It’s summer, and that means it’s time for some escapism. If you’re not going away, never fear: you can achieve this via your earbuds – or, perhaps, via a time machine resembling a deconstructed London taxi complete with a nodding dog and giant fluffy dice. That’s how they like to do it at Time Travelling Queers anyway, a new podcast that takes listeners back in history to re-examine figures we might now associate with rainbow flags and Pride parades. It’s hosted by the renowned UK drag king Don One, and it’s videoed too, hence the taxi – and gimmicks such as getting guests to put on a pair of 3D cinema glasses to “protect our eyes from the gamma rays”.
Episode one features the drag queen Tia Kofi, who wants to know if there are any LGBT royals in Britain’s past. To which the answer is surely: pick your favourite. James I? Queen Anne? Nope, we’re going further back, to the 14th century and Edward II, whose homoerotic downfall was immortalised in the play by Christopher Marlowe. The historian (and Big Brother finalist) Jonty Stern steps in to fill in the gaps for those whose school curriculum glossed over this particular medieval episode. Favourites draped in jewels, power-hungry barons, an 11-year-old bride from France – it’s all fun and games until someone loses their vital organs in an especially gruesome execution. But let’s get back to what’s important. Namely: “What kind of gay was he?”
The complaint that queer people have been written out of history is far from new – and nor is the attempt to return them to their rightful place. From ancient Greece to 1950s America, and from medieval England to the Victorian era, the past is always more complex – and less heteronormative – than the textbooks from our childhoods had us believe. These stories deserve to be told, reclaimed and celebrated, in academia and in podcast studios built to look like taxis. It’s admirable what the Time Travelling Queers team are trying to achieve. But I can’t help longing for the day when queer history is just viewed as, well, history.
Time Travelling Queers
Molly House Media
[Further reading: The last days of the Bourdain Bro]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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