Author Archives: Myles

Hot Boys, Great Art

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A Cellist Elevated by His Bath: Philip Gladstone (2007)


He had been in there for nearly an hour. Long enough for the water to cool, for the steam to disappear from the mirror, for the afternoon to slip into something approaching evening. He ought to have got out. There were things to do, people who might be waiting. But he had never been particularly good at doing what was expected of him.

Instead, he pointed at the cello.

There is nothing quite so exciting as a young guy in a bath. Especially one who brings his cello.

A Cellist Elevated by His Bath was painted in 2007 by American artist Philip Gladstone, whose work I’m beginning to think deserves considerably more attention.

Born in Philadelphia, Gladstone is known for his evocative figurative paintings, often featuring the male nude as protagonist, muse and general cause of distraction. He now paints full-time in a renovated barn studio at his antique farmhouse in rural Maine. Not a bad setting for an artist with such a particular eye for the male form.

This painting belongs to his long-running Tubs Series, in which bathers, animals and assorted objects find themselves in antique tubs that feel less like bathroom fixtures and more like protective, womb-like spaces. The results are surreal, dreamlike and just a little absurd.

And then there is the cello. The pose. The pointing finger.

I have questions. But I’m not sure I want answers.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Pianophilia


Severin introduced me to the works of German classical pianist Julius Asal. I am ‘polyjamorous’ which is an engaging way to describe me as someone who enjoys multiple, diverse music genres. Either that, or I am ‘genre fluid’. I can listen to almost anything but I must confess to finding classical piano a bit tedious. But Severin shocked me more than anything. He rarely listens to anything but R&B hip-hop, but swears he loves Asal’s music. I’m not convinced. I think it’s a classic case of being entirely enamored by the package and not the product.

Queerbaiting


The film textbooks insisted I watch Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist masterpiece Shoeshine (Sciuscià). It was quite charming in the bleakest possible way.

Postwar Rome. Giuseppe and Pasquale, two impoverished shoeshine boys, pool their pitiful earnings to buy a beautiful white horse. Unfortunately, a black-market scam lands them in a brutal, overcrowded juvenile reformatory, where the system proceeds to turn their devotion into a spectacular mess of betrayal, jealousy and tragedy.

The cinema boffins have a field day with the coded queer subtext, particularly a shower scene widely regarded as the homoerotic high point of the film. A bit awkward for De Sica, who acknowledged the element but insisted it was dictated by the reality of the reformatory rather than any desire to explore it.

Then, in a 1971 interview, when asked why he hadn’t developed the theme of “homoerotic love among adolescents”, he offered the following charming explanation: “Because it revolted me.”

That put a dampener on the after-film discussion.

Defiance


Published in Berlin between 1896 and 1932, Der Eigene (roughly, “The Self-Possessed”) is widely regarded as the world’s first gay magazine. Founded by Adolf Brand, it began life as an anarchist publication before turning its attention to male beauty, same-sex love and what it rather grandly called “manly culture”.

Inspired by Max Stirner’s anarchist classic The Ego and Its Own, the magazine attracted an impressive cast of contributors, including writers Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Erich Mühsam and John Henry Mackay, alongside artists such as Wilhelm von Gloeden and Sascha Schneider. Not exactly a niche publication without literary connections.

Subscribers also gained membership of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of Self-Owners), a discussion group intended to offer solidarity and protection against blackmail. Women, however, need not apply.

The magazine operated under the watchful eye of authorities who were less than enthusiastic about its interests in male nudity and personal advertisements of an allegedly indecent nature. Brand himself was convicted of distributing obscenity in 1922. Apparently, celebrating the male form was not always considered a respectable pastime.

The end came with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Brand’s home was raided, his materials confiscated, and Der Eigene was silenced for good. For more than three decades, however, it had helped make a little space for gay culture in a world determined to keep it out of sight.


Unfiltered


I finally got round to watching Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), the film that scandalised audiences with its raw, unapologetic portrait of New York teenagers behaving as though tomorrow was a rumour.

Judging by the Letterboxd reviews, it still has the power to horrify. Apparently, I’m immune to the outrage. Or perhaps just unfiltered.

I loved it.

Shot in a loose, documentary-style aesthetic, Kids feels less like a conventional film than an afternoon you’d rather not have witnessed. At its centre is Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a seventeen-year-old who makes a sport of seducing virgins, treating sex as a conquest and other people as collateral damage.

Then there’s Jennie, a teenage girl who discovers she’s HIV-positive and races across New York to find Telly before he can put other girls at risk. What follows is a headlong descent into nihilism, drug and alcohol abuse, casual violence and a spectacular absence of adult supervision. Good times, then.

Beneath the grime is a fascinating portrait of male group dynamics: the posturing, the need for approval, the casual cruelty and the almost religious importance of impressing your mates. Female partners are disposable; male approval is everything.

The film’s legacy is hardly less troubling. Its young, largely inexperienced cast reportedly received little protection from the material they were asked to inhabit, and the subsequent deaths of actors Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter lend the film an especially grim afterlife.

Kids remains ugly, uncomfortable and morally bleak. But that’s precisely the point. It doesn’t ask us to approve of these boys. It asks us to look at them. And, judging by the continuing outrage, plenty of people would rather look away.

On the Cute and the Willing

Photograph by Walter Jenkel (2026)

Hypermasculinity, but make it submissive. Tactical gear, exposed skin, defined abs and a gaze less a threat than an invitation. The homoerotic tension. All that violence and control, softened by a body that is at ease being looked at. Masculinity as spectacle; vulnerability as seduction. The male form, offered up for consumption. Less alpha male, more please perceive me. The male gaze has entered the chat, and he can stay.

What Tuke Should Have Painted

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Baron Corvo, the Venetian lagoon, and a rather specific artistic brief


Quite what painter Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929) would have made of the letters Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), better known as Baron Corvo, sent to his wealthy British benefactor Charles Masson Fox (1866–1935), is anybody’s guess.

Written in Venice in 1909–1910, these letters are a glorious mixture of literary gossip, artistic criticism, financial desperation and homoerotic obsession. Tuke crops up during Rolfe’s often contentious discussions about mutual acquaintances within the “Uranian” literary and artistic subculture — that rather extraordinary network of Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists united by an idealised romantic interest in adolescent boys.

Rolfe, Fox and Tuke moved through overlapping circles, alongside figures such as John Gambril Nicholson and Horatio Brown. Rolfe was particularly interested in Tuke’s artistic success and, rather cheekily, in what he thought Tuke ought to be painting.

And here he really gets going:

“One thing that the world wants is some Tuke pictures of the Venetian lagoon and some Tuke pictures of mediaeval gondoglieri poised on poppe in Venetian canals.The only Venetian (Italian) worth talking about who paints it is Giuseppe Miti-Zanetti, who uses a process of his own, neither oil nor water, which certainly is wonderful, but purely architectural and atmospheric and generally nocturnal. Which signifies that a painter like Tuke would have a free field here: for there is not a single painter of young Venetians poised, (‘poise’ is the unique characteristic) poised on lofty poops, out on the wide lagoon, at white dawn, when the whole world gleams with the candid iridescence of mother of pearl, glowing white flesh with green-blue eyes and shining hair poised in white air trembling like song in white light reflected in white smooth sea – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at high noon, when all the world which is not brilliant is blue, glowing young litheness with its sumptuous breast poised in air like showers of acquamarines on a sapphire sea with shadows of lapislazuli under a monstrous dome of turquoise – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at sunset, glowing magnificent young strength dominantly illumined, poised in an atmosphere of lavender and heliotrope in tremendous stretches of sea and sky all cut out of jewels, limitless amethyst and far-reaching turquoise, or, all burnished copper splashed with emeralds and streaked with blue, the insistent blue of borage. No one does these things: no one sees them, but me. But Tuke is the only man alive who can do them; and he has not seen them. And who but Tuke could do real mediaeval gondoglieri in long fantastically striped hosen of silk, proud in the pomp of brocade, poised on lofty poops in the luminous shade of some small canal by some wonderful old water-gate like the Casa Agnusdei, or that of the Casa Amore degli Amici, or the one of the Calle Tedeum? No one. And he does not. It is dismal.”

There is something wonderfully unhinged about this. Rolfe is essentially telling Tuke, through Fox, that he has completely misunderstood the possibilities of Venice.

The letters were written while Rolfe was in severe financial distress and functioned, in part, as begging letters. Alongside his literary work on The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, he filled Fox in on his daily life, his infatuations with Venetian gondoliers and youths, and whatever else happened to be occupying his rather fevered imagination. The two men also exchanged stories and photographs of male nudes.

Rolfe apparently instructed Fox to burn the Venice Letters after reading them. Thankfully for us, Fox ignored him.

Because of their explicit content, the letters remained suppressed for decades before eventually being published by Cecil Woolf in the late twentieth century. They now provide a fascinating — and occasionally rather eye-popping — primary source for understanding Rolfe, his Venetian obsessions and the wider artistic world in which Henry Scott Tuke was also moving.

As for Tuke, I suspect he would have preferred to keep a respectable distance from the infamous Baron Corvo.

Tuke lived his life with discretion, and history has generally been kind to him.

Rolfe?

Not so much.

A Venetian Affair

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Part 2 – The Venetian Complication 


“Ciao,” said Bianchi.

“Ciao,” I replied.

“S-ciào vostro,” he grinned.

I am your slave.

He had discovered that ciao was derived from an old Venetian expression and couldn’t resist repeating it whenever he had the opportunity.

Venice woke early and seemed determined to wake us with it. The vibrating hum of delivery boats bounced off the brick façades of the Renaissance buildings, followed by the dull thunk of their hulls against the wooden mooring piles. Then came the metallic rattle of carrelli being pushed along the wooden decks.

“Slaves don’t sleep in the same bed as their masters.”

“But I have a good master and I must surrender to his wishes,” Bianchi replied cheekily.

My phone vibrated.

A message from Cola.

My mother is furious with you both. She knew that you would sleep together.

I smiled.

Bianchi crawled to the end of the bed and opened the curtains. He was naked, unlike the night before, and it was the first time I had seen him that way. He turned towards the window, completely oblivious to the effect he was having on me.

He had got his wish. Almost.

I had remembered Signora Bruschi’s warnings and allowed nothing more than a few kisses and cuddles. Nothing beyond that. Bianchi had no idea how much willpower it had taken not to give in to him.

But he was playing the long game and, for now, seemed perfectly happy.

Alas, the inevitable would happen eventually.

Sunrise had brought a soft morning light and a rising canal fog that would soon burn away.

“I shall make coffee,” Bianchi declared as he scrambled down the spiral staircase to the kitchen below.

I stayed in bed and closed my eyes.

I listened to the patter of his feet across the terrazzo, followed by the rattling of cups. Then came the sound of the French doors opening onto the stone balcony.

“Cazzo!”

He scuttled back inside.

“I did not know there were apartments overlooking us… and you can see everything.”

I peered through the newel posts and watched him grab a large towel and wrap it around himself.

I am going to struggle here, I thought.

The message from Charlie came at midday.

Ponte delle Guglie. 8pm?

I sent a thumbs-up.

Nothing more.

We shall see you then, he replied.

We.

My mind was made up.

I would definitely be taking Bianchi with me.

When I told him, I detected a nervousness that hadn’t been there earlier. But, as he explained, Signora Bruschi had sent him to accompany me and he would respect her wishes.

We resisted the urge to kick tourists into the nearest canal, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were tourists too.

We spent the day wandering narrow calli, crossing little bridges and drinking too much coffee outside cafés.

It was a way of killing time.

I was apprehensive about seeing Charlie again. The outcome was uncertain. Was this going to be closure for both of us, or the beginning of a new chapter?

I was mindful that I had instigated our enforced absence, although I hadn’t intended it to turn out the way it had. Not for the first time, I had ruined something that, on the surface at least, had seemed special.

But I had forgotten that Charlie was stubborn. And if he believed he had been wronged, nothing would alter his mind.

An observer might have regarded the whole mess as six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Quite true.

Charlie had inexplicably posed naked for a French gay magazine, confident that I would never find out.

On the other hand, I had slept with his brother.

And that, it appeared, was a far greater sin.

The other question I kept asking myself was whether we were still in love with each other.

There had been an unwillingness on both sides to resolve the mess and move on. Months apart had only strengthened our positions.

Part of me hoped that our meeting would lead to reconciliation.

But another part told a different story.

That story involved Thomas in Paris.

The uncertainty wasn’t helped by Bianchi, who had become uncharacteristically subdued. His early-morning brightness had gradually faded until he slipped into an awkward silence.

It wasn’t until we were heading back that I understood why.

We had reached the end of a ramo — a dead-end alley overlooking the Rio de la Pleta — and stopped to watch the boats passing below.

“There is a boy at work called Cesco,” Bianchi began.

He paused.

“He doesn’t say much. When I first met him, I tried to make conversation. He simply nodded. Now he sometimes smirks and occasionally speaks. We are slowly getting there. I think he trusts me.”

I tried to understand where the conversation was heading.

“The other staff say that Cesco is a handsome boy. Such a shame about the spots. They wish he’d do something better with his hair. They want him to be more sociable. They often lose patience with him.

“But when he smirks, they think he is smiling. My friends say, ‘How do you get him to do that?’”

Bianchi sat on the stone step and rested his elbows on his knees.

“And so they send me to collect the orders. I stand and wait. I make small talk. Sometimes I get a reaction.

“I tell my colleagues that I enjoy the challenge.

“‘You’re always so calm and collected,’ they say. ‘What’s your secret? Why doesn’t he speak to us? Why do you make time for his bad habits?’

“The answer is easy,” Bianchi continued. “I like handsome people. I can do spots. I can accept bad haircuts.

“I look at him in his black jeans, black T-shirt and black apron. Everything about him is black.

“But underneath all that black there is something attractive.”

I sat beside him, suddenly unsure that I was going to like what came next.

“What is that?”

“I imagine him standing behind his counter,” Bianchi replied. “I imagine him transformed in my mind, and suddenly I can wait patiently.”

I didn’t know how to respond.

L’erba del vicino è sempre più verde, he said sadly.

I tried to translate it.

The grass is always greener.

It was Bianchi’s way of sending a warning shot, and I was determined not to react.

“I cannot wait forever, Miles.”

One of my failings is that I sometimes fail to see what is right in front of me.

Bianchi was in love.

He had quietly persevered, waiting for me to return his affection.

I wanted to tell him that I loved him too.

But I would become a liar if my reunion with Charlie ended positively.

Life can be complicated.

Charlie.

Thomas.

Bianchi.

They all had a hold on me.

“I am not looking forward to meeting your boyfriend,” he added.

“Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected.

“But what if you decide to get back together? Where does that leave me? I might never see you again.”

He bit his lip.

“I am not sure that I would want to see you again if you did.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you don’t have to come with me.”

“I will come,” he decided. “But it is difficult for me to accept.”

“I know you have feelings, Bianchi, and I’m sorry that you’re caught up in all this. But please realise that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.”

“Then tell me there is hope. Tell me I am not wasting my time. If not, for my own sanity, I must look somewhere else.

“Even if it is the boy with spots and a bad haircut.”

I laughed, not unkindly, and squeezed his arm.

“You are not wasting your time, Bianchi.”

I wanted to hold him.

I wanted nothing more.

And he would gladly have let me.

But then the nose of a gondola appeared and glided silently into view.

Three women of various ages and sizes looked startled to see us sitting on the steps. Then they looked at us with curiosity.

Standing behind them, a young gondolier made light work of propelling the boat along.

“Buonasera,” Bianchi called.

And the gondola disappeared around the corner.

The Beautiful Mess of Justin Pierce

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Reckless youth and the tragedy behind the swagger


Raw, unpolished charisma. Deep-seated vulnerability beneath a tough exterior. A tragic beating heart.

A few words to describe actor and skateboarder Justin Pierce, who died in 2000.

He was a bit of a looker.

Sharp, angular features. A symmetrical face. Strong jawline. High cheekbones. Intense, dark eyes. Dark hair that alternated between a sharp buzz cut, a messy, tousled style and chin-length waves, often tucked beneath a backwards baseball cap or a knitted beanie. And that layer of stubble, the faint moustache.

There was a dishevelled edge about him.

And the dress code.

Baggy cargos. Oversized skate tees.

He was a 90s rebel, a style icon for a generation of skaters who followed in his footsteps. The truth is, today’s skater boys probably have no idea who Justin Pierce was.

His claim to fame came when film director Larry Clark discovered him skating in New York’s Washington Square Park. He cast him in Kids, a film following 24 hours in the lives of aimless Manhattan teenagers, who prey on and protect one another. They drink, get high, talk trash. But mostly, they have unprotected sex.

Released in 1995, Kids was both condemned and praised for its uncompromising portrayal of teenage sex, drugs and violence.

It has since become a cult classic.

Pierce played Casper, a profane, drug-addicted skateboarder. The New York Times described him as:

“A reckless goon who spends his day huffing nitrous oxide, swilling beer and starting fights in the park.”

An antihero with chaotic charm.

“He’s really riveting,” his co-star Rosario Dawson said. “I had such a crush on Justin when we did the movie. He was such a mess.”

By all accounts, he could get seriously fucked up. Drunk. Arrested. There were also stories of fist fights with co-star Leo Fitzpatrick.

The line between Justin Pierce and Casper was never an easy one to draw.


Pierce grew up in Marble Hill, in northern Manhattan. As a teenager, he dropped out of school and moved into a basement apartment on 176th Street, known as the Dungeon, which was teeming with fellow skaters. His self-destructive streak wasn’t invented for the screen. Casper had been written specifically with him in mind.

“His style, his swagger, his whole thing was kind of unprecedented,” screenwriter Harmony Korine said. “He was supermagnetic, and there was something really beautiful about him. At the same time, he was completely uncontrollable. He went for it all of the time, and that’s part of what got him into trouble.”

In 1996, Pierce won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance.

After Kids, he went on to appear in a further dozen films. His most recognisable mainstream role was Roach in the 2000 box-office comedy Next Friday, alongside Ice Cube. On television, he appeared in the HBO film First Time Felon (1997) and guest-starred in two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle in 2000.


But skateboarding remained his first love.

Pierce was an original rider for the Zoo York skate team. He featured prominently in the now-iconic Zoo York Mixtape video (1998) and was a founding member of the original Supreme crew, back when the brand was still a single shop on Lafayette Street.

After Kids, he moved to Los Angeles and married stylist Gina Rizzo in 1999.

But something was troubling him.

In July 2000, aged just 25, Pierce was found dead in his room at the Bellagio Hotel in Paradise, Nevada. His death was ruled a suicide. Reports indicated that two notes had been found, though their contents were never made public.

There has been speculation about the toll that drugs took on the young cast of Kids. Pierce struggled with substance abuse, something that was an open secret within the community. Another of his co-stars, Harold Hunter, died of a cocaine-induced heart attack in 2006.

Pierce’s death received relatively little attention at the time. But Kid 90, the 2021 documentary directed and produced by Soleil Moon Frye, brought him back into view for a new generation and offered another glimpse of the troubled young man behind the swagger.

Frye had spent four years going through footage she had shot as a teenager in the 1990s, along with her diaries and voicemails. What emerged was a time capsule of youth, excess, friendship and vulnerability.

Those who knew Pierce remembered his extraordinary good looks. Perhaps there was a little envy in their recollections, too. But there was affection as well. They remembered the magnetism, the swagger, the beautiful mess of him.

Another waste of a young life.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Després del somni (After the Dream): Nil Masip Boget (2025)


It makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Here’s someone who is only twenty years old, extremely good looking — and, annoyingly, an amazing artist too.

Barcelona-based Nil Masip Boget is a classical and figurative painter who trained at the Barcelona Academy of Art and Acadèmia La Gràcia. He has already won several awards, and his work is now held in public and private collections across Europe and the USA. He has also just had his first solo exhibition, sense por d’oblidar, at Inéditad Gallery in Barcelona.

He works mainly in oils, using light, colour and texture to create paintings that feel quiet and introspective. There is often a sense of silence in his work — moments caught somewhere between thought, memory and dream.

Després del somni (After the Dream) was the last oil painting he completed for Happiness Journey, a contemporary art exhibition held in Barcelona last year.

It shows a shirtless young man sitting on a bed, wrapped in crumpled white sheets. He looks away from us, towards the right of the canvas, while a mirror on the far left gives us a second, more distant view of him.

It is a beautifully strange composition. The dark background seems to remove the outside world altogether, leaving the boy suspended in some private, timeless space between sleep and waking. The mirror adds another layer — self-reflection, vulnerability, perhaps even the feeling of watching yourself from outside your own body.

Enough of the art criticism.

What actually caught my eye about this painting?

I shall leave you to guess.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Hindsight


The week that my post on Jonathan Brandis made social media sit up. In other words, it was an unexpected success.

What is this obsession with dead guys?

I keep asking myself that question.

I’ve seen a lot of death.

Far more than anybody understands.

I’m not talking about family or friends. I’m talking about people I never knew.

It is an unhealthy addiction from which abstinence is not an option.

For a start, dead guys are more interesting than living ones.

I like researching their lives. Trying to piece together who they were, and form my own conclusions about how and why they died.

The strange thing is that I have this ridiculous notion that I might somehow have been able to save them.

It is a burden I shouldn’t have to carry.

There is a term for it.

Hindsight bias.

I’m looking at the past with information I only have now because the event has already happened. My brain rewrites history, convincing me that I should have seen the warning signs. That I should have known. That I might have done something.

But I couldn’t have done any of those things because I never knew them.

And often, they died before I was even born.

I explained all this to someone who asked about the increasing frequency of my ‘dead guy’ posts.

They didn’t understand.

They thought I was weird.

But in their attempt to get me committed to an asylum, they may also have stumbled upon something.

“It is a misplaced extension of your love and responsibility for them. You wish you could have been their protector, even against the odds.”

Byron


Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Lord Byron has crept into my psyche.

Somewhere between Venice, poetry and beautiful young men, I find myself becoming rather too interested in a dead man. My loins have developed a historical imagination.

Byron embodied his own creations: brooding, melancholic, rebellious, mysterious. He turned his life into a kind of living poem — and surrounded himself with a close-knit circle of younger, adoring companions whom he likened to the Theban Band, the ancient Greek military unit composed of male lovers.

And then there were the boys.

John, the choirboy — “violent though pure love and passion.”

Eustathius, the volatile Greek youth.

Nicolo, the fourteen-year-old Franco-Greek beauty.

And Loukas, the agonising, unfulfilled love.

It all begins to feel less like biography and more like fever dream.

So here I am, wandering through Venice in search of Byron.

I’ve gone looking for Byron and discovered that Byron was looking for me.

Noctambulate


I like walking late at night.

Swallowing the shadows. The darkness.

Just gentle water and silence. A whole city asleep.

For a while, I become a ghost. An observer moving through streets that belong to no one.

The emptiness feels like a temporary pause from life. No demands. No noise. Nothing expected of you.

And strangely, you’re never afraid.

Not even when you turn a corner into a dark calle and suddenly find someone standing there.

You just keep walking.


Villain


I realised that more people don’t like me than do.

Lately, the air has shifted, and the echoes returning to me are all wrong.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the eyes of someone —a sudden, freezing clarity. They didn’t see a cautious soul trying to navigate a loud world. They saw something cold. They saw a calculated, arrogant silence. To them, my hesitation is a snub. My quietness is a judgmental withdrawal.

For years, I assumed the growing crowd of people who disliked me did so because I wasn’t enough—not funny enough, not present enough, not bright enough. Now, I see the truth is far more unsettling. They hate a version of me that I have never met. They are reacting to a loud, imposing stranger who wears my clothes and speaks with my voice, but possesses none of my intent.

They have already written the script, and I am the villain, completely unaware of my own lines.


Kid 90


Punky Brewster had hundreds of hours of personal and archival video footage, audio tapes and diaries from her teenage years. This documentary brings it all back: partying, friendships, adolescent romance — and the darker side of early notoriety. Substance abuse. Suicide. The unfiltered chaos of the 1990s set against stark, quiet interviews in the present day. Kid 90 is a jolting reminder that we could be bad in our youth. And some of us will get older.


Secret


That famous line from The Killers:

You had a boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year.

It makes me feel a bit guilty.

Maybe because it reminds me of the opening line of my favourite book:

Last night I fell out with Amy when she caught me sucking off her boyfriend under the table.

There’s a lot of sexual ambiguity going on here.

Who looks like whom? Who is doing what to whom? And, more importantly, why does all of this somehow feel completely normal?

It’s all very early-2000s indie boy meets literary sexual confusion.

I’m here for it.


Tease


Sometimes it feels like Venice is playing a game with you.

I’m not remotely interested in playing, but neither do I want to leave.

Perhaps that is the game.

It teases you with beauty, then hides it. Gives you a glimpse of something extraordinary, only to turn a corner and disappear.

You follow anyway.

You always follow.

Elsinore


I was fortunate enough to see Andrew Scott in the premiere of Elsinore.

For me, he’s one of those actors who has always been around. Never out of work. Consistently good. Completely underrated.

Is this the performance that finally earns him an Oscar?

Bloody hell, he was good!

I’ve read a few reviews, and there are some Nix Negatives out there. But if I’m glued to a film from start to finish, then it must be doing something right.

I don’t need a chorus of critics to tell me what I’ve just witnessed.

Sometimes, you just know.


On the Cute and the Willing

Zach Duncan. Photo by Retina Conspiracy (2026)

The Face I Never Saw Again

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The Parting: Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1910)


Two boys had met to bid “goodbye,”
One was my friend, the other 1;
He was going home—going home to die.

I know for long he talked to me,
But I think I only heard the sea—
It moaned and moaned incessantly,

I dared not look at him—I saw
The wind play with a wisp of straw:
‘Twas early Spring and cold and raw.

But when the station came in sight
Through parted clouds the sun shone bright.
Flooding the world with warmth and light.

A moment later in the train
I glanced at, with a stab of pain,
The face I never saw again.

The train went out: dark grew the sky
And all at once tempestuously
A storm of hail swept far and night.

But darkness could not blot or kill
That sunlit face—it never will:
By night and day I see it still.

Edwin Emmanuel Bradford’s The Parting first appeared in The Romance of Youth and Other Poems in 1910, with later editions appearing around 1920. It is tempting to read it as a wartime farewell between two young men, particularly because of its language of death and separation.

But the date matters.

This is 1910.

The First World War is still four years away.

So who, exactly, are these two boys?

Bradford gives us almost nothing. Just the meeting. The silence. The cold. The train. And that extraordinary final image of the boy’s face surviving everything — even darkness.

The poem belongs to the strange, fascinating world of early twentieth-century Uranian literature: writing that openly explored romantic and homoerotic relationships between men and adolescent boys.

Bradford himself lived an extraordinary double life. He was an Anglican vicar, respectable enough to be reviewed seriously and, remarkably, often favourably. At the same time, he was publishing poetry about male beauty, youth and desire.

That tension is part of what makes The Parting so haunting.

It never says what these boys are to each other.

Perhaps that was precisely the point.

Two boys meet.

One leaves.

And one face remains.

A Venetian Affair

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Part 1 – The Venetian Arrangement 


I have only been to Venice twice before.

The first time I was thirteen years old, and it was a cold, damp, misty day. I seem to remember wandering around alone for most of the day, although it was extremely unlikely that I actually did.

The second time was a couple of years ago, when I caught the train from Verona with Cola and stayed for only a few hours before returning. That day it was bright and sunny and completely different from the Venice I remembered. A thunderstorm rolled across the lagoon just as we were about to leave.

And now, for the third time, I have returned to Venice.

This time I will be staying considerably longer.

It was not by choice. There are too many things to do in the UK, and a trip back to Italy seemed more of a distraction than it would be to most people.

I think it was Truman Capote who said: “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.” I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, but I imagined that a stay here was more than most people could stomach.

For a start, there are the tourists.

On a typical day there may be as many as 60,000 of them. I hate tourists. Particularly those who wander around not so much looking at the sights as looking at the sights through a mobile phone. Hundreds of photographs they will never look at again. And if they do, it will probably be to bore the pants off an uninterested friend.

It’s not so much of a problem in Verona, but I imagined that you couldn’t escape them in Venice, which is, after all, a series of small islands.

If tourists get in my way, I will unashamedly kick them into the nearest canal.

But my visit is not for the purpose of being a tourist either.

I am above that.

Venice is neutral territory for a reunion with my long-lost lover, Charlie.

I’ll not bore you with the details, but we went our separate ways after my ill-fated trip to Paris in April. I took the advice of his father, who suggested that I play hard to get and Charlie would follow.

He never did.

Neither did he answer my messages.

He simply disappeared for the summer.

I moved on to Verona and my adventures with Signora Bruschi et al.

There comes a point when you think you have finally got someone out of your system. It is usually at precisely that moment that the least expected thing happens.

I received a message.

You okay?

I made the mistake of replying out of curiosity and allowed the floodgates to open.

Charlie had mistakenly believed that I had spent most of my time not in Verona but in Venice, and expressed a wish to meet up with me there.

For my sins, Verona had always been a secret I kept from Charlie. I wanted it to remain that way for as long as possible. Charlie’s older brother, Thomas, had subscribed to my wishes and, when pressed, had lied that I had settled in the floating city.

And so, we were to meet in Venice.

Signora Bruschi got in touch with an old school friend who lived in Venice, and I was allowed to stay in rooms close to the Ponte di Rialto.

“For as long as you wish,” Signora Bruschi told me.

But she had concerns about me staying on my own.

Alas, Cola had to remain in Verona for treatment on his broken arm. Instead, she insisted that Bianchi jump on a Trenitalia train and arrive at Venezia Santa Lucia in time for my own arrival by Alilaguna Linea Arancio from Marco Polo.

My heart leapt at the thought of Bianchi joining me.

But it would also cause complications for any reconciliation with Charlie, if reconciliation was actually on the agenda.

After all, Charlie had probably been the love of my life.

But I suspected that I had not been the love of his.

And there were too many secrets between us.

Before I set off, an English friend told me to watch The Comfort of Strangers because it would put me in the mood for Venice.

I did as I was told.

He was right.

It put me in exactly the right frame of mind if I wanted to get my throat cut by a psychotic stranger.

I met Bianchi near Rialto.

We had only been apart for a few weeks, but it seemed much longer.

Bianchi threw his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks.

“I have missed you, Miles,” he cooed excitedly. “But we are together again, and we are going to have a good time.”

Signora Bruschi had told me that it hadn’t taken much to persuade Bianchi to come.

None at all.

He had jumped at the opportunity without hesitation.

But she had also warned him that I was unavailable and that we must sleep in separate beds.

“Signora Bruschi says that I am too young for you,” Bianchi moaned.

Perhaps so, I thought.

But I also knew that teenage boys have a habit of ignoring good advice.

We manoeuvred through the hordes of ignorant tourists I had already taken a dislike to. Like Piazza San Marco, they descend on Rialto as though these are the only two places worth visiting in Venice.

At last we found the quieter calli and crossed small bridges until we reached the place where we would be staying.

Palazzo Pesaro Labia dalle Rose had been described to me as a small but elegant two-room apartment overlooking the canals and located in a fifteenth-century palace.

From the outside, it looked as though it hadn’t been touched since the fifteenth century, with its weathered appearance and crumbling brickwork.

We accessed it through a private courtyard and climbed a set of steps leading to a locked door, beyond which another staircase led upwards to a pair of old double doors.

But as soon as we saw inside, we both loved it.

It was so far removed from Signora Bruschi’s house in Verona, which, up to this point, I had always considered grand. It was even further removed from Bianchi’s modest family home in San Giorgio in Salici.

For a start, it wasn’t small.

Its two rooms dwarfed my own apartment back home.

I would describe it as grand Italian.

The living room was stylishly furnished with antiques, and the walls were covered with tasteful prints. The second room consisted of a kitchen space, a huge dining area, and a small bathroom attached.

The roof space was so vast that a half-mezzanine floor had been built, with a circular staircase leading to the sleeping area.

And there, occupying most of it, was a huge double bed.

Bianchi looked at it.

I looked at Bianchi.

It was plain to see.

We would both have to sleep together.

“I hope that this doesn’t disappoint you,” Bianchi said rather sheepishly.

“It doesn’t,” I told him. “But we must be careful not to tell Signora Bruschi.”

“I do not think that either of us has the courage to do so,” he innocently replied.

The Boy Hollywood Forgot 

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Jonathan Brandis and the loneliness of being forgotten


While researching Jonathan Brandis, I had the strange feeling that he reminded me of someone.

Then I realised.

He looked uncannily like my friend.

I would later discover that they shared some of the same torments.

But there is a difference.

Jonathan Brandis is dead.

My friend isn’t.

“I want to be remembered as an actor who put in some good work in the beginning of his career, even better work at the end of his career and slowly, successfully made the transition into writing and directing,” he told Nicki Swift in the Hartford Courant in 1994.

It didn’t end that way.

Brandis was boyishly handsome. Dark blond hair. Blue eyes.

Yes, the eyes were beautiful.

In the 1990s, Tiger Beat readers voted him their number one ‘dreamboat’, while Seventeen placed him among its ten sexiest guys.

At the height of his fame, he was receiving 4,000 fan letters a week. Three studio guards were needed to escort him through the mobs of fans at Universal Studios in Orlando, where seaQuest DSV, the Steven Spielberg-produced futuristic underwater fantasy, was filmed.

Between 1993 and 1995, Brandis played Lucas Wolenczak, a teenage computer genius who bonded with Darwin, a dolphin capable of communicating with the crew.

Born in Connecticut in 1976, Brandis began modelling for advertisements as a child. By nine, he had moved to Los Angeles.

There were television appearances in L.A. Law, Who’s the Boss?, Full House and Blossom.

Then came the films.

Most famously, he played Bastian in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter in 1991.

He auditioned for the role of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Hayden Christensen got the part.

It was no big thing.

seaQuest DSV was just around the corner.

Then seaQuest was cancelled.

And suddenly the boy who had been everywhere was finding it difficult to get the roles he thought he deserved.

There were television movies. Smaller parts.

But the momentum had gone.


Brandis was devastated when most of his appearance in the 2002 war drama Hart’s War ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Underneath the persona, the long career lull — and the creeping realisation that he was no longer the boy Hollywood had once wanted — became sources of anxiety.

He began drinking heavily.

He allegedly told people he wanted to kill himself.

In November 2003, a friend found the 27-year-old Brandis hanging in the hallway of his Los Angeles apartment.

Paramedics rushed him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

He died the following day.

There was no suicide note.

There were no drugs in his system.

At first glance, Brandis might seem like another tragic victim of Hollywood.

A beautiful young man who had been adored, then discarded.

But perhaps it was more complicated than that.

In his memoir Growing Up Urkel, Jaleel White writes about Brandis and the strange pressure placed on young actors who grow up in the business.

“Just like me, he had dedicated his entire life to achieving what Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of his peer group had seemingly accomplished with ease.”

When White learned that Brandis had died, he wrote that he “cried for what felt like a fallen soldier.”

Years later, Brandis’s father offered another explanation.

He suggested that his son may have been bipolar.

“His death wasn’t due to the entertainment industry,” he said. “I look back now, and in his 20s, he showed signs of manic depression.”

Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable truth.

The industry may have contributed to the disappointment, the loss of status, the feeling of being forgotten.

But the darkness may have been there long before the lights went out.