Bonus Video! Highlights from the never-aired Real World pilot

It's so sad to see companies pandering to the current political situation instead of standing with us.

So sweet of you to give me a shoutout! 😃🥰 I’m honored!

Some more queer stuff from olden times! First, do you know about Christopher Marlowe? Elizabethan era playwright, probably gay. The opening of his play Dido, Queen of Carthage features Jove and Ganymede being flirty, and that’s the only Elizabethan play I’ve come across which has men clearly, obviously flirting with each other. I mean, okay, the female parts were all taken by young male actors, as women weren’t allowed to perform on stage back then, so technically all flirting on the Elizabethan stage was between men, but this is the only one I know of between male characters, as opposed to male actors. Marlowe also wrote an unfinished epic about Hero and Leander, where the description of the two characters is… quite interesting. With Hero (who, in spite of the name, is actually the girl), it’s mostly about how nice her clothes are. There’s a brief mention of her hands, and an even briefer one of her neck, but that’s it. But when we get to Leander, Marlowe can’t stop going on about his chest and his belly and his cheeks and his lips and all these cute little dimples on his back and okay Marlowe, you want to go lie down for a bit, maybe? He also specifically, unambiguously describes Leander as being desired by men, which is pretty daring for the era. Even Shakespeare’s sonnets to Mr W H never quite went that far! But probably his most queer work is Edward II, which is – well, it’s about a gay couple. Okay, not explicitly (at least not in the original text). It’s perfectly possible to put on a performance of this play where Edward and Gaveston are just a couple of really good friends. Buuuut it’s also entirely possible – and, I would say, a lot more true to the spirit of the play – to do a performance where they’re very obviously banging each other. And here is a clip of baby Ian McKellan in a production which is doing just that – the whole thing used to be on YouTube, but I can’t find it any more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JPWrTvgVfM There’s also a Derek Jarman version, which is a lot less faithful to the text than the baby Ian McKellan version, but also a lot easier to get hold of on DVD. Other fun stuff: Aphra Behn’s poem To The Fair Clorinda, which I think might be the first ever lesbian love poem in English. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50479/to-the-fair-clorinda By the way, at the time when this was written, being a lesbian might not have been illegal, but was seen as being weird and icky, also sinful. So this poem isn’t so much reflecting the current cultural consensus as it is pushing back against it. Also, The Roaring Girl, a play which features a cross-dressing woman, who, interestingly, is portrayed pretty positively. She’s not seen as a bad person for dressing (and, in many ways, acting) like a man; it’s the people who judge her for that who are bad. Plus, she gets to have a sword-fight with a guy and win! I especially liked that part. Btw, I seem to remember I once told you that the early silent film era had the very first badass female leads: well, that’s still true. The Roaring Girl is badass and female, but she’s not the lead, even though the play is actually named after her. A few more random bits: Jeremy Bentham, radical 18th century philosopher, wrote an essay arguing that being gay shouldn’t be illegal, but never published it, just left it among his papers to be discovered after his death. It wasn’t actually published till I think the 70s? He did seem to think that being gay was kinda gross and icky, he just didn’t think it should be banned. Peter Wildeblood wrote a memoir, Against the Law, about what happened to him in connection with the Lord Montagu case. Oh, and then there’s The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, which admittedly I haven’t read but which apparently has gay sex scenes in it (it was published in the late 19th century, in case you’re wondering why this is in any way remarkable). Plus, here’s a little window into queer lives in the 1920s: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/uncovering-lgbtq-lives-in-the-archive/the-link-transcript/ I came across this first via the book Shapely Ankle Preferr’d, towards the end of the chapter A True Comrade and Friend. It’s only about a paragraph, but I think it explains things a little bit more coherently than the webpage I just linked, and Shapely Ankle is a fun book anyway, so might be worth checking out! Fanny and Stella by Neil McKenna is also worth taking a look at. Last little random thing, which isn’t exactly gay but is a little genderqueer: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24518/pg24518-images.html#beards I haven’t seen this confirmed anywhere else, so take it with a pinch of salt, but I just really like the idea of all these mighty warriors being so determined to keep their long, lovely locks that they were willing to risk damnation over it. Now, obviously all of this is about trying to find background material for a possible Cole & Weinstein video, but also I just want to add something a bit more direct: in your video on Victim, you mentioned there was a point where public opinion on gay rights shifted quite dramatically in a fairly short period of time; well, I worked it out at the time and the period when that happened would have been about when the kids who’d grown up on Adventures of Robin Hood and other C&W shows would have been reaching adulthood. Could be a coincidence; or could be that people who’d grown up seeing queercoded characters being portrayed in unusually positive and counterstereotypical ways would have been primed to be more positive than average about gay people. I’m not trying to take anything away from Victim, clearly it was a vitally important film, I just think Robin Hood could’ve been in that mix as well. And here’s some evidence of just how popular Adventures of Robin Hood, at least, was: everyone over here knows the theme song, we just don’t know where it’s from. I know this because, when I first watched a full episode of Robin Hood and heard the theme song, my initial reaction was “Oh, so that’s where that song’s from!” And when I was telling people I knew about these amazing shows that I’d been watching, to give them context I would say something like “You won’t have heard of any of this, but I bet you know this,” then start singing the Robin Hood theme song; they would always respond with some variation on, “Oh, that’s where that song’s from!” The only time that didn’t work was when I tried it on an American. And while the theme song for a children’s show being sung by kids in the playground isn’t uncommon, it’s pretty unusual for a theme song to survive in the culture for decades after the show itself has stopped running. The song’s pretty catchy, but not particularly amazing; I don’t think it could have survived so well just on its own merits, so I’d say it has to have been Adventures of Robin Hood’s popularity that gave it the initial boost which made it last so long. Finally, just wanted to say again, I will absolutely stop sending these wall o’ text comments if you tell me to! I’m already trying to leave them a few days after the initial video so people don’t have to scroll past all of this to check out the other comments.

Bea's fabulous hat! I have a red feather hat from my Nana that's similar. ❤️

I really enjoyed the videos about the Real World. I remember watching them as a teenager and loved Pedro.

Oh, dear. I have a dear on-line friend at EA. I will have to see if she is okay.

I, for one, would certainly not mind if you returned to talking about queer gaming a bit. There's a LOT to talk about, if you find the right story you want to tell.

hi Matt, I’m wondering if you’ve ever done any full episodes on the gaming industry as a whole? If so, Can you link me to it?