BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!

We celebrate the best in British Queer Talent with BAFTA winning actor & writer Ryan Sampson, ground breaking music academic & drag performer Jacob Mallinson Bird, & concert pianist Cyrill Ibrahim.First up, Graeme Smith meets the very funny Ryan Sampson, known for playing Grumio in the Ancient Rome sitcom Plebs and Tommo in the comedy-drama Brassic. He also created, wrote & starred in Mr Bigstuff alongside British actor Danny Dyer, who called him “one of the best actors this country has ever produced”.Ryan discusses the fifteen years of persistence behind getting his own show made, writing for Dyer, and bringing a gay perspective to straight masculinity. He reflects on growing up in northern England, finding himself through acting, and discovering that fans have had his character permanently tattooed on their bodies.Music academic & drag performer Dr Jacob Mallinson Bird joins Alastair James to explore queer identity, music and performance. A lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge universities, Jacob talks bringing queer noise into his lectures, challenging expectations and giving students new ways to think about music, sex and self-expression.Then concert pianist Cyrill Ibrahim talks to Alastair about the expressive power of music, the barriers he has encountered in the classical world, and developing his own voice as an artist. He also shares stories of performing for the British royal family and Kim Kardashian.

This week BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Podcast is a queer fashion special.Graeme Smith is joined by the enfant terribles of the fashion world JordanLuca - Jordan Bowen & Luca Marchetto. The couple talk about their love story, the creative partnership behind the brand, getting married on the runway in Milan, and the realities of building an independent fashion label. They also speak candidly about the state of the fashion industry, and why they believe the traditional system is broken.Then Tag Warner, Chair of Gay Times, meets the new boys on the block: Average Boys. Founders Jordan Sloan & Chris Ashley explain how the brand began, the gap they saw in gay menswear, the inspiration they take from decades of queer style, and why they want Average Boys to become more than just a clothing label.

In this special episode of The BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Podcast, actors Sebastian Croft & Connor Jessup curate highlights from their first Queer Was Always Here Residency at BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Gallery Café London.British menswear designer Geordie Campbell joins i-D magazine’s Douglas Greenwood for a conversation about fashion & queerness; Marty Davies is in conversation with Drag King Don One about why & how they set up Trans+ History Week; film-makers Jomo.Wrld join Connor to discuss the relationship between film & queerness; and we have readings from poets Troy Cabida, Jaime Lock, William Rayfet Hunter, & William Wyld (all published by Fourteen Poems).Queer Was Always Here is a community dedicated to queer lives, queer art and queer history. For more information visit queerwasalwayshere.com

Ben Pentreath OBE is an English architectural and interior designer, described by Country Life as one of the best country-house architects in Britain.Recorded live at our BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Gallery Café in London, Ben joins Alistair James to discuss colour, beauty and his belief that the best homes and buildings should evolve over time.He also reflects on working closely with King Charles, his lifelong love of Scotland, and the chance discovery that led him and his husband Charlie to leave Dorset for a remarkable new life on Orkney - an experience many listeners will know from his Financial Times column.

This week’s BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! podcast looks at queer publishing through fiction, photography & independent print.Matt Cain is interviewed by Graeme Smith in front of an audience at a BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! MEETS event at our gallery in London, discussing his career, the rejection he faced from mainstream publishers, the launch of Pansy Books and his new novel, The Castle of Stories.Alistair James talks to Adrian Lourie, the photographer and publisher behind the cult gay zine MEAT, and to German author Kai Spellmeier about his debut English-language novel, Boy Friends.BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! MEETS continues again soon at our gallery in Fitzrovia, London. Upcoming guests, dates and tickets are available on boysboysboys.org.

For more than 50 years, William Yang has documented Australia's queer community through his camera, creating one of the country's most important social archives.Although his name may not be familiar to everyone, his photographs have captured generations of queer life, from the liberation movement of the 1970s, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present day. His work has become an invaluable record of queer history.As William celebrates his 80th birthday, BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! revisits his remarkable story in this exclusive chat with one of the pioneers of gay photography. Graeme Smith speaks to William about his extraordinary career, the stories behind some of his most powerful images, and why preserving LGBTQ+ history has never been more important.William features in Volume Six of BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! magazine, where we celebrate his life and work.

Two of the most exciting young queer actors working today, recorded live at the BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Gallery Café.First, Xelia Mendes-Jones, the breakout star playing Dane in Amazon Prime Video's post apocalyptic juggernaut 'Fallout' opposite Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan. Footballer turned Cambridge scholar turned screen actor, Xelia is razor sharp on trans representation, on the difference between a character whose transness is the whole story and one for whom it is simply true, and on why the loudest takes about who gets to play whom usually miss the point.Then, Tiptoe star Gabriel Clark. First coming to our attention as Ollie Morgan on Hollyoaks, now in Russell T Davies' hot new drama 'Tip Toe' alongside Alan Cumming and David Morrissey. Gabriel also takes us inside the chemsex play 'Jock Night' and the tabloid storm around his coming out. Funny, fearless and unafraid to say the things most actors will not.

This episode of The BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Breakfast Club comes from one of the most significant locations in queer history: the Oscar Wilde Suite at The Cadogan, A Belmond Hotel, in London. The room where Oscar Wilde was arrested in April 1895.Joining Graeme Smith & Ghislain Pascal is the award-winning historian and biographer Matthew Sturgis, whose acclaimed biography Oscar: A Life is widely regarded as the definitive account of Wilde's life. Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and praised by the Times Literary Supplement as "the Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade", Sturgis drew on newly discovered letters, court records and years of original research to create the most authoritative portrait of Wilde ever written. If you're going to tell the story of Oscar Wilde in the very room where history unfolded, there is no better guide.Then we are joined by BOYS! photographers Paul McDonald and Nigel Grimmer to discuss photo fairs & galleries; Paul's new zine Things I Wanted to Say - but Never Did; and Nigel's striking brutalist series in the latest edition of our BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Magazine Volume 11.From Oscar Wilde's final days of freedom to contemporary queer photography and storytelling, this episode brings together history, art and lived experience in one of London's most remarkable rooms.