Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Polly Fry, I'm Tracy ban Wilson. Uh And two
Speaker 1: hundred years ago, there was a craze sweeping Europe which
Speaker 1: was balloon Nomania. Manned balloon flights were amazing crowds and
Speaker 1: capturing imaginations, and balloons became a popular decorative motif from
Speaker 1: everything from ceramic plates to copper cake tins and even
Speaker 1: integrated into fashion. Uh And, one of the famed figures
Speaker 1: in this whole balloon ing um madness was a woman
Speaker 1: named Sophie Blanchard, and she was the first woman to
Speaker 1: become a professional balloonist. But how did a timid girl,
Speaker 1: which she was according to most people, become a trailblazer
Speaker 1: in what was an extremely dangerous career field. Before we
Speaker 1: get to that story, we need to look a little
Speaker 1: bit how balloons became so popular in the late eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: So in seventeen sixty six there was a scientific thing
Speaker 1: that happened, which is that British philosopher and chemist Henry
Speaker 1: Cavendish made a discovery that really kind of catapulted ballooning
Speaker 1: into the public eye. He isolated hydrogen, which at the
Speaker 1: time he called inflammable air. It wasn't named hydrogen until
Speaker 1: another scientist worked with it, later named Antoine Levoisier. This
Speaker 1: new knowledge of this lighter than air element led to
Speaker 1: experimentations in balloon technology that weren't based on hot air uh,
Speaker 1: and so the invention of the gas balloon, which was
Speaker 1: also known as Charliere or Robertine uh took place. Whereas
Speaker 1: nowadays we're back to hot air. But there's a reason
Speaker 1: for that that comes up in this podcast. Well, and
Speaker 1: you may guess what it is if you have listened
Speaker 1: to our podcast about the Hindenburg. Yeah, it's not a
Speaker 1: super big serret that they called it inflammable air for
Speaker 1: a reason. It caught fire extremely easily. Yes, so spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: there will be fire. Fire will happen. So when Sophie
Speaker 1: was still just a child in the seventeen eighties, two
Speaker 1: brothers by the name of Mongolfy eight were experimenting with
Speaker 1: balloon technology. France's King Louis the sixteenth was intrigued by
Speaker 1: the Mongolfies work, and he proposed that they send two
Speaker 1: criminals up in a manned flight. When the technology had
Speaker 1: reached the appropriate five. Yeah, they had balloons, had started small,
Speaker 1: and we're getting bigger and bigger, and Louis the sixteenth
Speaker 1: is like, we could send up a couple of criminals.
Speaker 1: There's no real risk there. Something happened sort of demonstrates
Speaker 1: the element of danger that was involved here, like not
Speaker 1: quite safe enough for regular people, but in the view
Speaker 1: of the king, criminals would be fine. Yeah. But the
Speaker 1: Mongolfiated brothers did not actually agree their first flight. They
Speaker 1: actually opted to send up farm animals. They arted with
Speaker 1: a duck, a rooster and a sheep, and the animal's
Speaker 1: main history is the first living creatures in flight in
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty three and at ann and A, France, and
Speaker 1: they landed safely on the ground after about ten minutes aloft.
Speaker 1: So the king and his queen, who was of course
Speaker 1: Brie Antoinette, were apparently utterly delighted by this exhibition, as
Speaker 1: was a very large crowd that had gathered to witness
Speaker 1: this event. Sounds like a like the setup to a juke.
Speaker 1: There were get in a balloon and delight the King
Speaker 1: of France. Yes. A few months later, one of the brothers,
Speaker 1: et Tienne, got to be the first human to man
Speaker 1: a balloon flight, so at the end flight was tethered,
Speaker 1: but not long after his controlled foura into the sky.
Speaker 1: An untethered flight carried the French Marquis Francois Laurent, le
Speaker 1: Vie d'arlande and Pila Rosier on a brief flight, which
Speaker 1: was witnessed once again by King Louis the sixteenth as
Speaker 1: well as Benjamin Franklin, and again a sizeable crowd. People
Speaker 1: were really white entranced by these balloon flights. The man
Speaker 1: Sophie would marry was born on July fourth, seventeen fifty three.
Speaker 1: Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard was twenty five years older than
Speaker 1: she was, and Jean Pierre started his own experiments with
Speaker 1: flying machines in the seventeen seventies. His focused on the
Speaker 1: use of a rowing in the air, almost like you
Speaker 1: would have ship, and trying to get air currents to
Speaker 1: lift the vessel. But once the Mongolfie brothers showed the
Speaker 1: success of balloon ing, Jean Pierre switched gears completely and
Speaker 1: joined the ballooning craze. Jean Pierre made his first balloon
Speaker 1: ascent in March of seventeen eighty four. Sophie would have
Speaker 1: been around six at this point, and in January seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty five he made the first manned flight over the
Speaker 1: English Channel with an American doctor, John Jeffries. They started
Speaker 1: in England and landed in France. Yeah. Subsequent attempt to
Speaker 1: cross the Channel in the opposite direction by pelatroge Rosier,
Speaker 1: who was had been in one of those earlier flights,
Speaker 1: did not end so well. Uh. It resulted in the
Speaker 1: first recorded aviation fatality. In his heart, Jean Pierre was
Speaker 1: a showman above anything else, and to make money he
Speaker 1: took his ballooning on tour. During this time, he abandoned
Speaker 1: the wife he had been married to since seventeen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Victoire Lebron, and their four children to poverty while he
Speaker 1: traveled and showed crowds his arenautical skills. Yeah there. Jean
Speaker 1: Pierre is a very interesting character and he could be
Speaker 1: his own whole podcast because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: crazy stories about him, and they are always these little like, oh,
Speaker 1: he was doing these amazing things. By the way, he
Speaker 1: did some really seedy stuff as well, like he left
Speaker 1: his wife. He tried to cheat some business partners along
Speaker 1: the way there there are all of those, so keep
Speaker 1: that in mind. Um. But as he was doing all
Speaker 1: of his showmanship, he decided to add a bit of
Speaker 1: flare to the proceedings, and so he would sometimes drop
Speaker 1: a parachuted dog from the balloon basket or shoot off fireworks. Um.
Speaker 1: And the first dog drop happened on June three five,
Speaker 1: and according to accounts, the dog survived, so Blanchard would
Speaker 1: repeat the experiment on subsequent shows because people were so
Speaker 1: wowed by this idea of a dog being dropped from
Speaker 1: a balloon and surviving. He also tried parachuting himself. He
Speaker 1: was the first person to successfully use a parachute, and
Speaker 1: at one point he added sales to his balloon in
Speaker 1: the hope of improving propulsion and maneuvering. Jean Pierre was
Speaker 1: basically a rock star of the ballooning world and even
Speaker 1: a trendsetter. Balloon enthusiasts copied his hairstyle and the images
Speaker 1: of his balloon appeared on ladies, fans, and other accessories,
Speaker 1: and he also, as one of his business ventures, founded
Speaker 1: a short lived school called the Balloon and Parachute Aristatic Academy,
Speaker 1: but it did not last terribly long. In sevente Jean
Speaker 1: Pierre ascended from a prison yard in Philadelphia aboard a balloon,
Speaker 1: the first North American ass for an audience, which included
Speaker 1: the US founding fathers. It was his forty five ascension,
Speaker 1: and he was doing all of these incredible things. He
Speaker 1: actually still holds records, and he was incredibly popular, and
Speaker 1: he did a lot of theatrical lifts and would sell tickets.
Speaker 1: But Jean Pierre really found himself in some pretty steep
Speaker 1: financial trouble, and to make matters worse, he had angered
Speaker 1: John Jeffries, who had been his primary financial contributor and
Speaker 1: was also his partner in the English crossing, the English
Speaker 1: Channel crossing. But he had always handled his money poorly.
Speaker 1: Even when he was making a lot of money, he
Speaker 1: was spending far more than he was taking in, and
Speaker 1: he was trying to find new ways to reinvigorate the
Speaker 1: interest of spectators and always sell more tickets and book
Speaker 1: more shows. Before we go on, we need to finally
Speaker 1: talk about Sophie. Sophie was born on March. Her birth
Speaker 1: name was Marie Madeleine Sophie Armand one of the bothersome
Speaker 1: aspects of this story is that we just don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of information about what her life was like
Speaker 1: pre Jean Pierre. Yeah, almost any biography you read of her,
Speaker 1: when you look it up in books on the history
Speaker 1: of ballooning, it's literally like she was born and then
Speaker 1: she married this guy, and then she became important. Things
Speaker 1: happened in between. Yeah, there must have been, but it
Speaker 1: really is pretty difficult to find any of them. But
Speaker 1: what we do know is that she was a very
Speaker 1: nervous young woman. People that know who knew her describe
Speaker 1: her as being afraid of even writing in carriages. Uh.
Speaker 1: Physical descriptions of her from multiple sources all describe her
Speaker 1: as very small, with angular features. Sometimes she's described as
Speaker 1: bird like, and most accounts of her appearance are actually
Speaker 1: kind of unflattering. I found one that said she was pretty,
Speaker 1: but the rest were kind of mean. I am sort
Speaker 1: of tired of mean descriptions of ladies personal features in history. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that happens now today too. At some point
Speaker 1: we will be history and people will talk about how
Speaker 1: everyone was, talking about how ugly everybody was. I gets
Speaker 1: on my ner herbs John she had a very interesting life.
Speaker 1: It didn't really matter. I think it matters the focus
Speaker 1: on appearance is what is getting on my nerve. Jean
Speaker 1: Pierre and Sophie were married at some point between seventeen
Speaker 1: nine and eighteen o four, and it kind of varies
Speaker 1: depending on the source you look at, so you might
Speaker 1: see any number of conflicting dates. Yes, some suggest that,
Speaker 1: um there, it's hinted in some biographies that he may
Speaker 1: have married her as a way to propel his show career. Um.
Speaker 1: Others suggest that they had already been married, but and
Speaker 1: what had happened to his old wife? She died in poverty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks Jean Pierre. Sorry Victoire, You're apparently not important enough
Speaker 1: to him to worry about. Uh, he's got to do
Speaker 1: his balloon thing. And as part of his plan to
Speaker 1: drum up new income, Jean Pierre hatched this plan to
Speaker 1: add Sophie to the show to add novelty and attract
Speaker 1: bigger crowds. So again some some books will suggest that, um,
Speaker 1: him to eating her up in a balloon was like
Speaker 1: a honeymoon, and others just say no, no, they were
Speaker 1: already married, but he took his wife, who at this
Speaker 1: point was just aged six, half his age, up in
Speaker 1: their first duo flight together on December four at Marseilles,
Speaker 1: sort of unexpectedly, given everything everybody had said about her
Speaker 1: at this point, Sophie found balloon flight exhilarating, and she
Speaker 1: didn't show any of her timidity that she had shown
Speaker 1: on land while she was aloft, so this attraction to
Speaker 1: traveling was born. She said to have described balloon flight
Speaker 1: as an incomparable sensation. In addition to her as sense
Speaker 1: with Jean Pierre, Sophie also started to make solo balloon
Speaker 1: trips as well, and just as a note, while Sophie
Speaker 1: is often referred to as the first female aeronaut, she
Speaker 1: was not, strictly speaking, the first female balloonist. Several other
Speaker 1: women had made a sense in balloons, both tathered and
Speaker 1: free before her, but she was the first woman to
Speaker 1: fly a balloon solo, and she was certainly the first
Speaker 1: to make a career out of it. During a flight
Speaker 1: over the Hague in February eighteen o eight, Jean Pierre
Speaker 1: had a heart attack and he fell out of the
Speaker 1: basket that he and Sophie were in, and we wound
Speaker 1: up following more than fifty feet or fifteen point two meters,
Speaker 1: and Jean Pierre never recovered from his injuries. From this fall,
Speaker 1: and he hung on for a little more than a year,
Speaker 1: but he died on March seventh of eighteen o nine,
Speaker 1: and he was only fifty six at the time. When
Speaker 1: Jean Pierre died, he left this mountain of debt behind,
Speaker 1: and rather than being a quiet and retiring widow, Sophie,
Speaker 1: he vowed to make good on all of those debts.
Speaker 1: She kept on with her ballooning career to bring in money,
Speaker 1: and she fulfilled her promise to pay back the creditors
Speaker 1: that Jean Pierre owed. That always kind of blows me away,
Speaker 1: Like this woman in the early eighteen hundreds is left
Speaker 1: not just destitute, but deeply in debt by her husband,
Speaker 1: and she's like, Okay, I'll handle it all right, ballooning,
Speaker 1: let's do it. That's pretty impressive. Uh. And she is
Speaker 1: said to have loved ballooning at night in particular, and
Speaker 1: she eventually got into the habit of all night trips.
Speaker 1: There was one biographical article I was reading that suggested
Speaker 1: that part of why she might have its pure speculation,
Speaker 1: enjoyed ballooning even though she was afraid of like everything
Speaker 1: on the ground, was that it was quiet there. And
Speaker 1: what was really scaring her like in of course carriages,
Speaker 1: and you know out on the streets was just the
Speaker 1: noise of it. It is quite noisy to be a
Speaker 1: carriage drawn by horses like cobblestone or whatever. But we
Speaker 1: don't know. But if that was the case, it would
Speaker 1: make sense that she would really find it to be
Speaker 1: a good place to spend the night. Uh and then
Speaker 1: following her to see spouse's lead. She also took on
Speaker 1: some theatrics. She would use these night trips to launch
Speaker 1: fireworks from the balloon to dramatic effect. That is just
Speaker 1: as bad of an idea as it sounds horrible idea.
Speaker 1: These don't ever go up in a helium balloon. This
Speaker 1: was hydrogen. Don't do helium either. Don't set off fireworks
Speaker 1: bullet even if what's inside of it is not an
Speaker 1: immensely flammable gas. On June ten, Sophie made her sixteenth
Speaker 1: ascension as part of a celebration of the marriage of
Speaker 1: Napoleon and Marie Louise, and Napoleon was extremely fond of Sophie.
Speaker 1: He appointed her Chief Air Minister of Ballooning, and in
Speaker 1: this role she actually developed and assessed plans for balloon
Speaker 1: based aerial raids of England for Napoleon, although she eventually
Speaker 1: had to report to him that this really was not
Speaker 1: a feasible way to wage a war, that these were
Speaker 1: not missions that he should plan on doing. They needed
Speaker 1: dragons like in the Terror air books. That's what I think.
Speaker 1: Even after the French monarchy was restored, Sophie stayed in
Speaker 1: the good graces of the nation leaders. As part of
Speaker 1: Louis the eighteenth Restoration celebration, Sophie ascended in a balloon
Speaker 1: from pont Neuf and was eventually named official aeronaut of
Speaker 1: the Restoration by the Bourbon king. And she was also
Speaker 1: something of a daredevil in the air, and she really
Speaker 1: did become quite famous throughout Europe. Uh. What's interesting is
Speaker 1: that she accomplished a lot of feats that her husband
Speaker 1: had only dreamed of, and of course she also got
Speaker 1: herself in a lot of dangerous situations. One of the
Speaker 1: big accomplishments was that she crossed the Alps by balloon,
Speaker 1: which UH Jean Pierre had always said he was interested
Speaker 1: in doing but never achieved. En route to turn in
Speaker 1: April of eighteen twelve, she had nosebleeds and icicles formed
Speaker 1: on her face and hands a little bit dangerous. In
Speaker 1: eighteen seventeen, she had a really weird sort of brush
Speaker 1: with danger. She mistook a flooded field for a meadow
Speaker 1: and she tried to land there and she nearly drowned.
Speaker 1: But fortunately there were horsemen that had been tracking her
Speaker 1: flight and when they saw the balloon go down, they
Speaker 1: were able to get to her and pull her to safety.
Speaker 1: Her night trips would also sometimes last all night, and
Speaker 1: she would occasionally fall asleep in the basket, which isn't
Speaker 1: really maybe the smartest thing doze off while you're conducting
Speaker 1: a vehicle. I'm gonna go with a vehicle that is
Speaker 1: in the sky and also flammable. None of the vehicles
Speaker 1: should you sleep all your but especially if it's in
Speaker 1: the sky and also flammable. Uh so. On July six,
Speaker 1: eight nineteen, Sophie prepared for one of her regular appearances
Speaker 1: over the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, and she normally made
Speaker 1: this ascent twice each week. When she was in Paris,
Speaker 1: she would sell tickets to spectators who would come and
Speaker 1: watch her balloon, and they would also watch her huge
Speaker 1: nighttime fireworks show. On this particular night, she was carrying
Speaker 1: a larger than normal compliment of the fireworks because she
Speaker 1: was preparing what she called her Bengal fire display, and
Speaker 1: this was a slow burning fireworks shoe. She reported to
Speaker 1: have said at all Sister a Pla as she got
Speaker 1: into the basket, which means, let's go for the last time.
Speaker 1: Whether she actually meant for the show to be her
Speaker 1: last one, she was forty one at the time, and
Speaker 1: all she was financially stay stable, but she was not
Speaker 1: exactly rolling in money and ready to tire. It's not
Speaker 1: really clear. We don't have a record or sure of
Speaker 1: whether she really meant for this to be her last show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are discussions of it in different books. One is
Speaker 1: just that because she had so many fireworks, there are
Speaker 1: some stories, and again they're unverified that people were like, no, no,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't go. It's it's too much, and others were like,
Speaker 1: come on, let's start the fireworks. And it could be
Speaker 1: that she was just saying for the last time, I'm going,
Speaker 1: we're doing this, just that it didn't have anything to
Speaker 1: do with it being her last time in the air.
Speaker 1: But it did prove to be a little bit prophetic
Speaker 1: because as the show started, the wind shifted, and Uh,
Speaker 1: Sophie would do this thing where she would drop fireworks
Speaker 1: from the basket on parachutes, similar to how they had
Speaker 1: dropped dogs and people after the past ket previously. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they would burn out as they fell to the ground.
Speaker 1: But because of the wind shift, she was being carried
Speaker 1: away from to Voli Gardens. Something went wrong with this
Speaker 1: show and Sophie's balloon on on fire, as you may
Speaker 1: have guessed was going to happen by the abundant foreshadowing
Speaker 1: and just the simple science, like the choice of hydrogen
Speaker 1: is as a gas to inflate the balloon and then
Speaker 1: carry fire and carry fire around those some spectators cheered,
Speaker 1: believing that the flames were part of just a huge
Speaker 1: spectacle that was intentional and part of the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she had such a reputation for putting on these amazing
Speaker 1: shows that they were like, wow, she's making it look
Speaker 1: like the balloon's on fire. The balloon was on fire. Uh.
Speaker 1: And she is said to have tried to slow the
Speaker 1: descent of the balloon by cutting ballast as it went
Speaker 1: up in flames. So she's kind of floating over Paris
Speaker 1: at this point, um, and trying to slow things down
Speaker 1: so she doesn't just crash into something. And there are
Speaker 1: some accounts that suggest that spectators thought, even after they
Speaker 1: had realized that this was not part of the show,
Speaker 1: they really thought that she might have a good shot
Speaker 1: at landing safely. But as she was working, the balloon
Speaker 1: hit the roof of a house and she was thrown
Speaker 1: out of it. She was found dead on the street,
Speaker 1: according to newspaper accounts YEA. Some suggests that she broke
Speaker 1: her neck um others simply say that she was dead
Speaker 1: in the street, and they don't go into any detail.
Speaker 1: Sophie was buried in Paris in the Parlasch Cemetery, and
Speaker 1: her monument was paid for through public donations. It features
Speaker 1: a pedestal with a sphere and a flame atop it,
Speaker 1: representing the aeronaut's fiery final voyage. I find that kind
Speaker 1: of morbid. It is a little bit weird to show
Speaker 1: the manner of death on the monuments. There's an apoctable
Speaker 1: story that the funds for the monument were actually the
Speaker 1: profits from ticket sales, which the Tivoli Gardens management had
Speaker 1: initially earmarked for Blanchard's children, but then they realized she
Speaker 1: had no children and reallocated them to the monument. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find verification on that one, but it was
Speaker 1: such a fun odd story, like they were like, we
Speaker 1: must give the money to her children, someone knowing she
Speaker 1: doesn't have kids. We must build a monument. It's so
Speaker 1: almost money python esque and it's kind of uh, well
Speaker 1: meaning uh incorrectness, that is. And I don't mean to
Speaker 1: disparage her or using hydrogen for her balloon. That is
Speaker 1: what was available for her to you well, and it
Speaker 1: was an age of excitement, you know, where things were
Speaker 1: being experimented and you know, it had only been about
Speaker 1: fifty years since hydrogen had been identified and these balloons
Speaker 1: kind of represented like a new age of what they
Speaker 1: could do and achieve and how far they could go.
Speaker 1: And we all part of science. And as we've talked about,
Speaker 1: it took a very long time for people to stop
Speaker 1: filling things with hydrogen to then float people around in Yes,
Speaker 1: there is actually an animated documentary that's being directed by
Speaker 1: Jen Sachs titled The Fantastic Flights of Sophie Blanchard that's
Speaker 1: been in production um for a while now, since it's
Speaker 1: successfully funded through an indiego go campaign and as of
Speaker 1: about a month ago. Their last update was that the
Speaker 1: production was working on the final animation sequence, so there
Speaker 1: will very soon theoretically be a new short animated documentary.
Speaker 1: I love those two words together about Sophie Blanchard and
Speaker 1: her life and work and uh, this crazy balloon career
Speaker 1: that she had, which you know, relatively short but quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: I think that sounds like fun and I hope it's
Speaker 1: available for people to to stream or otherwise see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can visit the website now and we'll link to
Speaker 1: it in the show notes. Um, and you'll see kind
Speaker 1: of the pitch animation that they did for Indigogo, which
Speaker 1: is quite interesting and it's a fun style, and you'll
Speaker 1: see kind of where it's going. Do you also have
Speaker 1: some listener mail for us? I do. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: from our listener lease uh. And she says, I just
Speaker 1: listened to both of the Bride episodes and I enjoyed
Speaker 1: them overall. But I must say that I was disappointed
Speaker 1: to hear you characterized Charles Lawton as gay. So many
Speaker 1: times I've heard you discuss the issues about labeling someone's
Speaker 1: sexual identity in ways they did not describe themselves. According
Speaker 1: to your quote from Elsa's autobiography, Charles described himself as
Speaker 1: partially homosexual, and he and Elsa did conceive a child.
Speaker 1: Unless there's information you've come across that you did not cite,
Speaker 1: Charles was bisexual. I find a change in terminology problematic
Speaker 1: and hope that you rethink or clarify it. It's a
Speaker 1: very good point and valid. Uh. And he never certainly
Speaker 1: never came out himself publicly. And even when Elsa published
Speaker 1: her autobiography at first and revealed this information, a lot
Speaker 1: of his friends were very angry and said, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I think you must be making this up. Uh. So
Speaker 1: it's really valid and we should say, like from Elsa's
Speaker 1: point of view, she was married to a gay man,
Speaker 1: because she does talk about throughout the book that even
Speaker 1: when they were together, she realized that like his preference
Speaker 1: for her mode of dress had more to do with
Speaker 1: like her sort of looking boyish, and even her wedding
Speaker 1: outfit was almost like a little uniform kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And and she really felt like he was trying to
Speaker 1: conform to the social norm of, you know, a heterosexual marriage,
Speaker 1: but also trying to make it work for him, like
Speaker 1: what appealed to her about him was probably her traits
Speaker 1: that were very independent and some would characterize as masculine,
Speaker 1: because most women were not quite as independent and self
Speaker 1: sufficient and outspoken as her at the time, at least
Speaker 1: not publicly. And she talks about also as they lived
Speaker 1: their lives together that he's always very unhappy unless he
Speaker 1: had sort of a a male companion with him, Like
Speaker 1: he would become quite mean and angry with her um
Speaker 1: and even cruel at times. But if he, you know,
Speaker 1: had the companionship of a man, it was like he
Speaker 1: that was when he felt right. So from her point
Speaker 1: of view, having just read the reread the autobiography when
Speaker 1: I was working on the show notes, I just sort
Speaker 1: of naturally slip into her POV and go, yes, he
Speaker 1: was gay, but you're absolutely right, we shouldn't say outright
Speaker 1: he was gay. As for whether he was bisexual, I
Speaker 1: mean that sort of gets into a whole other thing
Speaker 1: because there are lots of people that identify as gay
Speaker 1: that have had had her sexual relationships. So there's a
Speaker 1: only tangentially related. There's a really interesting oral history of
Speaker 1: the lesbian bar culture. All boots of leather, slippers of gold,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that the author talks about
Speaker 1: is how much difficulty they had finding women who had
Speaker 1: been in this culture and had been in like more
Speaker 1: of the them stereotype who still identified as lebian. Which
Speaker 1: I sort of put that out there is as one
Speaker 1: of the things about in my in my mind, sexuality
Speaker 1: being a continuum that has all kinds of places on it,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people resist fitting exclusively into a
Speaker 1: label that's a sumhere on that continuum. Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's all tricky, but it was Lee's. I appreciate very
Speaker 1: much you bring it to my attention, because I should
Speaker 1: not have outright I said she's married to a gay man.
Speaker 1: She was married to what she believed was a gay man,
Speaker 1: and she certainly felt through their years of marriage together
Speaker 1: that she was married to a gay man. But it's
Speaker 1: like a point to bring up. I'm just glad this
Speaker 1: conversation continues and is happening and people are thinking about it,
Speaker 1: and not just sexual identity, but just people's identities and
Speaker 1: how they get labeled historically. It's all very um fascinating
Speaker 1: and quick meaningful, and so I appreciate it. Thank you.
Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us about the
Speaker 1: bride or ballooning, or anything else that you have in mind.
Speaker 1: You can do so at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: You can connect with us on Facebook and Facebook dot
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Speaker 1: in History, and you can also visit our tumbler, which
Speaker 1: is missed in History dot tomsare dot com, and we
Speaker 1: are also on Pinterest pinning away. If you would like
Speaker 1: to learn a little bit more about what we talked
Speaker 1: about today, you can go to our website and do
Speaker 1: a search for the word balloons and you will get
Speaker 1: how hot air balloons work, which are not nearly as
Speaker 1: dangerous as the hydrogen variety. I have different dangers, but
Speaker 1: less so much of Maybe it will catch on fire
Speaker 1: and in a dramatic crash. Yeah, we may have learned
Speaker 1: a bit from all of these bad accidents. Uh. And
Speaker 1: if you would like to research almost anything else your
Speaker 1: mind can conjure, you should do that at our website,
Speaker 1: which is how stuff works dot com. For laralness and
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