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

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.