A Venetian Affair

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Part 1 – The Venetian Arrangement 


I have only been to Venice twice before.

The first time I was thirteen years old, and it was a cold, damp, misty day. I seem to remember wandering around alone for most of the day, although it was extremely unlikely that I actually did.

The second time was a couple of years ago, when I caught the train from Verona with Cola and stayed for only a few hours before returning. That day it was bright and sunny and completely different from the Venice I remembered. A thunderstorm rolled across the lagoon just as we were about to leave.

And now, for the third time, I have returned to Venice.

This time I will be staying considerably longer.

It was not by choice. There are too many things to do in the UK, and a trip back to Italy seemed more of a distraction than it would be to most people.

I think it was Truman Capote who said: “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.” I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, but I imagined that a stay here was more than most people could stomach.

For a start, there are the tourists.

On a typical day there may be as many as 60,000 of them. I hate tourists. Particularly those who wander around not so much looking at the sights as looking at the sights through a mobile phone. Hundreds of photographs they will never look at again. And if they do, it will probably be to bore the pants off an uninterested friend.

It’s not so much of a problem in Verona, but I imagined that you couldn’t escape them in Venice, which is, after all, a series of small islands.

If tourists get in my way, I will unashamedly kick them into the nearest canal.

But my visit is not for the purpose of being a tourist either.

I am above that.

Venice is neutral territory for a reunion with my long-lost lover, Charlie.

I’ll not bore you with the details, but we went our separate ways after my ill-fated trip to Paris in April. I took the advice of his father, who suggested that I play hard to get and Charlie would follow.

He never did.

Neither did he answer my messages.

He simply disappeared for the summer.

I moved on to Verona and my adventures with Signora Bruschi et al.

There comes a point when you think you have finally got someone out of your system. It is usually at precisely that moment that the least expected thing happens.

I received a message.

You okay?

I made the mistake of replying out of curiosity and allowed the floodgates to open.

Charlie had mistakenly believed that I had spent most of my time not in Verona but in Venice, and expressed a wish to meet up with me there.

For my sins, Verona had always been a secret I kept from Charlie. I wanted it to remain that way for as long as possible. Charlie’s older brother, Thomas, had subscribed to my wishes and, when pressed, had lied that I had settled in the floating city.

And so, we were to meet in Venice.

Signora Bruschi got in touch with an old school friend who lived in Venice, and I was allowed to stay in rooms close to the Ponte di Rialto.

“For as long as you wish,” Signora Bruschi told me.

But she had concerns about me staying on my own.

Alas, Cola had to remain in Verona for treatment on his broken arm. Instead, she insisted that Bianchi jump on a Trenitalia train and arrive at Venezia Santa Lucia in time for my own arrival by Alilaguna Linea Arancio from Marco Polo.

My heart leapt at the thought of Bianchi joining me.

But it would also cause complications for any reconciliation with Charlie, if reconciliation was actually on the agenda.

After all, Charlie had probably been the love of my life.

But I suspected that I had not been the love of his.

And there were too many secrets between us.

Before I set off, an English friend told me to watch The Comfort of Strangers because it would put me in the mood for Venice.

I did as I was told.

He was right.

It put me in exactly the right frame of mind if I wanted to get my throat cut by a psychotic stranger.

I met Bianchi near Rialto.

We had only been apart for a few weeks, but it seemed much longer.

Bianchi threw his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks.

“I have missed you, Miles,” he cooed excitedly. “But we are together again, and we are going to have a good time.”

Signora Bruschi had told me that it hadn’t taken much to persuade Bianchi to come.

None at all.

He had jumped at the opportunity without hesitation.

But she had also warned him that I was unavailable and that we must sleep in separate beds.

“Signora Bruschi says that I am too young for you,” Bianchi moaned.

Perhaps so, I thought.

But I also knew that teenage boys have a habit of ignoring good advice.

We manoeuvred through the hordes of ignorant tourists I had already taken a dislike to. Like Piazza San Marco, they descend on Rialto as though these are the only two places worth visiting in Venice.

At last we found the quieter calli and crossed small bridges until we reached the place where we would be staying.

Palazzo Pesaro Labia dalle Rose had been described to me as a small but elegant two-room apartment overlooking the canals and located in a fifteenth-century palace.

From the outside, it looked as though it hadn’t been touched since the fifteenth century, with its weathered appearance and crumbling brickwork.

We accessed it through a private courtyard and climbed a set of steps leading to a locked door, beyond which another staircase led upwards to a pair of old double doors.

But as soon as we saw inside, we both loved it.

It was so far removed from Signora Bruschi’s house in Verona, which, up to this point, I had always considered grand. It was even further removed from Bianchi’s modest family home in San Giorgio in Salici.

For a start, it wasn’t small.

Its two rooms dwarfed my own apartment back home.

I would describe it as grand Italian.

The living room was stylishly furnished with antiques, and the walls were covered with tasteful prints. The second room consisted of a kitchen space, a huge dining area, and a small bathroom attached.

The roof space was so vast that a half-mezzanine floor had been built, with a circular staircase leading to the sleeping area.

And there, occupying most of it, was a huge double bed.

Bianchi looked at it.

I looked at Bianchi.

It was plain to see.

We would both have to sleep together.

“I hope that this doesn’t disappoint you,” Bianchi said rather sheepishly.

“It doesn’t,” I told him. “But we must be careful not to tell Signora Bruschi.”

“I do not think that either of us has the courage to do so,” he innocently replied.

The Boy Hollywood Forgot 

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Jonathan Brandis and the loneliness of being forgotten


While researching Jonathan Brandis, I had the strange feeling that he reminded me of someone.

Then I realised.

He looked uncannily like my friend.

I would later discover that they shared some of the same torments.

But there is a difference.

Jonathan Brandis is dead.

My friend isn’t.

“I want to be remembered as an actor who put in some good work in the beginning of his career, even better work at the end of his career and slowly, successfully made the transition into writing and directing,” he told Nicki Swift in the Hartford Courant in 1994.

It didn’t end that way.

Brandis was boyishly handsome. Dark blond hair. Blue eyes.

Yes, the eyes were beautiful.

In the 1990s, Tiger Beat readers voted him their number one ‘dreamboat’, while Seventeen placed him among its ten sexiest guys.

At the height of his fame, he was receiving 4,000 fan letters a week. Three studio guards were needed to escort him through the mobs of fans at Universal Studios in Orlando, where seaQuest DSV, the Steven Spielberg-produced futuristic underwater fantasy, was filmed.

Between 1993 and 1995, Brandis played Lucas Wolenczak, a teenage computer genius who bonded with Darwin, a dolphin capable of communicating with the crew.

Born in Connecticut in 1976, Brandis began modelling for advertisements as a child. By nine, he had moved to Los Angeles.

There were television appearances in L.A. Law, Who’s the Boss?, Full House and Blossom.

Then came the films.

Most famously, he played Bastian in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter in 1991.

He auditioned for the role of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Hayden Christensen got the part.

It was no big thing.

seaQuest DSV was just around the corner.

Then seaQuest was cancelled.

And suddenly the boy who had been everywhere was finding it difficult to get the roles he thought he deserved.

There were television movies. Smaller parts.

But the momentum had gone.


Brandis was devastated when most of his appearance in the 2002 war drama Hart’s War ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Underneath the persona, the long career lull — and the creeping realisation that he was no longer the boy Hollywood had once wanted — became sources of anxiety.

He began drinking heavily.

He allegedly told people he wanted to kill himself.

In November 2003, a friend found the 27-year-old Brandis hanging in the hallway of his Los Angeles apartment.

Paramedics rushed him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

He died the following day.

There was no suicide note.

There were no drugs in his system.

At first glance, Brandis might seem like another tragic victim of Hollywood.

A beautiful young man who had been adored, then discarded.

But perhaps it was more complicated than that.

In his memoir Growing Up Urkel, Jaleel White writes about Brandis and the strange pressure placed on young actors who grow up in the business.

“Just like me, he had dedicated his entire life to achieving what Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of his peer group had seemingly accomplished with ease.”

When White learned that Brandis had died, he wrote that he “cried for what felt like a fallen soldier.”

Years later, Brandis’s father offered another explanation.

He suggested that his son may have been bipolar.

“His death wasn’t due to the entertainment industry,” he said. “I look back now, and in his 20s, he showed signs of manic depression.”

Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable truth.

The industry may have contributed to the disappointment, the loss of status, the feeling of being forgotten.

But the darkness may have been there long before the lights went out.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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La Ville dont le prince est un enfant: Raymond Carrance (1967)

Raymond Carrance, working under the name Czanara, created a quietly intriguing body of homoerotic work during the 1950s and ’60s.

Much of it was private: drawings, engravings and photographs of male youth, sensuality and those strange, dreamlike worlds where beauty and desire tend to get a little blurred.

Carrance (1921–1998) was hardly a one-subject artist, though. He produced elaborate etchings and lithographs for works by Jules Renard and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as illustrating a 1951 play by Henry de Montherlant, La Ville dont le Prince est un Enfant — The City Whose Prince is a Child.

And this is where things get interesting.

Montherlant’s play is set in a strict Catholic boys’ school before the Second World War. At its centre are André Sevrais, an older pupil; Serge Souplier, the younger boy with whom he forms an intense friendship; and the Abbé de Pradts, a school prefect whose feelings towards Souplier become increasingly complicated.

Friendship. Possession. Jealousy. Authority. Desire.

All the things a Catholic boys’ school presumably hoped to keep out of sight.

Carrance illustrated a 1967 edition of the play with a series of delicate, highly charged images. Knowing something of his private work as Czanara, the choice feels less than accidental.

The title itself comes from Ecclesiastes: “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.”

A rather ominous little biblical quotation for a book about boys, priests, desire and forbidden attachments.

And Carrance seems to have understood exactly how much could be said without saying very much at all.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Reliquary


He who desires must pursue his desire though the whole world obstructs him.

Someone once told me I weave stories and aliases the way Baron Corvo did. I took it as a compliment.

He invented himself. Collected names. Drifted through Venice like fact and fiction were basically the same thing.

And then there’s the small matter of how he ended up: broke, alone, and dying in Venice.

Let’s hope I’m only following the interesting parts of his life.

Although, knowing me, the aliases are already in place.


Dreamlike


I didn’t bargain for Venice. In fact, I tried pretty hard to get out of it. But here we were. Midnight. The lagoon was dark. And the echoing performance of the Marangona — the great bell of the Campanile di San Marco — rolled across the city.


Ragazzo


The young boy chases around Campo Santa Maria Formosa.

Young Italian boys do this.

A flash of skinny brown legs. Too much energy with nowhere else to go. And they are happy. Any worries belong to mamma and papa.

He is told to stop running.

He has no intention of doing so.

He scatters the seagulls around the old vera da pozzo, watching them flap away, delighted with himself. For a moment, the whole campo belongs to him.

Then he stumbles.

Down he goes on the ancient cobbles.

He is brave. He gets back up, examines his grazed knee, and limps back to mamma and papa. They tell him it is nothing. Nothing to worry about.

This is good enough for him.

Away he runs again.

Every now and then he stops to admire the blood on his knee.

Then off he goes.


Conformity


“To be accepted by society, you must follow the laws it prescribes. The right to be eccentric must be earned – and it takes time to earn it.“

Alan Dale: A Marriage Below Zero (1889)

An anonymous reviewer in Bedford’s Magazine described it as “A saturnalia in which the most monstrous forms of human vice exhibit themselves shamelessly.”


Veneziano


I’ll call you Santino. Little saint. Distinctive. Warm.

What brings you to Piazza San Marco so late at night?

Every night.

There has to be a story.

Why do you stand there, deep in thought? Is it a little prayer passing silently between your lips?

And what made you think nobody would notice you?

Just an ordinary boy in ordinary clothes.

Always the same.

But you don’t know what caught me.

The legs.

It is always the legs.


Anthology


Gay intrigue, hidden in plain sight.
Queerness didn’t appear — it evolved.
Passed hand to hand, century to century.
Turns out history was never straight.

Phantasmagoric


Old books.
Old photographs.
Old movies.
Queer history.
Vintage Italian library music.

An old head on young shoulders.
And a young dick attached.


On the Cute and the Willing

Sacha at Universe Scout and Street Hunting

Strip away the noise of colour.

Black and white forces us to look beyond the surface and feel the raw essence of a moment. Light and shadow cut across the face. The gaze becomes deeper. Even the smallest details matter—the texture of the hair, the metallic glint of a simple bracelet.

Monochrome doesn’t simply capture a scene. It captures a feeling.

It turns a moment into something timeless. Something almost poetic.

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.

The Lost Room

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Two lovers. One forbidden night. And a ghost who remembers everything 


The room was lined with cork. The air smelled of dried lavender, lime-blossom tea and the faint, sweet decay of old paper.

A pale light filtered through the heavy curtains, and dust motes danced in a single beam.

The bed was narrow and firm, made of brass and covered with a blue satin bedspread. Beneath it, a mattress of coiled steel springs offered no comfort.

“It’s cold,” said Jean-Luc, snuggling further beneath the sheets. “Why are we doing this? What if we’re discovered?”

“Relax,” said Marc-Andre, sitting upright and scrolling through his phone.

All he could see was the top of Jean-Luc’s head on the pillow. He reached down and stroked his thick black hair, an affectionate gesture of reassurance.

Marc-Andre knew they were safe.

When Jean-Luc turned on his side, the bed creaked and the sound echoed around the room. He ran his fingers over Marc-Andre’s stomach.

“Are we going to have sex?” he asked hopefully. “We’ve had sex in many strange places, so why not here?”

“No,” said Marc-Andre, resisting the temptation. “I have to write three thousand words before we leave. You must be quiet, Jean-Luc, or I won’t be able to concentrate.”

Jean-Luc sighed and contented himself with sniffing Marc-Andre’s armpit instead.

Marc-Andre felt the deep quiet of the room, the place where the great writer had shaped his memories.

Time felt slow and heavy here.

The scratchy texture of the vintage wool blanket contrasted with the sleek, cold glass of the smartphone in Marc-Andre’s hands. Occasionally he looked up from the screen and felt that the shadows in the corners had deepened and shifted.

Jean-Luc fell silent. He drifted between wakefulness and sleep. He felt safe with Marc-Andre; safe from the fragments of dreams that made no sense but which he could still somehow control.

“Are you asleep?” Marc-Andre asked.

“Hmmm,” Jean-Luc murmured drowsily.

Marc-Andre smiled and tapped furiously at the screen. He wrote about the excitement of being there, about how he felt, about how the completed work would look to others.

If it was successful, he knew they would be in serious trouble.

But that was the thrill of it.

Jean-Luc woke with a start, but Marc-Andre hadn’t noticed.

The air had become thick and cloudy. It smelled of strong cigarettes.

Marc-Andre had switched on the bedside lamp with its green shade and was lying back with his head resting on two pillows.

“Turn the light off,” Jean-Luc whispered. “It will draw attention to us.”

While Jean-Luc had been sleeping, Marc-Andre had found the school exercise books he carried in his backpack. He was writing in one now, propped against his bent knees. The others were scattered across the bed.

“Don’t worry. I’ve nearly finished.”

“How can you possibly write like that?” Jean-Luc asked. “It looks extremely uncomfortable. I thought you preferred using your phone.”

Marc-Andre looked at him with annoyance.

“He took it away with him.”

“Who did?”

“I did.”

The voice startled Jean-Luc.

A figure had materialised beside the small writing desk.

He wore a dark, heavy overcoat. His large, dark, melancholic eyes were fixed upon them both. He gestured faintly towards the glowing screen with a pale hand.

“Ah,” he whispered in a soft, rasping French voice. “Do you carry your entire past in a tiny glowing box as well? Do you also look for lost time there?”

“Who are you?”

The man gestured towards Marc-Andre, who was still scribbling in his exercise book.

“I did not write in bed out of laziness. By shutting out the sensory details of the modern world, I was able to plunge deeply into the world of my own memories. I did not need a magic box.”

“Wake up, Jean-Luc. I’ve finished.”

Marc-Andre was shaking him by the shoulder.

Jean-Luc blinked several times.

The room was cold and dark. The smell of cigarette smoke had disappeared.

“It’s time to leave,” Marc-Andre declared.

“Shit,” said Jean-Luc. “Who was that man?”

“You were dreaming,” Marc-Andre told him. “It will soon be light, and we must leave everything exactly as we found it.”

Gaspard Ulliel: God Gave Him Beauty

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Beauty, kindness, cinema — and one story I cannot tell

My French friend Thomas has a story about Gaspard Ulliel.

It is not shocking and not for me to tell. I wish I could. It is simply beautiful.

Xavier Dolan, the film director, came closest to putting it into words.

“Your discreet laugh, your attentive eye. Your scar. Your talent. Your listening. Your whispers, your kindness. Every feature of your person was actually made from a sparkly sweetness.”

Ah yes. The scar.

Gaspard Ulliel had that characteristic, dimple-like scar on his left cheek. He got it at the age of six when he tried to ride a Doberman pinscher like a horse and the dog caught him across the face with its claws. The scar became one of his most recognisable features — and, somehow, part of his beauty. Ulliel himself once said that it might have helped his acting because it added something to his face.

I recently watched two Ulliel movies.

In André Téchiné’s Les égarés (Strayed) (2003), he plays a mysterious young wanderer who leads a mother and her two children, fleeing from the Nazis, into the forest, where they spend a long period of survival, danger and sexual tension.

Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times described Ulliel as an intense but assured seventeen-year-old, with a “feral quality” that was unsettling, but also the instincts and skills of a survivalist.

I love feral.

I then saw Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) (2004), which tells the story of a young woman’s relentless search for her fiancé, who has disappeared in the trenches of the Somme during the First World War.

Ulliel plays a gentle young soldier, psychologically broken by the horrors of war. His performance relies heavily on those expressive, soulful eyes and a melancholic vulnerability that lingers.

I love deeply romantic, tragic and hauntingly vulnerable boys.

These were his breakout roles.

Afterwards came the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising (2007), and twelve years as the face of Chanel’s men’s fragrance, Bleu de Chanel.

His androgynous beauty and roles in films such as Strayed, Paris, je t’aime and Saint Laurent also made him an important gay icon for many viewers.

In Saint Laurent (2014), Ulliel played the iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, in a film that explored the designer’s homosexuality, his intense relationships and the gay world of 1970s Paris.

And then there was Louis Garrel.

Ulliel later spoke warmly about their kiss, which was not even in the original script. Bonello decided on the night that the scene needed it. Ulliel and Garrel agreed to give him one take. Ulliel described the moment as “magic”.

With It’s Only the End of the World (2016), he played Louis, a gay playwright returning home to his family in Xavier Dolan’s award-winning drama.

And in Paris, je t’aime (2006), in the “Le Marais” segment directed by Gus Van Sant, he appears as a young gay man flirting in a print shop.

But God gave him beauty…

…and God took it away.

Ulliel died on 19 January 2022, aged just thirty-seven, following a skiing accident at La Rosière resort in Savoie.

People spoke afterwards of his profound kindness, his discretion and his warmth.

And that is what brings me back to Thomas.

I still have no idea what his story is.

I only know that it is beautiful.

Perhaps that is enough.

For someone whose face seemed almost impossibly made for cinema, it is strangely fitting that what stays with me is not a film, or a photograph, or even that famous scar.

It is kindness.

And that does it for me.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Night in the Desert: George Quaintance (1951)


George Quaintance (1902–1957) was an American artist famous for his “idealised, strongly homoerotic” depictions of men in mid-century physique magazines. He often used historical settings to justify nudity, or to remove his subjects from the constraints of modern society. Muscular, semi-nude or completely nude men dominate his paintings, with the Wild West becoming one of his favourite settings. He would later influence artists such as Tom of Finland.

One of his iconic masterpieces was Night in the Desert (1951)

John D. Wainbright, on the LGBTQ encyclopedia, wrote:

“It portrays a reclining nude cowboy, well-honed musculature gleaming in the moonlight and blond hair perfectly coiffed. He is proffering a lighted match to a cigarette in the mouth of the dark handsome youth lying next to him, suggesting a shared post-coital moment. In the background, two equally hyper-masculine cowboys face each other clad only in Levis, legs provocatively spread.”

In this and several other paintings in the series, the blond cowboy bears a striking resemblance to Quaintance himself. He was something of an egotist, but he also kept himself in remarkable physical shape. Perhaps he understood better than most artists the appeal of the body he was painting.

On November 8, 1957, Quaintance suffered a heart attack. He was just 55.

In reporting his death, Bob Mizer described Quaintance as “a perfectionist” who “drove himself unmercifully”, working days and nights to finish a painting or sculpture, sometimes taking Benzedrine to keep himself awake.

His legacy is more than sixty signature oil paintings, now scattered among private collections and a handful of gay-oriented museums around the world. More importantly, he helped create an image of male beauty that could be unmistakably homoerotic while still hiding behind the conventions of the American frontier. Cowboys, muscles, moonlight. It was a pretty effective disguise.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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A Book from Osbert


An obsession with grabbing hold of vintage books at a reasonable price. I have a curious interest in the Sitwells. Twice, quite inadvertently, I have found myself meeting a few of the modern ones. But it is the dead Sitwells who remain the most famous — and the most eccentric.

Sometimes there is a surprise hidden inside.

Osbert Sitwell, modernist author, poet, satirist and prominent cultural figure, lived from 1892 to 1969. Alongside his equally famous siblings, Edith and Sacheverell, he was known for his formidable personality, eccentricity and fierce nonconformity.

His book Open the Door was published in 1941. That same year, with characteristic generosity, Osbert sent copies to friends.

In my copy there is an inscription:

For G. B. Stern, because she lost her books, and must be given a great many new ones to replace them, in addition to many other reasons, and a friendship, from Osbert Sitwell, November 1941.

G. B. Stern — Gladys Bronwyn Stern — was an English novelist, playwright, journalist and literary critic. Over a career spanning six decades she wrote more than forty novels, as well as plays, short stories, screenplays and memoirs. She moved through the literary world of London with friends and acquaintances including H. G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Rebecca West and Noël Coward.

And then there is the reason for Osbert’s inscription.

In 1941, during the German air raids on London, Stern’s home was hit by a bomb and completely destroyed. She survived physically unharmed, but lost almost everything: her house, her library, family heirlooms, papers and personal belongings.

She emerged from the rubble with virtually nothing.

Except the clothes she was wearing and her favourite walking stick.

And then, two months later, Osbert Sitwell sent her a book.


A Fox at Battersea


I get why David Hockney’s muse, Peter Schlesinger, left him for Eric Boman (1946–2022). I mean, who wouldn’t have? I found this photograph in a book, taken by Schlesinger at Battersea in 1977. I’d say Boman was a bit of a ‘Fox’, as they said in the 1970s. Wouldn’t you agree? Schlesinger famously recalled that people would crash their cars in the street just to steal a glance at him. He was a rare creature: as beautiful on the inside as he was on the outside, leaving an undeniable and unforgettable mark on the world. And yet, somehow, he still isn’t worthy of a Wikipedia page. 


What Becomes of Joey?


Getting my head around the fact that Joey, turning a trick or two in 1987, would be 61 now. I’m sure he never imagined that the beauty being advertised here was something temporary. We are shallow and cruel. We fall for youth, then discard it when it disappears. Would we even give Joey the time of day now? 


Troppo giusto!


Paninaro. Milan, 1980s. Fast food. Designer labels. Mopeds. New York fantasies. Basically, a whole aesthetic before anyone called it an aesthetic. I wish I’d been a Paninaro.

“Girls, boys, arts, pleasure,/ Food, cars, travel, food, cars, travel, travel,/ New York, New York, New York,/ Armani, Armani, A-A-Armani, Versace, Cinque”.


The Decadent Comrades


Casimir, destroyer of peace, and Leonid, son of the lion, shared a love of baked apple, cinnamon and each other. Branded remnants of ‘bourgeois decadence’ and capitalist moral decay, they were shunned by their comrades. In their loneliness, they turned to a growing art form called ‘gaysky pornsky’. 


Bedtime Books


Bedside table energy: beautiful men, Italian lakes, doomed artists and absolutely no intention of going to sleep.


That Unspoken Rizz


The Split from Desire. True eroticism in representation. Classic inspo. The male form as the ultimate standard of aesthetic excellence. Male beauty has been serving since antiquity.


German Decadence


Says it all. The dining room of Harry Graf Kessler’s apartment in Berlin, circa 1900. An inherent critic of the rigid, hyper-masculine culture of Imperial Germany. He expressed his aesthetic and homoerotic interests in everyday life, writing in his diaries about his attraction to athletes at boxing matches in London or handsome sailors in Belgium. 

On the Cute and the Willing

Airat Rahimov

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.