side of the Ottomans, not because like, oh, they're being picked on, but because like, if the Ottomans fall and Russia, you know, extends the Russian Empire across like fucking Constantinople, then we don't have a bulwark against this country that we see as a geopolitical rival, right?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  You're saying that the Western powers need to have an ally in the?

• 51:28Robert Evans?

  Yes, in the struggle against Russia, yes. And in this case, it's the Ottomans. The British had another reason for wanting good relations with the Ottomans that's even more selfish, which is that the Sultan of the Empire, and again, this is a Turk, is the Caliph of Islam, right? Now, this does not in fact make, the way a lot of Europeans take this is, is that like, he's the Pope of Islam, right? Which is kind of the case, but also really not the case in the hearts of most Muslims, because like- A shitload of the Muslim population are Arab, right? And so they, they both are co-religionists with the caliph and also are oppressed and ruled by the Turks and not happy with it necessarily, right?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  You're starting to get kind of more the rise of Turkish nationalism during this period, I think.

• 52:15Robert Evans?

  Turkish nationalism and Arab nationalism is starting to rise in this period.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  I meant to say, God, I meant to say Arab nationalism.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, Turkish nationalism is also a major factor in what's happening, right?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  But in like opposite directions, right? Because the Arab nationalism is fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire.

• 52:29Robert Evans?

  And as we're talking about, we'll talk about, the Turkish nationalism is like everyone in this entire wide region of the world are Turks. There are no Arabs, there are no Kurds. You're just mountain Turks who've lost your language, right? Which a lot of Turkish people still, uh, still argue for today. It's kind of a major fact in what's happening in Rojava. So anyway, a lot of Europeans assume, oh, this caliph is like the king of Islam. And so, you know, we have India, the gem and the crown of the British Empire with this massive Muslim population, and we have constant issues with uprisings. And if the caliph gets pissed at us, he might call for a jihad from these Indian Muslims, and who knows what will happen then, right?

• 53:10Robert Evans?

  Which is not like a complete non-factor as a threat, but they're also vastly overstating the degree of influence the caliph has, right? In, in fucking India. So this is the status quo for a while. Like, we're gonna, you know, keep propping up the Ottoman Empire because of these reasons that are useful for our own empire. But then things start to change in 1869, which is when the Suez Canal opens in Egypt. One reason that the British Empire had needed the Ottomans to, to remain semi-stable was that we need them in order to provide us with a way to quickly and easily take goods from the East into Europe and vice versa, right?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Would you say goods and services?

• 53:50Robert Evans?

  Goods and services, right. Speaking of goods and services, you know who else takes every product that's sponsored on this show, travels through the Ottoman Empire, you know?

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Including the podcasts.

• 54:01Robert Evans?

  It's extremely expensive, yeah, yeah. It's ruining the time stream. We have time cop problems every fucking week, always trying to bring various weight loss pills and gambling apps through the Ottoman Empire. And, you know, how do Ottomans from the 1890s feel about Chumba Casino? They don't love it, Margaret, they don't love Chumba Casino. They're broadly positive about the Trump sneakers, though.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:26Robert Evans?

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• 56:55Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series sniffies cruising confessions bedside manner now on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get podcasts sponsored by healthy sexual from Gillian sciences.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  So we're back. So yeah, the British, you know, get the Suez Canal going and suddenly they don't really need the Ottoman Empire to be a staple in order to like move goods and services, right? And they, you know, they make a shitload of money off the canal. And once they're kind of fatted on canal profits, they stop really caring about the Sultan and like propping his bullshit up. And as a result, the British kind of snooze through another Russian invasion of Ottoman territory. Now, this isn't the Ottoman heartland, it's the Balkans, right? Which you have to remember, much of the Balkans, you know, the territory that becomes like Yugoslavia during the 20, the later 20th century is, is Ottoman territory in this period of time. And so the Russians invade the Balkans and, you know, 1882, or the Russians invade the

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  Balkans and like, you know, the, the Brits don't do anything. And then in 1882, the British occupy Egypt. Near the end of the century, Greece and the Ottomans go to war and war spreads quickly in this connected world. British colonial figures in India are shocked and horrified when Indian Muslims start demonstrating in support of the Ottoman side of the war. And they take this as, oh, you know, the Kalif, their leader has called them to action. I think what this actually is, is that like Muslims in India sympathize with their co-religionists in a very natural way in a war against the Wests, right? I think that's more accurate than like, ah, the Kalif ordered them and they have to follow him. I want to quote now from a book called setting the desert on a fire by James Barr.

• 58:46Robert Evans?

  And this is talking about like European coverage of the war against Greece. At the times, Valentine Chirrell believed that the Sultan's power as Kalif gave him a disturbing and disruptive political influence worldwide. He and others feared that the Sultan would use his position to upset the stability of Britain's Eastern Empire.

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  Now, this is not how things work work out like, and this is probably, we know now, probably fair to call this a silly and racist assumption. But you know who else is silly and racist, Margaret? Not our sponsors, the Germans. And while the British are like, oh, my God, what if the Caliph incites a rebellion in India? The Germans are also looking and seeing England as a geopolitical enemy and going, oh, my God, what if we could get the Sultan to incite a rebellion in India? Or, you know, that could really help us with our British people problem. So the Germans start increasingly sinking resources into making the Ottomans their friends. They send engineers and metalworkers to help the Sultan build railways, and they send military officers to modernize his army.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  And this is the You know that tanky, if tankies existed then, they'd be supporting the Germans because they'd be like, well, at least they're against the British.

• 59:52Robert Evans?

  Anti-imperialist icons, the Kaiser's Germany.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's no genocide in Namibia. What are you talking about? No Armenians were ever killed by the Turks. No. Anti-Western imperial, anti-imperialist icons, the Turkish Empire.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  I know a bit about how the Germans are going to be involved in the Armenian genocide and a little bit of the story.

• 1:00:14Robert Evans?

  The Germans, yeah. And we're not gonna get, we'll be talking a little bit about that, not enough, but this isn't a story primarily about that, but that is happening, right? This is the situation in the Muslim world when T E Lawrence embarks on his first journey there in June of 1909. A steamer ship takes him to the port of Jeddah in modern day Saudi Arabia. Now, later, during a second landing in Jeddah in 1916, Lawrence writes about the experience of taking this steamer ship to Jeddah, and this is such a beautiful passage that I just have to read it. "When we at last anchored in the outer harbor off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon,

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless."

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  I like that he clearly cares about living an aesthetic life.

• 1:01:07Robert Evans?

  Yes, that's everything to him.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  But also, like you were talking about earlier, how he like, he still wants, I'm sure he's gonna fail a whole bunch of times, but he wants to do what's right in any given situation, while at the same time, yeah, trying to live a beautiful life regardless of the

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  cost to his health. And that's fascinating.

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is. And I can tell you, just from extensively traveling in this similar region, that description of like, the heat like a drawn sword striking you in the face, I identify with quite a lot. Like, that is, that is how it, like, especially that first getting off the plane in Iraq, and stepping outside for, it is, it does feel like you've been assaulted suddenly. It's like a violent experience.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Is it a dry or is it a hot, a wet heat?

• 1:01:52Robert Evans?

  It is a dry heat.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  Yes. From Jeddah, he covered more than 1,100 miles, mostly on foot. In a write-up for the Guardian, Laura Feigl describes his journey. Lawrence wandered around Syria clad fastidiously in a bespoke suit and hobnail boots. He bemused the natives with his insistence on walking, even when accompanied by guides on horseback. He was especially English in his understated response to hardship. "I have had the delay of four attacks of malaria, when I had only reckoned on two," he complained to his mother, informing her nonchalantly that he had been robbed and rather smashed up by a group of armed robbers. Just casually like, "Nearly died of malaria, got beaten by bandits. Anyway, how are you doing, Mom?"

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  That is the one, the British characteristic that like

• 1:02:42Robert Evans?

  Endurance.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  It's pretty good.

• 1:02:44Robert Evans?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Not everyone should have it, but the keep calm and carry on while you're being, while you're literally the only nation, power of fighting the Nazis.

• 1:02:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  Sometimes you just need the like, obnoxious stoicism.

• 1:02:57Robert Evans?

  Stiff upper lip. I mean, it's part of why I've spent most of my career reporting alongside British journalists, when like, you're really into shit, it's very helpful to have a Brit next to you. They're very good.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Would you like a cigarette? Yeah. I can't do a British accent, but yeah.

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  They call them a word that sounds like a slur, but it's not. So his experience entered the, his experience of this time where he's like nearly dying while walking 1,100 miles is completely positive. He is just, he falls madly in love with the local culture, with particularly like these Arabs that he's starting to meet as he begins his journey through that portion of the Ottoman Empire. And he is particularly taken by their treatment of him as a guest. He writes home to his father, "This is a glorious country for wandering in. For hospitality is something more than a name. Setting aside the American and English missionaries who take care of me in the most fatherly or motherly way, they have all so far been as good as they can be. There are the common people, each

• 1:03:56Robert Evans?

  one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals, and without a thought of payment from a traveler on foot. It is so pleasant, for they have a very attractive kind of native dignity." And there's a, you know, there's Orientalism going on in that passage, but this is also something, if you travel in this region of the world today, you will experience, which is the treatment of guests. It's deeper than just Islam. It's something that goes back very far in that region of the world, and it is a profound experience. I don't know how else to describe it, but like the welcome you are in people's homes, people like fighting over hosting you and putting you up through the night, like it's, it's a very unique

• 1:04:39Robert Evans?

  experience. And I'm not surprised he's taken by it. I know exactly how he feels here. And there is this feeling of belonging that's totally different from like southern hospitality, right? Where people will offer you things, but it's kind of rude generally to take them. It's, it's more a matter of like, you, like, you all, it's almost sometimes a problem for you, the degree to which people are offering you meals and hospitality, because like you have, you have a schedule to keep. You've got to get places, right?

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  When you say it goes beyond Islam, I know that's a fundamental concept in Islam is taking...

• 1:05:12Robert Evans?

  Yes. But, but it's a fundamental concept in Islam, because that was present in the cultures of the region before Islam existed, right? I'm not saying like Islam stole it. I'm saying that like it is a part of Islam, because it's been a part of the culture for much longer.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  The people who made Islam already had that going on. That's interesting. That's cool.

• 1:05:32Robert Evans?

  Now, Lawrence seems to have been drawn in part to the feeling of belonging that he felt here, because he'd never felt like he belonged at home, in part because he's haunted by his status as an illegitimate child. So part of the appeal here-

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's bullied everywhere he goes, because he glues pottery together, like a nerd.

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  Right. He doesn't feel like he belongs, he feels like a fraud and impostor, he's bullied, and then he goes to this place where everyone's extremely happy to see him and nice to him, and he feels like he has a place to be, right? Now, there's also imperialist impulses, right, that are influenced by his obsession with the Crusades. Schneider writes, quote, "Lawrence began to see the Arab world in a new way, and would soon come to believe that he could move and bend it to his will, that his Crusader musings were more than an adolescent fantasy." We're starting to see some of, like, the darker side, growing, like, as he begins to understand, he also starts to think about how I can manipulate and change things here. So Lawrence has this first trip, and he has a wonderful time. He returns home with his,

• 1:06:28Robert Evans?

  you know, documentation of these different, like, structures he's seen from the Crusades, and he graduates from Oxford, right? He makes several more trips to France to work for the Ashmolean Museum, but he remains obsessed with the East, right? And in late 1910, he succeeds in setting up an apprenticeship at an archaeological dig in Turkey. To prepare, he traveled to Beirut that Christmas, and spent two months in Lebanon being tutored in Arabic. Schneider writes that, "60 years later, his Arabic teacher recalled him as someone who, quote, 'lived rather in the spirit than in the body,' right? That's her description of Lawrence from meeting him."

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:07Robert Evans?

  Now, many descriptions of Lawrence paint this picture of him as almost a monk, this severe aesthetic philosopher type. I think some of that is conscious, because he admires these monks who are like, a major part of the transmission of the medieval history. That is such an obsession to him, right? That said, he is not one of these guys who's like, this, that almost gives you this picture of him as someone who's like, unknown and unknowable. That's not him at all. In fact, he is incredibly popular with the local Arab diggers that he meets in, you know, some are Arabs, some are Turks- But like he this is like in a rural region of Anatolia, right?

• 1:07:48Robert Evans?

  And and a lot of these guys, these very like dirt poor diggers really identify with Lawrence because he's not like the other Europeans in that he doesn't just like sit around and wait for other people to do work for him. He digs as hard as anyone else on the team, right? He's actually useful and he's committed to not just like sitting around while other people do shit. Snyder writes, quote, "A typical example of this aspect of Lawrence's leadership occurred in June. Today I cured a man of compound scorpion bite by a few drops of ammonia. For that, I have a fame above Thompson's as Hakim, doctor, and as a magician who can conjure devils into water. His role as camp physician would be put to good use,

• 1:08:28Robert Evans?

  for in June of 1912, a severe outbreak of cholera struck the Aleppo area and saw Lawrence helping the local population deal with the problem through the remainder of the summer." Lawrence also adapted local garb, dressing in a Kurdish belt and attiring himself like the diggers he'd gotten to know. He found their clothing much more practical than what he'd bought from Oxford, and he wrote of his Western colleagues, "The foreigners came out here always to teach, whereas they had much better to learn." You can see why this guy's well-liked, you know? Now, in his book, Setting the Desert on Fire, Barr also gives a much, again, if you want a little bit less of the like, you know, agent of history moving nobly through time

• 1:09:11Robert Evans?

  picture, here's a much more fun account of Lawrence's behavior at this time. "He injected these excavations with an excitement not usually associated with the world of archaeology by firing his pistol in the air whenever an interesting find was unearthed." This is also what makes him popular. He loves shooting his gun in the air whenever he's in a good mood.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Honorary American.

• 1:09:34Robert Evans?

  Honorary American. Yeah, you have, we are, I am declaring you a citizen of the state of Texas, Lawrence. Your tin gallon hat is in the mail. Now, the digging season is not a year-round thing. Yet Lawrence could always be counted to hang around long after all the other foreigners had left. He just doesn't want to leave when the digging is done. One of his English colleagues later wrote, "I never quite fathomed why Lawrence was still at Carchemish when the digs were closed down, but I gather that it was partly from choice and partly from economy. He used to spend his time wandering around in Arab dress, sometimes for days at a time, storing his phenomenal memory with scraps of local knowledge, which came in very useful later on. When he was not doing this, he was trying to puzzle out the Hittite inscriptions, or

• 1:10:17Robert Evans?

  target shooting with a long Mauser pistol. I amused myself by competing with him at both of these games." So he's just a fun dude. He likes shooting, he likes puzzling out Hittite inscriptions, you know?

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he wants to dress like the locals.

• 1:10:32Robert Evans?

  And he wants to dress like the locals.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  See where he's... Because when he's walking around in his, like, suit and hobnail shoes in the desert, you're like...

• 1:10:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Oh, man, he's like one of those, like, young Republican kids.

• 1:10:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, he just didn't know a better way. And like, a big part of it is, like, it's just much more reasonable to be dressed that way in the... in this part of the world. Like, he is Carchemish, he's like, right on the border of, uh, you know, modern-day Turkey, like, the far southern Turkey, and Syria, right?

• 1:11:07Robert Evans?

  So this is... It's not far from, like, some of the area, it's not... It's like, not far from... Well, actually, no, sorry, it is a little bit... But like, yeah, it's far from Hasaka. But, like, yeah, he... So he's right in, you know, this is like, the Turks would say part of the Turkish heartland, but this is like, the Arab world, the Kurdish world, it's kind of like, right in the middle of all of that. And it's just not a reasonable place to wear a three-piece suit all summer. The garb that the locals wear is much more comfortable, especially if you're digging all day.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Compared to the thing that was developed on a terrible island where the sun never rises.

• 1:11:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  That's why they want an empire where the sun never sets is because they live on an island where it doesn't rise.

• 1:11:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. So Lawrence was to spend the next three years of his life in Turkey as much as possible. This was by every credible account, the happiest period of his life. And it is also where we get the first claims that he was a bastard, right? Specifically, the claim that he was a pedophile or some sort of groomer, right? Now, I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't agree with this interpretation, but I'm gonna make the, I'm gonna make the case for it. I'm going to explain to you why people talk about this. So the gist of it is that while Lawrence was participating in this dig, a 14-year-old boy named Saleem Ahmed was hired on as a donkey boy. In the parlance of the times, this means he helped lead donkey trains of supplies to the diggers.

• 1:12:30Robert Evans?

  Saleem, nicknamed Dahum, or the Little Dark One by his fellows, became fast friends with Lawrence. We don't know precisely why, but their bond deepened when Lawrence caught dysentery later that year. And Dahum cared for him until he got better. The two traveled to Aleppo together. And Lawrence began promoting his young friend to higher positions and ultimately made Dahum his assistant. While on the dig, the two lived in the same house and seemed to take particular pleasure in wearing each other's clothes. This is something that everyone will say about them is like, they would exchange outfits and dress like each other. They have pictures taken where they're dressed in identical outfits, like dressed as each other. And by all accounts, they are inseparable, right?

• 1:13:11Robert Evans?

  And again, this is like, I think he's 14, you know, to 16 during like the period where they're spending most of their time together. And Lawrence is in his twenties, so this is potentially very problematic, right?

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Robert Evans?

  Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson described Lawrence as having a, quote, "almost fatherly concern for the boy." One of his colleagues at the dig, Leonard Woolley, went much further. After Lawrence became famous, he made public allegations that Lawrence had convinced, quote, "Dahum to live with him and got him to pose as a model for a queer crouching figure, which he carved in the soft local limestone." To make an image was bad enough in this way, but to portray a naked figure was proof to them, the local Arabs, of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence was widely spread and firmly believed. So Woolley's allegation is that these two were homosexual lovers and like the locals found out about it because he was carving an image of Dome in local, naked and local limestone.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:09Robert Evans?

  Now, again, Dome would have been 15 or 16. And at the time, that is not the same as 15 or 16 today. Again, in like Germany, you're an adult at 14. But I don't say that to mitigate potential pedophilia, just to say like, that is why his countrymen who criticize him for who like, he was homosexual, they're not calling him a pedophile because that's not how they would have seen this, right? They would have seen this as a gay relationship. That's not how we see it. I don't think we're wrong in seeing it differently, but he is not written about by people who criticize him as his time as a pedophile. He's written about as a homosexual, which is a severe criminal offense in the UK at the time, right? If he had been convicted of this, he would have gone to prison.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. What was interesting is because for centuries,

• 1:14:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  gay men in Britain would go to the Ottoman Empire because it was like more accepted to be gay there and just a friendlier place. But obviously, I think that that started to fade around this time. Actually, I've heard because of Western influence, but I'm not, I've been more certain about things.

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  It's a bit more, it's too complicated for us to get into in detail, but one aspect of this that I think was an aspect of why it was friendlier in the Ottoman Empire, and it's an aspect of how everyone looks at it and how like Lawrence is famous, he's not homophobic, right? He has friends who are gay, that he knows are gay, and he does not seem to have any issue with this. But also, I don't know that he would have, I don't think he had any kind of sexual relationship with Doom, to like skip ahead here, but I don't know that he would have felt that was wrong, because he would have looked at it in the way that like, he saw, in the way like ancient Greeks had these relationships between older men and their younger wards, right? That is probably how he would have seen it, right?

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  That makes sense to me.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  That's not what I think is going on here. Now, there are allegations later in his career from adult colleagues in the army who claimed that Lawrence asked them to whip him, right? And so these have kind of been merged in the public mind with some of these rumors that he and Doom had a sexual relationship. And a good example of how this like comes down in casual history is a quote from a very bad listicle I found called Great People Who Were Also Perverts, which I found on this terrible shitty clickbait website called Backlull.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  I thought you were gonna make a crack.com joke, but no, okay.

• 1:16:33Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, no. I don't know, maybe they stole this from us, I don't know.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:16:38Robert Evans?

  Lawrence was very famous for playing Lawrence of Arabia, pictured here. A great actor, not many know that he was also a great archaeologist. I think they're confusing him with Peter O'Toole here, so I think we would have caught that at crack.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Robert Evans?

  It was said that Lawrence didn't go much for relationships at all. Then suddenly he fell in love with a young boy who was underage. He also loved to be whipped hard on his backside, so definitely had strong leanings towards masochism. A pedophile and a masochist is a far cry from the over glamorized image people have of him as a great actor. Do you not know Lawrence was a real, he's not Peter O'Toole, I don't think Peter O'Toole was a pedophile, what, like, okay, anyway.

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  It's even in the name actor, that this is a separate person.

• 1:17:18Robert Evans?

  You have some serious misconceptions about the history here. Now, a different article I found on a better website, cliohistory.org, made the equally confusing decision to ignore the particulars of Doom's age and depict his relationship with Lawrence as more of a thwarted gay love affair. While at Carquemish, he formed a particularly close bond with a handsome, young Arab water boy, whom Lawrence once took on a long visit to Oxford. However, given the reticences of the time, it seems impossible to finally get a clear picture of Lawrence's romantic life. Now, I'm going to skip to the end here and say, there's no evidence that Lawrence had sex with Daum, or that he even wanted to. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever

• 1:18:01Robert Evans?

  that Lawrence ever chose to engage in sexual activity with any person over the course of his entire life. Anthony Satin writes, Lawrence said he never had a sexual relationship, and most people who knew him found that credible.

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because if he's friends with gay folks, he would have said it if he was like, no, I used to sleep with boys.

• 1:18:20Robert Evans?

  And he does. He describes himself in a letter to a friend of his who was gay and who he knew was gay as, this is Lawrence describing himself, funnily made up sexually. And from the context, we can see two things. He was aware of homosexuality and not judgmental of it. And he did not consider himself gay or straight. And I think probably the best term that fits for him is asexual, right? Now, this is not an orientation that is well-understood even today, and we shouldn't assume that he would have talked about his sexuality the way modern-day ace people talk about it, right?

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:53Robert Evans?

  This is 1911. And asexuality is pretty much nonexistent in the public consciousness, right? He probably would have thought of his own sexuality more like he thinks of like a monk, someone who has taken a vow of celibacy.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:19:05Robert Evans?

  Right? Although he doesn't write about having any particular sexual desires. And in fact, Ian Forster, the gay friend that he wrote to about his own sexuality, seems to have interpreted Lawrence's feelings towards Daum as an unconsimated love affair. But I think that's Forster kind of pushing some of his own sexuality on to Lawrence, right?

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:26Robert Evans?

  Lawrence describes himself as kind of celibate. He writes repeatedly about his love for Daum, but in a manner more complicated than just like fatherly affection, but also not in a way that sounds like lust to me. And here's Satin again. "Ten years later, when Lawrence referred to his friendship with Daum, he talked of it as one in which there was such intimacy and mutual understanding that they had said all two people could say to each other. This freed them to work or rest together for hours without speaking. Lawrence experienced that sense of calm and trust with very few people in his life. It was not obvious that one of them would be a donkey boy from Jerablas." In the summer of 1913, the two of them spent most days and evenings together,

• 1:20:09Robert Evans?

  working at the digs, swimming in the euphrates, cleaning and drawing, photographing and cataloging the finds in the courtyard or a large sitting room of the expedition house, even while Lawrence was busy writing of his adventures in Seven Pillars of Islam. And, you know, by this characterization, yeah, they had, they were, they were two people who had a profound bond.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Robert Evans?

  But not a sexual one. And like, why did he carve that sculpture? Well, because he liked sculptures, right? And he, he was, he, he was raised on sculptures of the naked human form that he didn't see as sexual, because this is not a guy who particularly had any sexual feeling, probably.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because I was talking to my sister about this one time, and we were talking about the whole historically close friends thing and how like, you know, we kind of, we go back in time and say like, oh, all of these women were lesbians, like all the ones who like, just had historically close friends that they lived with as roommates. And it's hard, because we, we just actually don't know in most circumstances. Like, sometimes we do, we have like professions of sexual love between the two. But like, sometimes historically close friends were just historically close friends in a way that also doesn't map to any current understanding of sexuality that we

• 1:21:19Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  we operate with today.

• 1:21:21Robert Evans?

  And, and all I can say is, you know, for one thing, that, that colleague who initially made the allegations that Lawrence was gay, later in life came to be like, actually, I, I think it's probably likely that he never had any kind of sexual feelings towards Daum. And Lawrence, in his own letters to his friends with, with whom he could have been open if he had what they would have seen as a homosexual affair, was like, I've never had sex and I've never really wanted to. And that's how Lawrence talks about it, right? Now, Lawrence is not a perfectly reliable narrator, but I just don't see any reason he would have lied about this. I think he was probably, if we were, if we're characterizing him today, he's probably asexual, right? And I, I want to close with a quote by Satin about Lawrence and Daum.

• 1:22:06Robert Evans?

  It is impossible to know what Daum thought of these changes to his life. He was obviously flattered that Lawrence was taking an interest in him. While the extra money and new status helped set him apart in the village. A range of possibilities was opening through his growing ability to read and write Arabic. But only occasionally can we hear Daum's voice with any clarity. One moment was at Ibn Wadani. But the most persuasive was his answer to Ms. Farida's question in the summer of 1912 of why he loved Lawrence. "He did so," he replied, "because Lawrence was brother, friend, and leader. Because he could do things better than them. Because he was courageous, playful, humorous, and perhaps more important to them because they knew he cared for them." And I think that that, if you're looking for like, is he a pedophile? Well, that's not what Daum says. Daum says he was like a brother.

• 1:22:51Robert Evans?

  And I think that's probably a better, much, that's probably the right way to look at this relationship.

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 1:22:59Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  So far, the only way in which he's a bastard is in a literal sense.

• 1:23:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a bastard, literally, a little bit. He does some more analyzing, right?

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:23:08Robert Evans?

  You know, but like, not in a way that would earn him an episode here. He's probably not a pedophile. Kind of maybe an ace icon, Lawrence of Arabia. I had always, my dad had always told me when we would watch the movie together that he had been gay. And I've come to find that like, there's not really any evidence for that. Like, he was cool with gay people, but like, there's not really any evidence that he was gay.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Do you think that was your dad, like, trying to be chill about a gay person? Because it sounds like your dad liked Lawrence.

• 1:23:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It may have been. It was also just like, that was the understanding, the common understanding. And I think that still is. I think most people would still say, oh, he was gay, right? Like, I think that is still how most people think of this.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  I mean, in a weird way also, because I've been reading a whole bunch recently about some of the early Protestant ideas around sexuality. And, and not making kids and not getting married is all sort of equally gay.

• 1:24:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  To a certain degree. So like monks and priests were sort of gay to the Protestants because they like, weren't having, weren't getting married and having kids.

• 1:24:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Speaker 00

  You know? And so I could see.

• 1:24:16Robert Evans?

  I'm always saying this.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  There's a version of, you know, queerness, whatever, that, there's a reason that Ace is in the queer umbrella now, you know?

• 1:24:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:24:29Robert Evans?

  All right, well.

• 1:24:32Robert Evans?

  So, uh, that's it. That's the episode.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  We did it.

• 1:24:38Robert Evans?

  We did it, Joe.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  MacPhee, do you have anything you want to plug?

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  Well, if you like history about complicated people who mostly aren't bad, then I have a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which is on this little-known network called Cool Zone Media, and you can listen to it. And it's probably too late to catch me on tour when you're listening to this, but maybe, maybe it's not. Maybe I'll be on a different tour by the time you hear this. And in which case, you can find me there. But just go listen to Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

• 1:25:12Robert Evans?

  Listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and you know, uh, launch an insurgent war. I don't care against who. Do it, do it somewhere, you know?

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  This is gonna sound really weird, depending on what happens next week.

• 1:25:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's my, that's my advice to you. No matter where you are in the world, go start some shit, you know?

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Or don't.

• 1:25:34Robert Evans?

  Or don't. Legally, don't.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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