At the height of his career, today's subject was a national hero in the UK, knighted by George V. His life ended as a traitor and a pervert, executed by hanging in Pentonville Prison before being thrown in an unmarked grave in the prison yard, his body covered in quicklime. His name was Roger Casement, and we'll talk about his rise and fall, Britain’s hypocritical relationship with imperialism and colonialism, and secret black diaries full of "gentle thrusts" and "splendid erections."

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SOURCES:

Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: And the Trouble with Nigeria. Penguin Great Ideas 100. London: Penguin Books, 2010.

Dudgeon, Jeffrey, and Roger Casement. Roger Casement: The Black Diaries : With a Study of His Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Belfast Press, 2016. Goodman, Jordan. The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness. 1st American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Halifax, Noel. “The Queer and Unusual Life of Roger Casement.” Socialist Review, February 2016. http://socialistreview.org.uk/410/queer-and-unusual-life-roger-casement. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Inglis, Brian. Roger Casement. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Blackstaff Press, 1993. Mitchell, Angus. “REPUTATIONS: Roger Casement and the History Question.” History Ireland (blog), June 30, 2016. https://www.historyireland.com/volume-24/reputations-roger-casement-history-question/. O’Toole, Fintan. “The Multiple Hero.” The New Republic, August 2, 2012. https://newrepublic.com/article/105658/mario-vargas-llosa-dream-of-celt-fintan-otoole. Toibin, Colm. Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Roger Casement

Bad Gays