Dear Oscar,

I wish you could be here now!  I wish it were possible to have you here by my side so that you could see all that has ensued since your much publicised demise.  

You have become a by-word!  

You are not only the very definition of urbanity, of wit, of classical learning, the first celebrity of the modern age;  you are now a pervert, too louche for your own good, a sinner, a product of depravity, made to suffer in full public gaze, and through history, for your lack of moral standing.  

You fell from grace!  

You fell from that blissful state that the right-minded and the quietly-behaved occupy with such smug hypocrisy – which your work of course, which still lingers on, parodies so well.  

Your work is standing the test of time, plays still performed, poetry in print, even the words of your own legal defence archived for posterity.  People know who you were, and know who you are, and if they do not there are endless reference points for them to consult:  biographies, essays, academic papers, audio recordings, articles, speculative prose, photographs, films, artworks, statues, monuments … and letters. It makes me wonder if you have really left us at all!

You certainly made an impact, entered common parlance, found a place in popular consciousness, and have been variously revered and condemned for well over a hundred years, the entirety of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty first!

With each revision of your memory, each revisiting of your canon, insights are added, new perspectives unearthed, and you sail triumphantly from age to age always a touchstone for … for what?  

For good, and for bad.  

You pivot that particular binary divide – the good and the bad.

I am writing to you as an adulant, and as a co-conspirator.  I admire your work, and your stance on social mores, and I see you as a figure with whom I can associate, to some degree, as I also feel entirely misunderstood and wrongly classified by the spirit of these passing ages. I am, like you, not quite straight down the middle, peaking and pushing at the perimeters – and so open to attack!

You are nominated as the first ‘homosexual’, the first to be classified as such in the public eye, criminalised, pathologised, psychologised, and medicalised throughout your own age and well into mine.

The love, that great love, that love through ages and across continents, traversing millennia and cultural boundaries … and that dare not speak its name, not clearly, not just one word … love, uncompromised, appreciative, valued, accepted, tolerated, positive, and forward-looking.

I hold it for you, and all who are anything like you, and for myself too. 

Now, it seems, in certain circles, there are no more homosexuals!  It is no longer the descriptor of choice!

Apparently we are now in the era of metrosexuals (who are either people who enjoy sexual trysts on underground trains, or those who experiment sexually in cities), and of gays (not always so very happy, but strident, loud and proud, fighting, quite rightly, for better treatment and the improvement of human rights); of the sexually ambivalent, the vers, the gender-queer, the gender-fuck, the non-binary, the human, the human beings.

I am glad we have moved on somewhat.

I did always think that the simple classifications were always problematic – that age old cliché of heterosexual and homosexual, that attempt at rationalising a state of being that set itself, supposedly, against what was, supposedly, the norm. Those norms are toppling now, let me tell you!  The general belief that there are static ways of being set throughout time and across societies is slowly losing favour.

Now there are acknowledgements of difference, moves towards acceptance, and a tentative celebration of variegation – in all its multiplicity.  Everyone is having to get to grips with the reality that we are simply not all the same, whilst in essence being but one!  The gradual collapse of division, however it may be nominated.

You would love it, Oscar, the levels of confusion, the misunderstandings, and the endless ramifications of political correctness, which try to navigate their way around phraseologies, manifestations, proclamations of being.

Oh, this slowly evolving cultural transformation would benefit from your acute eye, your razor sharp wit, your wordplay and poésie, bursting the champagne bubbles of pretension!

I will write again soon, and remain,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.