“His beauty brings you here, on this page. As you open him up, the scent of Hyacinth floods your senses. You lean forward — the tip of your nose feeling his chest hair. You made it. Welcome back friend. Hello stranger. Now let the world of The Boy Is Beautiful bloom between your fingertips.”
Bold, opinionated and unequivocally queer, in its trademark terracotta pages, the third issue of The Boy Is Beautiful magazine – Hyacinth – is now available to beautiful readers worldwide.
Weaving together compelling stories captured through the intimate, homoerotic lenses and brush strokes of fleshing international photographers and artists, Issue #3 sets out to explore diverse facets of ancient and modern day Greek identity and re-negotiate the idea of Greece as a common place for queer people everywhere.
Surrounded by fabulous photographs, costumes, plaster limbs and cocks we begin our journey with a deep dive into the Camp world of Studio Prokopiou who use Greek mythology to construct impenetrable icons out of London’s queer scene. Three stops on the Northern line later, we are joined by Manchester-based artist James Unsworth, who introduces fat queer bodies into the narrative of art history. From the shores of the Thames to those of the Saronic Gulf, our Athenian eyes, pen and butt cheeks, Ilias Sapountzakis, talks Greek boys and full-frontal intimacy with Chris, the man behind the erotic film camera of “Tale of Men”. Moments before his first solo show in Athens, the artist, polyglot and Greek by “practice-right”, Darryl Babatunde-Smith, discusses whitewashed histories and otherness within the queer community, before drawing himself as Aphrodite using 24K gold.
In a moment, we find ourselves stranded amongst ancient ruins and Exarchian alleyways through ZOE, Hamburg-based photographer Maik Gräf’s photobook charting queer Athenian histories and communities. Muscles and groin made of marble and flesh immortalised by Chicago-based photographer Michael Weinbergamalgamate into erotic visual poetry, and Dario Laureano’s intimate photography sets the scene for our international readers’ steamiest adventures on the shores, five-star hotels and cheap rentals of the “Athanato Elliniko Kalokairi!” (vernacular expression meaning Immortal Greek Summer).
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112 pgs, 23.2 × 16.5 cm, Softcover, 2023,
