Kurt Marshall: One of the Beautiful Boys

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On survivor’s guilt, and remembering the boy we lost


My friend David gets a bit tetchy when I write about death, especially when that death was caused by AIDS. David is a survivor of the eighties and knows all about it. He lost a lot of friends. He feels guilty because he escaped while some of them didn’t.

I’ve never quite grasped the scale of the devastation the 1980s brought, or how an entire generation could be so cruelly diminished.

AIDS did not discriminate against anyone.

“It was always the beautiful boys who got it. Still, it gave the rest of us a chance,” David says, with his customary dark humour.

Perhaps it goes some way towards explaining why he can sometimes come across as an arrogant son of a bitch.

One of those beautiful boys was James Allen Rideout Jr., from Waterville, Maine (1965–1988).

At eighteen, Rideout moved to California, where he attended college and worked as a computer programmer in San Francisco. To help pay his way through college, he adopted the name Kurt Marshall and began appearing in gay pornographic films. There were only four: Sizing Up, The Other Side of Aspen II, Splash Shots and Night Fall.

The website The Closet Professor describes him as “one of the most stunning and lusted after blondes to ever hit gay porn”.

He was fortunate, in a sense. Unzipped magazine noted that the films in which he appeared were noteworthy. But there was more to Marshall than his good looks, blond hair and buff body.

He was also an advocate for gay rights.

“I think to be gay is to be blessed. We have so much freedom, so many choices. This isn’t our moment to party or to think we’re going to stay young forever…maybe it’s our time to find someone to be safe with…to be happy with…”

How incredibly tragic those words seem now.

Marshall tested positive for HIV in 1986. That same year, he came out to his family and entered a drug rehabilitation programme. He later moved into the construction industry.

In October 1988, aged just twenty-two, he died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. His official cause of death was kidney failure attributed to substance abuse and AIDS.

Twenty-two.

Sometimes a number is all it takes to bring home the sheer waste of a life.

There is a memorial to Marshall on the Find a Grave website. It is an extraordinary, if rather heartbreaking, tribute:

Dear friend, while the time discolors the vanity of our old pictures, you can instead be an immortal guardian angel for all us, just for the fact you are in eternal life of your young rest, because what I believe is that where you are now, the time will not pass and so it doesn’t consume your face anymore forever… and ever.

The words may be imperfect, but perhaps that makes them all the more affecting. Someone wanted to preserve the young man they remembered, untouched by time, his face no longer subject to the ravages of age.

His photographs remain. His movies remain. And somewhere, in the memories of those who knew him, there is still that beautiful boy.

David remembers what happened to so many of them. I can write about it, but I can never really know what it was like to be there, to watch friends disappear and to wonder why you were spared.

Perhaps that is why we should keep telling their stories.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Love on Beach 21: Alexy Berthelot


Alexy Berthelot has a thing for series. His Beach Boys and Meditation collections, often organised around numbered themes, move away from the idea of the individual portrait. Instead, his figures become archetypes: familiar, almost dreamlike presences that feel less like people being observed and more like moments we’ve somehow stepped into.

A self-taught artist based in Geneva, Berthelot moves between figurative art, abstraction and surrealism, creating an intimate, highly aesthetic universe. His work feels poetic and imaginative, with a particular fascination for masculine beauty, intimacy and vulnerability. There’s something quietly compelling about the way he explores the male form without sacrificing its softness. Beauty, here, doesn’t need to shout.

This painting brings together three young men, seen from behind as they walk into the sea. It’s a classic composition, but one that works beautifully. Standing side by side, they draw us into their world, placing us just behind them, looking out at the same horizon. We’re not observing them so much as joining them for a moment.

They’re caught mid-stride, their feet breaking through the shallow surf. The subtle alternation of heels and legs creates an easy, almost musical rhythm, carrying the eye gently from one figure to the next. Nothing feels forced. It’s movement without urgency, a little slice of summer that seems to exist outside time.

The figures seem almost incandescent against the sea, their warmth intensified by the coolness surrounding them. You can practically feel the heat, hear the gentle wash of the water and imagine the sand beneath your feet.

It’s a painting about bodies, certainly, but also about atmosphere, companionship and that fleeting moment when the world seems to slow down. Three boys, the open sea, the sun on their skin.

What’s not to love?

My Week, For What It Was Worth

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Undercurrents


I’ve just read my first bit of Dirty Bertie — the name critics rather unkindly gave D.H. Lawrence because of the sex in his writing. The Prussian Officer is a psychological short story, first published in 1914, and what a little beast of a story it is.

The Captain is a forty-year-old aristocratic Prussian officer, a Junker who’s lost his inheritance gambling and is now stuck in a loveless, rigid military life. A man simmering with tensions he can’t quite acknowledge, including, it seems, a repressed desire for his handsome young orderly.

Schöner is twenty-two, from a much simpler background, full of physical life, and with a young woman waiting for him back home.

The Captain can’t deal with whatever it is he feels for the young man, so he does what men like him often do: turns it into cruelty. He piles on the punishing duties, tries to keep Schöner away from his private life, and makes the young soldier’s life a misery.

Those dozy Edwardians seem to have concentrated on the physical violence, largely missing — or choosing to ignore — the story’s intensely queer subtext. Lawrence’s literary peers, and later critics, were rather more alert to just how provocative it was.

And it all ends rather dramatically.

There’s an interesting little story behind the book, too. Lawrence originally published it in magazines under the title Honour and Arms. But as a collection was being prepared for publication in November 1914, war broke out. With anti-German feeling sweeping Britain, Lawrence’s editor, Edward Garnett, changed the title to The Prussian Officer and Other Stories without asking him.

Sales were painfully slow. So slow, in fact, that copies printed in 1914 were still being bound and sold, complete with leftover advertising pages, as late as August 1918.

And yet Lawrence himself maintained that it was the best short story he ever wrote. I can see why it stayed with him.


Hustler


Another book has passed into my hands. Lights Out, Little Hustler, written by Lance Lester, a pen name used by George Davies, was published in 1968. I have a real affection for these gritty little pulp fiction books, with their garish covers that leave precious little to the imagination.

According to the Vintage Greenleaf Classics site:

“Gay pulp of this period relied on sensational titles and noir-inflected framing to survive distribution. Hustlers, sailors, drifters, and night people populated these books not simply for shock value, but because they mirrored the margins where queer life was most visible—and most vulnerable. Readers understood the code: beneath the moral tension and lurid language were recognizable social worlds, rules, and survival strategies.”

It’s a reminder that these books were more than just lurid entertainment. Published against a backdrop of censorship and hostility towards homosexuality, they offered glimpses of lives that mainstream publishing was often reluctant to acknowledge.

Davies rarely wrote under his own name, working instead through a collection of pseudonyms that included Lance Lester, Clay Caldwell, O. R. Wells and Thumper Johnson. His most notorious work was the 1968 gay sleaze novel Fruit of the Loon, published under the wonderfully cheeky name Ricardo Armory. It was an audacious and highly successful parody of Richard Amory’s hugely popular gay pastoral trilogy, Song of the Loon. The irony? Both the original books and Davies’s parody were published by the same company, Greenleaf Classics. One can only imagine the mischief involved.

The cover artwork is by Robert Bonfils, an artist with a rather unexpected background. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute alongside artists such as Jackson Pollock, under the tutelage of Thomas Hart Benton. After serving in the Second World War, he moved into commercial advertising before becoming the principal illustrator and art director for Earl Kemp’s Greenleaf Classics.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Bonfils painted hundreds of colourful, playful and often provocative covers for adult paperback novels. His work was unsigned, and his identity remained a mystery to collectors until his distinctive style was formally attributed to him in the mid-1980s.

I love the curious history behind these books almost as much as the books themselves. Beneath the lurid titles and outrageous covers lies a little piece of queer publishing history, produced in a world where desire had to find its own language, its own codes, and sometimes its own very colourful disguise.


Saint


A new Italian documentary showing in cinemas.

Carlo Acutis – first saint of the digital age. An avid gamer who limited himself to just one hour of video games per week as a self-imposed penance. He is buried in Assisi wearing casual clothes, including jeans and Nike sneakers. The Vatican made an exception to archive his emails and digital hard drive files rather than relying solely on handwritten letters. I hope this is true.


Prayer


Something about this photo makes my nether regions flutter. I’m only human.

Prayer, by Eric Gibbons, featured in 100 Artists of the Male Figure and Oil Paintings (2011).

Gibbons is an American artist, author and educator, best known for his Box Series of monochromatic oil paintings of the male figure. Photography is part of his wider artistic practice, but it’s these paintings that have earned him international recognition.

The Box Series comprises more than 100 works, placing classically rendered figures in stark, minimalist, box-like spaces. There’s something rather compelling about the simplicity: the restricted space, the absence of colour, the precision of the human form. Some figures meet our gaze head-on; others turn away, retreating into themselves. Either way, there’s a tension that’s hard to ignore.

The inspiration came in 2004, when Gibbons travelled to Paris and spent days studying classical art at the Louvre. Michelangelo, Ingres and Jacques-Louis David all left their mark on his artistic vision, and you can see that reverence for the male form running through his work.

His paintings have been exhibited in Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. One even found its way into the Obama White House art collection.

But back to Prayer. I could talk about the classical influences, the composition and the treatment of the male figure. And I will, if you insist.

For now, though, I think we know what caught my eye.


On the Cute and the Willing

Photograph by Jonathan Ivan, New York (2026)

The Devil Within Them

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Jerome K. Jerome, The Chameleon, and the Victorian fear of male desire


In late 1894, the short-lived undergraduate magazine The Chameleon published a series of pieces exploring same-sex love. Most famously, it included Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem containing the line “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Writing as an editor of To-Day in December 1894, Jerome K. Jerome publicly condemned the magazine and its sentiments as “nothing more nor less than an advocacy for indulgence in the cravings of the unnatural disease.”

Jerome was, of course, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). But beneath the humour was a very Victorian fear of what might corrupt the young.

“That young men are here and there cursed with these unnatural cravings,” he wrote, “no one acquainted with our public school life can deny.” Such young men, he argued, must “wrestle with the devil within them”, often through a “long and agonised struggle” fought “unseen and unknown” in their hearts. A publication such as The Chameleon, falling into their hands before “the victory is complete”, might, unless the reader were “of an exceptionally strong nature”, “utterly ruin him for all eternity.”

It is a remarkable glimpse into the moral climate of Victorian Britain — written only months before Oscar Wilde’s arrest and the sensational trials of 1895.

Indeed, Jerome’s condemnation of The Chameleon was later invoked by the defence during Wilde’s trials.

And yet there is an interesting twist.

When the Wilde trials became the great scandal of London, To-Day did not join in the sensationalist frenzy. Later, the magazine turned its criticism on the blatant hypocrisy of London’s theatre managers, who hurriedly erased Wilde’s name from their marquees while continuing to profit from plays that were still running.

Victorian morality, it seems, had its limits. And so did its hypocrisy.

A Venetian Affair

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Part 3 – The Venetian Encounter


I had agreed to meet Charlie at eight o’clock, but I’d already decided we would turn up fifteen minutes late. I knew Charlie would be late himself, of course, but there was another reason. I’d always assumed that whoever arrived first risked looking the more desperate.

Venice has more than four hundred bridges, and we had chosen one of its most distinctive: the Ponte delle Guglie, famous for its ornamental spires. It spans the Cannaregio Canal just before it empties into the Grand Canal, one of the city’s main waterways and a route for the larger vaporetti.

Charlie had always pronounced Venice in the French fashion, Vuh-neez, although, as far as I knew, he had never visited. I was therefore surprised that he had suggested such a specific, seemingly random meeting place.

On the way, Bianchi had plenty of questions.

“What is Charlie like?”

I thought carefully before answering.

“He’s a typical French boy,” I told him. “Slim. Good-looking. Artistic. He’s not like anyone else I’ve had a relationship with.”

“If he’s so wonderful, why did you end it?”

Bianchi had a point.

There had been so many positives and relatively few negatives, but something unexpected had happened in Paris that had fractured everything between us. I’d thought about it a great deal since, and the more I did, the more convinced I became that perhaps I’d overreacted.

“It was a question of trust. Charlie did something that made me angry, so I did something stupid to get my own back.”

Bianchi stopped and gave me a knowing look.

“Like sleeping with his brother,” he suggested.

Very little escaped Bianchi, and I had no doubt he’d gleaned this particular detail from Cola.

“Yeah. Like sleeping with his brother,” I admitted sheepishly.

“Did you love him?”

“He’s called Thomas,” I volunteered.

I needed to be careful now.

“I wouldn’t say I was in love with him. He’s very different from Charlie. Tall, blond and skinny. More outgoing. A bit of a risk-taker.”

Bianchi nodded as though he understood exactly what I meant.

I congratulated myself on having revealed very little and hoped it would be enough to satisfy his curiosity. I knew better, though. There would be more questions.

“Would you sleep with him again?”

“No. Definitely not,” I lied.

There was still a steady flow of people when we reached the Ponte delle Guglie. Most of the tourists had disappeared, either heading towards Venezia Santa Lucia station or making their way back to their accommodation. In their place were locals returning home from work, a reminder that ordinary life continued in Venice, even when the city seemed to belong to everyone else.

Darkness had settled in. The lights from shops and bars illuminated the streets, casting warm pools of light onto the pavements and canal water. We waited near the crest of the bridge, watching the vaporetti pass beneath us.

It was quite clear that Charlie wasn’t there.

Except that he was.

I spotted him sitting beneath the umbrellas outside a nearby bar, and, as expected, he wasn’t alone. I nudged Bianchi and headed towards them. A feeling of foreboding rose in the pit of my stomach, rather like the sensation you get before a job interview when you suddenly wonder whether you are quite as well qualified as you’d thought.

It struck me then how much had changed in a matter of months. Whatever closeness Charlie and I had once shared seemed to have vanished, leaving me to approach him almost as a stranger.

A gooey-eyed young waiter came to take our order as we sat down.

Two large beers.

Charlie said nothing at first, although his smile seemed friendly enough. My attention, however, was drawn to the young man sitting beside him. Dark hair, dark complexion, a little stubble on his chin. Probably in his late twenties, like me.

Handsome, certainly. And very much Charlie’s type.

I realised that Charlie was doing precisely the same thing with Bianchi. Bianchi flushed pink when he understood that he, too, was being scrutinised.

“So,” Charlie began, “you’re my replacement.”

Bianchi seemed momentarily lost for words, then pretended not to understand. It was a ploy he’d learnt from me.

“This is Bianchi,” I explained. “A friend from Verona.”

The expression on Charlie’s face suggested he didn’t believe me, but he let it pass.

“I’m Ethan,” his companion interjected, offering me his hand.

Polite enough, I thought. He was American, too, with the sort of well-spoken Westchester accent I associated with money and private schools.

“Ethan’s a musician,” Charlie announced proudly. “He plays the violin and he’s here to perform a concert in Vuh-neez. Such a coincidence that this is also where you’ve been hiding.”

“Miles has been living in Verona,” Bianchi corrected him.

“Ah,” Charlie said. “I knew Thomas had lied to me. But at least you’re here now, and with a new friend.”

There it was.

A flicker of jealousy.

“Ethan’s playing with the orchestra at La Fenice,” Charlie continued.

“Well, not exactly,” Ethan said, looking embarrassed.

“How did you meet?” I asked.

“We met in Paris during the summer,” Ethan replied pleasantly. “I suppose we hit it off and became good friends.”

“Are you lovers?” Bianchi blurted out.

I was shocked.

Charlie looked as though he was, too.

Fortunately, the waiter arrived with our drinks, offering us all a moment to recover.

“Would it matter if we were?” Charlie shot back.

“No, it wouldn’t,” I assured him.

Bianchi shifted in his seat. I recognised the movement. The quiet ones can be the most dangerous when they decide to speak.

“I recognise you now,” he continued. “I remember your photographs in that French gay magazine.”

Charlie shifted uncomfortably. Ethan, meanwhile, looked completely bewildered.

If Charlie had intended to make things awkward, Bianchi seemed determined to get there first.

“I trust Miles has told you about his sexual relationship with my older brother,” Charlie said to Ethan. “And not just my brother. His friends, too.”

This time, it was Bianchi’s turn to look unsettled.

“I think we all need to move on,” I said. “The thing is, Charlie, I’m selling the apartment back home, and it’s full of your stuff. I need to know what you intend to do with it.”

“I’ll send my cousin to collect it,” he replied matter-of-factly. “But you can keep the artwork, Miles. One day it might be worth a lot of money.”

It was a generous gesture. The work was actually rather good, but keeping it would mean finding somewhere to store it. One more complication to add to the list.

“Where are you going to live?” Charlie asked.

Bloody hell, he was handsome.

For a moment, I considered whether it might be possible to salvage what had once been a perfectly good relationship. But the reunion had already acquired all the characteristics of a car crash, and I knew the door had closed firmly behind us.

“I’ll stay in London with Deej,” I replied. “But I’ll spend time in Italy, too.”

Charlie nodded.

“There were too many secrets between us, Miles. Your secret life in Italy was one of them. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

It had always seemed easier to say nothing than to explain a part of my life that was both fascinating and seedy. I thought of Nico, my former boyfriend, who had once asked me to move to Perugia with him. Then there were Pietro and Elio. And Severin, with whom I’d spent time in Taormina.

Charlie knew nothing about any of them.

But then, Charlie had been equally mysterious.

I’d accepted his solo trips abroad and trusted him when he told me what he’d been doing. According to him, not very much. I was beginning to have doubts about almost everything he’d ever told me.

Thomas, the infamous brother, had once assured me that Charlie had been happy with me and that all he’d wanted was to settle down. But Thomas had his own agenda, and I’d been too willing to believe him. I could see it clearly now. He’d used Charlie to get to me, wanting to score a victory over his younger brother. Through my own weakness, he’d succeeded.

French boys could be so problematic.

I glanced at Ethan, trying to work out what Charlie wanted from him. There was bound to be an agenda. Something about Ethan suggested a comfortable, well-heeled background, and I found myself wanting to know more. Perhaps it was the accent. Perhaps it was the easy confidence with which he occupied his place beside Charlie.

Or perhaps I was simply looking for something to distract me from the conversation.

Life was far too complicated to untangle in one evening.

“We had a good time, Charlie,” I said.

“Yes, we did.”

“But it’s over now,” Bianchi reminded us.

I kicked him on the ankle. He flinched.

“I’ll order another round,” Ethan said, apparently deciding that diplomacy was the best way forward. “I hope we can all be friends.”

“I hope we can stay in touch,” I said.

Charlie looked at me, and for the first time that evening his expression softened.

“I’d like that,” he said quietly.

Sergei Yesenin: A Poet Behaving Badly

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Beauty, booze, broken hearts and a bloody goodbye


“I’ve been in love with Sergei Yesenin ever since I had a Russian literature class and he died in 1925.”

A comment posted by somebody who sympathised with my strange new-found love for Lord Byron.

I’d never heard of Sergei Yesenin. But, inquisitive mind that I am, I had to find out who he was.

Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925) was a Russian poet and literary rogue. These days, he is something of a cult hero.

He wrote hundreds of poems, from lyrical verses inspired by Russian folk traditions and rural life to longer, more ambitious works. But, if I’m honest, he’s probably more interesting for the life he led than for his poetry.

There’s a quote attributed to him:

It’s always the good feel rotten. Pleasure’s for those who are bad.

It seems to sum up his chaotic Bohemian lifestyle, his alcoholism, public outbursts and brief, passionate relationships with women.

Born into a peasant family, Yesenin initially wrote nostalgically about the Russian countryside. But the world he celebrated was disappearing, swept aside by revolution, industrialisation and the changing face of Russia.

He welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, believing it would empower the peasantry, but soon became disillusioned with the new regime. His increasingly erratic behaviour and criticism of Soviet life made him an awkward figure for the authorities, including Leon Trotsky, who was openly critical of him.

Yesenin married four times, with plenty of other women in between. Relationships overlapped, promises were made and abandoned, and chaos was never far away.

It isn’t hard to see why women (and, no doubt, men as well) fell for him.

His most famous marriage was to the American dancer Isadora Duncan. She spoke little Russian; he spoke no English. Somehow, they managed to make themselves understood — including during their spectacular public screaming matches.

They travelled across Europe and America, where Yesenin’s drunken escapades and violent outbursts made headlines. His alcoholism spiralled, and reports of cocaine use added to the picture of a man seemingly determined to destroy himself. Luxury hotel rooms and expensive restaurants became the settings for his increasingly notorious behaviour.

The marriage lasted barely a year.

There were also bar fights, public brawling, drunken insults and frequent brushes with the police. Yesenin was, in short, that literary bad boy.

By the age of thirty, he was in serious trouble. He suffered a mental breakdown and spent time in a psychiatric clinic.

Then he checked himself out and travelled to Leningrad, where he booked into the Angleterre Hotel.

According to the familiar account of his death, he found no ink in his room, cut his wrists and wrote an eight-line farewell poem in his own blood. He then hanged himself, reportedly from a heating pipe, although accounts of the precise circumstances differ.

The poem is known as Goodbye, my friend, goodbye. Its final lines have been translated in various ways:

Do not grieve or knit your brows —
In this life there’s nothing new in dying.
But nor, of course, is living any newer.

Even his death seemed to belong to the drama of his life. His suicide was followed by a wave of copycat deaths among admirers, cementing his reputation as a tragic literary figure.

And yet, almost a century later, Yesenin refuses to disappear.

A considerable body of speculation, along with a 2005 television miniseries, has kept alive the theory that he was murdered by the secret police and that his suicide was staged.

But would the authorities really have gone to the trouble of composing an eloquent farewell poem in his blood?

I doubt it.

There’s one final twist to the story. Yesenin had a son, Alexander, with the poet and translator Nadezhda Volpin. Born in 1924, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin went on to become a mathematician, logician, poet and prominent Soviet dissident. He later emigrated to the United States and became an important figure in the Soviet human rights movement.

Father and son never met.

Which seems a rather sad ending to the story of a man who spent his life making such a spectacular noise.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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A Cellist Elevated by His Bath: Philip Gladstone (2007)


He had been in there for nearly an hour. Long enough for the water to cool, for the steam to disappear from the mirror, for the afternoon to slip into something approaching evening. He ought to have got out. There were things to do, people who might be waiting. But he had never been particularly good at doing what was expected of him.

Instead, he pointed at the cello.

There is nothing quite so exciting as a young guy in a bath. Especially one who brings his cello.

A Cellist Elevated by His Bath was painted in 2007 by American artist Philip Gladstone, whose work I’m beginning to think deserves considerably more attention.

Born in Philadelphia, Gladstone is known for his evocative figurative paintings, often featuring the male nude as protagonist, muse and general cause of distraction. He now paints full-time in a renovated barn studio at his antique farmhouse in rural Maine. Not a bad setting for an artist with such a particular eye for the male form.

This painting belongs to his long-running Tubs Series, in which bathers, animals and assorted objects find themselves in antique tubs that feel less like bathroom fixtures and more like protective, womb-like spaces. The results are surreal, dreamlike and just a little absurd.

And then there is the cello. The pose. The pointing finger.

I have questions. But I’m not sure I want answers.

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.

What Tuke Should Have Painted

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Baron Corvo, the Venetian lagoon, and a rather specific artistic brief


Quite what painter Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929) would have made of the letters Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), better known as Baron Corvo, sent to his wealthy British benefactor Charles Masson Fox (1866–1935), is anybody’s guess.

Written in Venice in 1909–1910, these letters are a glorious mixture of literary gossip, artistic criticism, financial desperation and homoerotic obsession. Tuke crops up during Rolfe’s often contentious discussions about mutual acquaintances within the “Uranian” literary and artistic subculture — that rather extraordinary network of Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists united by an idealised romantic interest in adolescent boys.

Rolfe, Fox and Tuke moved through overlapping circles, alongside figures such as John Gambril Nicholson and Horatio Brown. Rolfe was particularly interested in Tuke’s artistic success and, rather cheekily, in what he thought Tuke ought to be painting.

And here he really gets going:

“One thing that the world wants is some Tuke pictures of the Venetian lagoon and some Tuke pictures of mediaeval gondoglieri poised on poppe in Venetian canals.The only Venetian (Italian) worth talking about who paints it is Giuseppe Miti-Zanetti, who uses a process of his own, neither oil nor water, which certainly is wonderful, but purely architectural and atmospheric and generally nocturnal. Which signifies that a painter like Tuke would have a free field here: for there is not a single painter of young Venetians poised, (‘poise’ is the unique characteristic) poised on lofty poops, out on the wide lagoon, at white dawn, when the whole world gleams with the candid iridescence of mother of pearl, glowing white flesh with green-blue eyes and shining hair poised in white air trembling like song in white light reflected in white smooth sea – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at high noon, when all the world which is not brilliant is blue, glowing young litheness with its sumptuous breast poised in air like showers of acquamarines on a sapphire sea with shadows of lapislazuli under a monstrous dome of turquoise – of young Venetians poised on lofty poops out on the wide lagoon, at sunset, glowing magnificent young strength dominantly illumined, poised in an atmosphere of lavender and heliotrope in tremendous stretches of sea and sky all cut out of jewels, limitless amethyst and far-reaching turquoise, or, all burnished copper splashed with emeralds and streaked with blue, the insistent blue of borage. No one does these things: no one sees them, but me. But Tuke is the only man alive who can do them; and he has not seen them. And who but Tuke could do real mediaeval gondoglieri in long fantastically striped hosen of silk, proud in the pomp of brocade, poised on lofty poops in the luminous shade of some small canal by some wonderful old water-gate like the Casa Agnusdei, or that of the Casa Amore degli Amici, or the one of the Calle Tedeum? No one. And he does not. It is dismal.”

There is something wonderfully unhinged about this. Rolfe is essentially telling Tuke, through Fox, that he has completely misunderstood the possibilities of Venice.

The letters were written while Rolfe was in severe financial distress and functioned, in part, as begging letters. Alongside his literary work on The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, he filled Fox in on his daily life, his infatuations with Venetian gondoliers and youths, and whatever else happened to be occupying his rather fevered imagination. The two men also exchanged stories and photographs of male nudes.

Rolfe apparently instructed Fox to burn the Venice Letters after reading them. Thankfully for us, Fox ignored him.

Because of their explicit content, the letters remained suppressed for decades before eventually being published by Cecil Woolf in the late twentieth century. They now provide a fascinating — and occasionally rather eye-popping — primary source for understanding Rolfe, his Venetian obsessions and the wider artistic world in which Henry Scott Tuke was also moving.

As for Tuke, I suspect he would have preferred to keep a respectable distance from the infamous Baron Corvo.

Tuke lived his life with discretion, and history has generally been kind to him.

Rolfe?

Not so much.

A Venetian Affair

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Part 2 – The Venetian Complication 


“Ciao,” said Bianchi.

“Ciao,” I replied.

“S-ciào vostro,” he grinned.

I am your slave.

He had discovered that ciao was derived from an old Venetian expression and couldn’t resist repeating it whenever he had the opportunity.

Venice woke early and seemed determined to wake us with it. The vibrating hum of delivery boats bounced off the brick façades of the Renaissance buildings, followed by the dull thunk of their hulls against the wooden mooring piles. Then came the metallic rattle of carrelli being pushed along the wooden decks.

“Slaves don’t sleep in the same bed as their masters.”

“But I have a good master and I must surrender to his wishes,” Bianchi replied cheekily.

My phone vibrated.

A message from Cola.

My mother is furious with you both. She knew that you would sleep together.

I smiled.

Bianchi crawled to the end of the bed and opened the curtains. He was naked, unlike the night before, and it was the first time I had seen him that way. He turned towards the window, completely oblivious to the effect he was having on me.

He had got his wish. Almost.

I had remembered Signora Bruschi’s warnings and allowed nothing more than a few kisses and cuddles. Nothing beyond that. Bianchi had no idea how much willpower it had taken not to give in to him.

But he was playing the long game and, for now, seemed perfectly happy.

Alas, the inevitable would happen eventually.

Sunrise had brought a soft morning light and a rising canal fog that would soon burn away.

“I shall make coffee,” Bianchi declared as he scrambled down the spiral staircase to the kitchen below.

I stayed in bed and closed my eyes.

I listened to the patter of his feet across the terrazzo, followed by the rattling of cups. Then came the sound of the French doors opening onto the stone balcony.

“Cazzo!”

He scuttled back inside.

“I did not know there were apartments overlooking us… and you can see everything.”

I peered through the newel posts and watched him grab a large towel and wrap it around himself.

I am going to struggle here, I thought.

The message from Charlie came at midday.

Ponte delle Guglie. 8pm?

I sent a thumbs-up.

Nothing more.

We shall see you then, he replied.

We.

My mind was made up.

I would definitely be taking Bianchi with me.

When I told him, I detected a nervousness that hadn’t been there earlier. But, as he explained, Signora Bruschi had sent him to accompany me and he would respect her wishes.

We resisted the urge to kick tourists into the nearest canal, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were tourists too.

We spent the day wandering narrow calli, crossing little bridges and drinking too much coffee outside cafés.

It was a way of killing time.

I was apprehensive about seeing Charlie again. The outcome was uncertain. Was this going to be closure for both of us, or the beginning of a new chapter?

I was mindful that I had instigated our enforced absence, although I hadn’t intended it to turn out the way it had. Not for the first time, I had ruined something that, on the surface at least, had seemed special.

But I had forgotten that Charlie was stubborn. And if he believed he had been wronged, nothing would alter his mind.

An observer might have regarded the whole mess as six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Quite true.

Charlie had inexplicably posed naked for a French gay magazine, confident that I would never find out.

On the other hand, I had slept with his brother.

And that, it appeared, was a far greater sin.

The other question I kept asking myself was whether we were still in love with each other.

There had been an unwillingness on both sides to resolve the mess and move on. Months apart had only strengthened our positions.

Part of me hoped that our meeting would lead to reconciliation.

But another part told a different story.

That story involved Thomas in Paris.

The uncertainty wasn’t helped by Bianchi, who had become uncharacteristically subdued. His early-morning brightness had gradually faded until he slipped into an awkward silence.

It wasn’t until we were heading back that I understood why.

We had reached the end of a ramo — a dead-end alley overlooking the Rio de la Pleta — and stopped to watch the boats passing below.

“There is a boy at work called Cesco,” Bianchi began.

He paused.

“He doesn’t say much. When I first met him, I tried to make conversation. He simply nodded. Now he sometimes smirks and occasionally speaks. We are slowly getting there. I think he trusts me.”

I tried to understand where the conversation was heading.

“The other staff say that Cesco is a handsome boy. Such a shame about the spots. They wish he’d do something better with his hair. They want him to be more sociable. They often lose patience with him.

“But when he smirks, they think he is smiling. My friends say, ‘How do you get him to do that?’”

Bianchi sat on the stone step and rested his elbows on his knees.

“And so they send me to collect the orders. I stand and wait. I make small talk. Sometimes I get a reaction.

“I tell my colleagues that I enjoy the challenge.

“‘You’re always so calm and collected,’ they say. ‘What’s your secret? Why doesn’t he speak to us? Why do you make time for his bad habits?’

“The answer is easy,” Bianchi continued. “I like handsome people. I can do spots. I can accept bad haircuts.

“I look at him in his black jeans, black T-shirt and black apron. Everything about him is black.

“But underneath all that black there is something attractive.”

I sat beside him, suddenly unsure that I was going to like what came next.

“What is that?”

“I imagine him standing behind his counter,” Bianchi replied. “I imagine him transformed in my mind, and suddenly I can wait patiently.”

I didn’t know how to respond.

L’erba del vicino è sempre più verde, he said sadly.

I tried to translate it.

The grass is always greener.

It was Bianchi’s way of sending a warning shot, and I was determined not to react.

“I cannot wait forever, Miles.”

One of my failings is that I sometimes fail to see what is right in front of me.

Bianchi was in love.

He had quietly persevered, waiting for me to return his affection.

I wanted to tell him that I loved him too.

But I would become a liar if my reunion with Charlie ended positively.

Life can be complicated.

Charlie.

Thomas.

Bianchi.

They all had a hold on me.

“I am not looking forward to meeting your boyfriend,” he added.

“Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected.

“But what if you decide to get back together? Where does that leave me? I might never see you again.”

He bit his lip.

“I am not sure that I would want to see you again if you did.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you don’t have to come with me.”

“I will come,” he decided. “But it is difficult for me to accept.”

“I know you have feelings, Bianchi, and I’m sorry that you’re caught up in all this. But please realise that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.”

“Then tell me there is hope. Tell me I am not wasting my time. If not, for my own sanity, I must look somewhere else.

“Even if it is the boy with spots and a bad haircut.”

I laughed, not unkindly, and squeezed his arm.

“You are not wasting your time, Bianchi.”

I wanted to hold him.

I wanted nothing more.

And he would gladly have let me.

But then the nose of a gondola appeared and glided silently into view.

Three women of various ages and sizes looked startled to see us sitting on the steps. Then they looked at us with curiosity.

Standing behind them, a young gondolier made light work of propelling the boat along.

“Buonasera,” Bianchi called.

And the gondola disappeared around the corner.