Category Archives: Boys Burn Quiet

The Boy Who Vanished from the Spotlight

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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.

Then I closed the file.

The Price of Staying Beautiful

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Francisco ‘Chico’ Lachowski

There is one image I keep returning to

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

The Camera Loved Peter Johnson

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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?

You bet he was.

The Boy Who Never Grew Old

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I think I may have fallen in love with someone.

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.

Boys Burn Quiet: Rodney Harvey – Beautiful and Forgotten

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‘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)

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.