Category Archives: Boys Burn Quiet

Boys Burn Quiet: The Man from Baghdad Knew

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He was called Sajjad, and there was something dangerous about him. Rumour had it that he came from Baghdad and had fled to Europe to escape death threats from an armed militia. A man probably in his forties, he sat in the corner of the small bar smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking zammù — a mixture of water and aniseed. He seemed to look at nothing in particular, yet you understood that he heard everything. When he spoke, it sounded almost aggressive, and that frightened most people.

Alfio whispered in our ears: “If that man speaks to you, you must answer politely. Ignore him and he might turn unpleasant.”

And so we pretended that the threat in the corner did not exist.

“Mithli?” the man called Sajjad barked.

We hoped the word was not meant for our ears and ignored him.

“Mithli?” he shouted again, and this time there was no doubt that he was referring to us. His tone was far from friendly.

“Omosessuale? Homosexual?” he growled.

Severin smiled nervously and nodded.

The man called Sajjad looked at us with contempt, and for a moment we expected him to pull out a dagger and slaughter us. Instead, he spat on the floor. Then he slammed his fist against the table, causing his empty glass to topple over and smash on the floor. He jumped to his feet and hurried outside, but as he passed us he grunted a single phrase:

“Abu Nuwas.”

And that was the first time I had ever heard the name.

Afterwards, I wondered whether the man called Sajjad truly hated homosexuals, or whether he had been trying, in some strange way, to show sympathy. Was he imparting knowledge to us? Or was he simply a man of unsound mind?

Later, I discovered who Abu Nuwas was.

Born in Iran to a family of mixed Persian and Arab heritage, Abu Nuwas eventually settled in Baghdad during the late eighth century and became famed for his erotic verse, as well as his love of the debauched and degenerate. He was celebrated as one of the most influential Arabic poets of all time: renowned for his wine and hunting poems, but equally notorious for the profane and provocative imagery he used to subvert the authority of the caliph and mock the excesses of the court.

In one verse he called sodomy the “true jihad”. In another, two young boys fall in love and, instead of praying five times a day, fornicate five times whenever the call to prayer echoes across the city.

In the Muslim world, eroticism was regarded as sinful, while homo-eroticism was considered something beyond the ordinary boundaries of sin. Yet Abu Nuwas wrote without fear of execution or ostracism — and remarkably, that still appears to hold true today.

There is a statue of him in Baghdad, created by the renowned Iraqi sculptor Ismail Fattah Turk. It stands along Abu Nuwas Street on the banks of the Tigris River.

It took a long time for his work to be translated, and not everybody welcomed it. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture reportedly burned around 6,000 copies of Abu Nuwas’s poetry, condemning it as homoerotic and offensive to Islam.

I have since discovered two verses that are perhaps the best known of his so-called “homoerotic” works, and, in the hands of the translator, are distinctly modern. When I read them, I imagine the man called Sajjad reciting them aloud — perhaps choking on the words and spitting on the floor.

Love in Bloom
I die of love for him, perfect in every way,
Lost in the strains of wafting music.
My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body
And I do not wonder at his beauty.
His waist is a sapling, his face a moon,
And loveliness rolls off his rosy cheek
I die of love for you, but keep this secret:
The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope.
How much time did your creation take, O angel?
So what! All I want is to sing your praises.

In the Bath House
In the bath-house, the mysteries hidden by trousers
Are revealed to you.
All becomes radiantly manifest.
Feast your eyes without restraint!
You see handsome buttocks, shapely trim torsos,
You hear the guys whispering pious formulas
to one another
(“God is Great!” “Praise be to God!”)
Ah, what a palace of pleasure is the bath-house!
Even when the towel-bearers come in
And spoil the fun a bit.

Boys Burn Quiet: The Rise and Fall of Gerry Sundquist

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Gerry Sundquist: The best looking man on TV (1975)

Imagine it: you were once described as “the best-looking man on television”. Then you lost your looks, put on weight, and became addicted to heroin. Worse still, you became a liability — punching a producer and beating up your own brother after he threw your drugs out of the window. Unsurprisingly, the acting offers dried up. How would you handle it? How would you turn things around? Perhaps you couldn’t.

This is the story of an actor who was exceptionally handsome and might have gone on to far greater things had it not been for a destructive streak that eventually consumed him.

Gerald Christopher Sundquist — known as Ged or Sunny — was born in Stretford, Manchester, in 1955. He attended St John’s School in Chorlton and later St Augustine’s R.C. School in Wythenshawe. One former school friend described him as “part of the disco youth club teenage scene” and popular with his contemporaries. But he was no angel. In fact, he was something of a bad boy — smoking on the school bus, nicking chocolates from the sweet shop. Still, everybody loves a bad boy, right? “He had the world’s biggest blue eyes and could pick up a girl at fifty paces.”

He joined the Stretford Children’s Theatre and left school at sixteen to work the night shift at the Kellogg’s factory in Manchester. It was there that he was spotted by Granada TV casting director Doreen Jones, who cast him as Jim Woolcott in the nine-part children’s serial Soldier and Me in 1974. The role led to another part, Billy Adams in the ATV serial The Siege of Golden Hill in 1975.

His theatrical breakthrough came when he played the lead in All Walks of Leg at the Young Vic, adapted from John Lennon’s books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Next came the National Theatre in 1976, where he played Alan Strang in Equus opposite Colin Blakely. Critic B.A. Young wrote: “As the boy, Gerry Sundquist brings the sexual side of his fixation nearer the surface than in any other performance of the part I have seen. He is a slim, good-looking young man.” The story went that Sundquist had inherited his father’s Swedish looks.

And yes, he was undeniably a bit of a dish. Other people thought so too.

While appearing in Equus, a letter arrived from Buckingham Palace inviting him to visit. The invitation came from two gay chefs employed within the Royal Household. Sundquist, however, declined the offer.

By now he had become a hot property, appearing in a succession of television and film roles while still returning to the theatre between projects.

“This world was never meant for someone as beautiful as you.”

In 1978 he starred opposite Nastassja Kinski in Passion Flower Hotel, in which girls at an exclusive German boarding school live across a lake from an equally exclusive boys’ school. The pair became romantically involved. Sundquist nicknamed her “Nasty” and reportedly preferred spending time with the German actress to attending his own brother’s wedding.

He went on to play Michael Radlett in The Mallens (1980), Karpenko in Peter Brook’s Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979), and Pip in the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations (1981).

There were other roles too: Gerry in The Music Machine (1979), Tommy Frisking in Alexandria… Why? (1979), Pierre in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982), and Claudius in The Last Days of Pompeii.

But all of this came before the fall.

Had it succeeded, Sundquist’s appearance in The Music Machine might have catapulted him to international stardom. The film was billed as Britain’s answer to Saturday Night Fever — all glitter balls, disco lights, and North London dance-floor drama. Sundquist later admitted: “I actually had two left feet when I started making The Music Machine, but since then I must have improved enough to at least look convincing on screen. I literally went clump, clump, clump when I tried to dance.”

Unfortunately, The Music Machine was a flop, and Sundquist never quite reached the heights that had once seemed inevitable.

The film’s writer and producer, James Kenelm Clarke, later blamed its failure on the fact that neither of the two leads — Sundquist and Patti Boulaye — could really dance.

Still, there were plenty of pin-up photographs for British teenage girls — the sort of magazines young gay boys quietly borrowed from their sisters. Sundquist regularly appeared in full-page spreads, half-naked and sporting a finely toned torso. He certainly looked the part.

And there were women — lots of them, perhaps too many — though he never married.

But it was all beginning to unravel.

“No matter how much fame you have, it’s not something that belongs to you.”

What the public did not see were the underlying problems that came with fame and fortune. His life became a rollercoaster of highs and lows, and the warning signs were there if anyone had cared to notice them.

In 1980, Sundquist was fined £100 for growing cannabis. At the hearing, he said he had not worked since The Mallens ended and was living “off his fat” because he could not claim unemployment benefit. 

According to his older brother Geoffrey, Gerry had always dabbled in soft drugs, but things worsened after he met a girl involved with harder substances. That marked the beginning of his rapid decline. He eventually came off heroin and switched to methadone, but the earlier success never returned. By then, he had become something of a pariah within the industry.

The 1980s were lean years. His brother paid him to do odd jobs, while Sundquist picked up occasional voiceover work.

But he struggled badly with the comedown from fame.

After a four-year absence from television, his final screen appearance came in 1992, playing Jimmy Matthews in an episode of the police drama The Bill titled Lost Boy. After that, there was nothing.

In 1993, Sundquist threw himself under a train at Norbiton station in South London. There was never any doubt that it was suicide; he left notes for his family that read: “Please forgive me. I love you all. I’ve ruined my life.”

After his death, the casting director who had discovered him, Doreen Jones, reportedly said she wished she had taken a different route to work on the day she spotted him at the Kellogg’s factory.

What a waste.

His name died quietly with him and is now barely remembered.

From The Stage: 23 September 1993

Boys Burn Quiet: The Photographer Who Hid His Desire

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Calabria, three young men in bathing trunks on the beach , April 2, 1954. Konrad Helbig.

The story is sad in its own way. Imagine spending a lifetime taking more than a hundred thousand photographs of beautiful places around the Mediterranean. Many are published in travel magazines such as Merian and Atlantis, or used to illustrate the travel guides of the 1950s and 1960s. Then old age arrives, you die, and the work is left behind and forgotten. Later, someone sorting through your estate — a friend, perhaps, or a distant relative — discovers something that was probably meant to remain secret.

When Konrad Helbig died in the German city of Mainz in 1986, a completely unknown collection of black-and-white photographs was found among his possessions. They were images of young Sicilian men, many of them nude, and they had never been published; more likely, nobody had even known they existed. Now, forty years later, Helbig is remembered less as a travel writer and photographer than for these newly uncovered erotic images.

I have tried, and failed, to discover more about Helbig.

Searching through archives, I found only a single contemporary mention of him: a 1961 review following the publication of Umbria: The Heart of Italy, with text by Harald Keller and photographs by Konrad Helbig. The reviews were mixed, sometimes scathing. One correspondent wrote: “Herr Helbig’s black-and-white photographs cover art, architecture, and landscape with wide-ranging sympathy. (I say nothing of his five colour plates, which are frankly disastrous.)”

Young male nude with outstretched arm, 1950–1959. Konrad Helbig.

His first published photographic collection was a volume on Sicily in 1956, followed by collaborations with Karl Heinz Hoenig in 1959 and, later, with photographer Toni Schneiders on Archipelago in 1962.

Yet one cannot help wondering whether Helbig’s true artistic interest lay elsewhere: in his studies of the male nude, composed in the style of Classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Had those photographs become known during his lifetime, his reputation would almost certainly have been destroyed.

Konrad Helbig was born in Leipzig in 1917. He fought in the Second World War, was captured by Soviet forces, and remained a prisoner of war until 1947. After his release, he studied art history and archaeology, concentrating particularly on the Mediterranean world. Of his private life, however, very little is known. I have met someone who had known him — indeed, someone who had posed for him — but he either could not remember, or would not reveal, anything beyond the sparse details already available.

And what of the photographs themselves? Helbig’s best-known posthumous collection is Homo Sum (Latin for “I Am Human”), published in 2003 and featuring what were described as “his boldest erotic works from the 1950s and 1960s.” Another volume, Ragazzi, was published in 2001. First editions of both books now sell for hundreds of pounds.

Young male nude lying in high grass, Sicily, ca. 1950–1959. Konrad Helbig.

Boys Burn Quiet: Despised and Rejected

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Extracts from Despised and Rejected by A.T. Fitzroy (Rose Allatini) (1918)

“Dennis thought again, with an odd pang of tenderness, how absurdly young he looked, and how his mother must love to stroke back the dark hair from his forehead. There was a photograph of her on the mantelpiece – a tired-looking woman with dull eyes and long slender hands. The father, from his portrait, was evidently thick-set, with side-whiskers and a self-assertive expression. A queer couple, they seemed, to have bred this finely-strung creature with the tanned face, sensitive level brows, and great black eyes that burned with a smouldering fire.”

“Dennis added in a lower voice, ‘I shouldn’t find one like you. I shouldn’t find anything half as good.’

Alan glanced up with a quick flush of pleasure. ‘You’ve liked meeting me, then… Ah, but you can’t have liked it half as much as I’ve liked meeting you. Think of it – after all this time and among these people, suddenly to come across another human being from the world I’ve almost forgotten!’

Dennis said half-aloud: ‘Consider the even greatest wonder of meeting someone from a world that one didn’t know really existed – that one had scarcely dared to dream into existence.’

Alan cried eagerly: ‘Then you’ll stop on here for a bit, won’t you? Give a poor starving wretch a chance!’

“It would be cruel to refuse Alan’s request. In spite of the magnitude of the task which the boy had set himself, and although he was engrossed in it heart and soul, he was still young enough to want his play-time, genuine play-time; not the play-time of which, he had told Dennis…. He was asking for play-time now, but Dennis knew that he must not yield; must tear himself away from a danger doubly dangerous, because, far from wishing to avoid it, he longed to succumb to it!”

***

These striking lines were considered daring in 1918 and, perhaps inevitably, Despised and Rejected was banned. Not, however, for the excerpts above, but for other seemingly innocuous lines:

“Isn’t this worth fighting for?” Dennis smiled as he answered the question: “It’s worth more than that; it’s worth – not fighting for!”

Despised and Rejected was published in May 1918, while Britain was still at war with Germany. It was first submitted to George Allen & Unwin, but Stanley Unwin rejected it on the grounds that the firm might be liable to prosecution. He instead suggested offering the novel to C.W. Daniel Ltd, which agreed to publish it.

The book was written under the pseudonym A.T. Fitzroy, the nom de plume of Rose Allatini, whose first novel had been published by Mills & Boon in 1914. She was born in Vienna in 1890 to a Polish mother and an Italian father, but was raised in England.

The publisher’s publicity offered a revealing indication of the novel’s themes:

“A vigorous and original story, dealing in an illuminating way the two classes of people who are very commonly misunderstood – the Conscientious Objectors who refuse military service, and the so-called Uranians whose domestic attachments are more in the way of friendship than of ordinary marriages.”

When reviews appeared, critics focused less on the anti-war message and more on what they perceived as the novel’s treatment of homosexuality:

“The treatment of sexual matters is strictly decorous and there is nothing to attract the reader in search of sensationalist fiction, which is just as well, for the author’s standpoint is pitifully repellant.”

This, however, was mild compared to what followed:

“It is a beastly book, full of unnatural vice, and not written in the admirable literary style which gave a glamour to a certain book by Oscar Wilde.”

And,

“If the author wished to enlist our sympathy for those who are congenitally, sexually perverted, it could be wished that she had asked our pity and not for our admiration, and did not consider such persons as necessary for the production of the higher type, that which the whole considers to be wrong is not therefore proved to be right.”

And,

“A thoroughly poisonous book, every copy which ought to be put on the fire forthwith.”

In September 1918, Charles William Daniel, the publisher of Despised and Rejected, appeared before Sir Charles Wakefield at the Mansion House. He had been summoned at the insistence of the Director of Public Prosecutions for making unlawful statements likely to prejudice recruitment, as well as the training and discipline of those serving in His Majesty’s Forces, contrary to Regulation 27 of the Defence of the Realm Regulations.

Notably, the homosexual content did not appear to be the central issue; rather, it was the novel’s anti-war message that provoked concern.

Daniel pleaded not guilty, and the case was adjourned to allow Sir Charles to read the book for himself. When proceedings resumed in October, Sir Charles stated that the question of obscenity was not before him, though he did not hesitate to describe the work as “morally unhealthy and most pernicious.”

Penalties totalling £460 were imposed on Daniel, with the threat of imprisonment should he default on payment. In all, 1,012 copies of Despised and Rejected had been printed, of which 667 had been sold; the remainder were confiscated.

The Herald, which had previously shown sympathy toward Oscar Wilde, launched an appeal to cover the fine. It was oversubscribed, and among the contributors was Stanley Unwin—who had originally rejected the manuscript.

After this, Despised and Rejected fell into obscurity until it was republished by Gay Men’s Press in 1988.

Today, a first edition can command prices in excess of £1,000, and even later editions are often costly. However, modern readers can obtain a more affordable paperback edition, now republished under Rose Allatini’s own name.

In her personal life, Rose Allatini married the composer Cyril Scott in 1921, and the couple had two children. They separated in 1939, after which she lived with fellow writer Melanie Mills—an arrangement that has prompted comparisons with the character of Antoinette in Despised and Rejected.

Over the course of her career, Allatini published around 40 novels under several names, including A.T. Fitzroy, Mrs Cyril Scott, and Lucian Wainwright, though the majority—around 30—appeared under the pseudonym Eunice Buckley. She died in 1980.

Rose Allatini (1890-1980)

Boys Burn Quiet: Open, Heaven

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Open, Heaven: Seán Hewitt (2025)

“Now, this nightly ritual had been my secret for years. In my mind, it was linked somehow to that scene – the distance, the watching but never touching. I fixated only on those I thought would not reciprocate, but I could imagine the moment of pre intimacy when they would give in and a secret would be made between us. I understood that this was what desire was: wanting something I could not have, dreaming of holding it. But even then I knew there was a risk, a contradiction: if, by some chance, the object of my desire desired me, I had the sense that the desire might evaporate altogether. So, although there was this burning, urgent thing, I could not exorcise it, and my imagination went into overdrive under restraint. There was never a release, never a completion that didn’t feel soiled and voyeuristic.”

Joshua handed me a pristine paperback. “Read this,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.” The book looked untouched; seeing my hesitation, he added, “I enjoyed it so much I’m giving all my friends a copy.”

I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone do that, and I found myself wondering whether they could really afford such generosity.

But Joshua was right.

The novel is a debut from Seán Hewitt, better known until now as a poet, memoirist, and critic. He is also Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His first poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021—the same year he published J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, followed in 2023, and then came 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World; a second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, appeared in 2024.

Which brings us to Open, Heaven, a debut that confirms him as an all-rounder.

It is, in a way, a love story without quite becoming one—an infatuation we hope will deepen into something more, though it never does.

James, a teenager, dreams of a life beyond his small village; his emerging desires threaten to unsettle his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke—unkempt, handsome, charismatic, and impulsive—sent to stay with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm.

As the seasons pass, a bond forms between them, one that quietly reshapes their lives. Yet James remains uncertain of Luke’s feelings, and as summer draws to a close, he faces a choice: risk everything for the possibility of love, or let it slip away.

I have a weakness for bad boys, so it was inevitable that I fell for Luke—made all the more appealing by the fact that he turns out to be straight. I was less taken with James, who seems destined to spend the rest of his life wondering, What if I’d forced the issue? Though perhaps that’s unfair. He could just as easily have been me.

I suspect I’ll carry my own catalogue of missed opportunities. Memory has a way of softening the past, making it seem brighter, simpler—chiding you for not taking a chance. But it was never that simple.

Hewitt proves especially perceptive when it comes to these almost-relationships—the ones that hover on the edge of possibility but never quite materialise.

I finished the book still hoping, right up to the final pages, that something might finally happen between them. Afterwards, I read other readers’ responses; the consensus, unsurprisingly, was that it leaves an aching feeling.

Boys Burn Quiet: To Find a Kiss of Yours

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To Find a Kiss of Yours: Federico García Lorca
(Translation by Sarah Arvio)

To find a kiss of yours
what would I give.
A kiss that strayed from your lips
dead to love.
My lips taste
the dirt of shadows.
To gaze at your dark eyes
what would I give.
Dawns of rainbow garnet
fanning open before God—
The stars blinded them
one morning in May.
And to kiss your pure thighs
what would I give.
Raw rose crystal
sediment of the sun.

Renowned for his vivid imagery and emotional intensity, Lorca’s work often circled longing and desire; here, those themes unfold through a sequence of questions—each one probing what the speaker might sacrifice for intimacy.

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
This year marks the 90th anniversary of Lorca’s death. He was, by all accounts, a striking man: Iberian elegance, cultural poise, a magnetic presence. Thick, dark curls; penetrating eyes; a face alive with expression. Today, Lorca is recognised as one of Spain’s most important poets—his reputation only sharpened by the brutality of his death at just 38.

In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested in Granada, imprisoned, and within days taken to a roadside outside the city and shot by forces aligned with Francisco Franco. The exact reasons were never formally clarified. The regime’s official statement reduced his execution to a bureaucratic fiction: he had died of “war wounds.”

His body has never been recovered, despite repeated attempts to locate the mass graves into which victims like him were cast. Ian Gibson’s The Assassination of Federico García Lorca remains one of the most thorough investigations into the circumstances of his death, suggesting that his sexuality—at least as much as his politics—made him a target. One member of the execution squad reportedly boasted of firing “two bullets into his ass for being a queer.”

Lorca’s romantic life remains partly obscured, but figures associated with him include sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo, composer Manuel de Falla, and writer Juan Ramírez de Lucas. Whether he shared a romantic relationship with Salvador Dalí is still debated.

Across his work, Lorca returned again and again to the tension between desire and repression. Male longing appears coded, fractured, and often veiled—its intensity heightened precisely because it could not be spoken plainly within the society he inhabited.

Emilio Aladrén Perojo and Federico García Lorca