Ronnie, East End, Glasgow 1909.

They/them

Ronnie earned a meagre crust posing for still life classes at the Scotland School of Oils. The English politician Osgerby Shalesmoor declared the young Glaswegian to be “the most beautiful person alive”,  writing daily letters from his incarceration in a Northumberland sanatorium.

Modelling for a Fauvist painter, they married after barely a week, much to the chagrin of a deteriorating Shalesmoor – an ardent Pre-Raphaelite. The marriage was annulled two weeks later, due to differences recorded by an apologetic priest as “fundamental to the act of procreation, as I myself have always understood it”. 

Alas this news arrived too late to save Shalesmoor, distracting the nurses with release of his tamed mouse Morris for a moment long enough to take his own life.