How did it happen? I went for milk. He served me milk. Anything planned tonight mate? I shook my head. That’s a shame mate. What are you doing? Nothing at all mate. I take a chance. Come to mine then. What are you saying? Let’s watch a movie. Not sure about that. Please come, I say. It sounds weird mate. I tell him where. He comes around later. We chatted about things. We watched a movie. Gotta go now mate. I don’t want that. Please stay the night. That looks bad mate. It’s a good offer. He agrees to stay. We have good sex. Next morning he’s dirty. He takes a shower. Gotta go to work. I will miss you. Miss you too mate. Thanks for the milk.
A schoolboy dropped onto the bench beside me. Grey blazer, black trousers, loosened tie, scuffed shoes. I noticed everything that didn’t matter. A rough diamond, I thought – though his sparkle wouldn’t cut much around here.
The riverside benches stretched empty, yet he chose mine. I should’ve told him to shove off. His presence made me feel exposed, grimy. How old was he? Fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? I couldn’t pin it.
He glanced at my book. “What’s it about?” The cover stared up at me like a mute witness. Say something. Anything.
Instead, he dug in his bag and handed over his own. HappyHead. Yellow jacket. Boy in a green hoodie. Like Hunger Games, but better.
A woman passed with a rat-sized dog that barked like it deserved drowning. She glanced at us — too long, too sharp. The boy grinned. “He’s my dad.” I was far too young to be. Her cheeks flared; she looked away.
I slid him The Outsiders. Black cover, five combs — four white, one yellow, streaked with red. The misfit.
He read the first lines aloud –
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman – he looks tough and I don’t – but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad.”
A smirk tugged his lips, then he handed it back. Game recognised game.
The young man asked me to describe something that I had done during the week. “Something unusual that nobody else had done.”
I pondered too long and dismissed everything that came into my head. But then I had it.
“Well, it’s been a Luther Vandross week. I watched a movie-length documentary about him and listened to six of his albums.”
He absorbed what I had said. “That was pretty cool,” he replied, nodding with approval. “But I have one question to ask. Who the fuck is Luther Vandross?”
“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.”
The café hums softly — a low murmur of spoons, voices, milk steaming behind the counter. I go there more often than I should, pretending it’s for the coffee, though I know that’s not true. He’s always there — Joseph — the boy with the rolled sleeves, the nice ass, the quiet smile. He moves with a kind of unthinking grace that makes the simplest gestures unbearable to watch. The tilt of his head, the tiny crease that appears between his brows when he concentrates. He hums under his breath when the machine hisses, wipes the same patch of counter top as if he’s polishing a secret into it. The light hits his hair just so, and I find myself timing my arrival to catch that moment when he leans over the counter and looks up.
Sometimes he catches my eye, and it feels like an accident — a spark that wasn’t meant to happen. He doesn’t know what he does to me: the curve of his wrist, the steam curling around his face, the way his voice seems to linger in the air a heartbeat too long. When his hand brushes mine as he gives me change, there’s the faint scent of roasted beans and skin, a small, electric pause before he turns away.
I tell myself I could stop if I wanted to. That it’s just a crush, just admiration. But I don’t want to. I want the ache. It isn’t love — not really — it’s too fleeting, too impossible. He doesn’t see me, not the way I see him. Yet there’s a strange tenderness in wanting without having, in sitting there each morning, pretending to read, tracing the rim of my cup as the warmth fades — while the boy behind the counter unknowingly becomes the centre of my day.
I collect fragments of him and carry them home like offerings. Sometimes I imagine saying his name aloud, but I never do. It feels too intimate, too final — as if it might break the spell.
The room where I try to write has slowly become the room where Charlie paints – always in nothing but his underwear, as though bare skin loosens his imagination. He fills his canvases with young men borrowed from Pinterest photographs, embellishing them with his own wild inventions. His pace is relentless; one wall is already crowded with finished works, while the others gleam with fresh white paint, waiting their turn.
I, by contrast, sit fully clothed at my desk opposite him, my screen a blank page that refuses to yield. His half-naked body distracts me more than the silence we share – a silence that can stretch for hours. My sentences falter, my fingers hover above the keys, while my gaze strays repeatedly to the slope of his shoulder, the subtle shifting of muscle beneath skin. When our eyes do meet, the faintest smile flickers between us, and in that moment, it feels as though the room itself has been written.
Our different pursuits seem to mirror our temperaments: Charlie paints with fearless exposure, while I write with restraint, dressed in caution. Yet the tension coils tighter. My prose begins to echo the shapes of his body, the rhythm of his movements, until the line between art and desire starts to blur.
At times I tell myself I am only imagining it – that Charlie is merely eccentric, his near-nudity no more than a quirk. But each page proves otherwise. It is littered with involuntary admissions: the shadows along his collarbone, the hush of his breath when he leans too close, the bare expanse of thigh against the studio chair. These confessions rise from me slowly, as though I am being coaxed – cornered – into acknowledging what I cannot claim.
Tonight, the silence shatters. My phone vibrates, abrupt as a stone cast into still water. Charlie turns at once, alert, the brush slipping from his hand. “I need a rest from painting,” he announces lightly. “Let me see what you’ve written.” He springs up, knowing I will resist, his request merely a pretext to draw near, to glimpse what has intruded into our silence.
It is from Bianchi in Verona. A thrill runs through me, but I dare not open it – Charlie would notice too much. “Who is Bianchi?” he asks, now beside me, his voice soft but insistent.
“A friend of Cola,” I murmur, unwilling to elaborate. The words hang in the air, evasive, unsatisfying, already unravelling.
This relationship is borderline and has been like this for years. A decade when we changed from boys into men. I have no idea whether this long infatuation has been about love, or lust, or perhaps both. But it is MY infatuation and not his. He sends a message with three short words – ‘YOU DA BEST’ – and I want to screenshot it.
“I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.” – Novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) speaking to American author Michael Mewshaw in 1972.
Johnny and Vinny (second and fourth from left) – Danny Fitzgerald (1963). According to, Loncar and Kempster, Fitzgerald never printed this image. It was found in a short, four-frame strip of images of the brothers smoking between two cars with friends, on a street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
The noisy summer of 1963. Shouts, laughter, transistor radios blasting crooners and rock ’n’ roll. Danny Fitzgerald walked the streets of Carroll Gardens—sixty square blocks of brownstone row houses stretching from DeGraw Street to Hamilton Avenue, and from Court Street to Hicks. The neighbourhood bore the name of Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, and as if on cue, the bell towers of St. Mary Star of the Sea and Sacred Hearts & St. Stephens rang out, reminding Fitzgerald that faith was still the glue holding this community together.
Everybody knew everybody here. Reputations mattered, gossip travelled faster than the summer heat, and though Fitzgerald wasn’t an outsider, he knew that by the time he reached Carroll Park, word of his presence would already have spread. He checked that the roll of ten-dollar bills was still safe in his pocket.
On one corner stood a family deli; opposite it, the bakery, its doorway spilling the smells of fresh bread, sfogliatelle, and espresso, along with the little paper cups of ice that kids clutched in the sun. A neon sign buzzed over the grocery, where a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy hung proudly behind the counter.
Sicilian and Neapolitan voices floated from stoops where old women in black dresses swept steps, aired laundry, and fanned themselves as they traded gossip. Below them, men smoked cigars and talked dockside work while listening to baseball on portable radios. Children darted about—stickball, stoop ball, bicycles weaving down Union Street, dodging cars, or shrieking as they ran through the spray of a fire hydrant on President Street.
Fitzgerald found what he was looking for on Columbia Street: teenage boys in leather jackets and rolled-up jeans, striking poses, trying hard to look older as they flirted with girls.
Johnny leaned against an iron railing, a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth, hair slicked so smooth it gleamed in the afternoon sun.
“Johnny! Vai a prendere il pane!” his mother called from the window, tossing him a crumpled dollar bill. Go get the bread.
He caught it with ease, sighed, and stuffed it into his pocket. His buddies leaned against a parked Buick, passing around a cigarette. Johnny joined them, hesitated briefly—his mother waiting for bread—then shrugged. She could wait.
Fitzgerald stepped forward, cautious but deliberate. “Hi Johnny. I’ve got a proposition for you—and your brother.”
In 1963, Danny Fitzgerald was forty-two. A first-generation Irish-Italian, he had only taken up photography in his thirties. He trained at Abraham Goldberg’s gym on Clinton Street, where he gained the trust of the young men who boxed and lifted there. For a few dollars, he persuaded them to pose for what he called “standard beefcake”—half-naked in pouches or bikini trunks. These images sold covertly to private collectors and to Joe Weider, who used them for magazine covers: Young Physique, Muscles a Go-Go, Demi-Gods.
Health-and-fitness publications doubled as discreet erotica for America’s homosexuals, offering a socially acceptable way to admire the male form. For Fitzgerald, the work was both a business and a means of feeding his own desires. He was said to have fallen hopelessly in love with one of his muses, a blonde youth named Orest—“unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.”
In the early sixties, Fitzgerald met the striking bodybuilder Richard Bennett, who became his primary model and collaborator. Together they founded Les Demi Dieux—“the demigods”—a venture that presented “sublime, muscled beauties from the streets of Brooklyn, the beaches of New Jersey, and the woods of Pennsylvania.” Bennett often acted as bait, coaxing young men into Fitzgerald’s lens for tastefully erotic photographs.
By 1963, when Fitzgerald approached Johnny and his brother Vinny, his focus had shifted back to the gritty realism of South Brooklyn street life. A ten-dollar bill was enough to persuade a boy to pose; a little more, and one might strip to the waist.
It was a handsome life, but a quiet one. The photographs were rarely seen beyond private circles, and after 1968 Fitzgerald stopped shooting altogether.
He died in 1990, destined for obscurity, until Robert Loncar and James Kempster acquired his archive the following year. They catalogued his life’s work, publishing Brooklyn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux (1993) and mounting an exhibition. Though the book is now out of print, coveted by collectors, his photographs survive online at a dedicated website. https://lesdemidieux.com
The rediscovery sparked excitement. Critics praised the work for its intimacy, its blend of realism and myth, its ability to capture both the spirit of its era and something hauntingly timeless. For a while, Fitzgerald’s name flickered in the wider cultural conversation. Yet as the years passed, interest faded again. Today, the collection drifts in a liminal space—remembered vaguely, rarely exhibited, and maybe a danger vanishing once more. Its half-life raises a lingering question: how easily can art be lost, even when once found?
Muscle Boy. Photograph from the early 1960s by Danny Fitzgerald and his studio Les Demi Dieux
“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.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 