Simeon Solomon and Sascha Schneider - Live from Podfest Berlin

Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS, our monthly conversation on politics and culture, here or by clicking "Subscribe" on Apple Podcasts.

Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! As usual, we're making our contribution to family holiday entertainment with an hour-plus podcast about sodomy.

Today's program, recorded live at Podfest Berlin in October 2023, profiles two artists. We start with the gay Jewish pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon, whose story is a snapshot of the complexities of aa changing English society in the Victorian era, full of darkness, violence and repression, but lit too by a sense of a sort of waking dream of the possibilities of a rapidly shrinking world and modernising world. He was animated by those dreams, intoxicated by them, but his own desires would come into conflict with a society that was scared by these changes and would use all the tools in its power to halt them. Coming up the rear is Sascha Schneider, a German painter, sculptor, and bodybuilding instructor (does he, you know, run a bodybuilding academy?) whose work characterized both the Weimar-era masculinist gay political movement and four generations of Germans’ racist attitudes towards Native Americans.

Enjoy! Wear headphones if Grandma is around. Season 7 drops very soon.

To view the slideshow, click here.

SOURCES

Michael J. Cowen, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (State College: Penn State University Press, 2012)

Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy, "Simeon Solomon Two-Part Biography," Simeon Solomon Research Archive, 2000-2023, https://www.simeonsolomon.com/simeon-solomon-biography.html

Karl-May-Gesellschaft, https://www.karl-may-gesellschaft.de/index.php?seite=mininewsdetails&sprache=de&showdetail=133

Minneapolis Institute of Art, "Whatever Happened to the First Gay Art Star?" June 3, 2021, https://medium.com/minneapolis-institute-of-art/what-really-happened-to-the-first-gay-art-star-e5b830e19f86

H. Glenn Penny, Kindred By Choice: Germans and American Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Erwin in het Panhuis, "Karl Mays ziemlich offen schwuler Künstfreund," queer.de, 20. September 2020, https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=37110