Until now, I had avoided seeing Chop Suey (2001). The title alone suggested nothing that would interest me.
Then a friend encouraged me to watch it and followed up with a cryptic message.
“An elephant appears several times in Chop Suey. It might be the same elephant that wandered into the room and now refuses to leave.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
For those who have never seen Chop Suey, it is a documentary anchored around Bruce Weber’s relationship with Peter Johnson, a handsome high-school wrestler from Wisconsin who became a fashion model. Based on Weber’s photo book The Chop Suey Club (1999), it has been described as a visual memoir, using Johnson as a window into the director’s own youth, longing and pursuit of an unattainable ideal.
The film wanders freely between footage of Johnson and archival clips featuring the openly lesbian lounge singer Frances Faye, surfer Christian Fletcher, actor Jan-Michael Vincent, British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and, amongst others, the elephant. I challenge anyone to understand immediately what the hell is going on.
But that was the nature of Weber’s filmmaking.
My friend’s remark referred to the recent controversy surrounding Weber, the photographer-cum-filmmaker who shot to fame in the late 1970s and helped reshape advertising throughout the 1980s by becoming one of the first photographers to present male models as overt sexual objects.
At the height of his career he could command more than $20,000 a day. Then came allegations of sexual misconduct and exploitation. Weber denied the accusations, and several lawsuits were later settled out of court.
There are simply too many good photographs for me to turn my back on him.
Speaking at the film’s release, Weber said:
“I just hoped this film might be interesting for students or anyone who ever picked up a camera in their life. It’s a film about how things don’t have to go in their normal progression. I hope that somebody in a small town somewhere might be inspired by it to go their own way.”
Everything in Chop Suey revolves around Peter Johnson and Weber’s fascination with youthful male beauty.
For somebody as shallow-minded as myself, that makes for compelling viewing.
Weber met the 15-year-old Johnson at Dan Gable’s Wrestling Camp in Iowa in 1996. Over the following four years he documented the young man’s maturation as he embarked on a modelling career and eventually started a family.
“I thought that Chop Suey might be the right name for a boy from Wisconsin.”
The documentary is unapologetically homoerotic. Johnson appears clothed, semi-clothed and fully naked. It feels less like voyeurism than the gaze of an artist worshipping his young, athletic and heterosexual muse, exploring longing, unrequited desire and the aesthetics of the male physique.
“Peter Johnson really got a great confidence in himself. He was able to look people straight in the eye, and he wasn’t embarrassed that he was a great poseur.”
Weber has been married to film producer Nan Bush since 1977, a fact that inevitably prompts questions about his own sexuality.
The camera seems hopelessly in love with Johnson, lingering over him in shot after shot. Weber saw in him something almost mythic: youth, beauty and a perfection that could never quite be possessed. Johnson, meanwhile, appears blissfully unaware of the spell he cast. He comes across simply as a decent small-town boy, happy to indulge Weber’s fascination but never defined by it.
When the filming ended, Johnson quietly stepped away from the mythology that had grown up around him. Rather than pursue immortality as somebody else’s muse, he chose anonymity, marriage and the raising of three children. In doing so, he achieved something far rarer than eternal youth: an ordinary life, fully lived.
So, was my friend right to suggest that I might like Chop Suey?
Francesco called me noioso, which I had no trouble interpreting as “boring”. And he wasn’t wrong. There comes a point in everyone’s life when drinking simply becomes too much. If I’m honest, that moment arrived for me in my early twenties. Others, like Francesco, were still going strong well into their thirties.
I was on my sixth Birra Moretti, and the combination of oppressive heat and alcohol was beginning to take its toll. Italians don’t generally binge drink, preferring a few leisurely glasses of wine instead. But Francesco had once lived in London and had wholeheartedly embraced the British tradition of getting shitfaced in the shortest possible time.
I was sinking fast.
Francesco—whose name I’m delighted to say translates rather wonderfully as “Frank Horse” in English—suggested that later we should head to Paradiso, an underground club that played 1980s Italo-disco for people who had missed it the first time around. There was a rumour that Disco Bambino would be DJing, but when I checked, he wasn’t even in the country.
With three hours still to kill before Paradiso opened, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. “Noioso,” he repeated when I told him I was heading back to the apartment to sleep it off. “But first we must go to the river. It will be cooler.”
By Italian standards, Frank Horse was no longer especially handsome. He had put on weight, dressed as though he had wandered straight out of the 1980s, and would have blended seamlessly into Paradiso. His nose had also been permanently bent after a fight in Piazza Bra.
But he hadn’t always looked that way.
Once upon a time, Frank Horse had been slim, handsome and one of Pietro’s boys. Eventually Pietro grew tired of his heavy drinking and cast him aside. It seemed that I had become his long-term replacement until Pietro dropped dead from a heart attack. Frank Horse now earned his living as a distinctly unhurried car mechanic in a rather dubious garage off Via XX Settembre. Yet, despite everything, he had never shown me the slightest resentment. He had always remained perfectly cordial.
He dragged me to Ponte di Castelvecchio, the fortified medieval bridge spanning the Adige, where tourists crowded together, phones and cameras raised. I squeezed past them to peer through one of the crenellations and marvelled at the broad sweep of water gliding silently beneath us, the afternoon sun dazzling on its surface.
Behind me, an American voice was enthusiastically explaining the bridge’s history.
“Of course, it’s not really the original bridge because it was blown up by the German army in 1945 and rebuilt using the stones recovered from the river.”
After a fair amount to drink, I have a habit of retreating into my own little world.
Had I been fully aware of my surroundings, I might have noticed the commotion further along the bridge, followed by a loud cheer. Seconds later there was an enormous splash as somebody landed feet first in the Adige. The young man waved happily as the current carried him towards Ponte della Vittoria.
Frank Horse eventually climbed out further downstream, where he was promptly arrested by the decidedly humourless Polizia Locale.
Alas, he never made it to Paradiso.
On finding that leather’s just for the look…
There is a room at the top of Signora Bruschi’s house that is filled with clutter. It is where unwanted things are taken to be forgotten. The good lady mentioned that there were boxes up there that had belonged to Pietro—and that they probably belonged to me now. It was a less-than-subtle hint that I ought to sort through them. I pretended not to hear.
Three boxes appeared in my room the following day.
Box Number One …
Inside was an old Italian-language paperback, Fratelli by John Preston. The price sticker on the back still read L. 4.500. Time had turned the edges of the pages a brittle amber, carrying the faint scent of vanilla, dust and old glue. The book fell open naturally at page 142, where a paragraph had been permanently marked by the back of an old glossy Polaroid.
I recognised the photograph immediately. I’d seen it before. It was Hustler by Christopher Makos and taken in 1977: a handsome young man wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and a leather jacket, provocatively unzipped to reveal a well-toned chest.
Tucked inside the pages was a note, apparently torn from an old notebook.
One line leapt out at me.
“Leather’s just for the look. It comes off easy.”
On looking at young Peter again …
Well, I’m apparently being accused of hating David Hockney.
According to my inbox, my post about Peter Schlesinger, his lover and muse for three years, was unfairly biased in favour of the American (who, incidentally, is alive and well). Fair enough. But while I’ve always admired Hockney’s work—indeed, I seem to be surrounded by Hockney art at the moment—I never found the man himself in the least bit attractive.
The same could not be said of Peter Schlesinger fifty years ago. He was, surely, every man’s erotic dream.
I’ve now managed to get hold of Schlesinger’s A Chequered Past (2003), a collection of photographs taken during the 1960s and 1970s, accompanied by brief autobiographical reflections. (Note to self: why are old photography books always so darned expensive?)
The point I had tried to make—and evidently failed to make very well—was that Hockney was extraordinarily fortunate to have shared part of his life with someone like Schlesinger. Today, of course, such a teacher-student relationship would rightly raise serious ethical questions.
And perhaps Hockney was a little naïve not to realise that young free spirits have always had a habit—as they still do—of looking around the next corner.
How I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that “dramatic and public break-up” in Cadaqués in 1971.
On being fooled by Dorian Grai …
Spotify chucked a recommendation my way.
It was a singer called Dorian Grai and a song entitled Hockney Blue, which I found surprisingly seductive. It is a tribute to David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, particularly those populated by cute, half-naked young men.
A snapshot of the lyrics gives you the general drift.
I’ve had one night on my youth slipping away ever since I saw the boy who knew nothing of decay.
He slipped into the water cool, how it possessed him. So that every drop glistened as a diamond on his skin.
I can see him now as he swims across, how his body’s framed in that azure box.
And I had to be an admirer of the boy I knew I could never love.
So I wish him well, how I make my peace, and I take his portrait as a memory. And I see the stars and I smell the flowers, how the day is gone forever.
He was the boy in the turquoise swimming shorts, tanned skin, black hair, his body lean and honed and young.
He slipped into the swimming pool of Hockney blue.
So that all I could do was sit still, held beneath my eyes.
According to Blakeman Records, Dorian Grai is a twenty-year-old British-American digital artist. Hockney Blue is described as a smooth tropical house track with delicate harmonies and jazzy motifs—a paean both to the paintings of David Hockney and to the yearning regret of a love that never had the chance to blossom.
There is also an interview with the handsome young man.
“I’ll never forget how it felt to write my first song and to listen back to it. I was electrified by the act of creativity—that I had made this thing that had never existed before in the world—and I was hooked.”
Well, I like the song and I like the sentiment, but—and it is a very big but—it is entirely AI-generated, as is Dorian Grai himself.
To be fair, there is no attempt at deception. Everything is out in the open, right down to the lustfully created video of him swimming half-naked in a pool.
On the cute and willing…
Yehor at MOSS Management, Paris. Photo by Pasith Thirawatworakun (2026)
“You know I like Archie Pennybet very much indeed. In fact, I think I like him better than anyone else in the world, ‘septing of course my relations.” – Edgar Doe.
One of my recurring frustrations with old books is this.
Every so often, I pick up a novel now regarded as homoerotic and wonder how on earth its first readers failed to notice what was sitting in plain sight.
A second dose from Ernest Raymond’s 1922 First World War novel, Tell England: A Study in a Generation, a book that goes to extraordinary lengths to beat around the bush.
When it was published, the poor dears read it as a patriotic, high-church Anglican tribute to the tragic “lost generation” of British public schoolboys sent to Gallipoli. The lingering focus on male beauty and passionate friendships seems to have passed them by.
You may recall from an earlier post that Raymond himself later openly acknowledged the novel’s homosexual subplot.
The first half of the novel, Five Gay Years of School, introduces the narrator, Rupert Ray, and his classmates as young men who are acutely aware of their own attractiveness, opening one school chapter with Archie Pennybet’s boast: “I’m the best-looking person in this room.” Time and again, they are presented as magnificent, almost perfect creations of God.
At the heart of the story is Rupert’s deeply emotional attachment to his classmate Edgar Doe, who is quite unmistakably homosexual. Their relationship is marked by jealousy, devotion, and emotional intensity that often resembles a love affair far more than ordinary friendship.
“I say, why does Doe avoid us now?”
“The Gray Doe,” sneered Penny. “Oh he – She’s in love, I suppose. With Radley.”
“Don’t drivel,” I commanded. “Why does he hang about with that awful Freedham?”
“When you’re my age, Rupert,” began Penny, in kind and accommodating explanation, “you’ll know that there are such things as degenerates and decadents. Freedom is one. And very soon Doe will be another.”
“Well, hang it,” I said, “if you think that, how can you joke about it, and leave him to go his way?”
“Oh, the young fellow must learn wisdom. And he’s not in any danger of being copped. I’m the only one that suspects, and I guessed because I’m exceptionally brilliant. Besides, if he wants to go to the devil for a bit, you can’t take his arm and go with him.”
“No,” I said, “but you can take his arm and bring him back.”
The schoolmaster, Radley, is described as regarding the boys with a “strong, active love.” Rupert comments: “We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth.”
In the second half of the novel, the boys are sent to Gallipoli. The emotional and physical admiration established during their schooldays evolves into a romanticised martyrdom, where dying beautifully for England becomes the ultimate fulfilment of their youth.
By Jove, Ernest Raymond was clever.
He wrote about male intimacy with remarkable emotional and physical closeness without provoking the censors of the 1920s. Wrapped in high-church religiosity and fervent patriotism, it was accepted by the general public as nothing more than an innocent, heart-rending tribute to fallen soldiers.
“I don’t think your brother liked me,” I suggested to Bianchi.
His English had improved enormously since our last meeting, but he failed to understand what I had said. This, I realised, was how our conversations were going to be. My Italian was considerably worse.
“Lorenzo,” I persisted. “He hated me.”
“Enzo does not like me either,” Bianchi replied. “He says I must change. If I do not, he will make me change.” He paused before adding with a hopeful smile, “Is my English good?”
The memory lingered.
Bianchi’s mother scarcely looked old enough to have three grown children. Her eyes sparkled as she welcomed me into her home. Cinzia had clearly told her about me. Like most of the family, she spoke no English, and Cola translated.
She is delighted that you have come.”
In the background, Lorenzo had made his feelings perfectly clear. As we left the apartment, I glanced back just in time to see him draw a finger slowly across his throat.
We settled in the small courtyard behind Signora Bruschi’s building. Four sun-bleached walls, their peeling ochre and sienna softened by deep green ivy, enclosed the space. Around us drifted the familiar soundtrack of Italy: overlapping conversations spoken in rapid, melodic bursts, punctuated by warm laughter and the rhythmic clink of porcelain spoons against ceramic coffee cups.
Cinzia seemed to interpret my return as a declaration of intent towards Bianchi, who sat casually between us.
“Lorenzo è uno stronzo,” she declared. “He is a complete asshole. Ignore him.”
“I disagree,” Cola interrupted. “Miles must be careful not to antagonise him, otherwise there will be consequences.”
“I do not like the sound of this person,” Signora Bruschi frowned.
For the first time that day I was able to study Bianchi properly.
He was small in stature but lean and athletic. His olive complexion carried the faintest flush across his cheeks, while his pale eyes seemed incapable of hiding emotion. Whenever he spoke, his hands moved instinctively, every gesture as expressive as his words.
Bella figura.
Like many boys his age, he dressed with understated style: dark skinny jeans, immaculate white leather trainers, a pale button-down shirt, and around his neck a simple silver chain from which a small St Christopher medallion occasionally caught the light.
He noticed me watching him.
The unguarded charm of a working-class country boy surfaced immediately. His hand brushed gently against my knee, and the hopeful expression on his face suggested that he was still searching for my approval.
I remained uncertain whether this was a path I truly wanted to follow.
The oppressive heat mirrored the suffocating intensity of obsession.
Much had happened during the past year.
Bianchi was studying sports science at Liceo Scientifico Statale Angelo. He had also found part-time work as a porter at a hotel in Verona. Once school broke for the summer, he would spend the season picking peaches, cherries and kiwi fruit on a large farm before moving into the nearby vineyards for the September grape harvest.
Then Signora Bruschi announced that she would prepare lunch for everyone.
Almost immediately, Cola declared that he and Cinzia were meeting friends later at Pedrotti on Via Venti Settembre.
“But Bianchi will stay here,” he added with a grin. “No doubt he will spend the night with Miles.”
His announcement made it sound as though I had been volunteered to babysit Bianchi, who was still considered too young to spend the evening drinking with the others. Pleasant though it was to be included, I could not escape the feeling that Cola and Cinzia were quietly steering events.
Signora Bruschi immediately crossed herself.
“That will not happen,” she said firmly.
Her reaction caught me by surprise.
Like many Italians, she held deeply rooted Catholic beliefs, yet she had raised no objection when I had lived with Pietro several years earlier. After his death, she had even insisted that his rooms were mine whenever I wished to return.
“Bianchi is welcome to stay,” she continued, “but he must sleep in Cola’s room.”
“Cosa vuoi dire, mamma?”
There was, I had come to realise, a distinctly Veronese form of compromise. Family harmony always came first. Certain realities were quietly accepted, provided nobody spoke about them too openly.
“Bianchi will share a bed with you, Cola.”
“Ma, mamma…”
She folded her hands as though in prayer.
“I must protect both boys,” she said. “Miles is already in a relationship, and I will not allow anything to happen beneath my roof that might threaten that.”
Only then did Bianchi understand.
His shoulders dropped, and the disappointment on his face was impossible to miss. He had lived on memories for an entire year. Now it seemed he would have to keep waiting.
No one had asked for my opinion.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that obsession did not belong to Bianchi alone.
The thought of Cola and Bianchi sharing a bed stirred a jealousy I had never known I possessed. Whatever doubts I still harboured, I suddenly recognised that I regarded Bianchi as mine to lose. Cola, who had no interest whatsoever in Cinzia’s younger brother and would never dream of taking advantage of the arrangement, had nevertheless become the one person standing between us.
Only Cinzia seemed amused.
“Cola,” she teased, “I hope you can survive the smell of Bianchi’s cheap body spray and teenage sweat. Perhaps it would be better if you slept with Miles instead, and Bianchi could have Miles’s bed all to himself.”
A twenty-something with soft, youthful features and a quiet demeanour. He is highly desirable; his image has become an indelible symbol of Californian beauty and desire.
There is a problem.
A Bigger Splash, directed by Jack Hazan, was a groundbreaking film that merged documentary with scripted drama to explore a poignant period in David Hockney’s life between 1971 and 1973.
Released in 1974, A Bigger Splash chronicles the emotional fallout and creative struggle that followed Hockney’s devastating break-up with his young partner and muse, Peter Schlesinger. It received mixed reviews, with Private Eye dismissively referring to it as A Bugger’s Pash.
And yes, I have fallen in love with Schlesinger as he was more than fifty years ago.
In the film we see Schlesinger, clad only in white briefs, dancing with himself before an easel. He gets it on with a friend, the actor Eddie Kalinsky, skinny-dips with a pool full of twinks, and later swims alone, completely naked, before climbing out and revealing everything we wanted to know.
He was a handsome fellow with long, floppy hair, and Hockney was understandably devastated to lose him. In retrospect, A Bigger Splash is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, freezing Schlesinger in time.
He was in his mid-twenties and was rumoured to have agreed to appear only during the final months of production, and only if he was paid.
Hockney was said to have been “utterly shattered” by A Bigger Splash and allegedly offered Hazan $20,000 to destroy it.
These old films play tricks on us. They invite us into an imagined one-to-one connection, creating the illusion that we know the subject’s true personality. We fill the historical gaps with our own desires, values and fantasies. In effect, we create the perfect partner.
But it is a one-sided, unreciprocated affair. It gives us the experience of romantic love and emotional attachment without the risk of rejection or conflict. He can never disappoint me, change his mind, or break the spell of his visual perfection.
Schlesinger became the myth of the eternal muse.
There is another problem.
Our minds struggle to comprehend the ageing process, and the fact that Schlesinger is alive and well, now approaching eighty, threatens to shatter that myth.
Schlesinger was born in 1948 in Encino, in California’s sun-drenched San Fernando Valley, the son of an insurance agent and a social worker. He studied drawing at UCLA and, in 1966, aged eighteen, met Hockney, who was teaching a summer class. He soon became the subject of one of Hockney’s best-known paintings, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool.
He had stepped into an unfamiliar world, and who could have blamed him? Suddenly he was socialising with museum curator Henry Geldzahler and art dealers Nicholas Wilder and John Kasmin, while also befriending novelist Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy.
After graduating, Schlesinger moved to London with Hockney and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. There he was introduced to Hockney’s bohemian circle, including the designer duo Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell.
Hockney and Schlesinger were together for three years, and it was fortunate that Hazan chose the period of their separation as the backdrop for his documentary.
The question I kept asking myself was simple: why did the relationship end?
By then Hockney was in his thirties, and the imbalance in both age and influence inevitably played its part. Schlesinger struggled to establish an identity of his own while living within Hockney’s enormous social and professional orbit.
There was also the suggestion that Hockney became consumed by his work, leaving Schlesinger isolated, waiting for an artist who often seemed to prioritise the canvas over the relationship.
The cracks had already appeared.
The most convincing explanation, however, is that Schlesinger had fallen in love with someone closer to his own age—someone equally beautiful.
Schlesinger met the Swedish-born design student Eric Boman in March 1971 at Mr Chow’s restaurant in Knightsbridge. Following the London premiere of Visconti’s Death in Venice, Paloma Picasso invited Boman, Manolo Blahnik and Andy Warhol’s business partner Fred Hughes to dinner with Hockney and Schlesinger.
Hockney later regretted deciding not to attend.
“David was not interested,” recalled Boman, “so this adorable boy turned up at our table in a camel hair Ossie Clark coat.”
Schlesinger said it was love at first sight.
The final straw came a few months later during a group holiday in Cadaqués, Spain, where Schlesinger and Boman met again. Fatigued by constant drama, emotional claustrophobia and the pressure of being Hockney’s primary visual obsession, Schlesinger found himself drawn ever closer to Boman.
“Peter came with David Hockney and notoriously stayed on, causing their real dramatic and public break up. It was considered best that Peter and I go home, and we left at the crack of dawn in Ossie Clark’s Bentley, hoping to spend a night at Tony Richardson’s on the way, but he’d have none of it out of solidarity to DH. So we ended up at Mick and Bianca’s (Jagger). The next morning, Ossie put us on a train at Sainte-Anne, and since we had no reservations, the conductor let us stand in the corridor all the way to Paris in our swimsuits – the beginning of our new life.”
Hockney sank into depression and responded with bitterness and jealousy. In A Bigger Splash, he remarked that he might consider destroying the ‘Peter’ works. But, in fairness to Hockney, and all others who had lost their first love, who could have blamed him.
It took Schlesinger a long time to escape Hockney’s emotional pull. Jack Hazan later recalled in a Vice interview that Hockney would entice Schlesinger back under the pretence of painting him, simply so he could be near him. Schlesinger reportedly found this both “petulant” and “suffocating”, and longed to escape Hockney’s web.
One of the most important paintings from this period—and one that features in A Bigger Splash—is Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). In 2018 it sold at auction for a record-breaking $90 million.
“I don’t even think it’s a portrait of me, really,” Schlesinger said. “The figure standing beside the pool was a solution to a ‘conceptual’ problem, regarding composition and light, rather than an outpouring of romantic longing.”
After the break-up, Schlesinger moved into his own studio around the corner from Hockney. His relationship with Boman involved a lengthy commute between Notting Hill and Battersea by bus and bicycle.
Alongside painting, Schlesinger had always been interested in photography, but it was Boman who made a career from it. After borrowing Schlesinger’s Pentax camera, he became highly sought after for his art, fashion and society photography.
“Eric is very methodical and likes setups. I just snap pictures and he doesn’t understand that,” Schlesinger once said.
Eric Boman
During the 1980s Schlesinger also became disenchanted with painting and turned instead to ceramics, an art form he continues to pursue.
The couple moved to New York in 1978 and, a year later, settled in a tenth-floor loft where the Flatiron District meets Chelsea, in a building that had once housed a girdle factory. Four years later they bought a mid-nineteenth-century Greek Revival house near Bellport on Long Island, where they spent their summers.
Schlesinger and Boman remained together for fifty-one years, with Hockney once referring to them as a “couple of old maids.”
Eric Boman died of pancreatic cancer in 2022.
In recent years Schlesinger said he had no contact with Hockney and, referring to A Bigger Splash, reflected: “It’s not about me. It’s so long ago, it’s like a different person.”
But Schlesinger is like a painting in a museum.
Perhaps the only way to live forever is inside a work of art, and Schlesinger’s life remains preserved in Hockney’s paintings and, to some extent, in A Bigger Splash.
It is vintage media: a pre-digital art world, a lost world of effortless style, leisure and raw creativity.
And I am still in love with the young Peter Schlesinger.
Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. David Hockney (1966)
The Room, Tarzana. David Hockney (1967)
The last word. Peter Schlesinger’s Instagram post after Hockney’s death.
I am told a story about a man who goes to visit his mother’s grave at Cimitero Monumentale di Verona. He stands before it in prayer and then drops dead himself, overcome by the heat.
The problem with this story is that I have heard it before.
There was the case of a man in the town of Garlasco, near Milan, who collapsed while standing at his parents’ grave. In Naples, another was found slumped across his father’s tomb.
In Italy, they sometimes try to outdo one another, and that makes it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.
The heat, however, is real enough.
The Italian health ministry has been issuing its maximum Level 3 red alert — known as the bollino rosso — for cities across the country, including Verona.
The heatwave is being driven by the African anticyclone known as “Cerberus”, bringing temperatures with little variation between day and night and daytime highs of up to 40°C.
For now, the apartment where I am staying is woefully unprepared. There is no air conditioning, only a collection of small electric fans that offer little respite.
Signora Bruschi insisted that I keep the wooden shutters closed to block out the sun. She also instructed me to keep the windows shut.
I ignored her.
I needed fresh air.
Now the heat from outside has permeated and made the room unbearable.
I sleep naked, but sleep itself has become impossible. The nights are spent tossing and turning in my own sweat. When I wake, I discover that aggressive tiger mosquitoes, which are supposedly creatures of the day, have spent the night feasting on me. My body is covered in bites and an unsightly heat rash stretches across both arms.
Alas, I no longer feel beautiful. A plain, white-skinned English boy like me can only dream of the cold, the rain and, perhaps, even snow.
On the three naked butts …
Italian boys are more cultured than English and German boys.
Severin, the German boy, and I, the English boy, have not forgotten those hurtful words.
Over time, Severin and I have found each other like long-lost brothers. Recently he heard from Elio — the chosen one — who has discovered a diary belonging to Pietro.
Inside was the following entry:
“Elio is the lover I have always wanted, but he is spoiled and without scruples. Perfect for me. Severin is cute but stupid. He will do whatever I want him to. Miles could be wonderful, but he always thinks with his dick. There is no loyalty there.
“But I love them all, and I call them my three naked butts.”
Nude of Three Boys by Wilhelm von Gloeden
On Thomas and the Paris heatwave …
Thomas messaged me from Paris, where the temperature had become stuck at 40°C. He had covered his windows with emergency blankets to keep the heat out, though this also prevented him from seeing the world beyond them.
“It is hot and gloomy,” he moaned.
His girlfriend, Ambre, had abandoned her apartment in Batignolles. Poor insulation and a lack of external shutters had turned it into an oven. “The blazing sun hit her windows all day — she couldn’t breathe and felt dizzy because there was no air,” he explained.
“I have a headache all the time and now we must walk around my rooms completely naked,” he added, clearly for my benefit.
The image of Thomas — tall, skinny and entirely unclothed — was not an unpleasant one.
“And Léo was arrested for possessing drugs and had to spend the night in a police cell where temperatures reached more than 43°C.”
I was tempted to ask Thomas whether the heat had prompted Léo to shed his clothes as well and, if so, whether such a display might have proved provocative to his fellow prisoners.
Thomas signed off with a question:
“Are you missing me?”
On the boy by the water …
A cold stream. Stepping stones. It attracted students from Università degli Studi di Verona. If fashion models of either sex were to be discovered anywhere, this was the place to find them.
Nakedness was almost a prerequisite.
Gods and goddesses baked beneath a merciless sun, seeking relief in fast-running water, plunging into deep pools and sunbathing in temperatures that might well kill them. Youth does not concern itself with such things until it is too late.
I sat beneath the shade of the only tree.
I love the sun, but the sun does not love me. It burns me at the slightest opportunity. I had no desire to move because all around me was visual heaven. A multiple-choice examination in beauty: who was the most handsome, the sexiest, the most likely.
My eyes settled upon a young man wearing pale blue striped shorts that clung to his buttocks from the dampness. His hair was swept back as though he belonged on the streets of Milan. I could not see his eyes because they were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.
But it was his body that held my attention.
His soft, undeveloped chest. His slim frame. The perfectly proportioned legs he stretched out before him. He was the colour of a bronzed angel, without a blemish to be seen.
He lay upon a rock below me, water rushing around him, and I wanted to take his photograph but dared not because it would have seemed too obvious.
He assumed I was looking at him, just as I assumed he was looking at me, though neither of us could be certain.
If I had been forced to choose anyone there, he would have been the one.
Then he turned his head and smiled.
I smiled back, though I could not be sure the smile had been intended for me.
He lay back and the water rose around him. For a moment I thought I could detect the suggestion of an erection, though that may simply have been the product of an overactive imagination.
He sat upright again and flicked back his hair. His profile caught the light.
Then he shouted up and asked me for the time.
Four o’clock.
All was well.
A voice in my head suggested that a little flirtation was taking place. But I knew better than that. I knew the type of boy he probably was. He knew he was beautiful and, perhaps, enjoyed the effect he had on others. A fly-catcher, drawing us in simply for the pleasure of watching us hover.
I got up to find my friends and smirked as I stepped past him.
I decided to love him only as a memory.
Artwork by Daniel Jaen (2019)
On waiting for the fall …
We wait for the one who built the empire to fail.
We, the loyal followers, are waiting for the collapse. It cannot be far away.
And when it comes, we, the loyal followers, will make our move.
Photo by Aitana Valencia for Fucking Young! (2026)
Tyler distrusted men… including Kyle. And there was a reason for that.
It was something their parents had never spoken about, at least not in front of him. Yet Kyle had always known that something terrible had happened during that summer by the sea. Something that caused Tyler to retreat into a painful silence and refuse to leave his bed. Something that made both families weep behind closed doors. Something that brought the police to the house, speaking in hushed voices before taking Tyler away.
Their holiday ended that day.
Soon afterwards, Tyler’s family moved away from the neighbourhood. When Kyle asked where they had gone, his father sat him down and told him, “There are some things that don’t concern little boys.”
For years, Kyle wondered whether it had somehow been his fault.
Then, ten years later, he overheard his mother speaking on the telephone.
“I shall ask him,” she said. “I’m sure he will agree.”
That summer, Kyle and Tyler saw each other again for the first time since their childhood. They returned to the same house where their families had once stayed — the house that overlooked the beach where they had played, swum in the sea, and laughed at each other’s terrible jokes.
It was there that Kyle finally discovered what had kept them apart all those years.
Tyler distrusted men… and it had become impossible to ignore. His therapist had suggested that the only way to confront the past was to return to the place where it had happened, accompanied by somebody he could trust.
Image: The Picture of Dorian Gray – Gregrory Manchess
‘One evening about seven o’clock I determined to go out in search of some adventure. I felt that this gray, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins, as you once said, must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things. The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful night when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the poisonous secret of life. I don’t know what I expected, but I went out, and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares.’
From ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde (1890)
A deeply coded text. While The Picture of Dorian Gray does not explicitly describe sexual acts, it is widely considered a foundational queer or homoerotic novel. The language, deep obsession between male characters, and themes of hidden desires heavily reflect same-sex attraction, which led to the book being used as evidence in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial for homosexuality.
“C’è un ragazzo che viene a trovarti ogni giorno e ti chiede quando torni.” There is a boy who comes to visit you every day and asks when you are coming back.
Bianchi had been turning up at Signora Bruschi’s doorstep daily.
“Credo di essere nei guai. Sono nei guai grossi.” I think I am in trouble. I am in serious trouble.
Bianchi messaged me too, sometimes several times a day, and each time I replied with words designed to prolong the chase.
“Torna presto, per favore. Ho bisogno di parlarti.”
“I will come over soon,” I promised.
But that was last year, and I never did.
Bianchi was now seventeen, and on his birthday I sent the same number of red roses. His sister, Cinzia, provided me with updates. In her eyes, I had crossed a line. The time had come to make a commitment.
Cola, meanwhile, painted another picture.
“There is only one way to end his heartache,” he wrote. “There is only one way to calm a stormy sea.”
I was never entirely certain what he meant.
I had missed Cola.
He was now nineteen and no longer the skinny boy I remembered. I suspected that he had been spending time in the gym. His body had broadened, his shoulders were stronger, and he seemed taller than ever. With temperatures stuck in the mid-thirties, he wore sunglasses, a baggy white T-shirt and black shorts that showed off his long, sun-darkened legs.
But some things had not changed.
He still drove too fast, as if the possibility of death around the next bend had never occurred to him. He pushed the bright yellow Abarth 500 along the E70 before leaving the main road and cutting through the countryside towards San Giorgio in Salici.
Before I had arrived, Cola had sent me one of his strange messages:
In love, conversation is direct but risks becoming too harsh; measure your tone. In love, you desire stability, but someone is testing you.
I wondered whether it was a warning.
San Giorgio is a highly venerated figure in Italian Catholicism. He is also St George, the patron saint of England.
“Maybe it is a sign,” Cola said, his arms stretched along the steering wheel as he reclined in his seat.
I had arrived in Verona the previous night. Cola had collected me from Villafranca Airport and wasted no time suggesting that we visit his girlfriend, Cinzia, and her brother, Bianchi.
His mother, Signora Bruschi, had been less enthusiastic.
“The boy is too young,” she warned. “He is not old enough to know what he wants. Are you not happy with your boyfriend?”
I did not have the energy to explain about Charlie. I had neither seen nor heard from him since our falling-out in Paris, and the likelihood was that I never would again. My future suddenly seemed to contain too many possible paths.
Cola had not told Cinzia that we were coming.
“She is working this morning, but it is a half-day and she will be home around lunchtime. There is always somebody at home.”
I had my reservations.
My appearance in San Giorgio in Salici might reopen wounds that had only partially healed. Bianchi still messaged me, though now perhaps only once a week. It felt as if he was slowly moving on, while leaving a door open in case I chose to meet him halfway.
Cinzia was different. She had hoped that I would satisfy her younger brother’s desires and now believed that I had treated him badly.
Would I still be welcomed in the same way as the year before?
“I must tell you that Lorenzo will be there,” Cola warned.
“Who is Lorenzo?”
“Cinzia and Bianchi’s older brother. I suggest that you ignore whatever he says.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lorenzo is trouble — for his family and for himself. He makes life difficult for Bianchi because he is gay.”
Cola ran his hand through his short hair, leaving only one hand on the steering wheel, which did little to calm my nerves.
San Giorgio in Salici emerged from the Veronese countryside, surrounded by flourishing vineyards, a village that seemed little more than a collection of houses stretching along its roads. Cola screeched to a halt on Via Celà and announced that we had arrived.
The building where Cinzia and Bianchi lived looked tired. Four storeys high, its crumbling exterior had been patched with uneven concrete repairs. The ground floor contained a garage and storage rooms; the floors above were residential.
“They live at the top,” Cola said, pointing towards a balcony that stretched across the façade.
I followed him up the communal stairs. There was no lift. On one of the walls somebody had sprayed a single word of graffiti.
Vaffanculo.
“Go fuck yourself,” Cola translated.
I had long realised that Italians rarely knocked on doors or rang bells when they were not strangers. Once Cola had made sure I was behind him, he walked straight into the apartment and moved down a long corridor lined with family photographs.
The living room was filled with more memories — framed pictures, hand-painted ceramics and Catholic iconography: crucifixes, rosaries and a statue of Padre Pio. A large dining table stood by the window, covered with fine linen and carefully arranged dinnerware.
A young man — presumably Lorenzo — was stretched across a sofa watching a game show. He looked at us but did not move. Cola greeted him with a high-five and exchanged a few words in Italian.
Lorenzo turned his eyes towards me.
There was suspicion there.
He spoke quietly to Cola, but his expression suggested that he had already decided he did not like me.
“Cinzia is not home yet,” Cola explained. “Bianchi has gone to the grocery store with his mother and will be back soon. Sit down.”
There was an obvious resemblance between Lorenzo and Bianchi, although the older brother was taller, with shorter hair and the kind of beauty that seemed almost commonplace among young Italian men.
I remembered something David Hockney once said: if handsome New York boys ranked at one hundred, handsome Italian boys were almost certainly at one thousand.
But Lorenzo lacked Bianchi’s warmth.
“He does not speak English,” Cola said. “But Bianchi has been learning at the liceo.”
I remembered the days when our conversations had relied on Cinzia’s excellent English and her willingness to translate.
“Be careful of Lorenzo,” Cola continued in a lowered voice, although Lorenzo undoubtedly knew we were discussing him. “He hates that Bianchi is gay and will not like the idea of you being here, especially if he thinks you have come to take his brother away.”
“Then why did you insist that I come, Cola?” I asked.
“They are family to me,” he replied. “Just as you are like a big brother to me, Miles. But Lorenzo spends time with bad people — criminals who go into Verona to steal from shops and tourists. I do not like it, but he is Cinzia’s brother, and I must respect him.”
Suddenly, the apartment door slammed.
“Bianchi. Vieni qui. C’è qualcuno che ti aspetta.”
“Aspettare?” he replied.
There was a muffled exchange in the kitchen, followed by the sounds of cupboards opening and closing. Then their mother laughed — a sharp, joyful shriek, as though Bianchi had said something unexpected.
“Bianchi!” Lorenzo shouted impatiently.
It is difficult to describe the expression on his face when he appeared.
He stood in the doorway.
His eyes widened. His eyebrows lifted. His mouth fell slightly open as he struggled to draw breath.
‘The Curse of Idaho’ – River Phoenix with Rodney Harvey
In December 1998, Holly Millea wrote a piece for Premiere magazine about the death of actor and model Rodney Harvey, who had died eight months earlier. It is a long and painful read — almost too painful to finish — but it remains the definitive account of a young man who had everything placed before him and slowly watched it disappear. It was an extraordinary piece of journalism.
Rodney Harvey. A half-Italian, half-Irish boy from the rough streets of South Philadelphia who grew up wanting to be one of two things: an actor or a horse jockey. And when I say he was bad, I mean it in the most endearing sense. If there was trouble to be found, it was usually Rodney who found it. Fighting, petty crime, drugs — the catalogue of youthful misbehaviour seemed to follow him. Yet everybody adored him. He was charming, fearless, mischievous… and impossibly beautiful.
So beautiful that he achieved one of his ambitions almost by accident: spotted on the street while attempting to buy a gun, he was cast as Jose in Mixed Blood (1984), a film about Brazilian drug dealers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side who go to war with a rival Latino gang.
That was the beginning.
Other roles followed in Five Corners, Salsa, Guncrazy, Twin Peaks, and My Own Private Idaho. But perhaps he became best known to a younger audience as Sodapop Curtis in the television adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.
His looks also made him a favourite of photographer Bruce Weber, who photographed Harvey alongside Madonna for Life magazine and cast him in his Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost. His face was so striking that Calvin Klein used him in a campaign for Obsession for Men.
For a while, there seemed to be no stopping Rodney Harvey.
“He was one of the biggest life-grabbers. I don’t know many people that beautiful and fun and exciting and sensitive and strong and anxious about life,” said his friend Drew Barrymore, who was part of a circle that included David Arquette, Balthazar Getty and Amanda Anka.
Then there were the women — relationships with Lisa Marie, his Salsa co-star Magali Alvarado, and later Roxana Zal. Harvey could attract almost anyone he wanted, but his addictions and destructive behaviour left a trail of pain among those who cared for him.
The life of crime and drugs that had followed him from South Philadelphia eventually returned to claim him.
Some pointed to My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s film in which Harvey played Gary, a street hustler. Stories circulated about excess, wild parties and drug use around that period, and some believed that this was when his heroin addiction became impossible to control.
Drugs had always existed in Harvey’s world, but money and fame gave him the means to descend further.
Bruce Weber later recalled photographing the cast of Idaho and noticing a change in Harvey. The brightness remained, but there was a sadness behind his eyes that nobody seemed able to reach.
The so-called “Curse of Idaho” had already claimed the life of River Phoenix in 1993 and became linked, in the public imagination, with Harvey’s own tragic decline.
Rodney Harvey (1967-1998)
By the time Guncrazy was released in 1992, Harvey’s reputation in Hollywood had deteriorated. The young man who had once been considered a rising star was now consumed by addiction. He spent his money, stole from friends and strangers alike to support his habit, and was repeatedly arrested. There were stories of wealthy older men who continued to help him, even after he had betrayed their trust — perhaps unable to resist the memory of the beautiful young man he had once been.
Even his appearance changed beyond recognition. The striking face that had graced magazine pages and advertising campaigns disappeared. In its place was a man ravaged by addiction — thin, scarred and physically broken.
Millea’s article contained part of a letter Harvey wrote while serving one of his many jail sentences:
“I knew that the life I was leading was going nowhere. I had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. My acting career was over, my respect, all my morals, were gone.”
The end came in April 1998.
Harvey checked into a small room at the Hotel Barbizon in Los Angeles. A maid discovered him dead the following morning.
“A pair of black sunglasses lay at his feet on the linoleum floor along with some used syringes, an empty balloon, a hollow metal tube, and the bottom half of a 7Up can sticky with brown residue.”
A spent syringe still hung from his left forearm.
That final attempt to find euphoria, relief and escape had instead become the moment that ended everything.
Perhaps the greatest sadness is that generations who came afterwards barely know that Rodney Harvey ever existed. A young man who was once photographed by the greatest artists of his era, who moved among Hollywood’s brightest stars and who seemed destined for immortality, has largely faded from cultural memory.
And yet that may be his legacy. Rodney Harvey remains preserved in photographs, films and the memories of those who loved him — a haunting reminder of how beauty, talent and opportunity can never, on their own, save a person from themselves. A rose that bloomed brilliantly, withered too soon, but whose brief fragrance still lingers.
Rodney Harvey for Calvin Klein’s fragrance Obsession (1990)
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 