Imagine that Eddie Redmayne sat down beside you on the steps. He might do that. Soft-spoken, bookish and entirely unthreatening. His dandyish sense of style, expressive features and quiet politeness feel oddly familiar to me. He’s the perfect amount of gay—not in a sexual sense, but in that elusive way some men seem to embody a gentle elegance without ever feeling performative.
Fallen in love with …
Nineteen-year-old French student Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien. Some people volunteer. Some climb Everest. Didier licked a straw from an orange juice vending machine, slid it back into the dispenser, edited the footage into a short film, and posted it with the caption: “city is not safe.” Singapore fined him S$600 (about $465). He’s either the villain in a public health campaign or the greatest shitposter of his generation. There is no middle ground.
Too beautiful to know it …
“It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I’m the only guy that I know who wanted to run away to be a prostitute.” ―Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989)
Mark Morrisroe. Self-Portrait (to Brent), 1982
The book I haven’t opened yet …
Why do I feel faintly guilty after receiving a copy of The Romance of a Choirboy from a friend in London? I haven’t even read the first page, yet it has already acquired that awkward quality of a book which almost seems to require an explanation simply for owning it.
Part of me wonders whether I should leave it exactly where it is.
John Gambril Nicholson wrote the novel between 1896 and 1905, although it wasn’t privately printed until 1916. It tells the story of Philip, an Anglican minister whose emotional and romantic fixation on a schoolboy called Teddy is presented with complete sincerity. More than a century later, it’s difficult to read the premise without immediately recognising the imbalance of age, authority and power. Today we would simply describe the relationship as predatory.
And yet, the novel refuses to disappear. It still surfaces in studies of late Victorian and Edwardian literature, less because people admire it than because it captures attitudes that respectable society often preferred not to acknowledge. Reading an uncomfortable book isn’t an endorsement of its ideas any more than visiting a museum is an endorsement of history. Even so, I suspect this is one of those books I’ll keep eyeing suspiciously from across the room before eventually deciding whether curiosity gets the better of me.
The boy you shouldn’t like …
A twenty-something, hard-partying gay fashion model who doesn’t wear underwear. I’ve come across a few of those.
That’s the premise of Proud, HBO Max’s new Polish drama series.
Ignacy Liss stars as Filip, a carefree young man who is forced to grow up almost overnight after a family tragedy leaves him the guardian of his late sister’s infant daughter, Tosia.
We should be angry with him. We should probably be disappointed in him too.
But we aren’t, because there’s something undeniably appealing about him.
Maybe it’s the soft jawline, the expressive eyes, or the raw vulnerability that slips through the bravado.
Liss, who is straight and, away from the screen, a married father, makes for an infuriatingly convincing bad boy.
A forgotten actor, a lost Hitchcock film, the lifelong companion of Beverley Nichols, and a pioneer of British television. The remarkable life of Cyril Butcher deserves to be remembered.
Cyril Butcher
Metaphorically speaking, I spent two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table. I questioned him, shared my frustrations and searched for answers that never came. The only response was the occasional concerned glance from Signora Bruschi, who had begun to suspect that I was talking to myself.
I assured her it was research. Anyone who has spent hours buried in old newspapers, forgotten magazines and fading archive material will know how easily the outside world disappears.
The trail began with a copy of Film Weekly from 1930. There, among its yellowing pages, was a photograph of a dreamy-looking young man named Cyril Butcher. He was twenty years old and had just become one of two winners of a nationwide competition offering a six-month scholarship at Elstree Studios, worth £250 together with a weekly salary of £10.
There had been 6,783 entrants, although Film Weekly never revealed precisely what they had been asked to do. One winner was always a young man and the other a young woman. Butcher entered through the Picture House in Ipswich; his fellow winner, Aileen Despard, represented the Rialto Cinema in Raynes Park, south-west London.
Standing six feet tall, weighing eleven and a half stone, with brown hair and brown eyes, Butcher evidently impressed a formidable judging panel. Among them were some of British cinema’s most promising directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Ewald André Dupont, Norman Walker and Walter Summers.
The prize was more than a scholarship. British International Pictures quickly placed the two winners in a ten-minute comedy short entitled An Elastic Affair, directed by Hitchcock himself. The film premiered at the London Palladium, where Butcher and Despard were presented with contracts by the studio’s founder, John Maxwell.
Ironically, An Elastic Affair was a talking picture shown in a theatre that had yet to install sound equipment. Audiences watched the performances in silence.
Butcher appeared simply as ‘The Boy’; Despard as ‘The Girl’. One contemporary reviewer described his performance as “amateurish”, before generously conceding that he had never acted before. After a further screening in Ipswich, the film disappeared from circulation. Today it is regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lost films.
Later that same year Butcher appeared as ‘Dancer’ Johnny in Richard Eichberg’s crime melodrama Night Birds. It proved to be his final screen role.
I showed his photograph to Signora Bruschi.
“Bel ragazzo,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Then, after another glance:
“Omosessuale?”
She had guessed correctly.
Two years after his brief flirtation with cinema, Butcher came to the attention of Beverley Nichols, already one of Britain’s best-known writers. Novelist, journalist, playwright, broadcaster, composer and public speaker, Nichols embodied the glittering world of the Bright Young Things while carefully concealing his homosexuality from public view.
The two met during auditions for a theatrical adaptation of Nichols’ bestselling novel Evensong, itself inspired by the celebrated Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, whom Nichols had known personally during her later years.
Nichols was thirty-four. Butcher was twenty-two.
Their meeting would shape the rest of Butcher’s life.
He moved into Nichols’ cottage, Allways, at Glatton in Cambridgeshire, a picturesque Tudor thatched house whose gardens later inspired Nichols’ celebrated gardening trilogy beginning with Down the Garden Path.
Whether Fleet Street suspected the true nature of their relationship is difficult to judge. If rumours circulated, editors exercised remarkable discretion. Newspapers invariably described Butcher as a friend, visitor or business associate, never anything more intimate.
For more than half a century they remained together.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, after fifty-three years of companionship, Butcher inherited the largest share of his estate, valued at £131,750.
The public knew Beverley Nichols.
Very few remembered Cyril Butcher.
The obvious question is what Butcher himself made of it all.
The archives, frustratingly, have little to say.
His own voice is almost entirely absent. He left no memoir, no revealing interviews and no collection of personal letters that might explain the man behind the carefully posed publicity photographs. Almost everything we know comes from newspapers, theatre programmes and the lives of other people. It is enough to reconstruct his career, but rarely enough to understand his character.
Cyril Butcher
His family background was rather more remarkable than his modest film career might suggest.
Henry Ernest Butcher, Cyril’s father, was born in Ipswich and trained at the Royal Academy of Music before leaving England to pursue a career in German opera. For twelve years he sang across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Poland, establishing himself on the Continental stage. In Cologne, in 1907, he married Gertrud Maria Maassen. Two years later, while the couple were living in St Gallen, Switzerland, their only son, Cyril, was born.
The First World War abruptly transformed the family’s fortunes.
As an Englishman working in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Henry Butcher found his contracts cancelled almost overnight. Effectively stranded in Vienna, he reinvented himself under the Germanised name Heinrich Butscher and spent three years playing imposing villains and heavy dramatic roles for Viennese film companies.
Meanwhile, young Cyril was sent to the relative safety of Switzerland, where he spent the war at boarding school. Although born abroad, he was brought up as unmistakably English, eventually returning with his parents when they settled once again in Ipswich in 1919.
The stage fascinated him from an early age.
Before that dream could become reality he spent a brief period as a cadet in the Merchant Navy, only to discover that life at sea held little appeal. He abandoned it for work in a gasworks while nurturing rather more glamorous ambitions. He hoped to become a dancer in musical revues and, failing that, imagined a career as a writer.
Then came the Film Weekly competition.
Winning transformed an unknown twenty-year-old into a national curiosity almost overnight. Newspapers delighted in reporting the details that today seem wonderfully quaint. He stood six feet tall, weighed eleven and a half stone, had brown eyes and brown hair, and apparently possessed exactly the sort of wholesome good looks that British International Pictures believed audiences wanted to see.
Yet the promise proved fleeting.
After An Elastic Affair and Night Birds, film producers looked elsewhere. The great cinematic career that had seemed so certain never materialised.
The theatre, however, proved more welcoming.
When his screen career faltered, Butcher found steady work in the musical revues he had always loved. In October 1931 he appeared as Captain Donegal in a revival of Florodora, followed by performances in This World of Ours, Fanfare and Noël Coward’s Words and Music. He was never a leading man, but he worked consistently, quietly building a respectable theatrical career.
It was during this period that Beverley Nichols entered his life.
Beverley Nichols
Whether Butcher genuinely fell in love with Nichols or recognised the opportunities that accompanied the relationship can never be known. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Affection and ambition have often travelled together, particularly in professions where introductions and patronage mattered.
What is beyond dispute is that Butcher’s horizons widened dramatically.
Between 1932 and 1935 he wrote the stage and screen pages for Nora Shackleton Heald, editor of The Queen, the weekly magazine read by Britain’s aristocracy and fashionable society. When Heald moved to The Lady the following year, Nichols also became one of its occasional contributors.
Butcher was increasingly making his living not simply as an actor, but as a journalist.
He also wrote for The Sketch, contributing a series entitled The Worst Moments of My Life, in which well-known public figures recalled their most embarrassing or uncomfortable experiences. The articles were later collected in In Extremis: Worst Moments in the Lives of the Famous, published in 1934.
Then there was the matter of Brighton.
That year the town council published a promotional booklet about the seaside resort under Beverley Nichols’ name. It later emerged that the work had in fact been ghost-written by Butcher, with Nichols content to accept the credit.
It raises an intriguing possibility.
If Butcher could disappear so completely behind Nichols’ public persona once, might he have done so on other occasions?
The evidence simply isn’t there.
But it is difficult not to wonder.
The theatre remained Butcher’s natural home throughout the 1930s.
Between 1936 and the outbreak of the Second World War he appeared in a succession of musical revues and stage productions. He rarely enjoyed star billing, but there was satisfaction in regular work, and he increasingly found opportunities beyond acting.
Together with the pianist, composer and playwright Albert Arlen, he wrote and directed Counterfeit, a comedy thriller in twenty scenes. After previewing in Richmond it transferred to London’s Duke of York’s Theatre, where it featured a young Charles Hawtrey, years before the Carry On films would make him a household name.
The reviews, unfortunately, were lukewarm.
Around the same time, Beverley Nichols found himself under growing financial and personal pressure. In 1937 he sold Allways, the idyllic Cambridgeshire cottage that had inspired his famous gardening books. Publicly, the sale was attributed to the need to finance his latest West End production, Floodlight, itself destined to disappoint at the box office.
There may, however, have been another reason.
Village gossip had become increasingly hostile. Nichols’ frequent male visitors attracted attention, while rumours of moonlit skinny-dipping parties and young local men invited to the house circulated far beyond Glatton. Whether exaggerated or not, such stories carried genuine danger. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence, and a whispering campaign could destroy both careers and reputations.
War interrupted everything.
In 1940 Butcher joined the Royal Navy. Little has emerged about his wartime service, but once peace returned he resumed the theatrical life that had been placed on hold for six long years.
Nichols and Butcher settled at Merry Hall in Ashtead, Surrey, in 1946. The elegant Georgian house, surrounded by extensive gardens, would become famous through Nichols’ gardening books, although behind the scenes Butcher was contributing far more than readers realised.
In 1949 he wrote Dear Heart!, a comedy staged by the Playwrights’ Theatre Group at London’s Chepstow Theatre Club. By then, however, another medium was beginning to eclipse the stage.
Television.
Beverely Nichols and Cyril Butcher
When Butcher began writing a television column for The Sketch in 1950, the medium was still finding its feet. His weekly articles charted life inside the BBC’s Alexandra Palace studios and later recorded the birth of commercial television with the curiosity of someone who recognised he was witnessing history in the making.
Five and a half years later he crossed the divide himself.
Associated-Rediffusion, Britain’s first Independent Television contractor, recruited Butcher to write and direct drama. It proved to be the defining chapter of his professional life.
Today, when scenes can be filmed repeatedly until perfection is achieved, it is easy to forget how television drama was once created.
In the 1950s almost everything went out live.
A forgotten line, a jammed door, a misplaced prop or a camera appearing in shot became part of the broadcast forever. If a programme needed repeating, there was no videotape waiting on a shelf. The entire cast and crew returned to the studio and performed the production all over again from the beginning.
It demanded absolute concentration.
Between 1955 and 1960 Butcher directed episodes of The Granville Melodramas, ITV Play of the Week, ITV Television Playhouse and Murder Bag. Week after week he helped establish the grammar of British television drama at a time when the rules were still being invented.
His achievements have largely been forgotten.
Yet millions of viewers watched programmes that passed through his hands.
In 1953, while rehearsing Nichols’ little-known play La Plume de ma Tante at Bromley Theatre, Butcher left midway through production after being called away to direct a television adaptation of Evensong—the very work that had first brought the two men together more than twenty years earlier.
Life has a curious habit of closing circles.
In 1958 Nichols and Butcher moved for the last time, settling at Sudbrook Cottage in Richmond, where they would remain together for the rest of their lives.
By the end of the 1950s, Butcher’s career had begun to change direction.
For two years he served as Senior Director of Schools Programmes before returning briefly to drama. By now, however, the industry’s priorities were shifting. The man who had once directed ambitious live productions increasingly found himself overseeing factual programmes with decidedly less glamour. Titles such as Shopping For You, Shop on the Corner, election coverage and broadcasts from the Ideal Home Exhibition reflected the changing demands of commercial television rather than any decline in his ability.
His final appointment at Associated-Rediffusion was as Head of its newly established Commercial Production Department.
Then came an altogether unexpected opportunity.
Television in Ethiopia was in its infancy. The Ethiopian Television Service had only recently begun broadcasting when Butcher accepted the post of Director-General, moving to Addis Ababa in 1965. For two years he helped shape a national broadcaster from the ground up, an experience unlike anything he had previously encountered.
His contribution did not go unnoticed. Emperor Haile Selassie awarded him the Order of the Ethiopian Empire in recognition of his work.
By the time Butcher returned to Britain, the pace of his life had slowed considerably.
In 1967 and 1968 he and Beverley Nichols embarked on an extended journey through South Africa, Singapore and the Far East while researching The Sun in My Eyes. Nichols wrote the text; Butcher supplied the photographs.
The arrangement had become familiar.
One man occupied the public stage.
The other often worked quietly behind the scenes.
Retirement, when it finally came, was only partial. Butcher continued to review television for The Stage, lent his support to plans for a fringe theatre in Wimbledon and, in 1984, became the subject of Old Stagers, a BBC Radio 2 programme celebrating veterans of British theatre and entertainment.
It was a rare moment in which the spotlight fell, however briefly, upon him.
When Beverley Nichols died in 1984, Butcher inherited the greater part of an estate valued at £131,750. He continued living at Sudbrook Cottage, despite suggestions that the house might have to be sold to meet taxes and other liabilities.
It never was.
Four years later, in 1988, Cyril Butcher died at the age of seventy-nine.
The handsome young man from Film Weekly had long since disappeared.
There are still people who remember Beverley Nichols and who knew of his lifelong relationship with Butcher. Most biographies suggest that, by their later years, companionship had replaced passion. Nichols’ attraction to younger men is well documented, as are his discreet encounters with the “rough trade” of London, while Butcher appears to have accepted those indiscretions with quiet resignation.
What passed between them in private is known only to history.
It is tempting to wonder whether Butcher’s contribution to Nichols’ success extended beyond the few acknowledged examples. We know that he ghost-wrote at least one published work and spent decades living alongside one of Britain’s most prolific authors. Did other manuscripts pass beneath his pen? Did other ideas become Nichols’ bylines?
The evidence is silent.
Perhaps it always will be.
After two days and one long night sitting opposite Cyril Butcher at Signora Bruschi’s kitchen table, I know a great deal more about his life than I did when I began.
I know that he was the young man who caught Alfred Hitchcock’s eye and starred in one of the director’s lost films. I know that he spent more than fifty years beside one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, helped shape the earliest years of commercial television, accepted an imperial decoration from Haile Selassie and quietly contributed to British theatre, journalism and broadcasting.
Yet, in another sense, I know almost nothing about him.
The archives reveal the milestones of his life, but not the life itself.
They tell us where he worked, whom he loved and what he achieved, yet remain stubbornly silent on the questions that matter most: what kind of man was he, what made him happy, what made him laugh and, when the lights finally went out, whether he believed he had lived the life he wanted.
Perhaps that is the fate of those who spend their lives just beyond the spotlight.
History remembers the stars.
It is less kind to those who helped them shine.
As I left Signora Bruschi’s kitchen, I glanced once more at the photograph of the twenty-year-old Cyril Butcher.
For a fleeting moment, it felt as though he was looking back.
E.M. Forster spent much of his life hiding a part of himself.
In a diary entry from 1964 he wrote:
‘I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter’.
Between 1905 and 1910 he published four novels—Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View and Howards End. By the time A Passage to India appeared in 1924, Forster had grown weary of writing about marriage and the relationships between men and women. It would be the last novel published during his lifetime.
Instead, his imagination increasingly turned towards relationships between men. He wrote stories that explored same-sex desire but refused to publish them, convinced that the world in which he lived was not ready for them.
His novel Maurice finally appeared in 1971, a year after his death. It tells the story of Maurice Hall, whose love affair with his Cambridge friend Clive Durham ultimately gives way to a deeper relationship with the young gamekeeper Alec Scudder. Defying class prejudice, social convention and the threat of blackmail, the novel ends not in tragedy but in hope.
Forster wrote Maurice in 1913–14, yet he could never quite let it go. He revised the manuscript in 1932 and again between 1952 and 1960, repeatedly reworking the ending while remaining determined that the lovers should find happiness.
It is difficult not to wonder whether Maurice became the life that Forster wished he might have lived himself.
While at Cambridge he was infatuated with Hugh Owen Meredith, who is widely believed to have inspired the character of Clive. He was also drawn to working-class men and, in 1930, began a relationship with the London policeman Bob Buckingham that lasted for forty years. During his travels abroad he formed other relationships, reportedly experiencing sex for the first time with a soldier on an Egyptian beach when he was thirty-eight.
In 1970, the biographer P. N. Furbank observed:
“He achieved physical sex very late, and found it easier with people outside his own social class; and it remained a kind of private magic for him – an almost unattainable blessing, for which another person was mainly a pretext.”
The executor of Forster’s estate was Professor W. J. H. Sprott of Nottingham University, best known for translating Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Among Forster’s papers he discovered the manuscript of Maurice, together with the unfinished novel Arctic Summer, largely written in 1911, which also explored homosexual themes.
There were also a number of short stories written between 1903 and 1958. Published posthumously in 1972, only two had appeared during Forster’s lifetime; the remainder were either overtly homoerotic or explicitly gay stories that would almost certainly have been considered indecent by contemporary standards.
Within his closest circle, Forster made little attempt to conceal his sexuality. He shared successive drafts of Maurice with trusted friends including Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, Christopher Isherwood, Xiao Qian and Forrest Reid.
Beyond that circle, however, he was intensely guarded.
In 1962, John Bayley wrote in The Guardian that “the homosexual themes underlie all his novels.”
Forster replied:
“Are you aware that homosexuality is still a criminal offence, and any public implication of it therefore objectionable.”
As Kate Symondson notes on the British Library website, Forster was only sixteen when Oscar Wilde was sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour—the maximum penalty—for homosexual acts. It was a warning that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
The dangers faced by Maurice and Alec were not merely fictional. They reflected the laws, prejudices and fears that shaped Forster’s own existence.
Only in 1967, with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act, were private homosexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one decriminalised in England and Wales. By then Forster was eighty-eight years old, and the novel that had meant so much to him still remained unpublished.
There had been a thunderstorm warning across the Veneto, but nobody believed it. They complained about the relentless heat and the pitiless sun, longing instead for shorter days, cold mornings, and snow.
Even so, the wind hinted that relief might finally be on its way. It rattled the café awnings, scraped chairs across pavements, and sent menus tumbling into the next street. In Signora Bruschi’s courtyard the washing twisted itself tightly around the line, while the terracotta pots overflowing with pelargoniums, lavender, salvias, petunias and Mexican fleabane bore the worst of it. One of the smaller pots toppled from the kitchen step and shattered. Even the tiny finches that usually flitted between the potted citrus trees abandoned the branches for the shelter of a shaded corner, where they sang with frantic urgency. Signora Bruschi rushed outside clutching a broom and shouted for us to rescue the washing before it blew away.
It was Cola who first noticed the bruised-purple cloud creeping across the sky. Others followed behind it, darker still, advancing with slow deliberation as though reluctant to commit themselves. They lingered above the city, steadily subduing the sun. With every passing minute the light faded, the heat loosened its grip, and the stale air trapped inside the old stone walls for weeks was finally released. When the wind eased, Signora Bruschi scolded us for throwing the clean washing into the basket instead of folding it properly.
An uneasy stillness settled over Verona. The city seemed to pause in expectation. Even the finches fell silent.
Bianchi stepped into the doorway and sniffed the air. It carried that strange sweetness that always arrives before heavy rain, reminding us of freshly cut grass. He pointed towards the sky, where the clouds had taken on an unsettling greenish hue, their tops spreading into broad, flat anvils. For a fleeting moment the sun broke through, casting dramatic shafts of light that sharpened every corner of Signora Bruschi’s courtyard.
Then came the first distant growl of thunder from somewhere beyond Lake Garda.
A blinding flash of lightning sent Bianchi darting back inside. From neighbouring houses came cheers, laughter and exaggerated cries of alarm. Only a handful of raindrops struck the marble flagstones before Signora Bruschi ushered everyone indoors.
Moments later the wind returned with renewed force, and the rain followed.
It swept across the city from the west in solid sheets, lashing the parched streets and hammering rooftops. The sheer weight of water became a roaring wall of sound that swallowed everything else. Gutters overflowed, torrents cascaded from the roofs, and water surged across the courtyard until it pooled outside the kitchen door. Drains that had lain dry for weeks surrendered almost immediately. Through the window we watched the neighbouring buildings dissolve behind a curtain of rain until they became little more than grey silhouettes.
“The heavens are teeming,” Signora Bruschi cried.
Brilliant forks of lightning split the sky, vanishing almost as soon as they appeared. Each flash was followed by a violent crack and then a rolling explosion of thunder that rattled the windowpanes and shook the house to its foundations.
Again.
And again.
“I hope it stops soon,” Bianchi whispered.
Cola, however, seemed delighted.
He dashed into the courtyard, pulling off his T-shirt as he ran, and stood ankle-deep in the rising water, lifting his face towards the sky as the rain drenched him within seconds. By the time he wandered back inside, his jeans clung to his legs and streams of water spread across Signora Bruschi’s kitchen floor. Without missing a beat, she clipped him around the back of the head, snatched a towel from the washing basket, and thrust it into his hands.
“My son is stupido,” she sighed, with equal measures of exasperation and affection.
Pietro’s Books, Bianchi’s Curiosity …
College has broken up for the summer and, when he is not working, Bianchi is usually either trailing me around Signora Bruschi’s house or reading in my apartment. Since my return, our hostess has been content for him to stay, but she has made it abundantly clear that no relationship of any kind is to develop between us. Consequently, Bianchi has taken up residence in my rooms while I have been relegated to sharing Cola’s bed.
My stay in Verona is only temporary, and I have no illusions that, once I return to the UK, Bianchi will have any claim on my Italian life.
For now, however, he has been quietly investigating my possessions in an earnest attempt to learn everything he can about me. He has also been working his way through Pietro’s boxes, which Signora Bruschi finally carried down from the attic for me to sort.
That is how Bianchi came to be sitting on my sofa with one of Pietro’s hardback novels from the 1990s.
Scuola di nudo is an intimidating thing: six hundred pages of uninterrupted Italian, which effectively rules out any possibility of my reading it.
“It is about a university professor in Pisa,” Bianchi explained, “who explores his obsession with male beauty and desire, and who is very critical of his colleagues.”
“Would I like it?” I asked.
“Probably not. I think you like magazines instead.”
The remark was aimed squarely at the infamous French copy of Le Pénis lying beside my bed, a publication that, until then, he had politely pretended not to notice.
“There is no plot,” he continued. “But it is interesting. And there are many scandals.”
I suspect Bianchi has already grown bored with the novel, despite his insistence to the contrary, and is persevering with it largely because he thinks it will impress me.
I looked up the author, Walter Siti, and discovered that he taught at several Italian universities, wrote screenplays, and has also been a reviewer for La Stampa.
As for Scuola di nudo, I remain none the wiser. Bianchi’s fractured English synopsis is, I suspect, as close to understanding the novel as I am ever likely to get.
Not my Taormina …
Severin wishes I were back in Taormina. I’m not so sure.
Dolce & Gabbana recently unveiled its new Alta Sartoria collection at the Teatro Antico, with the Ionian Sea below and Mount Etna rising behind it. The guest list was suitably glamorous: Erling Haaland and Isabel Haugseng Johansen, Theo James and Ruth Kearney, Christian Bale, Monica Bellucci, Jennifer Lopez and Michele Morrone.
I wasn’t invited.
That, in a way, is the point.
Taormina isn’t really for north European wastrels like Severin and me. It’s for people willing to spend the equivalent of a monthly mortgage on a single night’s stay, pay limousine prices for taxis and happily buy things marked up tenfold simply because they can.
It is the most expensive destination in Sicily.
We visited out of season and enjoyed it, although even then the White Lotus pilgrims were beginning to get on my tits. According to Severin, they’ve since become unbearable.
I left after a few weeks. He stayed.
He now spends sixteen hours a day working in a restaurant, and even the flat that came with the job has lost its appeal. The owners have suggested he share it with three other young waiters, each expected to pay an exorbitant rent. Rooms are scarce in Taormina, they say.
Watching from afar, I realise the place isn’t really for me.
Give me the Taormina where writers, poets, artists and photographers arrived on the backs of flea-bitten donkeys and drank cheap wine in tiny houses with compacted earth floors.
Give me Alfio, paid peanuts to work in a hotel whose rooms now cost five times what I paid only weeks ago. The same Alfio who took us where the locals ate, introduced us to the Taormina hidden behind the postcards, and preferred the company of ordinary people to wealthy tourists.
Give me the sweaty boys chasing a football across a dusty patch of wasteland, before somebody decides it would make the perfect site for another luxury boutique hotel.
Severin won’t last the summer.
Sooner or later, he’ll leave Sicily in search of something better.
I’m tempted to invite him to Verona. But that would test Signora Bruschi’s generosity.
The First Twink …
“Adam, as in Adam and Eve. I think he was the first twink and he was definitely a power bottom. The snake of it all in the garden is sus to me.” – Grant Gibbs
Adam in Paradise. Kristian Zahrtmann (2020)
On the cute and willing…
Ruslan Danilchenko. Photographed by Kiana Beijleveld
“Thus began a friendship entirely different from any Gordon had known before. He did not know what his real sentiments were; he did not even attempt to analyse them. He only knew that when he was with Morcombe he was indescribably happy. There was something in him so natural, so unaffected, so sensitive to beauty. After this Morcombe came up to Gordon’s study nearly every evening, and usually Foster left them alone together, and went off in search of Collins.
“Indeed this friendship, coupled with his admiration for Ferrers, was all that kept Gordon from wild excesses during the dark December days and the drear opening weeks of the Easter term. During the long morning hours, when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure, and forget for a while the doubts and disappointments that overhung everything in his life. At times he would sit in the big window-seat, when the school was changing class-rooms, and as he saw the sea of faces, some big, some small, who had drifted with the stream, and had soon forgotten early resolutions and principles in the conveniently broadminded atmosphere of a certain side of Public School Life, he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same, no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the only unforgivable sin – to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy. In his excitement he might perhaps forget a little.”
I have never quite understood what all the fuss was about.
When The Loom of Youth by Alec Waugh was published in 1917, it provoked a minor literary scandal.
Written when Waugh was just seventeen and a half, the novel is both a realistic and romantic portrait of the early twentieth-century British public school system. Through its protagonist, Gordon Caruthers, he explores the complex social hierarchies, academic pressures and personal relationships that shape life at the fictional Fernhurst School.
The novel broke long-standing Victorian taboos by acknowledging the romantic and homosexual attachments that could develop between schoolboys, although by modern standards its treatment is remarkably restrained.
Indeed, the two passages reproduced above are about the only real indication that Gordon Caruthers and his fellow pupil, Morcombe, shared anything approaching a romantic attachment.
Contemporary reviews were, for the most part, favourable, though many cautiously skirted around the subject, resorting to euphemisms such as “immorality”, “decadence”, “sentimental relations” and “unhealthy” adolescent behaviour.
The fiercest opposition came not from the literary press but from conservative periodicals, educational journals and coordinated letter-writing campaigns organised by public school authorities, who regarded the novel as a damaging attack on their institutions.
Waugh depicted a world in which schoolboys cheated, schoolmasters were often out of touch, and both could become easy targets for the casual cruelties of adolescence.
He also challenged the Victorian conviction that team sports—particularly rugby and cricket—instilled the moral character and leadership required to govern the British Empire.
Then there was the schoolboy slang, which horrified many critics and parents, who dismissed the dialogue as vulgar, ungentlemanly and symptomatic of cultural decline.
As Waugh had himself been educated at Sherborne School in Dorset, the school quickly recognised itself as the model for Fernhurst and regarded the novel as a profound betrayal. By exposing the realities of life inside one of England’s elite public schools, Waugh opened institutions that had long been shielded from public scrutiny and, in the process, stirred anxiety among parents and former pupils alike.
Sherborne believed it had little choice but to expel him from its old boys’ association, the Old Shirburnian Society.
Reading it today, it is difficult to see what so alarmed its detractors. What once seemed a shocking exposé now reads as an unusually perceptive, and surprisingly tender, account of adolescence.
“You know I like Archie Pennybet very much indeed. In fact, I think I like him better than anyone else in the world, ‘septing of course my relations.” – Edgar Doe.
One of my recurring frustrations with old books is this.
Every so often, I pick up a novel now regarded as homoerotic and wonder how on earth its first readers failed to notice what was sitting in plain sight.
A second dose from Ernest Raymond’s 1922 First World War novel, Tell England: A Study in a Generation, a book that goes to extraordinary lengths to beat around the bush.
When it was published, the poor dears read it as a patriotic, high-church Anglican tribute to the tragic “lost generation” of British public schoolboys sent to Gallipoli. The lingering focus on male beauty and passionate friendships seems to have passed them by.
You may recall from an earlier post that Raymond himself later openly acknowledged the novel’s homosexual subplot.
The first half of the novel, Five Gay Years of School, introduces the narrator, Rupert Ray, and his classmates as young men who are acutely aware of their own attractiveness, opening one school chapter with Archie Pennybet’s boast: “I’m the best-looking person in this room.” Time and again, they are presented as magnificent, almost perfect creations of God.
At the heart of the story is Rupert’s deeply emotional attachment to his classmate Edgar Doe, who is quite unmistakably homosexual. Their relationship is marked by jealousy, devotion, and emotional intensity that often resembles a love affair far more than ordinary friendship.
“I say, why does Doe avoid us now?”
“The Gray Doe,” sneered Penny. “Oh he – She’s in love, I suppose. With Radley.”
“Don’t drivel,” I commanded. “Why does he hang about with that awful Freedham?”
“When you’re my age, Rupert,” began Penny, in kind and accommodating explanation, “you’ll know that there are such things as degenerates and decadents. Freedom is one. And very soon Doe will be another.”
“Well, hang it,” I said, “if you think that, how can you joke about it, and leave him to go his way?”
“Oh, the young fellow must learn wisdom. And he’s not in any danger of being copped. I’m the only one that suspects, and I guessed because I’m exceptionally brilliant. Besides, if he wants to go to the devil for a bit, you can’t take his arm and go with him.”
“No,” I said, “but you can take his arm and bring him back.”
The schoolmaster, Radley, is described as regarding the boys with a “strong, active love.” Rupert comments: “We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth.”
In the second half of the novel, the boys are sent to Gallipoli. The emotional and physical admiration established during their schooldays evolves into a romanticised martyrdom, where dying beautifully for England becomes the ultimate fulfilment of their youth.
By Jove, Ernest Raymond was clever.
He wrote about male intimacy with remarkable emotional and physical closeness without provoking the censors of the 1920s. Wrapped in high-church religiosity and fervent patriotism, it was accepted by the general public as nothing more than an innocent, heart-rending tribute to fallen soldiers.
‘I will send you a book,’ said Severin. ‘It is a German classic, but I shall make sure you get the English translation. But before you read it, you must promise me one thing: research the dead author first. Then you will understand the sadness behind it.’”
True to his word, a package appeared on the doorstep a few weeks later. Inside was a copy of At the Edge of the Night by Friedo Lampe.
Cut to 2 May 1945. Kleinmachnow, a municipality on the outskirts of Berlin. Hitler has been dead for two days. Soviet troops occupy the capital. Germany is collapsing, and everyone is afraid of what comes next.
A shabbily dressed man walks along the street, shoulders hunched inside clothes that hang too loosely from his thin frame. To suspicious eyes he resembles one of the many fugitives trying to disappear into the chaos of defeat. Two Soviet soldiers stop him and demand identification.
He hands over his papers.
But the photograph shows a sturdier, healthier-looking man. The exhausted figure standing before them looks nothing like it.
The soldiers shoot him dead.
That is almost everything we know about the death of Friedo Lampe — librarian, editor, and novelist — a writer who experienced remarkably little good fortune during his lifetime.
Born in Bremen in 1899, Lampe suffered from bone tuberculosis in his left ankle as a child, leaving him permanently disabled. He studied literature, philosophy, and art history in Heidelberg, Munich, and Freiburg before eventually working as a writer and editor.
His debut novel, Am Rande der Nacht (At the Edge of the Night), appeared in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. Lampe later remarked that the book had been “born into a regime where it could not breathe.” Writing to a friend shortly after publication, he confessed: “What do you think of it now it’s in print? Very shocking? I’m worried.”
He had every reason to be.
The Nazis quickly placed the novel on their list of “damaging and undesirable writings.” Its dreamy nocturnal atmosphere, homoerotic undertones, and depiction of a relationship between a Black man and a German woman were enough to condemn it. Copies were seized; many were almost certainly burned.
Yet even then, perceptive readers recognised its brilliance. Hermann Hesse admired the novel in 1933 and later wrote that what had struck readers “as so beautiful and powerful has not paled… it proves itself with the best, and captivates and delights just as then.”
Lampe continued writing despite censorship and growing political danger. After working for Hamburg’s public library, he moved to Berlin in 1937 to work as an editor for Rowohlt. His prose ballad Das dunkle Boot (The Dark Boat) appeared in 1936, followed by the novella Septembergewitter (September Thunderstorm) in 1937. Neither achieved significant recognition, and Rowohlt itself was seized by the Nazis in 1939.
Throughout the war Lampe lived in quiet fear. Under Paragraph 175, homosexuality remained criminalised, and gay men faced surveillance, arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to concentration camps. Lampe, himself homosexual, lived cautiously and privately. In 1943 he narrowly escaped catastrophe after being blackmailed by a male prostitute in Berlin; only the intervention of his publisher’s lawyer prevented the affair from escalating into a criminal case.
Friends described him as reserved rather than solitary: a chain-smoker, obsessive reader, and compulsive buyer of books. “It really is an illness with me,” he once admitted. “I simply must buy every book, even when I don’t have the money.”
Misfortune seemed to pursue him relentlessly.
“I never had much luck with books,” Lampe remarked bitterly in 1944. The previous year an air raid had destroyed his Berlin apartment and with it his vast personal library. Two weeks later another bombing raid destroyed the Leipzig printing works preparing a new volume of his stories, Von Tür zu Tür (From Door to Door). In 1944 he was conscripted into the German Foreign Office, where he worked analysing intercepted enemy communications.
Then came the end of the war — and his senseless death on a roadside in Kleinmachnow.
Lampe was buried beneath a simple wooden cross bearing the words: Du bist nicht einsam — “You are not alone.”
For decades he remained little more than a literary footnote. Am Rande der Nacht was republished in expurgated form in 1949, 1955, and 1986, with supposedly offensive passages removed. Only in 1999, the centenary of Lampe’s birth, did the first complete unexpurgated edition finally appear.
That restoration transformed his reputation.
Modern German critics increasingly came to regard Am Rande der Nacht as one of the great lost novels of the Weimar era: lyrical, melancholic, cinematic, and unlike anything else produced in Germany at the time. Lampe’s readership steadily grew into something close to a cult following. His collected letters were published in 2018; an English translation of At the Edge of the Night finally appeared in 2019, introducing him to a wider audience decades after his death. Johann-Günther König’s long-overdue biography followed soon after.
Today Friedo Lampe occupies the strange position reserved for certain artists: neglected in life, cherished in retrospect. The writer once condemned and erased by the Nazis is now included in The Oxford Companion to German Literature and discussed as an important rediscovered voice of twentieth-century German fiction. Perhaps that is the consolation history occasionally offers — that literature can outlive the regimes, prejudices, and accidents that once tried to silence it.
“Spendid, perfectly splendid!” replied the Colonel. “Eighteen, by Jove! You’ve timed your lives wonderfully, my boys. To be eighteen in 1914 is to be the best thing in England. England’s wealth used to consist in other things. Nowadays you boys are the richest thing she’s got. She’s solvent with you, and bankrupt without you. Eighteen, confound it! It’s a virtue to be your age, just as it’s a crime to be mine. Now, look here” – the Colonel drew up his chair, as if he were going to get to business – “look here. Eighteen years ago you were born for this day. Through the last eighteen years you’ve been educated for it. Your birth and breeding were given you that you might officer England’s youth in this hour. And now you enter upon your inheritance. Just as this is the day in the history of the world so yours is the generation. No other generation has been called to such grand things, and to such crowded, glorious living. Any other generation at your age would be footling around, living in a shallow existence in the valleys, or just beginning to climb a slope to higher things. But you” – here the Colonel tapped the writing-table with his forefinger – “you, just because you’ve timed your lives aright, are going to be transferred straight to the mountain-tops. Well, I’m damned. Eighteen!”
The passage is taken from Tell England: A Study in a Generation, a novel written by Ernest Raymond and published in February 1922 in the United Kingdom. Its themes are the First World War and the young men sent to fight it. The body of the novel is divided into two halves (or “books”), both narrated by Rupert Ray. The first book tells the story of his and his friends’ progress through school; while the second deals with the experiences of (specifically) Ray and his friend Edgar Doe during the war.
Forty-five years after the novel’s publication, Raymond wrote: “Another thing that is a cause of wonder to me as I re-read the book is the indubitable but wholly unconscious homosexuality in it,” since “‘homosexuality’ was a word which — absurd as this seems now — I had never heard.”
Fate is inscrutable, chance is unreadable, and circumstance is unfathomable. No one knows what he may one day suffer. The private sorrows of Sir James Barrie illustrate the insecurity of mortal happiness. Life has bestowed on him fame without stint and wealth without measure. All over the world his plays are spouting money as a gusher spouts oil. Riches pursue him day and night. He cannot escape from the golden rivers. But fame and fortune do not exempt him from the furtive blows of fate. Of his four foster-sons, Michael Llewelyn Davies was the best beloved. On the eve of his twenty-first year he perishes like Milton’s Lycidas. The witless unreason of the tragedy shocks us. Is there a grudge against glory, a spite against fame, a vendetta against dazzling fortune? Is there immunity in obscurity?
Hollacombe Court was a typical new-build apartment complex just off the Uxbridge Road. Four six-storey blocks stood around a large courtyard, entered through a gated archway at one end or via doors at the base of each stairwell. It was elegant without pretension and suited young professionals who preferred life beyond the city.
Elian—meaning God has answered—was of Iberian descent, though born in Dartford, and he had never considered moving to Spain. He had arrived at Hollacombe Court that summer and quickly became known to residents whose windows overlooked the courtyard. In his twenties, he might easily have been called handsome, and his athletic build drew the curious attention of anyone in search of an eligible bachelor.
He spent most summer evenings in the courtyard, with its cream flagstones, raised flowerbeds, and central water feature. He was often found sitting or stretched across one of the dozen stone benches set into the planted borders. He seemed to favour the one nearest the fountain, where water slipped between the fingers of the Greek god Zeus and fell into a circular pool below. Whether any of the residents could have named the statue, however, was open to question.
This was how Elian came to the notice of those living at Hollacombe Place.
Most assumed he had finished work, eaten, and chosen to pass the remaining hours of the evening outdoors with a book. That, above all, was what people noticed. While others switched on the television, Elian could almost always be seen reading. What he read remained a mystery, as few residents used the courtyard, leaving him—more often than not—undisturbed.
To those who glanced out, Elian had become a fixture. His presence lent a quiet reassurance. If, by chance, he was absent, it stirred a faint unease, as though something were amiss. Many had even taken to checking for him several times over the course of an evening. When darkness fell, it became customary to watch him close his book and make the short walk back into his block, though no one knew which apartment was his.
But there were those at Hollacombe Court who watched Elian for more selfish reasons. Had you challenged them, they would have denied it, yet it was hard to ignore that they had fallen in love with him—his Mediterranean looks, olive skin, and thick, black hair. On hot, humid days, they took particular pleasure in seeing him in football shorts, his six-pack on show, his long, smooth legs stretched out before him.
Elian enjoyed those evenings because he was an avid reader, with a particular fondness for novels, and for that reason he never felt lonely. He could summon characters from any book he had read; they were his companions.
His favourite writers were Lee Child, Alan Hollinghurst, and Colm Tóibín, and he often imagined himself as the protagonist in their novels. He had also discovered the work of André Aciman and Tim Parks, whose books stirred his imagination in different ways. When he finished a novel, he placed it carefully on his bookshelf, arranged by author and in order of publication. The classics, however, held little appeal; he found them too dour and overly wordy for his taste.
But reading aside, there was another reason Elian liked to sit in the courtyard.
Reading in full view of so many people made him feel connected. He knew they watched him, desired him even, and he welcomed the attention. He wanted to belong to a society that saw only his outward form; his need for acceptance was universal. Being seen confirmed his existence and importance, satisfying a deep psychological need for belonging. At times, he wondered whether this desire to be observed was a way of compensating for a lack of inner confidence.
And he was able to do this without interference. He liked that people looked at him yet respected his solitude. This paradox became a careful balance between the social need for validation and the personal need for quiet, self-reflection, and protection. He wanted the thrill of being in the spotlight, but also the safety of anonymity. When alone, Elian was answerable to no one, and in that freedom he could exist without fear of judgement.
And so the summer passed in a kind of quiet contentment. Elian with his books, and the curious residents of Hollacombe Court satisfied to watch over him.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 