Category Archives: Stolen Words

What Tuke Should Have Painted

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Baron Corvo, the Venetian lagoon, and a rather specific artistic brief


Quite what painter Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929) would have made of the letters Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), better known as Baron Corvo, sent to his wealthy British benefactor Charles Masson Fox (1866–1935), is anybody’s guess.

Written in Venice in 1909–1910, these letters are a glorious mixture of literary gossip, artistic criticism, financial desperation and homoerotic obsession. Tuke crops up during Rolfe’s often contentious discussions about mutual acquaintances within the “Uranian” literary and artistic subculture — that rather extraordinary network of Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists united by an idealised romantic interest in adolescent boys.

Rolfe, Fox and Tuke moved through overlapping circles, alongside figures such as John Gambril Nicholson and Horatio Brown. Rolfe was particularly interested in Tuke’s artistic success and, rather cheekily, in what he thought Tuke ought to be painting.

And here he really gets going:

“One thing that the world wants is some Tuke pictures of the Venetian lagoon and some Tuke pictures of mediaeval gondoglieri poised on poppe in Venetian canals.The only Venetian (Italian) worth talking about who paints it is Giuseppe Miti-Zanetti, who uses a process of his own, neither oil nor water, which certainly is wonderful, but purely architectural and atmospheric and generally nocturnal. Which signifies that a painter like Tuke would have a free field here: for there is not a single painter of young Venetians poised, (‘poise’ is the unique characteristic) poised on lofty poops, out on the wide lagoon, at white dawn, when the whole world gleams with the candid iridescence of mother of pearl, glowing white flesh with green-blue eyes and shining hair poised in white air trembling like song in white light reflected in white smooth sea – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at high noon, when all the world which is not brilliant is blue, glowing young litheness with its sumptuous breast poised in air like showers of acquamarines on a sapphire sea with shadows of lapislazuli under a monstrous dome of turquoise – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at sunset, glowing magnificent young strength dominantly illumined, poised in an atmosphere of lavender and heliotrope in tremendous stretches of sea and sky all cut out of jewels, limitless amethyst and far-reaching turquoise, or, all burnished copper splashed with emeralds and streaked with blue, the insistent blue of borage. No one does these things: no one sees them, but me. But Tuke is the only man alive who can do them; and he has not seen them. And who but Tuke could do real mediaeval gondoglieri in long fantastically striped hosen of silk, proud in the pomp of brocade, poised on lofty poops in the luminous shade of some small canal by some wonderful old water-gate like the Casa Agnusdei, or that of the Casa Amore degli Amici, or the one of the Calle Tedeum? No one. And he does not. It is dismal.”

There is something wonderfully unhinged about this. Rolfe is essentially telling Tuke, through Fox, that he has completely misunderstood the possibilities of Venice.

The letters were written while Rolfe was in severe financial distress and functioned, in part, as begging letters. Alongside his literary work on The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, he filled Fox in on his daily life, his infatuations with Venetian gondoliers and youths, and whatever else happened to be occupying his rather fevered imagination. The two men also exchanged stories and photographs of male nudes.

Rolfe apparently instructed Fox to burn the Venice Letters after reading them. Thankfully for us, Fox ignored him.

Because of their explicit content, the letters remained suppressed for decades before eventually being published by Cecil Woolf in the late twentieth century. They now provide a fascinating — and occasionally rather eye-popping — primary source for understanding Rolfe, his Venetian obsessions and the wider artistic world in which Henry Scott Tuke was also moving.

As for Tuke, I suspect he would have preferred to keep a respectable distance from the infamous Baron Corvo.

Tuke lived his life with discretion, and history has generally been kind to him.

Rolfe?

Not so much.

The Face I Never Saw Again

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The Parting: Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1910)


Two boys had met to bid “goodbye,”
One was my friend, the other 1;
He was going home—going home to die.

I know for long he talked to me,
But I think I only heard the sea—
It moaned and moaned incessantly,

I dared not look at him—I saw
The wind play with a wisp of straw:
‘Twas early Spring and cold and raw.

But when the station came in sight
Through parted clouds the sun shone bright.
Flooding the world with warmth and light.

A moment later in the train
I glanced at, with a stab of pain,
The face I never saw again.

The train went out: dark grew the sky
And all at once tempestuously
A storm of hail swept far and night.

But darkness could not blot or kill
That sunlit face—it never will:
By night and day I see it still.

Edwin Emmanuel Bradford’s The Parting first appeared in The Romance of Youth and Other Poems in 1910, with later editions appearing around 1920. It is tempting to read it as a wartime farewell between two young men, particularly because of its language of death and separation.

But the date matters.

This is 1910.

The First World War is still four years away.

So who, exactly, are these two boys?

Bradford gives us almost nothing. Just the meeting. The silence. The cold. The train. And that extraordinary final image of the boy’s face surviving everything — even darkness.

The poem belongs to the strange, fascinating world of early twentieth-century Uranian literature: writing that openly explored romantic and homoerotic relationships between men and adolescent boys.

Bradford himself lived an extraordinary double life. He was an Anglican vicar, respectable enough to be reviewed seriously and, remarkably, often favourably. At the same time, he was publishing poetry about male beauty, youth and desire.

That tension is part of what makes The Parting so haunting.

It never says what these boys are to each other.

Perhaps that was precisely the point.

Two boys meet.

One leaves.

And one face remains.

The Bather in the Blue Grotto at Capri 

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In 1918, Bradford dared to look

The Bather in the Blue Grotto at Capri is a homoerotic poem by the English clergyman and Uranian poet Edwin Emmanuel Bradford, first published in The New Chivalry and Other Poems in 1918.

The poem takes us into the famous Blue Grotto, where Bradford watches a young bather preparing to dive. What follows is an unabashed celebration of male youth and physical beauty. The body is described almost like a painting: the curly brown hair, the dark eyes, the sun-browned skin, the small details that become, in Bradford’s gaze, something close to an ideal.

Prepared to dive, he flings aside his vest,
And waits the signal. Brown’s his curly hair,
Deep brown his eyes, and now we see it bare,
Though face and hands are browner than the rest,
Save two brown nipples on the boyish breast,
His sun-burnt body’s nut brown everywhere.

Bradford himself is an intriguing figure. Born in 1860, he was an English clergyman, theologian, poet and novelist who wrote extensively about male beauty, desire and romantic attachment between men and boys. He belonged to the Uranian tradition—a largely underground literary culture in which male-male love could be expressed through poetry and fiction at a time when homosexuality was both socially condemned and, in Britain, criminalised.

And yet Bradford’s work was not entirely hidden away. Between 1908 and 1930, Kegan Paul published twelve volumes of his writing. His poetry also received attention from the mainstream press, sometimes with surprisingly favourable reviews.

There is something rather extraordinary about finding this openly homoerotic vision of a young male body in a respectable English poetry collection of 1918. Bradford looks at the bather in the blue light of Capri and simply allows himself to admire him.

A century later, the poem feels both of its time and strangely direct: an old-fashioned language wrapped around a very uncomplicated act of looking.

Boys, Daggers and Pseudonyms

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“For the boy was beautiful: blond curly hair, blue eyes which seemed to catch all the dim light of the tap-room, a spare but tightly muscled chest seen through a shirt open to his navel (because, evidently, its buttons had long ago been parted from it). The lad moved about the edges of the room, in the shadows, with pitchers of water and cider, alert to the needs of the other guests but observant, too, of the traveler at the corner table. Once or twice their glances met, and then our spy or informer might have heard the young man continue under his breath, “Yes, with a little expert attention and some new garments you might be a worthy page for Torben Lerche!”

Asger Lund, The Boy and the Dagger (1961)
Drengen og dolken

This might be historical ‘boy-love pulp fiction’.

Or perhaps something stranger.

Asger Lund was one of the many names used by the Danish writer and artist Kjeld Asger Frydenlund (1929–2013). The Boy and the Dagger was originally published in Denmark in 1961, although my copy is the English edition, published in October 1982 by Spartacus in Amsterdam. It is described as a “boy-love historical novel” and illustrated by Richard Steen.

Germany. France. Spain. North Africa.

It sounds like an adventure novel, but there is something much more peculiar going on here.

Frydenlund was a draftsman before he became a writer. His influences included Art Nouveau, Pierre Joubert and comic strips. Mostly black and white. Strong lines. Boys.

And then the names begin to multiply.

Stanley W. Baker. Pete Freeman. Horst Irgens. Asger Lund. Richard Steen. Sometimes simply RS. All the same man.

From 1952 onwards, under RS and later Richard Steen, he produced drawings of boys in a stark black-on-white style. From around 1960, as Horst Irgens, the drawings became darker and more photographic, using heavy shadows, hatching and stippling.

Then, from the 1970s, came Asger Lund.

Writer. Artist. Pseudonym. Another identity.

There is something fascinating about it all. Not simply the book itself, but the strange little underground world around it — pulp novels, drawings, pseudonyms and magazines, all circulating in a culture that now feels almost impossibly distant.

The Boy and the Dagger.

Even the title sounds like something I should probably not be reading.

The Psychologist Says…

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I got stuck somewhere between narcissism and the Lego


Somebody will probably be able to correct me, but I cannot find any credible evidence that J. H. Newton was actually a psychologist in the 1940s. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps these words came from the pen of a dedicated — albeit rather clever — hack, employed to churn out ‘The Psychologist Says’ every week.

Either way, read on.

What do we mean by the love life of the child? Psychologists usually divide the love-life of a child into three or four stages.

The first stage is known as the auto-erotic stage which appears in infancy. The child is interested in his own body and is exploratory. During this period the child will insert beans and other foreign particles into his nose or ears. During this age the child may also locate the erogenous parts of the body and begin the practice of sexual acts.

Psychologists designate the second period as the narcissistic period, originating from the story of the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own image in a glassy pool. In the very nature of the case the child loves himself first.

The third stage in the child’s love life is known as the homosexual period. It is the gang age of the boy. The boy is more loyal to his gang than his parents. The gang often has more influence over the boy than the home.

Dr. Ruch says from the boys’ club or gang, youth may learn lessons of loyalty, independence, and social-mindedness that may not be distinctly beneficial to the developing boy. Boys’ clubs may need some supervision, but not too much.

Some homosexuals may never recover. If they marry, the outcome is usually very unsatisfactory and unhappy. It is just as important that the homosexuals grow out of this period into the period called the heterosexual stage as it is that the youth learn writing, arithmetic and the rest. Happiness and success in life depends upon it.

The fourth stage of the child’s love-life is commonly called the heterosexual period. It is the period of love between the opposite sexes. It should be encouraged and not discouraged.

The first stage, the auto-erotic period, usually extends to the fifth or sixth year; the stage of childish narcissism, from the sixth to the eleventh year; the homosexual stage extends approximately to sixteenth or seventeenth year; and thereafter the heterosexual period.

From The Paris News, Texas, February 1941.

I might laugh.

Actually, I do laugh.

But it also makes me think.

About being five years old and being taken to hospital after pushing Lego pieces up my bum.

About apparently progressing beautifully through the narcissistic stage, because I was — and remain — completely in love with myself.

About failing to receive the appropriate supervision, thereby discovering that boy gangs were, apparently, incredibly erotic.

And about staying Peter Pan for considerably longer than the good doctor might have considered healthy.

Because, according to this wonderfully alarming piece of 1941 psychology, I should have grown out of all that homosexual gang nonsense and eventually entered the glorious heterosexual period.

I missed the appointment.

Perhaps I was too busy with the Lego.

The Only Thing I Ever Wanted

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“No, no. Don’t joke. I’m trying here, trying to be real for a minute. It’s hard to explain. It’s like when you’re listening to a favourite song and there’s this one part you love – a guitar riff or the way the singer says something. And you wait and wait, enjoying it all, but just fucking dying for that moment. And when the moment comes, it’s like you can let go and finally be happy. That’s how people – that’s how I – feel around you.”

I looked to the right of his eyes, behind him, and let things blur. It was everything at once – the only thing I ever wanted. “Thanks man. That’s really nice of you.”

From Anyone’s Ghost, August Thompson, 2025.

There is something in this passage that I recognise from my own life, although I have never quite known what to do with that recognition. I have known what it is to wait for a moment and to attach too much importance to it, and I have known the strange fear that comes with wanting to take things further. Perhaps sometimes we hold back not because we don’t want something badly enough, but because we want it so badly that we are frightened of what might happen if we reach for it. There are things that remain precious precisely because we never tested how far they might have gone.

The Asphalt Doesn’t Remember

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Powerful. Sad. And brutally direct.

While researching the death of Alessandro Momo, I came across an Italian article whose opening paragraph said almost everything that needed to be said. The Italians have a remarkable ability to get straight to the point — no throat-clearing, no sentimental padding, just the thing itself.

I wish I could tell you who wrote it. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to identify the author. So I can only reproduce the English translation here, and leave the original writer their anonymity.

The Asphalt Doesn’t Remember

“The asphalt doesn’t remember. So many boys have been torn apart. Crushed into the streets along with their scooters. Their skin scraped away on the road. Like an apple. Like cheese scattered over pasta.

Plastic, blood, rubber, raw flesh, the cast iron of engines. Then tar. Crushed stone. The proportions change, but this is the asphalt of Rome.

A city that lives on two wheels.

And dies on them.”

Norrie Always Wins

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In matters of the heart, Beverley Nichols was no match for Norrie

Beverley Nichols, by Howard Coster, 1929. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Norrie followed him in and all reserve then broke down. This happy state of affairs lasted for two days, but invariably short lived. There will be, he told himself, ‘rocks ahead’. It is just as well that he adopted this attitude, for who should arrive to accompany them to Henley, but the detestable Eddy, with his ‘bad complexion and a Cockney accent’. Instantly, Norrie was all over him and Beverley was forgotten. The weekend, not surprisingly, was a complete disaster. Once again, he tried to put a brave face on it and when they were joined by a boy called ‘Steegy’, he made a bid for the newcomer – only to be outflanked by Norrie who finished up with both Eddy and Steegy.

From ‘Beverley Nichols – A Life’, by Bryan Connon, 1991.

Evensong and Morwe Song: By C.K.Scott-Moncrieff (1908)

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Eugene Shadko, oil on canvas (2018)

“And if we are found out?” asked Maurice. He was still on his knees in the thicket, and, as he looked up to where his companion stood in an awkward fumbling attitude, his face seemed even more than usually pale and meagre in the grey broken light. It was with rather forced  nonchalance that Carruthers answered. “O, the sack, I suppose.” – and he stopped aghast at the other’s expression. Then as only at one other time in a long and well-rewarded life did he feel that a millstone round his neck might perhaps be less offensive than the picture of those small, startled features hung for all eternity before his eyes.

At the age of eighteen, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff (1889–1930) published his story Evensong and Morwe Song in the pageant issue of New Field, the literary magazine he edited at Winchester School. Circulated widely among parents, pupils, and masters, the magazine reached far beyond the school itself. The story caused such a scandal that the issue was immediately suppressed and its editor expelled.

The Gorgeous Young: A Poem By Perry Brass

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The speaker looks at beautiful young people in the present and wonders where they were when he was a child. Every generation believes beauty belongs to someone else. Every generation eventually discovers that it was temporary.

Canal Saint-Martin. Photo by Andrii Bulavka (2026)

Where were they
when I was a kid,
the gorgeous young
I see?

Did they drop
from the moon
on each sand dune

or arrive
at five
just for me?

Where were they
with their hair
and their teeth
and their shoulders
and stomachs, too;

did they fall
out of sight
on each summer’s night,
just to tempt me
and bend me
with fear?

I see them now
crowd the streets
and the beach,
the subways
and fashion stores,

they seem so cool,
unruffled and cruel
and make light fools
of us all.

But as you expect,
soon, quite direct,
they’ll become
just as you and I:

then the curious types
from their shadows will gripe,
just what did
become of us all?

Perry Brass
The poem originally appeared in Sex-Charge (1991).

Perry Brass is an acclaimed American author, journalist, poet, and pioneering LGBTQ+ rights activist. Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947, he became a core figure in the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement in New York City.