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: