The Boy Is Beautiful #4

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 erastes (Achilles) clinging to the body of his eromenos (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.