Dear Oscar,

I write to you across the years – the many years since your death – the century and more …

I write to you across the years because I think you will understand me, and I think I am more like you than I might want to imagine or admit. I have the same desires, deep-rooted lusts, needs that overtake my very being and come to be my purpose in life, my essential self, my way of being. To the point where I do not even notice life slip by.

You were deemed a bad man, and you were punished for being bad. Your society saw you as greedy, as gluttonous, a gourmand, an ugliness. In my age I am more indulged for the sins that you committed, but there is no difference, and my blue, green, pathway-led lifestyle choices, my waywardness and neediness, my refusal to be a part of it, my dependent hegemony to the new/old and older/newer status quo demands that our parallelism is seen. All over the world. Whether recognised or unrecognised, whether spoken about or whispered in hushed tones, whether displayed or hidden from view, you walk with me and I with you, our banners fluttering in a mythic sky.

You were open; I am closed. You made yourself known; I lock a door on the world and do not even venture out. You faced your fears whilst my fears paralyse me to the point of immobility. I do not know why your star shining before mine dimmed the lights, nor why it is that your reflected luminescence is all that I can see to grope my way forward on a path not dissimilar but exactly the same, nor why it is that where I live and when I live boys hang from cranes in the same universe as boys kissing, as weddings and nuptials flit between and beside imprisonment still and beatings and the funeral cortege. I have all of your emotions de profundis to the clouds and space and beyond to worlds you never saw.

I do not think you were ever free and I too am never free. Just as your age and society made you, so my age and society make me, and the two are terrifyingly the same and overlap and coalesce and become inexplicably crushed beneath the monoliths of being that are the dictates of the norm.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.