Reed Erickson

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's episode profiles an eccentric, wealthy businessman––with the pet tiger, Mexican nudist ashram, ketamine and cocaine habits, and baroque legal battles over the title to various compounds to prove it––who also financially supported trans research, gay history, and dolphin ESP. Reed Erickson forged his own path in a difficult world and his life helps us understand two connections that were crucial for the developing gay and trans liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: sexology and the New Age. Today's episode of our podcast was recorded before the 2024 United States Presidental election. Given yesterday's executive orders, discussion of the anti-trans backlash and fighting transphobia are more important than ever. Today, please consider contacting Trans Lifeline if you need support, or donating if you are able. ----more---- SOURCES: One From The Vaults, on Reed Erickson: https://soundcloud.com/onefromthevaultspodcast/oftv-5-the-trans-howard-hughes Making Gay History, on Reed Erickson: https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/reed-erickson/ Bello, Ada. “Reed Erickson, Pioneering Transgender Activist and Philanthropist, 1917-1992.” Outhistory. Accessed January 20, 2025. https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/erickson/essay. Devor, Aaron, and Nicholas Matte. “Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation.” International Journal of Transgenderism 10, no. 1 (October 12, 2007): 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1300/J485v10n01_07. Devor, Aaron, and Nicholas Matte. “ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964-2003.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 179–209. Gill-Peterson, Jules. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. London: Verso, 2024. Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Lewis, Abram J. “I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History." Radical History Review 120 (Fall 2014), 13-34. Nunn, Zavier. “Trans Liminality and the Nazi State.” Past & Present 260, no. 1 (August 2023): 123–57. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Badgay, a podcast all about evil and complicated people in history.
0:19.9	My name is Hugh Lamy.
0:21.1	I'm a writer and author.
0:22.1	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian,
0:23.9	currently working on a biography of the fashion designer Rudy Gerrach.
0:27.3	So last week we covered the German,
0:30.7	Washington foreign policy, Walter Mitty figure, Albrecht and Mirth.
0:34.8	Who are we talking about this week, Ben?
0:36.5	Well, today's subject is one of the two people this season who I first found out about as part
0:41.2	of my dissertation research. Unlike the last person, this person didn't actually play into my
0:46.5	dissertation because my dissertation's about white gay men and today's subject is not a white
0:51.0	gay man. But he did have an enormous influence on the creation of that dissertation
0:55.8	in many ways, and we'll get to how in a minute. Gay and queer history was just one of a few fields
1:00.4	of study on which today's subject had an outsized degree of influence. The others were,
1:04.8	Swallow your coffee, transgender health care, and human dolphin communication. Of course, two subjects
1:10.4	to go together like peat and carrots.
1:11.6	Well, we'll see that they actually do, it makes sense, the arguments for why it makes
1:15.6	sense.
1:16.6	An eccentric air with the pet leopard, Mexican nudist ashram, ketamine and cocaine habits,
1:21.6	and Baroque legal battle over the title to various compounds to prove it.
1:25.6	Today's subject was also an out and proud trans man, far before such a thing was common.
1:32.4	Reed Erickson forged his own path in a difficult world, and his life helps us understand
	...

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