Episode 59 - ROPE - Swooning for Leopold&Loeb

We're taking a long hard look at Hitchcock's queer classic 'Rope' where Farley Granger and John Dall thumb their handsome noses at the Hayes code and play a queer couple who murder for kicks. OK so they couldn't kiss, touch or tap dance to Judy Garland, but almost every scene in this play-on-film crackles with queer sexual tension between the two... and that's before their mentor Jimmy Stewart shows up... But where did the inspiration come for these twisted queens?

Enter Leopold and Loeb - socialite bright young things who in 1924 killed a young boy for kicks and thought they were above the law. They weren't. But their twisted romance and horrific crime meant the pair went down in history. Not only did they inspire a play by Patrick Hamilton and the movie by Hitch but they inspired Swoon, a 90s avant garde queer art film. We look at both, we celebrate the genius of Hitch (again) but we also have a right old laugh about butt plugs, flip-flopping tops and bottoms, and reveal which queer heart throb COULD have played opposite Farley Granger... if he hadn't been so painfully closeted.

Spoilers, bad puns and frankly disgusting humour ahoy!