Horst Buchholz made me gay...

Horst Buchholz died 9 years ago today. He was born in Germany 1933 and died aged 69 on March 3rd 2003. He had a beauty that was strangely modern - the picture to the right was taken, I think, during the 1950's. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it was taken during the 1980's.

He appeared in many films, most notably as Chico in The Magnificent Seven. But it is for his appearance in another film that I love him. In 1959 he appeared in Tiger Bay alongside John Mills and his daughter, Hayley Mills, in her debut picture. The film follows the story of a Polish sailor (Korchinsky), played by Horst Buchholz, who shoots his girlfriend whilst on shore leave in Cardiff and is helped whilst on the run by a young girl played by Hayley Mills - the only witness to the murder.

It's a highly entertaining film and has an added interest for me in that it's set in a now long disappeared Cardiff of the 1950's. More specifically, the main backdrop for the film is Cardiff's docklands, once known as Tiger Bay but now called Cardiff Bay, which is where I now live.

I first saw the film when I was eight or nine years old and I remember being fascinated by it. Of course, at that time, it was not the location that interested me as I didn't move to Cardiff's docks until the 1990s. No, I was fascinated, enraptured, besotted even by this man's beauty. Before I had the faintest inkling that I was gay; in all innocence - I fell in love with a Polish sailor called Korchinsky. I never tire of watching the film.

It's almost as if Buchholz shaped my idea of male beauty entering my imagination as he did at such an early age. How interesting to now learn that he was bisexual. Here's a clip from the film Tiger Bay. The area where this scene was filmed is now known as Mermaid Quay; how times change.

R.I.P. Horst Buchholz.

Today's run at 08:29
Distance	4.01 km	Time	22:45
Pace	5:40 min/km	Cadence	82 spm
Comments: Sunny, blustery, cold.