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My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Pianophilia


Severin introduced me to the works of German classical pianist Julius Asal. I am ‘polyjamorous’ which is an engaging way to describe me as someone who enjoys multiple, diverse music genres. Either that, or I am ‘genre fluid’. I can listen to almost anything but I must confess to finding classical piano a bit tedious. But Severin shocked me more than anything. He rarely listens to anything but R&B hip-hop, but swears he loves Asal’s music. I’m not convinced. I think it’s a classic case of being entirely enamored by the package and not the product.

Queerbaiting


The film textbooks insisted I watch Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist masterpiece Shoeshine (Sciuscià). It was quite charming in the bleakest possible way.

Postwar Rome. Giuseppe and Pasquale, two impoverished shoeshine boys, pool their pitiful earnings to buy a beautiful white horse. Unfortunately, a black-market scam lands them in a brutal, overcrowded juvenile reformatory, where the system proceeds to turn their devotion into a spectacular mess of betrayal, jealousy and tragedy.

The cinema boffins have a field day with the coded queer subtext, particularly a shower scene widely regarded as the homoerotic high point of the film. A bit awkward for De Sica, who acknowledged the element but insisted it was dictated by the reality of the reformatory rather than any desire to explore it.

Then, in a 1971 interview, when asked why he hadn’t developed the theme of “homoerotic love among adolescents”, he offered the following charming explanation: “Because it revolted me.”

That put a dampener on the after-film discussion.

Defiance


Published in Berlin between 1896 and 1932, Der Eigene (roughly, “The Self-Possessed”) is widely regarded as the world’s first gay magazine. Founded by Adolf Brand, it began life as an anarchist publication before turning its attention to male beauty, same-sex love and what it rather grandly called “manly culture”.

Inspired by Max Stirner’s anarchist classic The Ego and Its Own, the magazine attracted an impressive cast of contributors, including writers Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Erich Mühsam and John Henry Mackay, alongside artists such as Wilhelm von Gloeden and Sascha Schneider. Not exactly a niche publication without literary connections.

Subscribers also gained membership of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of Self-Owners), a discussion group intended to offer solidarity and protection against blackmail. Women, however, need not apply.

The magazine operated under the watchful eye of authorities who were less than enthusiastic about its interests in male nudity and personal advertisements of an allegedly indecent nature. Brand himself was convicted of distributing obscenity in 1922. Apparently, celebrating the male form was not always considered a respectable pastime.

The end came with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Brand’s home was raided, his materials confiscated, and Der Eigene was silenced for good. For more than three decades, however, it had helped make a little space for gay culture in a world determined to keep it out of sight.


Unfiltered


I finally got round to watching Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), the film that scandalised audiences with its raw, unapologetic portrait of New York teenagers behaving as though tomorrow was a rumour.

Judging by the Letterboxd reviews, it still has the power to horrify. Apparently, I’m immune to the outrage. Or perhaps just unfiltered.

I loved it.

Shot in a loose, documentary-style aesthetic, Kids feels less like a conventional film than an afternoon you’d rather not have witnessed. At its centre is Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a seventeen-year-old who makes a sport of seducing virgins, treating sex as a conquest and other people as collateral damage.

Then there’s Jennie, a teenage girl who discovers she’s HIV-positive and races across New York to find Telly before he can put other girls at risk. What follows is a headlong descent into nihilism, drug and alcohol abuse, casual violence and a spectacular absence of adult supervision. Good times, then.

Beneath the grime is a fascinating portrait of male group dynamics: the posturing, the need for approval, the casual cruelty and the almost religious importance of impressing your mates. Female partners are disposable; male approval is everything.

The film’s legacy is hardly less troubling. Its young, largely inexperienced cast reportedly received little protection from the material they were asked to inhabit, and the subsequent deaths of actors Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter lend the film an especially grim afterlife.

Kids remains ugly, uncomfortable and morally bleak. But that’s precisely the point. It doesn’t ask us to approve of these boys. It asks us to look at them. And, judging by the continuing outrage, plenty of people would rather look away.

On the Cute and the Willing

Photograph by Walter Jenkel (2026)

Hypermasculinity, but make it submissive. Tactical gear, exposed skin, defined abs and a gaze less a threat than an invitation. The homoerotic tension. All that violence and control, softened by a body that is at ease being looked at. Masculinity as spectacle; vulnerability as seduction. The male form, offered up for consumption. Less alpha male, more please perceive me. The male gaze has entered the chat, and he can stay.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Hindsight


The week that my post on Jonathan Brandis made social media sit up. In other words, it was an unexpected success.

What is this obsession with dead guys?

I keep asking myself that question.

I’ve seen a lot of death.

Far more than anybody understands.

I’m not talking about family or friends. I’m talking about people I never knew.

It is an unhealthy addiction from which abstinence is not an option.

For a start, dead guys are more interesting than living ones.

I like researching their lives. Trying to piece together who they were, and form my own conclusions about how and why they died.

The strange thing is that I have this ridiculous notion that I might somehow have been able to save them.

It is a burden I shouldn’t have to carry.

There is a term for it.

Hindsight bias.

I’m looking at the past with information I only have now because the event has already happened. My brain rewrites history, convincing me that I should have seen the warning signs. That I should have known. That I might have done something.

But I couldn’t have done any of those things because I never knew them.

And often, they died before I was even born.

I explained all this to someone who asked about the increasing frequency of my ‘dead guy’ posts.

They didn’t understand.

They thought I was weird.

But in their attempt to get me committed to an asylum, they may also have stumbled upon something.

“It is a misplaced extension of your love and responsibility for them. You wish you could have been their protector, even against the odds.”

Byron


Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Lord Byron has crept into my psyche.

Somewhere between Venice, poetry and beautiful young men, I find myself becoming rather too interested in a dead man. My loins have developed a historical imagination.

Byron embodied his own creations: brooding, melancholic, rebellious, mysterious. He turned his life into a kind of living poem — and surrounded himself with a close-knit circle of younger, adoring companions whom he likened to the Theban Band, the ancient Greek military unit composed of male lovers.

And then there were the boys.

John, the choirboy — “violent though pure love and passion.”

Eustathius, the volatile Greek youth.

Nicolo, the fourteen-year-old Franco-Greek beauty.

And Loukas, the agonising, unfulfilled love.

It all begins to feel less like biography and more like fever dream.

So here I am, wandering through Venice in search of Byron.

I’ve gone looking for Byron and discovered that Byron was looking for me.

Noctambulate


I like walking late at night.

Swallowing the shadows. The darkness.

Just gentle water and silence. A whole city asleep.

For a while, I become a ghost. An observer moving through streets that belong to no one.

The emptiness feels like a temporary pause from life. No demands. No noise. Nothing expected of you.

And strangely, you’re never afraid.

Not even when you turn a corner into a dark calle and suddenly find someone standing there.

You just keep walking.


Villain


I realised that more people don’t like me than do.

Lately, the air has shifted, and the echoes returning to me are all wrong.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the eyes of someone —a sudden, freezing clarity. They didn’t see a cautious soul trying to navigate a loud world. They saw something cold. They saw a calculated, arrogant silence. To them, my hesitation is a snub. My quietness is a judgmental withdrawal.

For years, I assumed the growing crowd of people who disliked me did so because I wasn’t enough—not funny enough, not present enough, not bright enough. Now, I see the truth is far more unsettling. They hate a version of me that I have never met. They are reacting to a loud, imposing stranger who wears my clothes and speaks with my voice, but possesses none of my intent.

They have already written the script, and I am the villain, completely unaware of my own lines.


Kid 90


Punky Brewster had hundreds of hours of personal and archival video footage, audio tapes and diaries from her teenage years. This documentary brings it all back: partying, friendships, adolescent romance — and the darker side of early notoriety. Substance abuse. Suicide. The unfiltered chaos of the 1990s set against stark, quiet interviews in the present day. Kid 90 is a jolting reminder that we could be bad in our youth. And some of us will get older.


Secret


That famous line from The Killers:

You had a boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year.

It makes me feel a bit guilty.

Maybe because it reminds me of the opening line of my favourite book:

Last night I fell out with Amy when she caught me sucking off her boyfriend under the table.

There’s a lot of sexual ambiguity going on here.

Who looks like whom? Who is doing what to whom? And, more importantly, why does all of this somehow feel completely normal?

It’s all very early-2000s indie boy meets literary sexual confusion.

I’m here for it.


Tease


Sometimes it feels like Venice is playing a game with you.

I’m not remotely interested in playing, but neither do I want to leave.

Perhaps that is the game.

It teases you with beauty, then hides it. Gives you a glimpse of something extraordinary, only to turn a corner and disappear.

You follow anyway.

You always follow.

Elsinore


I was fortunate enough to see Andrew Scott in the premiere of Elsinore.

For me, he’s one of those actors who has always been around. Never out of work. Consistently good. Completely underrated.

Is this the performance that finally earns him an Oscar?

Bloody hell, he was good!

I’ve read a few reviews, and there are some Nix Negatives out there. But if I’m glued to a film from start to finish, then it must be doing something right.

I don’t need a chorus of critics to tell me what I’ve just witnessed.

Sometimes, you just know.


On the Cute and the Willing

Zach Duncan. Photo by Retina Conspiracy (2026)

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.

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

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Rimbaud Still Prods Me Up the Bum


Most of us live to old age and never achieve the notoriety that Arthur Rimbaud did. He was only thirty-seven when he died, minus a leg, in 1891.

I like a bit of Rimbaud.

I even like his poetry.

We are stuck, however, with the knowledge that this raw, untamed youth, this rebellious genius, was, in truth, a bit of a ‘dirty arse’. And yet we gaze at Étienne Carjat’s iconic 1871 portrait, taken when Rimbaud was only seventeen, and lust after the boy with the wild, uncombed hair, slightly crooked tie and defiant stare.

Why wouldn’t we admire someone who, in that same year, penned the Sonnet of the Arsehole — originally titled L’Idole, or Le Sonnet du Trou du Cul — that gloriously obscene little collaboration with Paul Verlaine? Rimbaud wrote the opening quatrains; Verlaine supplied the tercets.

Rimbaud still prods me up the bum from time to time.

The latest occasion is the result of a new three-hour biopic, A. Rimbaud, written, co-produced and directed by American independent filmmaker Patrick Wang.

The chances of seeing it seem fairly remote, given its slow-burn release schedule.

Australian actor Blake Draper plays Rimbaud in what appears to be almost a one-man film.

“Utterly captivating to watch, in no small part because Draper balances theatrical expressiveness with nuance for the movie camera,” writes Variety.


Before He Was Gone


I managed to watch Profumo di donna (1974), the last film made by the Italian actor Alessandro Momo before his tragic death in a motorbike accident.

Its English title was Scent of a Woman. The film received two Oscar nominations and would later become the direct inspiration and source material for the much better-known 1992 American remake starring Al Pacino and Chris O’Donnell.

You might recall that Momo was only seventeen and not legally permitted to ride a motorcycle. The bike’s owner, 21-year-old actress Eleonora Giorgi, was investigated over the circumstances surrounding his death but was never indicted, having reportedly been told by Momo that he was 21.

I now have two observations.

First, Momo looked tiny, although there appear to be no reliable details about his height. One piece of information I came across suggests that he was actually a normal-height, slender adolescent rather than someone of unusually short or “tiny” stature.

Second, Momo looked about twelve years old. He certainly didn’t look 21, as he had apparently told Giorgi.

But what a handsome little devil he was.

I couldn’t help feeling sad watching him, knowing that just days after completing the film he would be dead. Never to grow old. Never to become the actor he might have become. There is something particularly poignant about seeing someone so young on screen when you know that their entire adult life has already been taken away from them.

Something else annoyed me, and it is something I have noticed in quite a few old Italian films: the way the dialogue was dubbed in post-production.

It always comes across as rather obvious—and often strangely awkward. The voices seem to exist slightly apart from the people speaking, as though everyone has been dubbed after the fact, which, of course, they were.

A bit of research suggests that the practice had roots in the Fascist regime’s attempts to eliminate regional dialects in favour of “standard” Italian. Dubbing subsequently became deeply embedded in Italian filmmaking, for a whole variety of practical and artistic reasons.

In Profumo di donna, Momo was dubbed by Sandro Acerbo, who would go on to have a very successful career as a voice actor.

So there I was, watching a fifty-something-year-old film, admiring an impossibly handsome seventeen-year-old actor, being irritated by the dubbing, and all the while knowing that the young man on the screen had only a few days left to live.

Cinema can be a rather strange thing.


A Man On My Bed


I walked into my room and found Joey Stefano naked on my bed. Actually it was a copy of Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano by Charles Isherwood that was published in 1996. 

It makes it a very old book in my eyes.

I don’t want to say too much about Joey Stefano because it will spoil things for next week.

But, you will have surmised from the title that he is dead.

My friend David put me onto Joey Stefano.

“The two of you would have been most incompatible,” he suggested. “He wasn’t called the ‘hungry bottom’ for nothing.”


For the Only English Person I Know


Luigi Bevilacqua, that elegant old gentleman, left me a gift, carefully wrapped in green floral Tassotti paper and tied with gold-coloured string.

It was a small book in a blue cloth case binding.

If I considered the book about Joey Stefano to be very old, then this book was absolutely ancient.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

This particular English-language edition was published in 1909.

“Luigi sells second-hand books in Veronetta,” said Signora Bruschi. “He found this copy in a storeroom and will find it hard to sell.”

There was a handwritten card inside.

“Per l’unica persona inglese che conosco.”

For the only English person that I know.


The Algorithm Did Well


Scrolling through my phone because I’m bored, and the Al Gore-ithms point me towards 17-year-old Corin Altemus, who is a multidisciplinary artist. Yes, I had to look that up as well.

Altemus spends long periods being bored too, and turns to YouTube to talk about whatever happens to pop into his head. He slaps. I could watch and listen to him all day. I could probably talk with him all day too.

His Instagram feed is full of his artwork. It all looks good, although I don’t actually understand any of it. But tucked in amongst the art are a few random poems.

“Dumb stuff I wrote this morning,” he says.

Totally up my street

Corin Altemus YouTube


On the Cute and the Willing

Actor Spike Fearn who leans leans into messy, relatable roles. Loose-limbed, charming and raw.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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I Hope It Won’t Come to This



September already, and my thoughts turn towards autumn and what might lie ahead.

It is also a time to reflect, to take a deep breath and see out the year. Autumn is when everything changes, and this year the changes promise to be greater than most.

I am selling my apartment in the UK, although I’m told it won’t be as easy as I make it sound. There are simply too many apartments for sale. It isn’t that I’ve fallen out with Britain. I still miss its grey mornings, familiar streets, and the quiet comfort of knowing where everything is. But I seem to have spent more time away than in it, and returning now feels less like coming home than visiting a life I once expected to keep.

The apartment is full of Charlie’s absence. Every room holds some small reminder: a mug left in the wrong place, a coat I can’t bring myself to move, the shape of a shared routine that has vanished. Selling it would mean letting go of more than bricks and furniture. It would mean admitting that Charlie has disappeared from my life—and that I have been preserving a home for someone who is no longer coming back.

“Don’t worry,” says Deej. “I have a spare room where you can stay… as long as you want.”

There was a hint of desperation in his voice.

His flat is in London. I like London, but perhaps only because I have always been able to leave it behind. And Deej happens to be the untidiest person in the world. He will also want to wear all my clothes. More importantly, he knows that a month’s rent from me would cut his own rent by half. What I would pay him would still be more than I currently pay for my mortgage.

“Thanks, Deej,” I said. “That’s something to consider.”

I hope it won’t come to this.

Anyone’s Ghost


We know that Jake is going to die. We know that Jake is going to die in a car crash. We know from the beginning of Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson that this intoxicating teenage idol is going to be a problem.

Charismatic, effortlessly cool, and deeply reckless.

We inherit Theron’s all-consuming crush.

“It took three car crashes to kill Jake,” writes Thompson, and knowing his fate we hold onto him tightly. He is fragile and precious. He is often selfish, manipulative, and deeply confused. We fall for him because, underneath his cool exterior, Jake is just as lonely and broken by depression as Theron is, chasing a sense of oblivion he can never quite outrun. 

Word came from Verona



Signora Scala’s Dutch lodger had arrived for the month of September. The young dancer was in Verona for a month, performing with a contemporary dance company at the Teatro Romano, and was supposed to be staying with Signora Bruschi’s neighbour.

There was an immediate problem.

Cola and Bianchi could hardly wait to tell me.

The boy had been in the house barely five minutes when Signora Scala came running to Signora Bruschi.

“He cannot stay,” she cried.

“Why ever not?”

She made the sign of the cross.

“È chiaramente omosessuale.”

“My mother wants to know if you will allow him to stay in your rooms,” Cola asked.

I wasn’t really in a position to say no.

“As you say in English, the boy is very camp,” said Cola.

“But he is very handsome and athletic,” Bianchi added.

The Art of Falling Asleep


“What did you think of the movie?” asked Deej.

We had found a cinema in Paris showing Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Bitter Christmas, with English subtitles.

“What did you think of the movie?” Deej asked as we left the cinema.

“I think I need to see it again,” I said, rather sheepishly.

“Yes,” Deej agreed. “There was a lot happening, and I need to digest it all again.”

Deej stopped to take a photograph of the poster, which would soon appear on his Instagram page accompanied by some knowing comment designed to make him appear more intelligent than he actually was.

It was time for me to confess.

“That’s not what I meant. I fell asleep. When I woke up, I had absolutely no idea what was happening.”

A Face for Radio


Classical Music?

Not sure about it, if I’m honest.

But I’m prepared to change.

And I might have to learn French, too.

After stumbling across a photograph of Hippolyte Pérès, I searched for him on France Musique, the French public radio station, where he is the new co-host of its breakfast programme, Musique Matin.

At twenty-one or twenty-two, he is one of the station’s youngest presenters.

There’s an old saying that some people have a face for radio. It means, of course, that they’re pig ugly.

Not the case here.

And what a story so far.

From the age of eight, he trained in classical dance, and two years later passed the entrance examination for the Paris Opera Ballet School, where he spent four years training as a petit rat.

An injury eventually forced him to give up dancing.

At nineteen, he began presenting specialist music programmes for France Musique, while also earning academic qualifications at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po.

Easy on the eye, bubbly, and presumably someone the station hopes will appeal to a younger generation.

All very impressive.

But I still don’t understand the majority of what he says.

A Bit of Spanish


Deej and I watched another movie this week.

It was a Spanish film called Romería, in which a young woman travels to Vigo to meet the family of her biological father, who died of AIDS, as did her mother, when she was very young.

But let’s cut to the chase.

There was a hot guy in it.

Deej frowned when I mentioned this.

He calls it my ‘Halo Effect’.

Apparently, I see someone who is physically attractive and immediately assume that they are kind, intelligent, funny and trustworthy — even when there is absolutely no evidence to support any of it.

The guy in question is the Spanish singer and actor Miguel Martín de Bustamante, known simply as Mitch.

We all like a bit of Spanish inside us sometimes.

I found his Instagram page.

‘Destroy thee expected,’ it says.

There’s something raw and authentic about him. A touch of vulnerability. A certain anti-fashion aesthetic. Away from television and movies, he’s a bit of a rock star, influenced by the punk of The Sex Pistols and the glam of David Bowie.

I could mention that he was also inspired by Elvis Presley, but that rather spoils everything.

Deej called him ‘angsty’.

Which, in my eyes, only makes him more attractive.

The Taste of a Kiss

I found a scrap of paper in my notebook on which I had written the following:

“If God or whoever is above exists, I hope he saw us tonight. Because I truly believe in that magic we spoke about tonight, kept safe in rooms like ours, lost rooms around the world, between strangers or people who’ve known each other the whole life, hope that they felt the same feeling we’ve felt, the true feeling wich shakes the heavens, that belongs to everyone, the same, everywhere around the world, like colors, the taste of a kiss between two people, that hasn’t other names, just one (…) buona notte.” Good Night.

I quite like it.

Actually, I think it’s beautiful.

And I cannot claim any credit for it.

On the Cute and the Willing

Igby Rigney. Photograph by Myles Pettengill (2026)

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Two Camus

Cool. Only one word to describe them.

The famous booksellers along the River Seine are known as les bouquinistes. Together, they form the world’s largest open-air book market, turning the banks of the Seine into a cultural landmark once described as “the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves.”

Apparently, the boîtes have to be painted Vert Wagon — Carriage Green — the same colour traditionally used for Parisian park benches, railings and Morris columns.

Deej wanted to see every single one.

Strange, really, considering he can’t understand a word of French.

“I want to buy things I can display around my flat,” he said.

The tradition of open-air bookselling dates back to the sixteenth century, when mobile peddlers sold pamphlets, engravings and second-hand books from baskets and temporary stalls on the bridges of Paris.

The regulations remain strict, with the emphasis still firmly on vintage print: antiquarian and rare leather-bound books, second-hand French literature and classic translations, old postcards, stamps, historical maps, retro advertising posters and hand-painted engravings.

Deej dragged me past what felt like every stall, stopping to browse hundreds of books.
And after all that, he bought two Albert Camus novels — L’Étranger and La Peste.

Which, given that he can’t read French, he could quite easily have bought on Amazon.


My Vocabulary Needs Work

It’s basically about improving my writing. Every post nudges it somewhere new and, hopefully, slightly more interesting. I sent a sample to David, a man who knows about these things, and asked what he thought.

“Dangerous, slightly absurd, affectionate, sexy in places, and with that very particular Miles-ish ability to notice something completely inappropriate at precisely the wrong moment. But, as someone who feeds on dictionaries and masturbates over a thesaurus, please try and extend your vocabulary.”

Fair enough.

He pointed me towards Tom Read Wilson and his gloriously camp ‘Word of the Day’ posts on Instagram. And honestly? He turned out to be charmingly eccentric, ridiculously articulate, and incredibly camp.

Tom Read Wilson


The Problem with Soungouroffs

“What is the worst thing that can happen to an artist?” asked Philippe Garnier in perfect English.

He was a distinguished gentleman and sat beside me while his golden Labrador chased other dogs around Square Georges Cain. They raced along the circular path with a freedom not usually afforded to them; dogs of every shape and size playing together as though they had temporarily forgotten their differences.

Garnier is an art expert, which seems to be a surprisingly popular profession in Paris.

I know absolutely nothing about art, except that I like certain types of paintings. Usually, those of an explicit and homoerotic nature.

“I shall tell you,” he said. “It is for your work to be attributed to somebody else entirely.”

He showed me an image on his phone. A shirtless young man was lying peacefully in the heat of an afternoon.

“La Sieste,” Garnier explained. “Painted in 1945. Relief, peace and escape from conflict. The work of an Estonian painter called Anatoli Soungouroff. Do you think he is a sailor or a fisherman?”

I studied the boy and liked him.

“He was extremely beautiful,” I said, “and I wouldn’t have cared what he did.”

The dog returned to his master and did a large shit directly in front of us.

Without hesitation, Garnier bent down and scooped it up with a poop bag. He tied the handles without once losing his train of thought.

“Soungouroff moved to France in 1930 and made his creative homes in Paris and Cannes. He became friends with Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard and Roger Peyrefitte. But by the 1960s he was starving. He paid his bar tab at a gay bar, Le Zanzibar, by painting murals of young sailors and gypsies on the walls. One of them was thirty feet long.”

He sounded like a man of my taste and therefore worthy of further investigation.

“The point I am making,” he continued, “is that Soungouroff’s work is often attributed to another painter — Antonin Ivanovich Soungouroff — who was a different artist entirely.”

Garnier went to deposit Baguette’s poop in a nearby bin.

Yes, his dog really was called Baguette.

“But,” he continued when he returned, “if you see a painting of a young male — a fisherman, sailor or harlequin — painted by a Soungouroff, then it will almost certainly be the work of ‘Tola’. Look for the same full lips. The same baggy eyes that reveal secrets.”

I looked again at the young man on Garnier’s phone.

He certainly had lips.

And eyes.

Note:
The “eternal bachelor” was Anatoli Sergeevich “Tola” Soungouroff (1911–1982).


A Little Shelter from the World

Paris at night. Au Café du Marais.

Music plays softly in the background, which Deej describes as ‘folky-wolky’. We are tired, but clink our coffee cups together and agree that we are good friends.

Then the storm clouds gather.

Rain splatters the worn flagstones, tentative at first, then with increasing intensity. The thunder comes next, followed by sudden flashes of lightning and, finally, the great blanket of rain racing down the street towards us.

Soon, the customers are marooned beneath huge umbrellas, huddled together against the deluge. But ours feels the most comfortable, the most welcoming, as though it has been placed there especially for us. A little shelter from the world.

The sky keeps flashing. Thunder rumbles overhead, gathering force until it erupts into cataclysmic explosions. The noise drowns out the music, so the waiter turns it up.

Dylan sings Lay Lady Lay, about some girl lying across a big brass bed.

This old song haunts me wherever I go.

I know very little about Dylan, except that he once looked better than his songs and smelt worse.


Shagdough

“Nah,” said Deej. “Not my scene at all.”

But I made him go to a gay bar anyway.

“Are you shagdough?”

That’s Deej-speak for asking if I’m begging for it.

I show compassion. I take him down a backstreet to a place for older queers, where there is at least a possibility that I might become shagdough.

There is hardly anyone in.

A murderer sits staring at us from a dark corner. An abuser pretends to look at his phone but is really taking sneaky pictures. A kidnapper sings karaoke, thrusts a microphone into our faces and insists that we sing along in French. A mugger offers to buy us expensive drinks.

We’ve exhausted the entire clientele.

I love the danger.

Deej is absolutely shitting himself.


A Straight Faggot

We walked back to the hotel. The streets are wet now, cleansed of people, the city briefly emptied by the storm.

But there are voices in the distance.

Out of sight at first, but getting closer.

Then comes a shrill scream from a flamboyant queen, followed by a high-pitched cackle that seems to echo between the buildings. Four guys turn the corner. Another over-the-top scream, loud enough to wake everyone in the surrounding hotels. Then that awful cackle again.

The others tell him to be quiet, but he is clearly drunk and beyond caring.

They pass us, disappearing into the wet darkness.

Deej turns to me.

“What an annoying faggot! Why can’t he be a straight faggot like you?”


In the Silence & On the Timeline

“I think about you a great deal, and you know this without my needing to tell you, but in the silence and between the lines you must read all the affection I feel for you and all the tenderness stored in my heart.”

From a lost letter from 1936 and written by 38-year-old Federico García Lorca to his lover, Ramírez de Lucas, who was barely 16 at the time. Ramírez de Lucas may have been the lover who inspired Lorca’s ‘Sonnets of Dark Love’.

It now translates as:

me thinking about you 24/7 like it’s literally my full-time job 😭 you already know I’m down bad, so I don’t even need to say it. but pls read between the lines bc there’s actually a ridiculous amount of love and affection in my heart for you rn ❤️‍🩹 

Ramírez de Lucas aged 18, drawn by Gregorio Prieto.

Appetising Young Boys for Sale

Four boys. Boys for sale. They’re going cheap. Only ten euros. That — or thereabouts. Nice boys. Rather pale. Through lack of sleep. Feed them protein shakes. Stop them getting stout. If I should say they weren’t very greedy, I could not, I’d be telling you a tale. Four boys. Boys for sale. Come take a peep. Have you ever seen such nice boys for sale? 


On the Cute and the Willing

Hessel de jong. Photo by Renie Saliba.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Paris, But Make It Complicated

Deej wanted to visit Shakespeare and Company in Paris. For this, I was expected to travel 750 kilometres and hold his hand. It was probably a good idea to leave Verona for a while anyway. There is a lot I can do in Paris, but I prefer to remain elusive, slipping into the city unnoticed.

I met Deej at CDG and we caught the train to Châtelet–Les Halles, from where it was a ten-minute walk to Rue des Gravilliers. As soon as we emerged from the station, it started to pour with rain. I mean, fucking pour. Within minutes we were soaked.

The hotel was easy to miss. It occupied a collection of renovated buildings hidden behind two enormous wooden doors, with no sign to announce that we had arrived. The instructions, however, were perfect. Along a narrow path, up three flights of winding stairs and there it was: our room overlooking a tiny courtyard, with windows facing other windows on the opposite side.

Ivy had taken over the walls. It climbed around the windows, covered some of them completely and seemed intent on swallowing the whole place.

The room was tiny but modern in a very nineties sort of way, and impeccably clean. A huge double bed occupied most of the space, leaving room for a small table and two chairs, a kitchenette and a bathroom that was little more than a cubby hole.

There was an art to taking a shower. There was nowhere to manoeuvre. Drop the shower gel and you were stuffed.

We had both travelled light: the shirts we were wearing, a couple of spare T-shirts and a pair of jeans. Unfortunately, the shirts had already got wet and were now hanging up to dry. Deej had already set his sights on one of my T-shirts and begged to borrow it.

I said no.

The next moment he was wearing it.

Deej, however, liked to sleep and would disappear for hours at a time.

I would wander off to my favourite place: a shaded courtyard filled with ivy and tall bamboo that kept out the sun. It was in almost permanent gloom. After the rain, the place filled with delicious scents and for a moment it seemed like something Gabriel García Márquez might have written in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But this was France, where the heat had been insufferable and relentless.

Deej blamed me for the rain.

Eventually the sun returned, although the courtyard was so heavily shaded that every so often I had to look upwards just to check that it was still shining.

I spent hours reading there.

I finished my Beverley Nichols biography.

Deej cannot understand my fascination with dead people, which might explain why he frequently took to his bed.

Nichols had been one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Look him up if you have never heard of him.

Shortly before his death in 1983, he said:

“Osbert Sitwell said that I was the first of the young bright people and now I am the last of them.”

I would have loved to have been Beverley Nichols. He had been everything I hoped to be.

From time to time I was joined by other guests: Americans, Spanish, Italians and Germans. They all behaved differently, but always with politeness. I would listen to their conversations because strangers can be an invaluable source of inspiration.

There was a Canadian couple with a son called Sam, probably fifteen or sixteen. He was ginger and had marvellous legs.

They sat around a table eating chicken baguettes bought from a local supermarket. The father complained that the bread contained sesame seeds, which seemed to be a disappointment.

“Why do you look like you are sucking dick?” Sam asked in a soft voice.

My ears pricked up.

“My jaw hurts,” his father explained. “Years ago I was eating semi-stale peanut brittle and something snapped. It hurt for a while but eventually the pain went away. Now I sometimes struggle to eat and it looks like I might be sucking dick.”

“Sam, what do you know about sucking dick?” asked a concerned Mommy.


I told Deej that I wasn’t doing the tourist thing. It was out of the question. I hate tourists. I hate the big queues, the clogged pavements and the meaningless photographs taken on phones that will probably never be looked at again. I hate the queues outside Shakespeare and Company, where people wait patiently to buy overpriced books they could probably buy cheaper somewhere else.

I have an urge to kick tourists whenever they get in the way.

I am like the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa, who described active tourism as an expression of restless, unimaginative misery.

Instead, we explored the backstreets of Le Marais, where I learned that the district had once been the floodplain of the Seine. The bourgeoisie moved here in the seventeenth century, encouraged by King Henri IV’s creation of the Place des Vosges, then called Place Royale, between 1607 and 1612. What had once been marshland became the trendiest residential district in Paris.

I explained to Deej that the ground beneath our feet was soaked in blood and the guillotined heads of those same bourgeois.

Like an idiot, he looked down at the pavement to see what I meant.

In the early twentieth century, Le Marais was a bit of a shit show.

The grand houses had been divided into flats. Heavy industry moved into rooms where aristocrats had once danced. It became a no-go area where crime prospered and prostitutes gathered on street corners.

It is hard to imagine that now.

The authorities eventually ploughed money into Le Marais. Its buildings were renovated, its history brought back to life and its streets transformed.

I love Le Marais.

With its beautiful buildings, cafés and pocket parks, it has become one of my favourite districts in Paris.

I must tell you about the handsome French boy who was working at a bar we visited.

He was a picture to be treasured.

Wild dark hair, eyes with a quiet spark, teeth straight and orderly whenever he spoke. There were even a few traces of teenage spots on his cheeks, which somehow added to his appeal.

Deej, who is as straight as they come, was completely uninterested in my infatuation. While I followed the boy’s every movement, Deej noticed a mouse running beneath the tables and chairs. He was so fascinated by it that he failed to notice the dirty looks the boy was giving me.

He made it quite clear that he didn’t like me.

I would like to tell you that we met the boy in the street later. That he was hopelessly drunk and vomiting into the gutter. That we walked past him, looked at each other and laughed at his misfortune.

But we didn’t.

And perhaps that is the problem with real life. It so rarely provides the ending you deserve.

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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The Things That Keep Us Here

I have immense admiration for those who fight invisible battles every day, push through intense pain, and somehow find the strength to rebuild their lives. Their journeys are a reminder that healing is possible, and that even the darkest periods can eventually give way to hope.

I came across Zach Montana on Instagram.

This guy pushes my buttons.

A little digging online reveals that Zach has been open about his mental health struggles following a drive-by shooting at his home. The trauma profoundly affected his well-being, plunging him into severe panic disorder and debilitating insomnia.

Those dark days are there to see online, and they make for disturbing viewing. There is something unsettling about watching somebody caught in the grip of fear, unable to escape his own mind.

The 28-year-old singer and TikTok creator began listening to ambient music in the middle of the night as a way of managing his disorder. There is something strangely intimate about that: the small rituals people invent to get themselves through the hours when sleep refuses to come.


A Boy in Love, Unfortunately …

He’d been pacing around the piazza for, like, an hour, one hand going absolutely feral with the gestures while the other was glued to his phone. Yeah. This boy was down bad. In love, basically.


Michelangelo and Other Bad Ideas …

The handsome carabiniere. Main character energy, but make it literary. Michelangelo, old books & questionable late-night thoughts. Romanticising the chaos since forever.


A Dirty Mind …

Am I the only one who thinks Troye Sivan is dirty?

Not filthy dirty. Seductive dirty.

There is something about the way he moves. Videos like Rush and My My My! are all uninhibited physicality, nightlife sweat and celebratory desire. He looks tough, physical, almost animal-like. There is something raw about it. Something that hints at naughty desires without ever quite spelling them out.

Then there is that wild, untamed intensity. Roguish. Edgy. He has the look of someone who might push a boundary simply to see whether anyone notices.

But perhaps he is dirty in another way.

I imagine a mind that can take an innocent remark and give it an entirely different meaning. A fondness for crude jokes, suggestive words and the sort of playful naughtiness that turns an ordinary moment into something else entirely.

A dirty mind.

Desire used mischievously, perhaps, to heighten the excitement.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Yes.

Troye Sivan is dirty.


Under the Surplice …

Thinking that my agnostic tendencies were showing, Signora Bruschi insisted that I go to Holy Mass with her.

I’d never realised that it was such a social occasion.

Before it started, Signora Bruschi stood outside talking to the dozens of women she knew. They wafted folding fans, complained about the heat, and predicted how hot it would be inside the church. But this was merely the forerunner to what really mattered: the latest gossip from the neighbourhood.

I was a spectator who didn’t quite grasp the conversations, smiling and frowning according to the situation.

My interest waned.

Attention switched to the teenage boys milling around the entrance.

They all favoured crisp white T-shirts with black shorts. They all seemed to dress the same in Italy: bella figura, that cultural obsession with looking effortlessly put together while remaining practical in the intense heat.

Style is treated as a social responsibility rather than a temporary trend. The sharp contrast of clean white against stark black creates an instant athletic frame. The T-shirts are rarely sloppy or oversized, and the shorts typically sit perfectly above the knee.

It is a reliable summer uniform: a neutral canvas for the things that really matter—expensive sunglasses, a luxury watch, pristine trainers.

The boys prodded one another and tried to trip each other up. The same things teenage boys did in every country.

But then they were called to action.

They disappeared through an arched doorway beside the church. One by one, they slipped into white cotte, their black curls making it difficult to tell them apart.

They reappeared as altar servers, suddenly possessed of an air of importance. One carried the processional cross, which he propped against the wall of an adjacent house. The others clutched unlit candles.

And then they waited while everyone went into church.

Cantiamo te, Signore della vita was sung. Don Carlo and the chierichetti walked down the aisle in a serious procession, the processional cross held high and the boys carrying flickering candles.

The tomfoolery had been left outside.

These boys—some happy to be there, others clearly not—were rising to the challenge. For a few minutes, they seemed to understand that something was expected of them and that they were capable of becoming something other than the boys who had been pushing and shoving outside.

And I smiled.

They paraded past, their clothes hidden beneath long white surplices; their true identities given away by flashy new trainers—Nike Air Force 1s, Adidas Sambas and New Balance 550s.

It was the trainers that betrayed them.

Beneath the white cotton, beneath the solemn expressions and the ritual and the incense, they were still those same boys outside the door. The church had given them candles, a cross and a moment of gravity, but it hadn’t managed to take away their swagger.

Perhaps that was what I liked about it. For all its ceremony, Holy Mass had not changed them at all. It had simply given them another costume to wear.


On the Cute and the Willing …

Photo by Paolo Roversi (2026)

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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The Sinti Boy

It was dark by the time we went out, but the heat was still oppressive. The only place left to buy milk was the little corner shop that opened and closed according to the whims of its owners. Nobody knew its hours. There was never any guarantee it would be open.

But Signora Bruschi had panicked. She needed milk for my morning coffee and for Bianchi’s Vitabella Corn Flakes. We could easily have managed without it, but she liked everything to be perfect. At confession, she would probably tell Don Carlo she had forgotten to buy milk and had therefore sinned.

Cola whistled as we walked. He had unbuttoned his shirt because he believed the months spent working for Signor Valenti had transformed him into a young Roman god. After sharing a bed with him for so long, I was inclined to agree. But Bianchi had been moved to the attic, and I was once again sleeping in my own room, with a large bed all to myself.

As we approached Via Cesare Trezza, Cola stiffened. He stopped whistling and buttoned his shirt. A young man stood beneath a streetlight, smoking a roll-up.

“Pezzo di merda,” Cola muttered.

The man had dark skin and closely cropped black hair. He wore jeans and a designer puffer jacket with nothing underneath, exposing his bare chest. His trainers were scuffed but spotless. Silver rings glinted on his fingers, a faded tattoo disappeared beneath the collar of his jacket, and an expensive pair of sunglasses rested on top of his head.

As we drew level, he gave a low, taunting whistle intended for us alone.

“He’s Sinti,” Cola said once we had passed. “He hangs around here. Dangerous. If you ever see him again, cross the street.”

Dangerous, I thought.

But extraordinarily handsome.

A Collector of People

It is all mirrors and smoke screens: the endless quest to protect an identity.

I shared my work with a friend—one of the privileged few—and he recognised the characteristics of people we both know, though inhabiting the wrong bodies.

“I am a collector of people,” I told him. “And it has always been my intention to confuse.”


The Same Quiet Corner 

I love the sun, but the sun does not love me. Shade is essential. It is time to discover whether cool air still exists. A time to slow down, to forget myself for a while and leave the rest of the world behind. Everybody needs a place to disappear.

Most days I come to these steps, where nobody thinks to look for me.

I sit beside carefully tended planters of oleander, bougainvillea and English lavender, the air fragrant with their scent. I drink my coffee in peace. It is silent except for the distant toll of a church bell or the occasional motor scooter threading its way through the alleyways.

Then a young man arrives. He always chooses a place nearby and settles down with a book. No matter what time I come, sooner or later he appears and quietly takes his seat. I ought to resent the intrusion, but I cannot. He is as pale as I am, and I suspect he, too, is a foreigner.

It is a curious thing.

We travel from distant places, only to find the same quiet corner of the world.


Circe’s Gift

Bianchi came up behind me and began ruffling my hair.

“Ti sto trasformando in un maiale,” he said. I’m turning you into a pig.

The display of affection was lost on me.

Later, I discovered that the bond between humans and pigs is forged in Homer’s The Odyssey by the powerful sorceress Circe on the island of Aeaea. When Odysseus’s crew stumble upon her palace, she welcomes them with a meal of cheese, barley, honey, and wine, laced with a potion. After they have eaten, she raises her wand and transforms them into swine, imprisoning them in her pens

Now I am a pig.


The Return of Antinous

People do not understand me. They cannot see why I am drawn to old things. But I am, and I have no idea why. More than anything, I like books about dead people.

At the moment I am reading a biography of Beverley Nichols, the English writer, playwright and broadcaster who died in 1983.

It is a banger.

His longing for intense, sometimes masochistic homosexual encounters existed alongside the refined, middle-class domesticity he cultivated in his bestselling memoirs.

Rather like me.

I would happily live my life as Beverley Nichols did, though I could do without the growing old part.

Which brings me to Antinous, the beautiful young Greek whose love affair with the Emperor Hadrian made him immortal. A statue of Antinous stood for decades in the gardens of Nichols’s house, Allways, in Glatton.

Nichols had bought the statue from Henry “Bogey” Harris, the wealthy London aesthete and art collector who lived in Bedford Square.

“Antinous would be much happier living in the Huntingdonshire countryside than at Bedford Square in London,” Nichols declared.

When Nichols sold the house, Antinous was left behind.

In the 1960s, the new owner ordered the statue to be removed. “One could clearly see his man parts and his bottom!” she complained.

It was thought to have been destroyed.

Imagine my delight to discover that, only a few years ago, Antinous was found abandoned in an overgrown corner of the garden. Restored to his former beauty, he now stands once more in his rightful place, gazing back towards the house below.

On the cute and willing…

Jonathan Kranebitter