"Exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied"

Ten tantalising minutes of clips from BBC Television's Play of the Month, September 1976: John Osborne's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, with John Gielgud as Lord Henry Wotton, Jeremy Brett as Basil Hallward and Peter Firth (creator of the, as it were, Daniel Radcliffe role in Equus) as Dorian:

Sixty years on

A new edition of the 1948 gay-themed novel An Air That Kills by Francis King. (He's still at work today; I particularly recommend his 1993 autobiography, Yesterday Came Suddenly.)

Well endowed

The Tom of Finland Foundation, that is (NSFW).

The Platonic Blow

A long and explicit poem W H Auden wouldn't admit he wrote.

A minor angel

Two joyous minutes (safe for work) with Canadian dancer and stripper Bobby Brown:

Painful path

Former top cop and now London Mayoral candidate Brian Paddick shares his gay memories.

Hat tip: Towle Road

Less unsung than I thought

In an earlier post I described Antony Grey as "a not-sufficiently-sung hero".

To my great pleasure I find he was last year's Stonewall Hero of the Year. Congratulations, sir.

And he's writing two blogs, anticant's arena and anticant's burrow.

Apologies for the old, creased photo - it comes from my cuttings files (Sunday Telegraph, 1995). Couldn't find a single image of him online.

Our great-great-grandfather

Introducing John Addington Symonds, the first modern historian of (male) homosexuality, and the first advocate of gay liberation in Britain.

Lost to us

The Adonis of my generation, Jon-Erik Hexum, died tragically in 1984 aged 26, after an accident on the set of his TV series, Cover Up.

These clips (10 minutes) show him in the title role of the 1983 Joan Collins cheesefest Making of a Male Model. Forgive the cheese, and share my awe:

"The last professional beauty"

John Waters celebrates Stephen Tennant, lover of Siegfried Sassoon.

Running himself down

Lynn Barber scratches her head over Matthew Parris in 2002.

Life or death

His boyfriend was executed, and nineteen-year-old Mehdi Kazemi fears the same fate if he returns to Iran. But Britain wants to send him back.

Mortal Kombat, Derbyshire style

Syncsta in their gleeful shirtless glory days:

Cute traitor

Alcoholic rentboy, Nazi broadcaster: John Amery finished up on the scaffold. Ronald Harwood tells all.

Taken suddenly

Flamboyant ex-Canon Brian Brindley dropped dead at his birthday banquet.

Penis deleted

What kind of churl would deprive this man of his manhood?


As you can see, he needs it:

No tittering matter

Dennis Heymer, for 37 years the secret lover of Frankie Howerd, breaks his silence.

A favourite review

1997: Antony Grey, secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the Sixties and a not-sufficiently-sung hero even to this day, shows his mettle by not actually succumbing to apoplexy while reading Patrick Higgins's Heterosexual Dictatorship.

Harvey Proctor's dazzling nemesis

Twenty years back, Mike of Troubled Diva met an unforgettable delinquent.

Totally Gay for America

A new anthem for the rabid right:

Duncan takes the plunge

The first Conservative MP to come out becomes the first to enter a civil partnership, and talks to the Telegraph about it.

Sod sodomy

This is interesting - a passionately gay site (NSFW) crusading against anal sex.

"Disgusted by the old me"

Nicholas de Jongh gives a candid and engaging interview in connection with his Gielgud play (already mentioned, but Rhoda Koenig has more).

Breathe deeply

Today he's a New Zealand soap star and would-be Tory politician, but Adam Rickitt used to be a god:

"Pulp-fiction Dostoyevsky"

A fascinating essay on Whittaker Chambers, the gay Soviet agent who changed sides.

He's at it again

Railways, cinema and young men in a state of undress: the amiable Leduc sticks with a winning formula in his new blog, Blood and Custard.

Blond Prefers Gentlemen

Strew petals of whatever hue upon the bones of Anthony Blond, publishing's loveable Icarus.

Map of the heart

A beautiful French animation (three minutes, NSFW) of the pains, joys and hopes of a young gay man. Fun, but also deeply touching:

Less genuflection, please

Michael Thornton dishes the dirt on Noël Coward.

Warhol's Apollo

Meet Joe Dallesandro, "the first film actor to be overtly worshipped as a nude sex symbol" (quite right too).

Hard to miss

The Times (last November) says goodbye to writer and publicist Eric Braun:

A larger-than-life, Rabelasian figure, who was gay and alcoholic, he was an arresting sight at showbusiness functions, often arriving on a bicycle - complete with gin and tonic in hand - and dressed in green tweeds with bright red trouser clips… On one occasion he had to be removed from the theatre on a stretcher.

Equus

So you're strolling along a mountain road accompanied only by the Beatles, and suddenly you meet a comely young man disguised as a horse and follow him helplessly into an abandoned building where God knows what fate awaits you. Happens every day if you're Jean Cocteau:

Corridors of power

Eagle, Bradshaw, Mandelson, Portillo… Pink News counts down the 50 most powerful LGBT people in British politics.

Witch-hunting days

In 1953 the newly knighted John Gielgud - one of the greatest actors alive - was convicted of importuning male persons for immoral purposes in a public lavatory. Some would say the British gay movement was born at that moment.

Now Nicholas de Jongh has written a play about it.

That's me told

The young man who marries not, except in a few exceptional cases arising out of ill health, deformity, malformation, or great perversity of temper, or eccentricity of character, fails in one of the most palpable duties of life.

~ from a Victorian volume on Courtship and Marriage

Start with a bang

En Vogue make the most of a troupe of heroically proportioned shirtless male dancers: