Category Archives: Stolen Words

Stolen Words – To a Sicilian Boy – Theodore Wratislaw

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Youth in tree with arm raised – Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931)

Love, I adore the contours of thy shape,
Thine exquisite breasts and arms adorable;
The wonders of thine heavenly throat compel
Such fire of love as even my dreams escape:
I love thee as the sea-foam loves the cape,
Or as the shore the sea’s enchanting spell:
In sweets the blossoms of thy mouth excel
The tenderest bloom of peach or purple grape.

I love thee, sweet! Kiss me again, again!
Thy kisses soothe me, as tired earth the rain;
Between thine arms I find mine only bliss;
Ah let me in thy bosom still enjoy
Oblivion of the past, divinest boy,
And the dull ennui of a woman’s kiss!

From ‘Caprices: Poems by Theodore Wratislaw’ (London: Gay and Bird, 1893)

No mystery about what’s going on here.

When someone at the Pall Mall Gazette got an early look at Caprices, they immediately picked up on the vibe — To a Sicilian Boy and L’Eternal Feminin were clearly written with a Uranian (homoerotic) theme. The staffer freaked out and threatened bad reviews unless those poems were cut. The publisher caved and swapped them for two safer options, Paradox and At Midnight.

But nobody seemed to notice the poems quietly dedicated to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. That particular scandal was still waiting in the wings.

To a Sicilian Boy eventually found its way into Charles Kains Jackson’s The Artist and the Journal of Home Culture, a more open-minded publication of the time.

Theodore William Graf Wratislaw (1871–1933) — yes, he claimed to be a Count thanks to his grandfather, who basically declared himself one — was born in Rugby. These days, almost no one remembers him, but he wrote about 160 poems, most during the so-called “naughty nineties.” His work popped up in Love’s Memorial, Some Verses, The Yellow Book, and The Strand Magazine. He’s even rumoured to have inspired Max Beerbohm’s character Enoch Soames.

At some point, Wratislaw swapped the pen for a government desk job — which he famously called “penal servitude.” He married three times, but people still speculated about his sexuality, and To a Sicilian Boy didn’t exactly hide the clues. The timing’s telling: Wilde’s trial happened in 1895, and that same August, Wratislaw quietly joined the Civil Service. Draw your own conclusions.

Stolen Words – Looking Away, Looking Back: The Ethics of Desire

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“He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap.”

Alan Hollinghurst – The Sparsholt Affair (2017)

Stolen Words: The Male Beauties. A Reign of Pretty Men

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“It was pretty, and the simpering, self-conscious style which shop girls adore and mammas dote upon. He had regular features, a placid and supercilious smile, drooping eyes which he would occasionally cast toward the crowd outside the window, and a daintiness of gesture which would have made him a success on the stage in the delineation of a certain type of metropolitan character. His hair was sleek, well oiled and beautifully banged, his colour pink and white and his narrow-chested body was encased in a beautiful blazer of pink and white silk, drawn together by a heavy and interlaced crimson cord down the front. On his head he wore a silk jockey cap, also of pink and white stripes, and his hands were rendered prominent by what might be called outside cuffs of snowy linen, which came up to the elbow and completely covered the blazer sleeves. The languid manner with which he tossed the taffy over the big silver hook was in thorough consonance with the languorous glance which he occasionally directed toward the women outside the window.”

Blakely Hall writes about a handsome young man working in a New York candy store.
The Philadelphia Times – 23 December 1888

Blakely Hall was a New York-based journalist who became editor of Truth Magazine in 1891 and spiced up the publication by adding more pictures of women to its pages, more social satire, and colour. Circulation grew to 50,000 subscribers at that point.

Stolen Words: I was fixated on their points of contact

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“I was probably eight or nine, a child of the postwar boom, and on vacation with my family at the Jersey shore. We had stopped at a convenience store on the way home from a day at the beach, and I was pawing through the store’s magazine rack while my mother shopped. I don’t remember picking up the magazine, but it opened to a page which stopped and startled me. Two mostly naked teenagers were posed for a picture titled “Victor and Vanquished,” one slung over the other’s shoulders—the spoils of a heated but not unfriendly war. Both boys were smiling, exhilarated, but I was fixated on their points of contact, especially where the naked groin of the Vanquished touched the Victor’s bare shoulder. What did that feel like? What could that feel like? Thinking about it made me dizzy and more aroused than I realized.”

Vince Aletti – The New Yorker – May 2025

Stolen Words / The Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision

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Klein Youth – Charlie Marseilles

“We speak of the body of the young man at his fullest development, just on the brink of maturity, a young man who has retained some of his original innocence. The model for the classic Greek was the young athlete, from an aristocratic family, who competed in the nude in the original Olympic Games. It is not until later that the natural male form was used as a medium for the expression of godliness, an idea that later became the basis for a popular religious sect. A look back through the twentieth century will demonstrate just how long the Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision. Examine the popular male images of the past 60 years. How many of them have been both young and beautiful?”

Helen Ziou – Valley Advocate Amherst – April 1984

Stolen Words / The latest thing from Harvard

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Image: Irina Biatturi

“Don’t fail to drop in to tea tomorrow old girl, or you’ll miss the treat of your life. A new beauty, my dear, the latest thing from Harvard. You may have read of him – Harold Halfseas. Has chestnut hair in crisp like waves all round his forehead; oval face, pure Grecian profile, marble and rose complexion and a magnificent figure. You’ll come? Thanks, darling! I thought you would.”

– From the World News – Columbus, Ohio – 2 December 1923

Seventeen and silly … and the servants talked for a year and a day

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“He was barely seventeen the first time it had happened, with that foolish Italian boy. He had naively fallen into the trap. It was all too good to be true and he was surprised when the boy demanded money, and kept demanding money. When he had no money left to give, the boy, true to his word, had gone to the police. Much to his shame and chagrin, he had been very publicly arrested in his father’s house in Wimpole Street, and every servant in the street had talked about it for a year and a day.”

The story of Charles Ferguson in ‘Fanny & Stella – The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England’ by Neil McKenna – 2013