Almost forgotten in Italy. Completely forgotten by the rest of the world.
There was once a time when Alessandro Momo looked destined to take on the world.
But life dealt him a fatal blow.
On November 19, 1974, the 17-year-old actor was speeding along Lungotevere Maresciallo Cadorna, a prominent and scenic stretch of boulevard running alongside the Tiber in Rome’s Della Vittoria quarter, on a borrowed Honda CB850 motorcycle.
“I’m lucky. The police won’t catch me.”
When a taxi turned left into Via Roberto Morra di Lavriano, Momo swerved, hit the taxi and was thrown more than ten metres into the opposite lane, his torso crushed against the motorcycle’s handlebars and fuel tank.
He was taken to Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia with horrific injuries: a fractured fifth rib, subcutaneous emphysema of the left hemithorax, a left orbital haematoma, abrasions to the right parietal bone, bruising to his lips and nose, a contusion to the left hypochondrium, extensive contusions and abrasions to his limbs, a ruptured spleen and a lacerated stomach.
He underwent emergency surgery but died ten hours later.
There was something eerily reminiscent of James Dean in his death.
Like Dean and his fast cars, Momo regarded motorcycles as his great passion. And, like Dean, he died doing the thing he loved, at precisely the moment when his career seemed ready to take off.
The strikingly youthful, dark-haired adolescent, with his intense blue eyes, embodied the quintessential look of the brooding and magnetic 1970s Italian teenager.
He projected a mixture of innocent charm and rebellious energy that defined his breakout performances in films such as Malizia (1973) and Profumo di donna (1974).
In Malizia, Momo played an intense, observant and brooding 14-year-old boy navigating his sexual awakening.
“The sexual curiosity of Momo is perverted and sadistic,” wrote one critic.
But there was something about Momo that captured the joys, anxieties and awkwardness of sexual awakening for a generation of young Italians.
At the time of his death, he had just completed Profumo di donna, in which he played a naive young military cadet nicknamed “Ciccio” — “Babyfat” — who is assigned to serve as the personal aide to a blind, retired army captain.
Its English title was Scent of a Woman. The film received two Oscar nominations and would later become the direct inspiration and source material for the 1992 American remake starring Al Pacino and Chris O’Donnell.
Before this, Momo had appeared in several films and, reportedly, never acted with his own voice. In both Malizia and Profumo di donna, he was dubbed by Sandro Acerbo, who would go on to make a successful career as a voice actor.
Newspapers initially reported that Momo was 19 when he died.
The error was significant.
It was subsequently discovered that he was only 17, just one week short of his eighteenth birthday, and therefore not legally entitled to ride a motorcycle.
The Honda had been lent to him by his romantic partner, the 21-year-old actress Eleonora Giorgi. She was investigated over the circumstances of the accident but was never indicted, having reportedly been told by Momo that he was 21. His family confirmed that he had repeatedly lied about his age.
Years later, Giorgi said that the immense guilt and psychological trauma following his death triggered a downward spiral into heroin addiction.
“With him, we were two solitary beings. This was our understanding. We were drifting, like a raft, but with a nuclear engine. Extremely strong, healthy, famous and scary young. Enviably beautiful. Together, even more so, because we multiplied our energy tenfold.”
And then, almost in an instant, it was over.
Alessandro Momo had been given the face, the talent and the moment. What he never got was the future. At seventeen, with Malizia behind him and Profumo di donna still waiting to be seen, he disappeared just as the world was beginning to notice him. Perhaps that is why his death feels so strangely unfinished: not simply because a young man died, but because somewhere beyond that November night in Rome was a life we will never know — all the films he might have made, the man he might have become, and the career that never had the chance to begin.
A screen test. A handsome, fair-skinned boy with freckles and reddish-blond hair. Small and slight. Youthful, expressive, innocent. He is energetic, pitch-perfect and physically effortless in the dance routine. There is a naivety about him, and a wide-eyed charm.
Gene Kelly, the director, is taken with the boy and casts him as seventeen-year-old Barnaby Tucker in the movie version of Hello, Dolly!
The actor is twenty-four-year-old Danny Lockin, who looks much younger than his age.
That was almost sixty years ago, and Lockin could never have known that he was destined to become the eternal Barnaby Tucker.
Nine years later, in August 1977, Lockin was found dead in a California apartment, stabbed and slashed nearly a hundred times, his body mutilated.
We will never know what went wrong with Danny Lockin. Nor will we ever know exactly what happened on the night he was murdered.
It is a classic Hollywood tale.
Lockin was born in Hawaii in 1943 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After leaving Benson High School and the dance team, the Checkers, he completed his schooling in Anaheim, California. He studied at Eugene Loring’s American School of Dance and later appeared in Carey Leverette’s Dance Arts Studio Festival.
There, he was spotted by Marc Platt, Radio City Music Hall’s choreographer, who recommended him for a San Francisco musical revue. Under Leverette’s management, Lockin studied acting and was cast in the film version of Gypsy in 1962. He had a small part in The Stripper the following year and appeared on television in Father of the Bride, several episodes of Dr Kildare, The Lieutenant and Mr Novak.
Lockin plunged into stage work, appearing in an Off-Broadway production of Morning Sun and, in 1964, a Broadway revival of West Side Story. The following year he auditioned for the role of Rolf in the film version of The Sound of Music.
But it was the role of the energetic store clerk Barnaby Tucker in Hello, Dolly! that made his name.
On either side of the film, Lockin played Barnaby on Broadway and in touring productions, appearing with ten Dollys: Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Merman, Phyllis Diller, Eve Arden, Dorothy Lamour, Annie Russell, Carol Channing and, of course, Barbra Streisand.
That was five years of Hello, Dolly!
Then the show abruptly closed on Broadway, and Lockin’s star faded almost as quickly as it had risen. He disappeared from public view. Drinking problems and possible substance abuse prevented him from working. There was a short run with Tom Sawyer in Kansas City, but at twenty-eight he returned to his mother’s house in Orange County and began teaching dance.
After his murder, a family friend said:
“He looked so young that it was difficult for him to find an adult role. He was frustrated that he couldn’t open new doors for himself. He was up against people who had the power and he told too many people off in the business. He began drinking because of his frustration and became more unruly and opinionated. He didn’t make many friends as a result.”
His temper. His demand for perfection. Perhaps they did him in.
His marriage to Kathryn Haas, a dancer in a stage production of Hello, Dolly!, in 1967 lasted only two years and ended following the birth of their son, Jeremy. Afterwards, Lockin became disillusioned with women and told friends that there had been a change in his sex life.
The engaging jack-in-the-box was bisexual.
In 1977, he appeared on The Gong Show at Burbank, hoping perhaps to be noticed again. Chuck Barris confusingly announced Lockin and his dance partner, Billy Jo Conway, as “Billy Jo and the Danny Trio.” They stormed it with a song-and-dance routine that earned them joint first place.
For a moment, it seemed as though something had returned.
On a high, his mother, Jean Lockin, took him for a meal before dropping him off at the Mug Bar in Garden Grove, where he intended to play pinball.
“He had the old light back in his eyes,” she said.
That was the last time she ever saw him.
On the night of August 21, 1977, Lockin’s killer, thirty-four-year-old Charles Leslie Hopkins, called the police and said that a man had entered his apartment and tried to rob him. When officers arrived at the Kona Palms apartment, they found Danny Lockin’s body.
Lockin had been wearing skin-tight dancing trousers without pockets for identification, and the body was so badly mutilated that the police were initially unable to identify him. Photographs of the lifeless face were circulated around the city, but his identity was eventually established when his fingerprints were matched with those taken following his previous arrests for drunken driving.
Hopkins, a known homosexual, was arrested after it was discovered that he had left the Mug Bar with Lockin and travelled with him to the apartment. Further investigation revealed that Hopkins had moved the body from room to room and attempted to clean up the blood before calling the police.
At his trial, Hopkins was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.
Four years.
An inexplicable miscarriage of justice.
The irony is that shortly before his death, Lockin had recorded a song in a small studio he had rented.
“Today is grey, and I’m just waiting for some sunshine. But, gee, I wish tomorrow would appear.”
“He was no saint,” his mother reflected.
And now Danny Lockin is almost forgotten.
Except for Barnaby Tucker.
Except for those immortal lines from a song.
“Out there. Full of sunshine and full of sparkle. Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby. Listen, Barnaby.”
Nicola Giancola, F. Holland Day, and the mystery of male beauty.
F. Holland Day, Portrait of Nicola Giancola, 1900.
Every old photograph asks the same questions. Who was this person? What did they fear? Whom did they love? What became of them? Every photograph is a small time capsule, preserving not just a face or a fleeting moment, but the enduring mystery of another human life.
When those photographs depict men, they often reveal something else: a world of relaxed intimacy and easy physical affection that feels startlingly unfamiliar today. Their expressions are open, their body language unguarded. To modern eyes, conditioned to read male beauty through the lens of sexuality, many of these images can appear strikingly, even unmistakably, gay.
Yet what draws us back to them is not simply curiosity. It is a curious blend of nostalgia, discovery, and recognition. They remind us that the language of masculinity has never been fixed, and that photographs can preserve not only people, but forgotten ways of being.
Few stories illustrate this better than that of Nicola Giancola (1886–1956).
It began when a friend sent me an old photograph he’d found online.
Giancola possessed a striking beauty that transcended the faded monochrome of the photograph. There was something in his gaze—confident yet vulnerable—that refused to remain trapped in the past. I wanted to know who he was.
The internet offered fragments: a handful of facts, a scattering of images, and tantalising references to Giancola’s connection with the American photographer Frederick Holland Day. But fragments were not enough. I wanted to turn fading photographs into a living man—to give substance to a ghost and answer questions that time had left forever unanswered. Every old photograph promises a story; the challenge is discovering how much of it can still be told.
Nicola Giancola was born in Campobasso, Italy, in 1886. His was a story shared by countless Italian families of the period.
Following Italian unification in 1861, the Molise region was devastated by chronic rural poverty, crippling taxation, and the decline of traditional agriculture. People left southern Italy in search of opportunity, many of them crossing the Atlantic to begin new lives in America.
Giancola was still a child when his family settled in the immigrant neighbourhoods of Chelsea, near Boston, Massachusetts. Like many boys of his generation, he contributed to the family income from an early age, working the streets as a shoeshine boy among the city’s growing Italian community.
His fortunes changed when he encountered Frederick Holland Day (1864–1933). Born into wealth and free from financial constraint, Day was a publisher, patron, and pioneering photographer who regarded photography not as mere documentation but as a legitimate form of fine art.
Exactly where the two first met remains uncertain, although the most plausible explanation lies in Day’s work at the Parmenter Street Mission in Boston’s North End, where he was closely involved with the Sunday School. One biographer memorably described him as the “Pied Piper of Parmenter Street.” He became mentor, benefactor, and friend to many underprivileged immigrant boys, often paying for their education and supporting them financially. He referred to them as his ‘Parmenter St. cherubs’.
Giancola, a gifted young artist whose striking good looks undoubtedly caught Day’s attention, soon became one of his favourites. Day financed his studies at the Eric Pape School of Art, paid for English lessons, and later used his influence to secure him work as a commercial artist.
Beginning in 1898, Day spent his summers at Little Good Harbor, his retreat near Five Islands, Maine. It became a haven for artists, writers, and the young men he had taken under his wing, including Giancola. They spent their days boating, swimming, reading, and playing board games, far removed from the crowded streets of Boston. Everyone wore identical sailor suits—a deliberate attempt by Day to erase outward distinctions of class and privilege and create a sense of equality among his companions.
F. Holland Day, Saint Sebastian, 1906
Frederick Holland Day’s sexuality has long been the subject of debate. His photographs of the male nude, together with the surviving evidence of his friendships and correspondence, have persuaded many historians that Day was homosexual, although definitive proof remains elusive. His close friend and business partner Herbert Copeland is widely believed to have been homosexual. Day’s extensive photography of adolescent boys would undoubtedly invite suspicion today, yet at the turn of the twentieth century it was widely understood within the conventions of artistic classicism rather than viewed through a modern lens.
Whether Giancola posed for Day as a child is something we will probably never know. In 1904, a fire destroyed around two thousand of Day’s prints and negatives, taking many possible answers with it.
One revealing anecdote survives from Giancola’s youth. His mother reportedly disliked the attention her son received from Day and Copeland and disapproved of him sitting for the two men. Greeting Copeland one day, she remarked coolly, “It’s very good of you, Mr Copeland, to take such an interest in my son.” Before Copeland could reply, the self-assured boy interjected, “Nobody can help taking an interest in me, can they, Mr Copeland?” Whether apocryphal or not, the story suggests a young man who was already aware of the power of his own beauty.
Day’s photography was painstakingly theatrical. He constructed elaborate settings, dressed his models in carefully chosen costumes, and manipulated his negatives to create soft, dreamlike images that blurred the boundary between photography and painting. Religious narratives, classical mythology, and scenes from history provided the inspiration, with friends, acquaintances, and often Day himself transformed into idealised figures from another age.
As Giancola entered adulthood, he became the model for some of Day’s most celebrated photographs. Made on the Ames Estate at North Easton, Massachusetts, the images combine classical symbolism, religious imagery, and varying degrees of nudity. To many modern viewers they possess an unmistakable erotic charge.
In her biography F. Holland Day, Pam Roberts goes further, suggesting that Giancola may have been more than simply Day’s favourite model. She observes that there is “a far stronger homoerotic element in almost all the photographs for which Giancola is the model than in Day’s other male nudes.”
The surviving correspondence between the two men offers tantalising, though inconclusive, hints of emotional intimacy. In one letter Giancola wrote:
“I will never forget the day we were out to Brockton, how happy I was… I thought the world was mine. When both of us were walking arm in arm… what Paradise it was! Tell me, Mr Day, do you not remember the happy times we had there?”
I have read the letter dozens of times and still cannot decide what it reveals. It may be no more than the heartfelt gratitude of a young man whose life had been transformed. Or perhaps there is something else beneath the surface. Like the photographs themselves, the words resist certainty.
The romantic ambiguity becomes even more complicated when the story continues. In 1910, Giancola married Mary Gertrude Conroy, with whom he would have seven children.
It is difficult not to wonder whether Giancola understood exactly how much Day admired him. Day had financed his education, paid him to model, and repeatedly supported him financially. Surviving correspondence suggests that Giancola frequently appealed to his benefactor for money, including one request for a loan of five hundred dollars to pursue a wealthy woman in New York. Day obliged, continuing to assist him for several years.
The two men appear to have remained in contact until the 1920s, after which the trail grows cold.
F. Holland Day, Nicola Giancola, Head-and-Shoulders Portrait, 1906
Giancola established himself as a successful commercial artist, working for several New York advertising agencies while living in Rockville Centre and later the Bronx. Alongside his commercial work he developed a reputation as a landscape painter, exhibiting at Babcock Galleries in 1926.
His career later took him to Brazil before he eventually settled with his family in New Canaan, Connecticut. During the 1950s the Giancolas moved once more, this time to Clearwater, Florida, where his paintings were exhibited at the J. Arlos Ogg Studios.
Nicola Giancola died suddenly in 1956 at the age of seventy. Yet more than a century after Frederick Holland Day first turned his camera towards him, it is those haunting photographs—not the paintings, the advertisements, or the ordinary milestones of his life—that continue to keep his memory alive.
We began with an old photograph of a stranger. By the end of the search he is no longer quite a stranger—but neither is he entirely knowable. That, perhaps, is the true power of old photographs. They preserve not certainty, but possibility.
F. Holland Day, Nude Youth, with Laurel Wreath, Leaning Against Rock, 1907
F. Holland Day, Nicholas Giancola, facing right, portraying St. Sebastian, 1906
F. Holland Day, Youth in Winged Hat and Robe, 1907
A forgotten actor, a lost Hitchcock film, the lifelong companion of Beverley Nichols, and a pioneer of British television. The remarkable life of Cyril Butcher deserves to be remembered.
Cyril Butcher
Metaphorically speaking, I spent two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table. I questioned him, shared my frustrations and searched for answers that never came. The only response was the occasional concerned glance from Signora Bruschi, who had begun to suspect that I was talking to myself.
I assured her it was research. Anyone who has spent hours buried in old newspapers, forgotten magazines and fading archive material will know how easily the outside world disappears.
The trail began with a copy of Film Weekly from 1930. There, among its yellowing pages, was a photograph of a dreamy-looking young man named Cyril Butcher. He was twenty years old and had just become one of two winners of a nationwide competition offering a six-month scholarship at Elstree Studios, worth £250 together with a weekly salary of £10.
There had been 6,783 entrants, although Film Weekly never revealed precisely what they had been asked to do. One winner was always a young man and the other a young woman. Butcher entered through the Picture House in Ipswich; his fellow winner, Aileen Despard, represented the Rialto Cinema in Raynes Park, south-west London.
Standing six feet tall, weighing eleven and a half stone, with brown hair and brown eyes, Butcher evidently impressed a formidable judging panel. Among them were some of British cinema’s most promising directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Ewald André Dupont, Norman Walker and Walter Summers.
The prize was more than a scholarship. British International Pictures quickly placed the two winners in a ten-minute comedy short entitled An Elastic Affair, directed by Hitchcock himself. The film premiered at the London Palladium, where Butcher and Despard were presented with contracts by the studio’s founder, John Maxwell.
Ironically, An Elastic Affair was a talking picture shown in a theatre that had yet to install sound equipment. Audiences watched the performances in silence.
Butcher appeared simply as ‘The Boy’; Despard as ‘The Girl’. One contemporary reviewer described his performance as “amateurish”, before generously conceding that he had never acted before. After a further screening in Ipswich, the film disappeared from circulation. Today it is regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lost films.
Later that same year Butcher appeared as ‘Dancer’ Johnny in Richard Eichberg’s crime melodrama Night Birds. It proved to be his final screen role.
I showed his photograph to Signora Bruschi.
“Bel ragazzo,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Then, after another glance:
“Omosessuale?”
She had guessed correctly.
Two years after his brief flirtation with cinema, Butcher came to the attention of Beverley Nichols, already one of Britain’s best-known writers. Novelist, journalist, playwright, broadcaster, composer and public speaker, Nichols embodied the glittering world of the Bright Young Things while carefully concealing his homosexuality from public view.
The two met during auditions for a theatrical adaptation of Nichols’ bestselling novel Evensong, itself inspired by the celebrated Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, whom Nichols had known personally during her later years.
Nichols was thirty-four. Butcher was twenty-two.
Their meeting would shape the rest of Butcher’s life.
He moved into Nichols’ cottage, Allways, at Glatton in Cambridgeshire, a picturesque Tudor thatched house whose gardens later inspired Nichols’ celebrated gardening trilogy beginning with Down the Garden Path.
Whether Fleet Street suspected the true nature of their relationship is difficult to judge. If rumours circulated, editors exercised remarkable discretion. Newspapers invariably described Butcher as a friend, visitor or business associate, never anything more intimate.
For more than half a century they remained together.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, after fifty-three years of companionship, Butcher inherited the largest share of his estate, valued at £131,750.
The public knew Beverley Nichols.
Very few remembered Cyril Butcher.
The obvious question is what Butcher himself made of it all.
The archives, frustratingly, have little to say.
His own voice is almost entirely absent. He left no memoir, no revealing interviews and no collection of personal letters that might explain the man behind the carefully posed publicity photographs. Almost everything we know comes from newspapers, theatre programmes and the lives of other people. It is enough to reconstruct his career, but rarely enough to understand his character.
Cyril Butcher
His family background was rather more remarkable than his modest film career might suggest.
Henry Ernest Butcher, Cyril’s father, was born in Ipswich and trained at the Royal Academy of Music before leaving England to pursue a career in German opera. For twelve years he sang across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Poland, establishing himself on the Continental stage. In Cologne, in 1907, he married Gertrud Maria Maassen. Two years later, while the couple were living in St Gallen, Switzerland, their only son, Cyril, was born.
The First World War abruptly transformed the family’s fortunes.
As an Englishman working in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Henry Butcher found his contracts cancelled almost overnight. Effectively stranded in Vienna, he reinvented himself under the Germanised name Heinrich Butscher and spent three years playing imposing villains and heavy dramatic roles for Viennese film companies.
Meanwhile, young Cyril was sent to the relative safety of Switzerland, where he spent the war at boarding school. Although born abroad, he was brought up as unmistakably English, eventually returning with his parents when they settled once again in Ipswich in 1919.
The stage fascinated him from an early age.
Before that dream could become reality he spent a brief period as a cadet in the Merchant Navy, only to discover that life at sea held little appeal. He abandoned it for work in a gasworks while nurturing rather more glamorous ambitions. He hoped to become a dancer in musical revues and, failing that, imagined a career as a writer.
Then came the Film Weekly competition.
Winning transformed an unknown twenty-year-old into a national curiosity almost overnight. Newspapers delighted in reporting the details that today seem wonderfully quaint. He stood six feet tall, weighed eleven and a half stone, had brown eyes and brown hair, and apparently possessed exactly the sort of wholesome good looks that British International Pictures believed audiences wanted to see.
Yet the promise proved fleeting.
After An Elastic Affair and Night Birds, film producers looked elsewhere. The great cinematic career that had seemed so certain never materialised.
The theatre, however, proved more welcoming.
When his screen career faltered, Butcher found steady work in the musical revues he had always loved. In October 1931 he appeared as Captain Donegal in a revival of Florodora, followed by performances in This World of Ours, Fanfare and Noël Coward’s Words and Music. He was never a leading man, but he worked consistently, quietly building a respectable theatrical career.
It was during this period that Beverley Nichols entered his life.
Beverley Nichols
Whether Butcher genuinely fell in love with Nichols or recognised the opportunities that accompanied the relationship can never be known. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Affection and ambition have often travelled together, particularly in professions where introductions and patronage mattered.
What is beyond dispute is that Butcher’s horizons widened dramatically.
Between 1932 and 1935 he wrote the stage and screen pages for Nora Shackleton Heald, editor of The Queen, the weekly magazine read by Britain’s aristocracy and fashionable society. When Heald moved to The Lady the following year, Nichols also became one of its occasional contributors.
Butcher was increasingly making his living not simply as an actor, but as a journalist.
He also wrote for The Sketch, contributing a series entitled The Worst Moments of My Life, in which well-known public figures recalled their most embarrassing or uncomfortable experiences. The articles were later collected in In Extremis: Worst Moments in the Lives of the Famous, published in 1934.
Then there was the matter of Brighton.
That year the town council published a promotional booklet about the seaside resort under Beverley Nichols’ name. It later emerged that the work had in fact been ghost-written by Butcher, with Nichols content to accept the credit.
It raises an intriguing possibility.
If Butcher could disappear so completely behind Nichols’ public persona once, might he have done so on other occasions?
The evidence simply isn’t there.
But it is difficult not to wonder.
The theatre remained Butcher’s natural home throughout the 1930s.
Between 1936 and the outbreak of the Second World War he appeared in a succession of musical revues and stage productions. He rarely enjoyed star billing, but there was satisfaction in regular work, and he increasingly found opportunities beyond acting.
Together with the pianist, composer and playwright Albert Arlen, he wrote and directed Counterfeit, a comedy thriller in twenty scenes. After previewing in Richmond it transferred to London’s Duke of York’s Theatre, where it featured a young Charles Hawtrey, years before the Carry On films would make him a household name.
The reviews, unfortunately, were lukewarm.
Around the same time, Beverley Nichols found himself under growing financial and personal pressure. In 1937 he sold Allways, the idyllic Cambridgeshire cottage that had inspired his famous gardening books. Publicly, the sale was attributed to the need to finance his latest West End production, Floodlight, itself destined to disappoint at the box office.
There may, however, have been another reason.
Village gossip had become increasingly hostile. Nichols’ frequent male visitors attracted attention, while rumours of moonlit skinny-dipping parties and young local men invited to the house circulated far beyond Glatton. Whether exaggerated or not, such stories carried genuine danger. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence, and a whispering campaign could destroy both careers and reputations.
War interrupted everything.
In 1940 Butcher joined the Royal Navy. Little has emerged about his wartime service, but once peace returned he resumed the theatrical life that had been placed on hold for six long years.
Nichols and Butcher settled at Merry Hall in Ashtead, Surrey, in 1946. The elegant Georgian house, surrounded by extensive gardens, would become famous through Nichols’ gardening books, although behind the scenes Butcher was contributing far more than readers realised.
In 1949 he wrote Dear Heart!, a comedy staged by the Playwrights’ Theatre Group at London’s Chepstow Theatre Club. By then, however, another medium was beginning to eclipse the stage.
Television.
Beverely Nichols and Cyril Butcher
When Butcher began writing a television column for The Sketch in 1950, the medium was still finding its feet. His weekly articles charted life inside the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios and later recorded the birth of commercial television with the curiosity of someone who recognised he was witnessing history in the making.
Five and a half years later he crossed the divide himself.
Associated-Rediffusion, Britain’s first Independent Television contractor, recruited Butcher to write and direct drama. It proved to be the defining chapter of his professional life.
Today, when scenes can be filmed repeatedly until perfection is achieved, it is easy to forget how television drama was once created.
In the 1950s almost everything went out live.
A forgotten line, a jammed door, a misplaced prop or a camera appearing in shot became part of the broadcast forever. If a programme needed repeating, there was no videotape waiting on a shelf. The entire cast and crew returned to the studio and performed the production all over again from the beginning.
It demanded absolute concentration.
Between 1955 and 1960 Butcher directed episodes of The Granville Melodramas, ITV Play of the Week, ITV Television Playhouse and Murder Bag. Week after week he helped establish the grammar of British television drama at a time when the rules were still being invented.
His achievements have largely been forgotten.
Yet millions of viewers watched programmes that passed through his hands.
In 1953, while rehearsing Nichols’ little-known play La Plume de ma Tante at Bromley Theatre, Butcher left midway through production after being called away to direct a television adaptation of Evensong—the very work that had first brought the two men together more than twenty years earlier.
Life has a curious habit of closing circles.
In 1958 Nichols and Butcher moved for the last time, settling at Sudbrook Cottage in Richmond, where they would remain together for the rest of their lives.
By the end of the 1950s, Butcher’s career had begun to change direction.
For two years he served as Senior Director of Schools Programmes before returning briefly to drama. By now, however, the industry’s priorities were shifting. The man who had once directed ambitious live productions increasingly found himself overseeing factual programmes with decidedly less glamour. Titles such as Shopping For You, Shop on the Corner, election coverage and broadcasts from the Ideal Home Exhibition reflected the changing demands of commercial television rather than any decline in his ability.
His final appointment at Associated-Rediffusion was as Head of its newly established Commercial Production Department.
Then came an altogether unexpected opportunity.
Television in Ethiopia was in its infancy. The Ethiopian Television Service had only recently begun broadcasting when Butcher accepted the post of Director-General, moving to Addis Ababa in 1965. For two years he helped shape a national broadcaster from the ground up, an experience unlike anything he had previously encountered.
His contribution did not go unnoticed. Emperor Haile Selassie awarded him the Order of the Ethiopian Empire in recognition of his work.
By the time Butcher returned to Britain, the pace of his life had slowed considerably.
In 1967 and 1968 he and Beverley Nichols embarked on an extended journey through South Africa, Singapore and the Far East while researching The Sun in My Eyes. Nichols wrote the text; Butcher supplied the photographs.
The arrangement had become familiar.
One man occupied the public stage.
The other often worked quietly behind the scenes.
Retirement, when it finally came, was only partial. Butcher continued to review television for The Stage, lent his support to plans for a fringe theatre in Wimbledon and, in 1984, became the subject of Old Stagers, a BBC Radio 2 programme celebrating veterans of British theatre and entertainment.
It was a rare moment in which the spotlight fell, however briefly, upon him.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, Butcher inherited the greater part of an estate valued at £131,750. He continued living at Sudbrook Cottage, despite suggestions that the house might have to be sold to meet taxes and other liabilities.
It never was.
Four years later, in 1988, Cyril Butcher died at the age of seventy-nine.
The handsome young man from Film Weekly had long since disappeared.
There are still people who remember Beverley Nichols and who knew of his lifelong relationship with Butcher. Most biographies suggest that, by their later years, companionship had replaced passion. Nichols’ attraction to younger men is well documented, as are his discreet encounters with the “rough trade” of London, while Butcher appears to have accepted those indiscretions with quiet resignation.
What passed between them in private is known only to history.
It is tempting to wonder whether Butcher’s contribution to Nichols’ success extended beyond the few acknowledged examples. We know that he ghost-wrote at least one published work and spent decades living alongside one of Britain’s most prolific authors. Did other manuscripts pass beneath his pen? Did other ideas become Nichols’ bylines?
The evidence is silent.
Perhaps it always will be.
After two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table, I know a great deal more about his life than I did when I began.
I know that he was the young man who caught Alfred Hitchcock’s eye and starred in one of the director’s lost films. I know that he spent more than fifty years beside one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, helped shape the earliest years of commercial television, accepted an imperial decoration from Haile Selassie and quietly contributed to British theatre, journalism and broadcasting.
Yet, in another sense, I know almost nothing about him.
The archives reveal the milestones of his life, but not the life itself.
They tell us where he worked, whom he loved and what he achieved, yet remain stubbornly silent on the questions that matter most: what kind of man was he, what made him happy, what made him laugh and, when the lights finally went out, whether he believed he had lived the life he wanted.
Perhaps that is the fate of those who spend their lives just beyond the spotlight.
History remembers the stars.
It is less kind to those who helped them shine.
As I left Signora Bruschi’s kitchen, I glanced once more at the photograph of the twenty-year-old Cyril Butcher.
For a fleeting moment, it felt as though he was looking back.
An almost naked young man stands beside a wall, his palms resting against it. Half-turned, he smiles seductively at the camera. He is teasing us: slim, tender, peach-coloured buttocks visible through his underwear, perfectly sculpted legs. He is devilishly cute. He wants to be devoured.
He ignites that unhealthy desire simmering somewhere inside us.
This, I found myself thinking, is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.
Except the photograph was taken twenty years ago. I would have been an impressionable eight-year-old boy.
The stalker in me wanted to know whatever became of this Boy Adonis.
As it turns out, he’s done rather well for himself.
He left modelling behind and built a successful career as a graphic designer.
Most strikingly, he bears almost no resemblance to the young man in that photograph.
The beautiful twink has become an ordinary forty-something, seemingly happier to indulge in junk food than gym memberships. Time has softened the angles that once made him so desirable.
Be careful what you wish for.
Not everything that glitters shines forever.
Yet he appears genuinely happy, and perhaps that matters more than eternal beauty. There is, it seems, life after the glitz and glamour have faded.
This was supposed to be a post about Brazilian supermodel Francisco Lachowski, one of the rare few who found fame at seventeen and remains in demand at thirty-five.
For every Lachowski, though, there are probably thousands who weren’t so fortunate.
The career of a male model is notoriously brief. By their late twenties many are already ageing out. Facial features lose their youthful sharpness, fresh faces replace familiar ones, and fashion’s relentless obsession with youth moves on without hesitation.
The pressure to remain lean, beautiful and commercially desirable is immense. Those who no longer fit a very specific ideal can find themselves discarded almost overnight.
Despite the glamour and apparent success, there is always one eye on the future—on life beyond the catwalk. Preparing for that transition can bring burnout, financial insecurity, sexual harassment and a heavy psychological toll.
Francisco Lachowski is one of the exceptions.
Discovered through a modelling competition, he won Ford Men’s Supermodel in 2008. His striking facial symmetry, hooded eyes and strong jawline quickly established him as an icon of modern male beauty.
“It changed completely, from being a lost boy who didn’t really know what to do with his life to travelling for the first time overseas and exploring the world working with the biggest names in fashion.”
His transition from teenage heart-throb to adult model became a visual blueprint for millions across Wattpad, Tumblr and, later, TikTok. He has also embraced Instagram, where a substantial online following has become an essential part of a successful modelling career.
For those whose careers end almost as quickly as they begin, however, the glamorous image of the fashion industry often bears little resemblance to reality. Losing relevance can mean losing income, identity and, for some, their mental wellbeing.
Francisco Lachowski. Cute teenage boy to adult model
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?
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.
‘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)
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.
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.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 