Dear Oscar,

You know of course that you were a friend to many, and an enemy to many more!

You had good friends, and arch enemies. Robbie Ross, dear Bosie, Constance … they all stood by you through thick and thin, always defending you, and more significantly, your take on how life was being lived and how it could be lived.

It is what is attractive about you – that you were able to verbalise and bring into being an entire aesthetic, a philosophical standpoint, a challenge to the orthodoxies of your day!

Your enemies, led by daddy to your lover, the much piqued Marquess of Queensbury, were able to whip up quite the storm, and appeal to mob politics. It has to be said that he introduced some element of thuggery, the outraged heterosexual male, forced to defend his view of society by fair means or foul! The sensationalist press, the easily cajoled witnesses, the public at its largest – there was simply no way back!

But now, with all the time that has passed, with the tip into the decades of the twenty first century, the witty and outrageous, camp and erudite, softly spoken and sibilant homosexual has become not only every girl’s best friend, but an object of ribald affection to many a successful male. Dictated by the times, it has to be said. And only in particular societies, it also has to be said. Don’t worry, dear Oscar, your fate would still be sealed in many parts of the globe – you might even be lynched (a suppressed desire, I would hazard a guess, of your own Victorian age)!

To those girls who love you – you are the acceptable male, good with fashion advice, and cutting in your remarks. They can have a laugh with you, whether refined by your learning, or simply the crude observations of everyday existence. You are just …. so funny!

With the boys, as you always have done – you flirt with their unstable masculinity, praise them to the hilt, give them the recognition that much of the world refuses to acknowledge in them. You make them proud to be as marvellous as they are, inside and out, mentally and physically, the pride of vibrant and hedonistic youth!

But of course, dear Oscar, the piercing eagle eye of uninformed disapproval, of ill-informed incomprehension, the lack of imagination, the stalemate of social opprobium still renders impossible your absolute acceptance. You can be a laughing stock at best, and the incarnation of evil at worst.

Happy days!

Happy unchanging days!

Though the march of history rumbles on, some things always seem to stay the same!

Some political theory called hegemony, I believe ….

I remain,

Your friend, and mine,

Algernon B. Duffoure.