Good evening!
In order, blog stuff about the North Leeds Food Festival, a TomTom update, and some rejigging in our living room; media recommendations, mostly movies; new works published from yours truly.
I am mostly not tinkering on the website for the time being, as I’ve got a lot of juice to write with, several pieces on the to-do list, and several publications I’m working to submit to, but your reminder that my commissions are open if this is something you might be interested in!
A peaceful enough week this one past – my partner and I went along to the North Leeds Food Festival, which was great fun. We had some smoked beef brisket from The Smokeshed, we tried some different drinks – for the most part, it was a little overpowering, as we mostly go to queer festivals, and a lot of straight people don’t know how not to stare at gays and disabled people.
With that in mind, the art in the tents was mostly not great, with a few significant exceptions, including some gorgeous and tiger- and cat-focused art by the talented Rosy Chen, and also some beautiful traditional Chinese ink painting from Wukong China Artcrafts, although we both got spoilt for choice with the latter and couldn’t pick a print to bring home.
Lorenzo tried some RHUCELLO, which is an incredibly brightly pink rhubarb-based liqueur, which he found to be a bit overpowering and apparently has a Marmite-esque reputation, and we also tried some Kin Toffee-fused vodka, although they only had the samples of the regular toffee flavouring, and I’m definitely a bit more interested in trying the toffee apple and toffee lemon.
What we did try and then I immediately bought a bottle of was Lucela’s Chocolate & Rum – when I tell you this stuff is smooth, I cannot understate it, you’d never guess it was 20% by how easy it goes down. I’m trying to get more into trying different cocktails and learning them off – I don’t care for mojitos, but regularly try different daiquiris and fruit mixes, and I’m a slut for a good espresso martini – and when we bought the bottle it came with some suggested cocktail recommendations, but this stuff is sweet enough to drink straight.
TomTom has been spoilt this week as he’s spoilt every week, and the last day I cooked him a personal omelette from scratch – one egg, a cut-up crab stick, a little bit of ham – and not only did he fucking love it, he screamed at me the entire time I was cooking it, because he has it in his head that crab sticks and ham only live in the fridge in order to be TomTom food, and he’s unfortunately not entirely wrong.
Here he is luxuriating post-omelette:
Speaking of the luxury our spoilt prince lives in, after we got ourselves a new green leather sofa and armchair for £150 from the St Vincent’s CHAS – although TomTom is of the understanding that these have also been purchased wholly for his benefit – we enjoyed putting together a METOD cabinet to serve as TomTom’s private bathroom.
For now, we’re just holding the cabinet door open with a clothes peg until we get a cat flap to install on the side, but it has its own automatic light, and while I want to install a shelf inside for storing his poop accessories and to put in some odour-absorbing blocks, it’s much better so far than having his box uncovered.
I’m honestly kind of obsessed with the cabinet and love how it goes with the green and gold already in the room – I’d been looking for some green leather sofas for ages, and it was great to pick them up and then put in the cabinet the same week.
The kitchen that my flat came with is one of the most hideous kitchens ever conceived by man or beast – it’s a terrible camel beige plastic-wrapped affair with bubble-like texturing on the doors, and metal grip door tops that frequently slide out of place instead of being screwed into place like a proper cabinet handle or knob might be. Water takes an age to drip down these hideous effigies to an uncaring god of kitchen design, crumbs and bits of crap constantly get stuck in the aforementioned terrible cabinet grips and it’s really hard to even hoover them out. The grip on the cutlery drawer often slides out of place and stops you from opening or closing the fridge – the fridge, which, by the way, has its own custom cabinet, as does the dishwasher and washing machine. A human being (not a righteous or moral one) not only picked out this awful kitchen, but got it measured to custom size for the appliances.
It’s going to be a while before I can spring for a new kitchen, but I’m hoping that with the publications I’ve been in and have docketed for later publication this year so far, with royalty payments and stuff on top of the switch to this new site, we might be able to afford it next year or the year after, and it’s really nice to already have tried out one of the cabinets for flavour already. I’ve had a play about in the IKEA kitchen-builder on their website, and I’m thinking I’ll do all the same cabinets, same white worktop, same green doors, and the same brass octopus handles on most of the cabinets and then just straight handles for the dishwasher door.
New Media Recs
Firstly, Ben Saunders is releasing Issue 2 of STRAP magazine, an erotic queer trans masc magazine that features art, photography, fiction, poetry, and all sorts of other wonderful stuff, by and for sexy transgender people. Pre-orders are open until the 8th of June!
Some non-fiction recs:
- ‘He Was Learning About Life by Studying the Dead’: The Ghastly Secret Behind Artist George Stubbs’s Beloved Paintings of Horses
- I Asked My Students To Write An Essay About Their Lives. The Reason 1 Student Began To Panic Left Me Stunned.
- The Reporter (Jeff German / Robert Telles / Ted Binion) | Audio Podcast
I’ve had a great few weeks for movies, but also for TV – Lorenzo and I have of course been enjoying the new series of Taskmaster that’s currently airing, with Fatiha El-Ghorri (she’s a really great Cockney comedian, I was already familiar and I love her a lot), Jason Mantzoukas (the Greek fella from The Good Place and Brooklyn 99), Matthew Baynton (from BBC Ghosts), Rosie Ramsey, and Stevie Martin. Rosie Ramsey I wasn’t familiar with at all, but she’s great craic, and Stevie Martin I mostly only knew from her web sketches before she got bigger on the TV and comedy circuit the past few years.
Someone on Tumblr recommended Fisk, which is a workplace sitcom set at a probate law firm in in Melbourne, co-created and starring Kitty Flanagan, and it’s absolutely aces, I whole-heartedly recommend. It was recommended to me on the basis of the main character’s gay dad, who’s a retired judge, and his husband, who was previously his tipstaff (law clerk) and is still obsessive and bizarre as his assistant, but honestly, as much as I love Tony and Victor, the whole show is excellent. There’s a positive array of strange and unlikeable women doing weird shit and not knowing at all how to act like human beings, and you know how I adore such things as that – the MC, Helen Tudor-Fisk, is a very odd and off-putting woman who is needlessly confrontational in like 80% of her interactions, and it’s truly spectacular to watch, she’s definitely a new favourite TV character of mine.
There’s loads of guest stars who are really fun – Aaron Chen is a member of the main cast, but there’s also Ray O’Leary, Rhys Nicholson, Sam Campbell, all of whom are Aussie and Kiwi comics I already liked and was familiar with, but there were a bunch of others as well.
Apart from that, Lorenzo and I are right at the end of The Good Wife S7, which is leagues better written than S5 and S6 were, but we’ve been told by everyone in the world that the finale is terrible, so we’re looking forward to that. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is introduced as a private investigator Alicia Florrick can actually have sex with onscreen, unlike Archie Panjabi’s Kalinda, and he’s so hot and sexy and smooth. Apart from that, we’ve been watching The Bad Dog Academy on Channel 4, which is excellent trash if you want to shout at the television because stupid people don’t know anything about their dogs, and I also watched the first episode of Maid, the miniseries starring Margaret Qualley, and I really enjoyed.
I’ve been replaying Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which is set in 13th century Bohemia during the conflict between Wenceslaus IV and Sigismund of Luxembourg. I’ve recommended it before – playing it was part of the inspiration for writing The Devil’s Mark, and I want to write some more works set in the same period and possibly the same area, I definitely haven’t written enough Slavs in general – and the sequel has come out recently that lets you be gay with your bestie, Hans Capon, but we don’t have a PS5 yet so it’s just on the to-play list when we get one as well as Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age: Veilguard, Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza, and Ghost of Yōtei.
And now, movies!
I’ve been having a great run.
- Jupiter’s Darling (1955, dir. George Sidney) – Now this is a fucking movie, baby. This is what it’s all about. Is it good? God, no. It’s so stupid. The music is terrible. The plot and the central premise are both utterly absurd. But God, it FUCKS. This movie is soooo horny and so incredibly passionate about its own horniness, it’s got some great costuming, everybody got bitten by the pet leopard that by no means should have been in the movie in the first place, and it has some fun choreography and dance scenes.
- Conspiracy (2001, dir. Frank Pierson) – This movie is fucking horrible, and it would not be accurate to say I enjoyed it, exactly, but it’s very good as what it sets out to be, which is an unflinching portrait of antisemitism and the intent behind the genocide by the Nazis. It makes sense that it’s coming up of recent given the USA’s fascist government and the coordinated attacks on all manner of dissidents, by no means only limited to immigrants, but the calculation and concentrated hatred in the room is horribly similar to the conversations one imagines British transphobes are currently having as to their strategies at the moment as well. Regardless of the similarities to current fascist and genocidal movements, it’s sickening as a portrayal of the actual Nazis themselves, especially when you get to the epilogue and you see how few of the actors in that coordination were actually meaningfully punished for their part in it, let alone executed.
- The Lost Language of Cranes (1992, dir. Nigel Finch) – This was beautiful and really wholly unexpected for me – I idly added it to my watchlist because Ben Daniels (Santiago in IWTV S2) is in it, but it’s a beautiful film, and Brian Cox gives an incredible performance as a closeted older man who can scarcely cope when his son comes out as gay. The movie has a narrow scope, focuses mostly on middle class white gay men in artistic and academic fields and the subtle differences between their circumstances and experiences – as Americans versus as Brits, as closeted men versus out ones, etc – but it’s very intentional in that careful framing, and it’s understated, but it’s spectacular.
- Georgia Rule (2007, dir. Gerry Marshall) – This movie has bad reviews, and that’s because most people don’t know what it’s like to be raped as a kid, and they automatically hate child rape victims and stories about us. Our experiences are alienating and difficult to meaningfully relate to, and it’s good that that’s the case, but also, it sucks. The script is a little unpolished in places, but this is a portrait of life that feels very genuine, unfortunately, and it’s only uplifted by the stellar cast. The fact that the cops mostly aren’t involved even when people do believe her feels extremely real and realistic, and this film has a lot of richness and complexity to it even though it tries to rush a bit through its plot in places.
Apart from the above, we rewatched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and I might end up writing a bit about POTC in the next month or so, and I watched a few far more mid movies – Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, dir. Lewis Milestone), starring Marlon Brando at his faggiest, was visually stunning but bloated and lacking in direction; Control Freak (2025, dir. Shal Ngo) showed some haunting stuff I hadn’t seen before, I haven’t seen very many Vietnamese-American or Buddhist-influenced horrors, but it was a bit bland and lacked a consistent punch; Companion (2025, dir. Drew Hancock) initially had some fresh exploration of tech fears, but lacked internal consistency and had a crappy script that was mostly held up by a terrific cast; Sunshine (2007, dir. Danny Boyle) I didn’t go into expecting much, which is good, because it kind of sucked.
New Works Published
A reminder that #MonstrousMay in ongoing and it’s worth looking through the tags on your favourite social media to see what beautiful contributions people have made – I’ve been regularly going through the tags on Bluesky and retweeting some favourites!
Some non-fiction recs from the back catalogue – I’m just in the mood for a movie with gay (or bi) dudes! has been getting some traffic of recent as people have been digging through for summer movie recommendations, and also Raped and Ruined: Themes of Sexual Assault and Reproductive Coercion in Alien (1979). Fiction-wise, people have been reading Butler vs Footman, the erotic threesome between a gentleman and two of his staff, and A Stranger’s Visit, the short featuring Esben the priest and some godly mischief.
A few new pieces from me this week:
Short Fiction: Chosen
7.2k, rated M, Gen. After nursing the dying Hildebrand Grouse on his deathbed, Harry Kahner, an ex-whore, is given a position as footman by Hildebrand’s brother, Dietrich Grouse — known to the world primarily by his title, Lord Altham. Harry is less suited to life in the big house than he might have hoped, and Lady Altham intervenes on his behalf.
Quiet and pensive fiction with some slice-of-life, a standalone short set in 1830s England. CWs for grief in various forms, oblique references to past sexual assault, survival sex work, and subtle period-typical homophobia and antisemitism. Adapted from a TweetFic.
Also available on Patreon / / Also available on Medium.
Erotic Fantasy Fiction: The Wolf and the Man
Rating E, cis M/trans M, 5.5k. Gethin, a trans man, spends a full moon with his partner Rhodri – for the first time, inside his enclosure. For Day 9 and 10 of the Monstrous May Challenge — Day 9, Knotted, and Day 10, The Werewolf.
Philosophical and ethical musings on the lycanthropy curse from a modern perspective, love and intimacy and care, werewolf behaviour contrasted with man, and so on. Note in advance the presence of body horror inherent to the transformation, including shed body parts and fluids and such.
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