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.
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.
“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.
To Find a Kiss of Yours: Federico García Lorca (Translation by Sarah Arvio)
To find a kiss of yours what would I give. A kiss that strayed from your lips dead to love. My lips taste the dirt of shadows. To gaze at your dark eyes what would I give. Dawns of rainbow garnet fanning open before God— The stars blinded them one morning in May. And to kiss your pure thighs what would I give. Raw rose crystal sediment of the sun.
Renowned for his vivid imagery and emotional intensity, Lorca’s work often circled longing and desire; here, those themes unfold through a sequence of questions—each one probing what the speaker might sacrifice for intimacy.
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) This year marks the 90th anniversary of Lorca’s death. He was, by all accounts, a striking man: Iberian elegance, cultural poise, a magnetic presence. Thick, dark curls; penetrating eyes; a face alive with expression. Today, Lorca is recognised as one of Spain’s most important poets—his reputation only sharpened by the brutality of his death at just 38.
In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested in Granada, imprisoned, and within days taken to a roadside outside the city and shot by forces aligned with Francisco Franco. The exact reasons were never formally clarified. The regime’s official statement reduced his execution to a bureaucratic fiction: he had died of “war wounds.”
His body has never been recovered, despite repeated attempts to locate the mass graves into which victims like him were cast. Ian Gibson’s The Assassination of Federico García Lorca remains one of the most thorough investigations into the circumstances of his death, suggesting that his sexuality—at least as much as his politics—made him a target. One member of the execution squad reportedly boasted of firing “two bullets into his ass for being a queer.”
Lorca’s romantic life remains partly obscured, but figures associated with him include sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo, composer Manuel de Falla, and writer Juan Ramírez de Lucas. Whether he shared a romantic relationship with Salvador Dalí is still debated.
Across his work, Lorca returned again and again to the tension between desire and repression. Male longing appears coded, fractured, and often veiled—its intensity heightened precisely because it could not be spoken plainly within the society he inhabited.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 