The Boy Is Beautiful, Issue 4

On the surface of a red-figure Attica vase, some thousands years ago, an inscription reading “ο Παῖς Καλός” had been engraved. Translating as The Boy Is Beautiful this intricate detail transforms a common vessel into a declaration of homoerotic affection; echoing the sexual liberation of a bygone era.

The Boy Is Beautiful is a biannual magazine but also an invitation to unravel the thread of queer Greek chronicles, from myth and history, to contemporary life. It’s a quest to figure out what happened between the time of Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinth, Achilles and Patroclus, the Band of Thebes and the Lesbian Sappho, Harmodius and Aristogeiton and my fascist, sexist, homophobic school mates, Thursdays’ straightwashed history lessons and Symposium-less Plato.

In this issue:

The Boy Is Beautiful is back for its most tender edition to date. Issue #4, HOLD ME, spans 112 pages of intimacy, proximity, touch, and play. Through text, image, PVC columns, and salt-stung hook-ups, it sets out to explore what it means to hold – and be held – in a world that so often denies us both.

The issue begins with the forlorn outcry of an erastēs (Achilles) clinging to the body of his erōmenos (Patroclus) on the battlegrounds of Troy, and unfolds into interviews with our cover artist Florian Hetz – whose visceral photography of the male form becomes collective memory – and architect and practitioner of many forms Andreas Angelidakis, who reflects on Athens as another kind of drag.

On still-warm bedsheets, Nathan Korn’s protagonist grapples with the stone-cold body of a Grindr hookup – a moment captured in film by London-based photographer Manos. Further on, lover, writer, and adventurer John Thomas leads a journey through Greece and beyond, in search of a place his heart might finally call home. To the Southeast, within the embrace of Nicosia’s Old Town Walls, Daniel Theophanous bears witness as the Queerwave film festival brings together communities long divided by decades of polarisation.

Following the sighs of pleasure and heartbreak penned by The Boy Is Beautiful readers, photographer Dario Laureano captures the sun-kissed skin of Mykonian hawtie, Bjornante, as he washes ashore Delos – the island that gave Cyclades their name, for all the other islands circle around it… like a warm embrace.