Dear Oscar,

Of course I know that what you chose to do – to stay and face the music, to own up to your approach to life and aim to justify the ways in which you chose to live – became a cause célèbre that has come to influence the ways in which more modern societies have developed. I know that by being steadfast you did uncover a side of your world’s mores that could be objected to, that probably needed reform – that in being addressed has put right some wrongs and opened up alternative ways of being. Nevertheless, I am being slowly persuaded that so much of what ‘hits the headlines’ and becomes the touchstone of an age is in actuality a lot of fuss about nothing. It just seems to take history for that to be the case, and the generation and popularisation of sets of ideals that go against whatever it was that caused the ultimate umbrage at the time.

You see Oscar, you did, in hindsight, sort of invite disaster, and a huge amount of pressure to be heaped upon you – so much, it might be argued, that it was impossible to behave in any way that might be deemed rational. You steadfastly held your position, and although that may be seen as laudable, the price you paid was so high as to deny you existence at all! Did that have to be the case? And did it have to be the case that your legacy of martyrdom still sticks like a mal odeur even around the modern depictions of the homosexual? I think of the century of suffering that has been enacted since your too early departure from the planet, the inevitable fight for freedom of expression, the fiery street protests, and the battles that were fought with words, and with rocks, and bricks, and cricket bats. It may have all been inevitable, but I do just wonder. I do just wonder if not inviting disaster might also have been an option; that you could have exited to Europe and used your mightiest of weapons, your pen, to argue for a more just society where there would not be persecution – which also had a ring of inevitability about it, as all societies were advancing in the greater sense, and still are around the globe, and ‘old’ ideas become replaced with ‘new’ ones, and democratisation, such as it is, for now, seems to hold some sway. Do you really believe that without your humiliation and suffering there would have bee no gay liberation? Somehow I think it would have been different. I worry that the taint of your treatment lingers even in the face of the most advanced developments. I worry that I need to worry, and that is both the point of this letter, and what I most ardently wish to subvert and deny.

All may not be so well with the world, and all of us carry some worldview where we know of instances where there are injustices and misdemeanours, but it is also true that all is also well with the world, because flowers do continue to grow and bloom – even green carnations! I know as well as you did that I can provoke disaster, that I can invite pressure into my life, that I can cause a stir, worry myself silly, pick and probe and prod and upset everyone who surrounds me, but I do wonder to what end? To get my own way? To be right about whatever it is that I wish to undertake? To try to mould the world in its entirety to my point of view? It all seems rather foolhardy, Oscar dear, when it is obvious that humanity loves humanity, and always will. The differences and the factions and the fights and the oppositions are so few and far between compared to the commonalities of being: the air that we all need to breathe; the water that we all need to drink; the sustenance that we can engender for ourselves, in all its forms, for our mutual well-being.

I am doing my utmost not to invite pressure into my life, Oscar, without compromise and with a sense of being true to myself and my world. I wonder what your life would have been if you had been able to do the same.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.