“It seemed as though it was happening to somebody else. He heard the rattle of German machine guns and believed they were aimed elsewhere. He pitied the unfortunate comrades who fell into the mud and filthy water, yet silently thanked the Lord that it was them and not him. Surely He had made him immune to this brutal enemy. He was too young to die.
“Then his tunic exploded before his eyes. Chunks of blood, cloth and gore splattered across his chest and stomach like enormous raindrops. There was no pain. Not at first. Then came the realisation that these were the very bullets meant for somebody else. After that came the searing pain—sharp, sudden, inexplicable. His insides had exploded. The Lord had deserted him after all.
“Those were his final thoughts as he fell to his knees: that he was going to die, and his secret would remain with him on the banks of the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors.“
*****
I am one of those who subscribes to the view that the poet was homosexual. Others, of course, suggest otherwise. His connections with a homosexual literary circle that included Siegfried Sassoon, Robbie Ross, Osbert Sitwell and Scottish writer C.K. Scott Moncrieff is well documented.
The truth of the matter died with Owen at Ors in November 1918.
Wilfred Owen had only five poems published during his lifetime. The vast majority of his work was published posthumously, much of it written between August 1917 and September 1918 during his stay at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh and a subsequent period in Scarborough.
One such poem, Who Is the God of Canongate?, is believed to have been written at Scarborough in November 1917, when Owen joined the Manchester Regiment, billeted at the Clarence Gardens Hotel (now the Clifton Hotel), where he spent much of his free time writing in a turret bedroom.
The poem has often been interpreted as an evocation of male prostitution in Canongate, Edinburgh, and Covent Garden, London, collectively represented as a “little god” who walks the pavements barefoot. This “lily-lad” is visited up “secret stairs” by men who “lift their lusts and let them spill”.
Did Owen write from experience? Or had he merely heard stories that inspired the poem?
Sonnet to Youth (No 1076) Youth, beautiful and daring, and divine, Loved of the Gods, when yet the happy earth Was joyful in its mourning and new birth; When yet the very odours of the brine Love’s cradle, filled with sweetness all the shrine Of Venus, ere these starveling times of dearth, Of priest-praised abstinence, made void of mirth, Had given us water where we asked for wine.
Youth, standing sweet, triumphant by the sea All freshness of the day and all the light Of morn on thy white limbs, firm, bared and bright For conflict, and assured of victory, Youth, make one conquest more; and take again Thy rightful crown, in lovers’ hearts to reign!
Words credited to the artist Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929). From The Artist (1889)
This text appears attached to the entry for Perseus and Andromeda (R121) in Tuke’s Registers. According to Charles Kains Jackson, who later informed the compiler S.E. Cottam, a sonnet published in the 1889 issue of The Artist was written by Henry Scott Tuke. The poem in question is likely the same work; however, the evidence is insufficient to confirm Tuke’s authorship with certainty.
We Two Boys Together Clinging. David Hockney (1961). Its name derives from a poem by Walt Whitman and two lines from it are scribbled to the right. It also references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident – ‘Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night’ which Hockney interpreted as an illusion to his idol, Cliff Richard. (Arts Council Collection)
On the life of David Hockney… A strange thing happened. I mentioned to a friend that I wanted to watch A Bigger Splash — the 1974 documentary about the artist David Hockney, in which his lover of three or four years, Peter Schlesinger, leaves him during filming.
I still hadn’t watched it, and the following day, it was announced that Hockney had died at the age of 88.
The news reminded me of a few years ago when I was given a Hockney print, Two Boys Clinging Together. I made a convincing show of being overwhelmed by it, but the truth was rather different. The print never made it onto the wall; to my eye, it looked like something I might have painted when I was four. His work never entirely won me over.
That said, I have always liked his California pool paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, although nobody has ever bought me one. My favourite is Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), which depicted the 19-year-old Schlesinger climbing from a swimming pool at the Hollywood apartment block where art dealer and gallery owner, Nick Wilder, lived.
I spent a few hours reading about Hockney — a man who, if I am honest, irritated me immensely. His dour Yorkshire monotone seemed at odds with the loud bow ties, red braces and trademark spectacles. He occupied the same corner of my imagination as the writer Alan Bennett; the two could almost have been twins. Yet it is impossible not to admire his courage. He was painting gay love at a time when homosexuality was still effectively illegal in Britain.
America held a particular attraction for him:
“I must admit, I’d begun to be interested in America from a sexual point of view; I’d seen American Physique Pictorial magazines when I first came to London. And they were full of what I thought were very beautiful bodies. I painted Domestic Scene from a photograph in Physique Pictorial, where there’s a boy with a little apron tied around his waist, scrubbing the back of another boy in a rather dingy American room; I thought, ‘That’s what a domestic scene must be like there.’”
But my favourite Hockney quotation comes from David Hockney in Paris, a BBC documentary from 1975:
“Men in white socks are very sexy. White tee-shirts are quite sexy, but not so sexy as socks.”
Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. David Hockney (1966).
Rodney Harvey (1967–1998) was an American actor, dancer, and model celebrated for his appearances in critically acclaimed 1990s films like My Own Private Idaho.
On good looking guys who died young… It is an unhealthy fascination. I have a curious interest in those young guys who left us too soon. I have a list of the unfortunates and will get to them in future posts. But the list is tragically long. There’s something mythic about it. At the height of beauty, talent, or promise, they stop aging while we keep going. They are fixed in our memory and will never change; permanently charged with youth and possibility. Although, there are too many stories where death came about due to self destruction – the doomed poet, the tragic actor and the brilliant addict. I mourn them all and kid myself that if I’d been around them their fate might have been different.
Héraklès Archer – Hercules the Archer . Antoine Bourdelle (1909) .
On a sculptor and a real-life model… I’m not entirely sure I like the sculpture, but I’m fascinated by how it was created. Hercules the Archer (1909), by the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), now exists in several versions, although it was originally commissioned by the financier and philanthropist Gabriel Thomas as a unique work.
Bourdelle modelled the sculpture in clay during the summer of 1909, using his friend Paul Gustave André Doyen-Parigot (1854–1916), a captain in the French Army, as his model. An accomplished sportsman, Doyen-Parigot possessed the physical strength and athleticism required for the pose. The dramatic extension of the body and the intense muscular tension of archery allowed Bourdelle to emphasise the model’s powerful physique.
At Doyen-Parigot’s request for anonymity, however, Bourdelle altered the head, distancing the finished figure from a direct portrait and transforming it into the heroic image of Hercules.
Paul Gustave André Doyen-Parigot modelling for Antoine Bourdelle.
On having childhood regrets… What if I had understood what was happening? What if I had been brave enough to acknowledge it? What might have become of us? Would he still have been my best friend?
Why was I thinking about Darren this week? Perhaps because some questions never quite leave us. When he later discovered that I was gay, he drifted out of my life. We have not spoken since.
On finding a poem about Manly Love… Douglas Malloch (1877–1938) was an American poet, short-story writer and Associate Editor of American Lumberman, a trade paper in Chicago.
Manly Love… Deep in your heart understand the love of a man for a man; He’ll go with you over the trail, the trail that is lonesome and long; His faith will not falter nor fail, nor falter the lilt of his song. He knows both your soul and your sins, and does not too carefully scan,— The Highway to Heaven begins with the love of a man for a man!
– Donald Malloch
The poem is preserved in modern literary history as an early piece of Western gay literature. It is notably featured in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, compiled by Byrne R. S. Fone. It was also collected in historic specialty anthologies such as Men and Boys (edited by Edward Mark Slocum), which curated historical verses exploring Greek love, male friendships, and same-sex devotion across different eras.
He was called Sajjad, and there was something dangerous about him. Rumour had it that he came from Baghdad and had fled to Europe to escape death threats from an armed militia. A man probably in his forties, he sat in the corner of the small bar smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking zammù — a mixture of water and aniseed. He seemed to look at nothing in particular, yet you understood that he heard everything. When he spoke, it sounded almost aggressive, and that frightened most people.
Alfio whispered in our ears: “If that man speaks to you, you must answer politely. Ignore him and he might turn unpleasant.”
And so we pretended that the threat in the corner did not exist.
“Mithli?” the man called Sajjad barked.
We hoped the word was not meant for our ears and ignored him.
“Mithli?” he shouted again, and this time there was no doubt that he was referring to us. His tone was far from friendly.
“Omosessuale? Homosexual?” he growled.
Severin smiled nervously and nodded.
The man called Sajjad looked at us with contempt, and for a moment we expected him to pull out a dagger and slaughter us. Instead, he spat on the floor. Then he slammed his fist against the table, causing his empty glass to topple over and smash on the floor. He jumped to his feet and hurried outside, but as he passed us he grunted a single phrase:
“Abu Nuwas.”
And that was the first time I had ever heard the name.
Afterwards, I wondered whether the man called Sajjad truly hated homosexuals, or whether he had been trying, in some strange way, to show sympathy. Was he imparting knowledge to us? Or was he simply a man of unsound mind?
Later, I discovered who Abu Nuwas was.
Born in Iran to a family of mixed Persian and Arab heritage, Abu Nuwas eventually settled in Baghdad during the late eighth century and became famed for his erotic verse, as well as his love of the debauched and degenerate. He was celebrated as one of the most influential Arabic poets of all time: renowned for his wine and hunting poems, but equally notorious for the profane and provocative imagery he used to subvert the authority of the caliph and mock the excesses of the court.
In one verse he called sodomy the “true jihad”. In another, two young boys fall in love and, instead of praying five times a day, fornicate five times whenever the call to prayer echoes across the city.
In the Muslim world, eroticism was regarded as sinful, while homo-eroticism was considered something beyond the ordinary boundaries of sin. Yet Abu Nuwas wrote without fear of execution or ostracism — and remarkably, that still appears to hold true today.
There is a statue of him in Baghdad, created by the renowned Iraqi sculptor Ismail Fattah Turk. It stands along Abu Nuwas Street on the banks of the Tigris River.
It took a long time for his work to be translated, and not everybody welcomed it. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture reportedly burned around 6,000 copies of Abu Nuwas’s poetry, condemning it as homoerotic and offensive to Islam.
I have since discovered two verses that are perhaps the best known of his so-called “homoerotic” works, and, in the hands of the translator, are distinctly modern. When I read them, I imagine the man called Sajjad reciting them aloud — perhaps choking on the words and spitting on the floor.
Love in Bloom I die of love for him, perfect in every way, Lost in the strains of wafting music. My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body And I do not wonder at his beauty. His waist is a sapling, his face a moon, And loveliness rolls off his rosy cheek I die of love for you, but keep this secret: The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope. How much time did your creation take, O angel? So what! All I want is to sing your praises.
In the Bath House In the bath-house, the mysteries hidden by trousers Are revealed to you. All becomes radiantly manifest. Feast your eyes without restraint! You see handsome buttocks, shapely trim torsos, You hear the guys whispering pious formulas to one another (“God is Great!” “Praise be to God!”) Ah, what a palace of pleasure is the bath-house! Even when the towel-bearers come in And spoil the fun a bit.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 