Eugen Sandow (with Ruby Hann)

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2022

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Happy Pride! We invited Ruby Hann, who completed her MA in History in 2020 and her MSc in History in 2021, both at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about Eugen Sandow, the bodybuilder who spread the cult of muscle around the world. Her research is focused on masculinity, sexuality, and the body in early twentieth century Britain. Ruby is not currently in academia, but she still occasionally writes, lectures, and attends conferences. You can follow her Twitter @RubyVolunteers to find her work. Our book is available at badgayspod.com/book along with tour dates in the US and the UK! SOURCES: Budd, M. A. The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Chapman, David. Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Dyer, Richard. White: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2017. Waller, David. The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited, 2011. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: gay male eroticism in photography and film from their beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Brauer, Fae. ‘Virilizing and Valorizing Homoeroticism: Eugen Sandow’s Queering of Body Cultures Before and After the Wilde Trials’, Visual Culture in Britain 18:1 (2017), 35–67. Conrad, Sebastian. ‘Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of World History 32:1 (2021), 95–125. Elledge, Jim. ‘Eugen Sandow’s gift to gay men’, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 18:4 (2011). Mullins, Greg. ‘‘Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in "Physical Culture"’, Discourse 15:1 (1992), 27–48. Snow, K. Mitchell. ‘Does this fig leaf make me look gay? Strongmen, statue posing and physique photography’, Early Popular Visual Culture 17:2 (2019), 135–155. Watt, Carey A. ‘Cultural Exchange, Appropriation and Physical Culture: Strongman Eugen Sandow in Colonial India, 1904–1905’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 33:16 (2016), 1921–1942.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to bad gays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:21.8	My name is Hugh Lemmy.
0:26.4	I'm a writer. And today we're bringing you a very special episode to mark the release of our new book, Badgays, a homosexual history, which is released today by Verso Books. The book is packed
0:33.1	with profiles of various nefarious Nellis from the Roman Emperor Hadrian all the way up to
0:38.5	Yukiya Meshima. And it tells a wider story, one that we, I guess, tell on this podcast,
0:44.0	which is about the history of the development of male homosexuality as an idea and perhaps
0:48.4	its failure as an identity with all its complicated links to colonialism, masculinity and empire.
0:54.8	So you can buy it now from today at versobux.com, or all good independent booksellers.
1:00.6	And you can also find a link to it on our website, Badgayspot.com.
1:04.8	So to celebrate the launch, today we have a very special guest, and we'll be discussing, I think,
1:09.3	many of these ideas around European
1:11.4	ideals of masculinity and their relationship to imperialism and to certain values around the male
1:17.1	body. Today's guest is the inimitable Ruby Han. Ruby completed her MA in history in 2020 and her
1:24.8	MSC in history in 2021, both at the University of Edinburgh, and her research is focused on masculinity, sexuality and the body in early 20th century Britain. Hello, Ruby. Hi, hi, Hugh. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for joining us. So let's get straight into it. Who are we talking about today, Ruby?
1:53.6	So today we're going to be talking about sex symbol, empire builder, and the father of bodybuilding, Eugene Sandow.
1:54.8	Great.
2:02.9	So without wanting to seem like too much of a super fan of the show, I'm going to very much copy your style and start with a little anecdote. Great. So in 1901, the so-called father of bodybuilding, celebrity strongman
2:09.9	and sex symbol, Eugene Sandow had his nude body cast in plaster. Behind this endeavor was a professor
2:17.4	Ray Lancaster, a mollusk expert and curator
2:21.5	of the Natural History Department. I know, it's already funny. It's already funny. Mollusks and
2:27.3	muscle men. Exactly, exactly. So behind this endeavor was Ray Lancaster.
2:35.0	He was also the curator of the Natural History Department at the National Museum, which is what would eventually become the Natural History Museum.
	...

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