The young man asked me to describe something that I had done during the week. “Something unusual that nobody else had done.”
I pondered too long and dismissed everything that came into my head. But then I had it.
“Well, it’s been a Luther Vandross week. I watched a movie-length documentary about him and listened to six of his albums.”
He absorbed what I had said. “That was pretty cool,” he replied, nodding with approval. “But I have one question to ask. Who the fuck is Luther Vandross?”
The café hums softly — a low murmur of spoons, voices, milk steaming behind the counter. I go there more often than I should, pretending it’s for the coffee, though I know that’s not true. He’s always there — Joseph — the boy with the rolled sleeves, the nice ass, the quiet smile. He moves with a kind of unthinking grace that makes the simplest gestures unbearable to watch. The tilt of his head, the tiny crease that appears between his brows when he concentrates. He hums under his breath when the machine hisses, wipes the same patch of counter top as if he’s polishing a secret into it. The light hits his hair just so, and I find myself timing my arrival to catch that moment when he leans over the counter and looks up.
Sometimes he catches my eye, and it feels like an accident — a spark that wasn’t meant to happen. He doesn’t know what he does to me: the curve of his wrist, the steam curling around his face, the way his voice seems to linger in the air a heartbeat too long. When his hand brushes mine as he gives me change, there’s the faint scent of roasted beans and skin, a small, electric pause before he turns away.
I tell myself I could stop if I wanted to. That it’s just a crush, just admiration. But I don’t want to. I want the ache. It isn’t love — not really — it’s too fleeting, too impossible. He doesn’t see me, not the way I see him. Yet there’s a strange tenderness in wanting without having, in sitting there each morning, pretending to read, tracing the rim of my cup as the warmth fades — while the boy behind the counter unknowingly becomes the centre of my day.
I collect fragments of him and carry them home like offerings. Sometimes I imagine saying his name aloud, but I never do. It feels too intimate, too final — as if it might break the spell.
The room where I try to write has slowly become the room where Charlie paints – always in nothing but his underwear, as though bare skin loosens his imagination. He fills his canvases with young men borrowed from Pinterest photographs, embellishing them with his own wild inventions. His pace is relentless; one wall is already crowded with finished works, while the others gleam with fresh white paint, waiting their turn.
I, by contrast, sit fully clothed at my desk opposite him, my screen a blank page that refuses to yield. His half-naked body distracts me more than the silence we share – a silence that can stretch for hours. My sentences falter, my fingers hover above the keys, while my gaze strays repeatedly to the slope of his shoulder, the subtle shifting of muscle beneath skin. When our eyes do meet, the faintest smile flickers between us, and in that moment, it feels as though the room itself has been written.
Our different pursuits seem to mirror our temperaments: Charlie paints with fearless exposure, while I write with restraint, dressed in caution. Yet the tension coils tighter. My prose begins to echo the shapes of his body, the rhythm of his movements, until the line between art and desire starts to blur.
At times I tell myself I am only imagining it – that Charlie is merely eccentric, his near-nudity no more than a quirk. But each page proves otherwise. It is littered with involuntary admissions: the shadows along his collarbone, the hush of his breath when he leans too close, the bare expanse of thigh against the studio chair. These confessions rise from me slowly, as though I am being coaxed – cornered – into acknowledging what I cannot claim.
Tonight, the silence shatters. My phone vibrates, abrupt as a stone cast into still water. Charlie turns at once, alert, the brush slipping from his hand. “I need a rest from painting,” he announces lightly. “Let me see what you’ve written.” He springs up, knowing I will resist, his request merely a pretext to draw near, to glimpse what has intruded into our silence.
It is from Bianchi in Verona. A thrill runs through me, but I dare not open it – Charlie would notice too much. “Who is Bianchi?” he asks, now beside me, his voice soft but insistent.
“A friend of Cola,” I murmur, unwilling to elaborate. The words hang in the air, evasive, unsatisfying, already unravelling.
This relationship is borderline and has been like this for years. A decade when we changed from boys into men. I have no idea whether this long infatuation has been about love, or lust, or perhaps both. But it is MY infatuation and not his. He sends a message with three short words – ‘YOU DA BEST’ – and I want to screenshot it.
“I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”
– Novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) speaking to American author Michael Mewshaw in 1972.
The noisy summer of 1963. Shouts, laughter, transistor radios blasting crooners and rock ’n’ roll. Danny Fitzgerald walked the streets of Carroll Gardens—sixty square blocks of brownstone row houses stretching from DeGraw Street to Hamilton Avenue, and from Court Street to Hicks. The neighbourhood bore the name of Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, and as if on cue, the bell towers of St. Mary Star of the Sea and Sacred Hearts & St. Stephens rang out, reminding Fitzgerald that faith was still the glue holding this community together.
Everybody knew everybody here. Reputations mattered, gossip travelled faster than the summer heat, and though Fitzgerald wasn’t an outsider, he knew that by the time he reached Carroll Park, word of his presence would already have spread. He checked that the roll of ten-dollar bills was still safe in his pocket.
On one corner stood a family deli; opposite it, the bakery, its doorway spilling the smells of fresh bread, sfogliatelle, and espresso, along with the little paper cups of ice that kids clutched in the sun. A neon sign buzzed over the grocery, where a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy hung proudly behind the counter.
Sicilian and Neapolitan voices floated from stoops where old women in black dresses swept steps, aired laundry, and fanned themselves as they traded gossip. Below them, men smoked cigars and talked dockside work while listening to baseball on portable radios. Children darted about—stickball, stoop ball, bicycles weaving down Union Street, dodging cars, or shrieking as they ran through the spray of a fire hydrant on President Street.
Fitzgerald found what he was looking for on Columbia Street: teenage boys in leather jackets and rolled-up jeans, striking poses, trying hard to look older as they flirted with girls.
Johnny leaned against an iron railing, a toothpick lodged in the corner of his mouth, hair slicked so smooth it gleamed in the afternoon sun.
“Johnny! Vai a prendere il pane!” his mother called from the window, tossing him a crumpled dollar bill. Go get the bread.
He caught it with ease, sighed, and stuffed it into his pocket. His buddies leaned against a parked Buick, passing around a cigarette. Johnny joined them, hesitated briefly—his mother waiting for bread—then shrugged. She could wait.
Fitzgerald stepped forward, cautious but deliberate. “Hi Johnny. I’ve got a proposition for you—and your brother.”
In 1963, Danny Fitzgerald was forty-two. A first-generation Irish-Italian, he had only taken up photography in his thirties. He trained at Abraham Goldberg’s gym on Clinton Street, where he gained the trust of the young men who boxed and lifted there. For a few dollars, he persuaded them to pose for what he called “standard beefcake”—half-naked in pouches or bikini trunks. These images sold covertly to private collectors and to Joe Weider, who used them for magazine covers: Young Physique, Muscles a Go-Go, Demi-Gods.
Health-and-fitness publications doubled as discreet erotica for America’s homosexuals, offering a socially acceptable way to admire the male form. For Fitzgerald, the work was both a business and a means of feeding his own desires. He was said to have fallen hopelessly in love with one of his muses, a blonde youth named Orest—“unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.”
In the early sixties, Fitzgerald met the striking bodybuilder Richard Bennett, who became his primary model and collaborator. Together they founded Les Demi Dieux—“the demigods”—a venture that presented “sublime, muscled beauties from the streets of Brooklyn, the beaches of New Jersey, and the woods of Pennsylvania.” Bennett often acted as bait, coaxing young men into Fitzgerald’s lens for tastefully erotic photographs.
By 1963, when Fitzgerald approached Johnny and his brother Vinny, his focus had shifted back to the gritty realism of South Brooklyn street life. A ten-dollar bill was enough to persuade a boy to pose; a little more, and one might strip to the waist.
It was a handsome life, but a quiet one. The photographs were rarely seen beyond private circles, and after 1968 Fitzgerald stopped shooting altogether.
He died in 1990, destined for obscurity, until Robert Loncar and James Kempster acquired his archive the following year. They catalogued his life’s work, publishing Brooklyn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux (1993) and mounting an exhibition. Though the book is now out of print, coveted by collectors, his photographs survive online at a dedicated website. https://lesdemidieux.com
The rediscovery sparked excitement. Critics praised the work for its intimacy, its blend of realism and myth, its ability to capture both the spirit of its era and something hauntingly timeless. For a while, Fitzgerald’s name flickered in the wider cultural conversation. Yet as the years passed, interest faded again. Today, the collection drifts in a liminal space—remembered vaguely, rarely exhibited, and maybe a danger vanishing once more. Its half-life raises a lingering question: how easily can art be lost, even when once found?
“It was pretty, and the simpering, self-conscious style which shop girls adore and mammas dote upon. He had regular features, a placid and supercilious smile, drooping eyes which he would occasionally cast toward the crowd outside the window, and a daintiness of gesture which would have made him a success on the stage in the delineation of a certain type of metropolitan character. His hair was sleek, well oiled and beautifully banged, his colour pink and white and his narrow-chested body was encased in a beautiful blazer of pink and white silk, drawn together by a heavy and interlaced crimson cord down the front. On his head he wore a silk jockey cap, also of pink and white stripes, and his hands were rendered prominent by what might be called outside cuffs of snowy linen, which came up to the elbow and completely covered the blazer sleeves. The languid manner with which he tossed the taffy over the big silver hook was in thorough consonance with the languorous glance which he occasionally directed toward the women outside the window.”
Blakely Hall writes about a handsome young man working in a New York candy store.
The Philadelphia Times – 23 December 1888
Blakely Hall was a New York-based journalist who became editor of Truth Magazine in 1891 and spiced up the publication by adding more pictures of women to its pages, more social satire, and colour. Circulation grew to 50,000 subscribers at that point.
The warm light of day. A sudden shout. A boy’s voice: “Questa è la fine!” — This is the end! The cry carries over the water, impossible to know which of them called it, only that it came from one of these boys, each charged with careless energy.
“Con petto nudo,” comes the whisper — with bare chest. “Speak it now, or the moment will slip into memory.”
The dares run high: peer pressure, bravado, that fragile seam between recklessness and courage. None of them yet know it, but this is their rite of passage — the pivot between innocence and the pull of adulthood. Here, in the heat, end the rituals, the invisible hierarchies, the unspoken rules of the pack.
The summer outsider watches. Friendship, rivalry, longing, jealousy, innocence, danger — all play out before his eyes. And he understands the cry for what it truly is: not a game, not a dare, but a declaration.
It is the end.
I had been summoned to Piazza Gilardoni, in the shadow of the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Maria—an imposing modernist church at Castel d’Azzano, some ten kilometres from Verona. The message had come from Cinzia, relayed with reluctance by Cola. During the drive he blasted Italian rap at full volume, perhaps to stop me asking questions.
We perched on a warm stone bench and waited. Cola, usually chatty, was subdued and chain-smoking.
The bells clanged on the hour. A man pruned branches into a heap outside the church, then stuffed them into a green bin. Another fussed with a watering can, an oddly futile gesture against the bulk of the trunk.
“My mother is angry with me,” Cola said suddenly. “She told me I should never have interfered—and if anything goes wrong, I’ll be the one to blame.”
I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but at that moment I saw Cinzia and Bianchi crossing the road. For such a small suburb, the traffic was vicious. Cinzia waved, ushering us into a café called Al Quindese.
Inside, she kissed us both on the cheek, whispered something sharp to Cola, and ordered drinks. Bianchi scrolled through his phone, pointedly disengaged, not even looking up when she ordered him a shakerato and the rest of us espressos.
“It’s been a long time since we were last here,” Cinzia said. “Our grandmother grew up nearby. She still lives just around the corner.”
I tried again. “Why is Signora Bruschi angry with you, Cola?”
He faltered, glanced at Cinzia. She only smiled, unembarrassed.
“Perhaps I am the cause,” Cinzia said lightly. “I hoped you’d come today, though I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t. Cola knew the reason, but apparently he couldn’t tell you.” She shot him a disapproving look.
“I couldn’t,” Cola protested. “You already had a boyfriend—a Frenchman. And when I told my mother, she said we had no right to interfere.”
Cinzia leaned closer. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I only try to look after my little brother.” She spoke as though Bianchi could not hear, forgetting – or pretending to forget – that his English was weak.
Bianchi sensed the attention on him and glanced up, puzzled.
“I hope someone will eventually explain,” I muttered.
“Oh, it’s simple,” Cinzia said breezily. “Bianchi is shy. He’ll sit there looking innocent while I say anything I please about him. I could call him a murderer and he wouldn’t know.”
As she spoke, I noticed a man on a high balcony, leaning against a railing where laundry hung. Unshaven, in a crumpled shirt, he looked down on us from his faded yellow building.
“Tell me,” Cinzia asked suddenly, “do you like my brother?”
I hesitated. “I do. Provided he isn’t a killer.”
She laughed, then called something to Bianchi in Italian. He blushed, shrugged, answered. She translated with a mischievous smile. “He says he won’t kill you – unless you break his heart.”
“How could I possibly do that?”
“Bianchi is a baby,” she said, “curious, uncertain. But for now, he thinks he’s in love with you.”
Heat rose in my face. I looked at Cola for rescue.
“Sedici,” he groaned. “Cinzia, the boy is only sixteen.”
I stared. “But you told me he was eighteen.”
“I lied,” Cola admitted. “Otherwise you’d never have gone to the cinema with us.”
Bianchi smiled faintly and fixed his gaze on the Virgin Mary statue outside. Cola muttered something in Italian. Bianchi’s shoulders drooped.
“What did you tell him?” I demanded.
“That you’re only interested in girls,” Cola said smugly. “It’s safer that way. My mother will be relieved.”
Cinzia scolded him in Italian. Whatever she said, it lifted Bianchi’s expression again.
“I do like him,” I said carefully, “but I already have Charlie. And Bianchi… he’s far too young.”
“In Italy, age is not the same concern,” Cinzia replied. “The law is fourteen, regardless of gender. And Bianchi is capable of marvellous things.” Her eyes glinted wickedly. “He can squeeze the juice from an orange with the cheeks of his buttocks.”
Bianchi understood enough to flush crimson. Cola looked guilty, and I seized the chance to turn on him.
There was a long story behind my relationship with Signora Bruschi – and the apartment. I was about Cola’s age when I first met an Italian boy named Nico and moved to Perugia. Those were long, hot summer days and steamy nights, but autumn soon cast its shadow over the affair. Quite frankly, we grew bored of each other. Being a free spirit, I hopped on a train to Milan.
That was where I met Pietro Mancini, an older gentleman with decidedly queer tendencies, who owned a large accountancy firm with branches in Turin, Milan, and Verona. I enjoyed the attention: the fine clothes, fancy restaurants, lavish holidays, and an endless supply of money. In return, I excused his camp mannerisms and tiresome gestures. I was his toy—his plaything—a good-looking boy at his beck and call.
Until I discovered there was nothing exclusive about this arrangement.
When Pietro suggested I move into his rented apartment in Verona, I saw it as the next step in what felt like a dreamlike adventure. Since he spent most of his time in Milan, I was spared his unwelcome advances and free to live as I pleased. Verona suited me, and it was there that my friendship with Signora Bruschi and her son, Cola, began.
On the day that Cola blurted out: “Is it true that you like to fuck boys?” His mother promptly clouted him on the head with a wooden spoon, but he pressed on: “Signor Mancini has a boy in every town, but I’m glad it was you who came to Verona.” I had been naïve enough to think I was the only one. His words made perfect sense, and the warning bells began to ring.
I didn’t begrudge Pietro his indulgences, but selfishly, I worried that I might fall out of favour and be cast aside when it suited him. On his next visit to Verona, over dinner in Piazza Bra, I demanded the truth. That was when I learned about Severin, a German boy in his Turin apartment, and Elio, my Italian replacement in Milan—apparently his favourite. “Italian boys are more cultured than English and German boys,” Pietro told me.
At Christmas, Pietro invited me to Milan, where I met Severin and Elio for the first time. He expected us to get along, but little was said between us. After a festive meal at Bulgari Milano, and more than enough drink, we realised we were all victims of his lustful whims. A conspiratorial bond formed between us.
In the new year, I returned to Verona, expecting Pietro to arrive on business the following week. On the day of his arrival, I went to Verona Porta Nuova to meet his train, but he wasn’t on it. I returned to the apartment and waited. That night, Elio called: Pietro had dropped dead of a heart attack.
Signora Bruschi was kind and told me I could stay in the apartment. I explained I couldn’t afford the rent, but she insisted it would not be a problem.
In the months that followed, with no money coming in, I lived on the Bruschi family’s generosity. Pietro’s affairs were slowly unravelled, and eventually his will was read. Nineteen-year-old Elio inherited the bulk of the estate, including the Milan apartment. Severin and I received only nominal sums—decent, but since the Turin and Verona apartments were rented, we were effectively homeless.
With little Italian and no job prospects, I left Verona and returned to the UK.
The apartment, however, was kept clean and tidy by Signora Bruschi, who insisted it remain empty and always available for me if I visited. The last time had been fourteen months ago—before Charlie gate-crashed my life.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 