#Aileen Philby

[j-august]

[Kim] Philby's most abominable behaviour was towards his mentally fragile second wife, Aileen, by whom he had five children. Aileen Philby's psychiatrist told the Service that among her problems was her belief in her husband's guilt - which was at least partly responsible for Philby's attempts to "smash Aileen up": "He is convinced that she possesses important security information about her husband and her own Communist past... In [Aileen's] opinion and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her 'done his best to make her commit suicide'."

Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

Incidentally, @shellcollector turned me on to this podcast and it is *everything*.

I don’t know why this is such a mood, but it is. I’m really into Burgess, Philby and McLane; I know another gay man who’s really into Leopold and Loeb. I suppose it’s the history nerd version of being into Disney queer villainy; just as cinema has given us such a wealth of representation of queer malevolence that we have embraced it as our own, so too have the “well behaved gays” rarely made history. In their place, we have a lot of people whose evil was used as an example of a specifically queer deviance, and who we know about because of it. & I think the fascination, too, is rather like the embrace of queer-coded Disney villains; I’m very into Jeremy Thorpe too. We get so comfortable with seeing ourselves only depicted as wicked, that we embrace it as our own, as part of our aesthetic.

The Morrisey episode is *exceptionally* good. The ones which are just a historic (not a personal) narrative, less so, but it’s still always exciting to me to be reminded We Have Always Existed. Historic LGBT people continue to be the greatest source of validation for me.

Also, very interesting how many of these figures slip into white nationalism/racism/nazism etc; it feels significant, like, people trying to cope with their own abjection by allying yourself with a different privilege axis where you are strong.

(Don’t underestimate the content warning for Aileen Wuornos. If you haven’t read about her life before, you need to be made aware that I don’t think I know of anyone who was more comprehensively failed by everybody around her; I guess that’s part of the fun of the evil queer men trope, is that they’re usually part of the upper echelons, and therefore both insulated from some of the consequnces of homophobia as well as beautifully dressed. Wuornos is not a fun part of the evil queer men trope. It’s a horrible life story, her serial killing doesn’t even make the top ten of distressing content in that episode)