Aesthetics

Eternality

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I have a feeling in this modern era that I am more of a Bosie than an Oscar.  Over indulged and flighty, everything at my beck and call, able to pick and choose and reject and dismiss – to ‘like’ and, of course, to ‘un-like’.  Oh, I wish you had encountered the internet!  Where an ‘influencer’ can die and be mourned by millions, while many other millions never knew that such a person ever existed!

I have a feeling that you were actually very set in your ways, and that despite the reprimand of imprisonment, of public humiliation, of loss of career and income, you actually carried on as normal, selecting youthful companions across France and the other denizens you visited once you were in your retirement.  Very strange thing about retirement; you may stop one thing but you carry on doing all of the other things that have been the compulsions of living.  I do think there was an element of compulsion in your character, Oscar, because you seem to have had to keep on doing what you always had done, like some irresistible urge, some ongoing defiance in the face of censure and opprobrium, an obsession lived out in your own real time.  

Almost addictive.  

We think we know all about addiction in this twenty-first century, because we have invented drugs and formed habits that have become utterly all-consuming.  I think it is probably the case that much of the planet is now drug dependent, and where people think they are not, they only have to look to the ingredients of the foodstuffs that we are all forced to consume, to the levels of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol that have become the staples of virtually the entire globe, to realise that we all keep on returning to the same substances, the same stimulants, to regulate not only our waking hours but our dreaming ones too.

None of it was unknown to you, Oscar, and I would hazard a guess that you indulged in various illicit substances throughout your lifetime.  After all, there may not have been the multiplicity of chemical concoctions that we have now at our disposal, but your Victorian age was notorious for gases and potions, acids and poisons, that were mind altering in their effects.  Even before your time!  Samuel Taylor Coleridge springs to mind, Kubla Khan, Xanadu, the ‘pleasure dome’ of heady intoxicants transporting the romantic mind.  I expect it has all been going on throughout the millennia, the ancient world with its nymphs and satyrs, its gods and demi-gods, the mysticisms of the Orient, water pipes, and hashish, and transcendental meditation, the yogis of the Indian subcontinent, the dream-time of Australia’s originary folk.  A part, it might be argued, of the human condition.

The problem, of course, is that such behaviours encourage a stepping away from the established norm, a re-evaluation of that established norm, and very often a subversion of its intent and its effect.  In collision with that other part of the human condition which seeks regularity, order, compliance, rules and proscribed regulation.  You know, we all know, all about all of that.  I wish you had not been made to suffer because of it;  as I wish those of today were not made to suffer because of it too.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Oscar Wilde! Viva!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

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.

…. a note ….

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

Just a brief note to let you know that I have not abandoned you and that my tardiness is due only to sloth and diversion. Everyday seems to be filled with the nonsense of living – the need to do things you could not even imagine as being necessary. In your day there were no supermarkets, no cars, no air travel, no television – none of the things that fill our everyday. I believe there were telephones – oh if only you knew how great is their importance in this era, how they store and define each personality, how they have become the very existence of society – at least – in those countries where they are not being given a more significant usage. You met your boys in the flesh and spoke to them and charmed them and gave them gifts and did all that you did that got you into so much bother with actual people; now there is a virtual dimension to communication, to meeting, even to enactments of congress, playing a part, being the sort of person who …. everything sort of learned by rote so that before you even meet with them you know exactly what will happen and there are few surprises. Nowadays there is a need to escape reality, to take drugs more powerful than alcohol, to get lost in a hyper-reality, in order to feel that anything has happened at all. I will explain soon ….

Oscar, don’t worry … life goes on.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Home

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Please see below a collage I have made for you.

You will see how complicated our age has become, the questions that are now under consideration, how we have moved from poor you and poor Bosie to political condemnation, to ongoing imprisonment, even death. In our world, just as in yours, some ways of being are not allowed, and people are made to suffer if they practice anything outside the status quo.

I do not want to tell you that everything is bad and pessimistic; it is possible to drink champagne and get drunk, to have sex and dance and parade through the streets, to live a blameless life with freedoms to express yourself – you just have to be aware that this is not true everywhere and that there are limitations – just as there were for you.

You had a marvellous time with your boyfriends and your parties, with Bosie’s devotion and the friendship of others – your dear Robbie buried with you, John Grey who turned from you – moments of happiness preceding … you know what they for you were preceding.

I believe it is possible to live your life openly, to reach a ripe old age, to be respected, to have a good time, to be a part of everything – somewhere in the world. Maybe in some part of America – the land of the free – which you visited and enjoyed I understand – just not everywhere.  In truth America is also problematic – everywhere is ever so slightly problematic, if you are gay.  South Africa, they say, is good in this modern era, and some European states – like Norway … it should of course be possible simply to stay at home – wherever home may be.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure

Catching Up!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I am wondering how to address you after so long, what to say, how to communicate the world we are now in to the world that you inhabited ….

In many ways – in awful ways – it is exactly the same; people are still persecuted for their passions, for their loves, for their stolen moments and primal urges, for having a good time, for giving into their nurture or their nature.

In some ways things have changed: there is an identity, a way of being which allows for a certain level of intimacy between loving souls – proscribed ways – controlled ways with levels of control varying across the globe, dependent upon social mores and social understanding. There are ways of being that permit the holding of hands, some kissing, and behind closed doors an absolute of congress, whatever that may be. There was always a locking of eyes, a long held recognition, a fleeting engagement – through millenia. An understanding. I wonder if now the new proscriptions limit and inhibit, set parameters which cannot be breached, dictate a state permitted.

Variance is still not encouraged.

There are laws and there are rituals, and dependent upon where you find yourself on the surface of the globe, in whose company, how observed, how interpreted, you can live as a free sexual entity, or you can die in trying to attain and express that freedom.

I love what you were trying to do; it is as difficult now to try to do what you might want to do as it ever was for you.

Your loving friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Workaday days

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

Have I told you anything of the world of work? 

Work is virtually compulsory in this day and age, driving the cogs of the capitalist machine. Gone, to a large extent, are the truly leisured classes, those who could choose when and if they would ever deign to get their hands at all dirty. It is true that we have the super rich, but even they seem to do, rather than merely to exist; there always seems to be some business scam up and running, because everybody wants more money, so everybody is tied into its procurement. 

Private incomes are rare, and to live the way you did, Oscar, in a way which allowed you simply to be, seems to be beyond the grasp of most of the workforce of today. It is true that we no longer go down the mines, but many people spend their days travelling, working, eating and sleeping as an ongoing and never ending cycle. Commuters, they are called – commuting into their place of work and then commuting back home again. 

Oh – we do also have the old – in ever increasing numbers. Nobody seems to die off these days, and so an aged population, some with money to spend, people the towns and cities of our realm. In a way they have become the leisured classes, but of course their faculties deteriorate, and their mobility grows ever restricted, so that in most cases, and in some way, they always become a burden. 

Now in your day the vast majority of them would have died off, but not now.  We have the advances of science and medicine to thank for keeping them all alive. One hundred years of age is starting to become commonplace! 

Anyway – my point here is that very many people do have to go to work, have to inhabit the workspace, and as a consequence, have to mix with a set of people with whom they would never normally associate in quite a close and intimate, and certainly ongoing, way. Tension, rivalries, hatreds flare up and make themselves known, as do love affairs, extra-marital affairs, friendships, and collusions. It is not a healthy atmosphere, Oscar, and because all of it is driven by profit and loss, not hearts and souls, people are overloaded, or are dispensable, or can be made redundant, at the drop of a hat. There is no sense of security or surety, and there is certainly little commitment. 

I have to witness so much unhappiness publicly displayed. There is very often real distress in the workplace. You led a charmed life. You could do what you wanted to do, and make a profit from it. And you did have a very good start in life, with breeding and money and privilege, also the artistic leanings and succour of your mother, preparing you for the life that you led; not that it was a happy one, but it did have marvellously productive highlights. 

Most people do not get the chance, as well you know, and in a world like the modern day, where supposedly everything is on offer to everyone, where we have equal rights and equal citizenship, where opportunity is there for the taking, there is the pretence that success awaits all. 

Of course it is impossible. 

Most have to be drones. 

Only a few can be queens!

Your friend and constant support,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Fantasy

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I am a manic depressive, or some sort of easily identifiable misery guts, but even though I was successful in buying the gay magazine this time, I do not feel great now that I have it. It presents a gay paradise. One of the articles quite specifically talks about money, and how the big corporations have worked out that tolerance means profit, but I find that worrying, don’t you? There is no honesty and no integrity there; everything is dependent upon the vagaries of the market, and so any hope of politicisation is lost. 

All of the bigger corporations are straighter than straight can be, and you can bet that at the tables of the top boardrooms homophobia is rampant. The pink pound only generates a certain amount of money; it is not the same as trading in arms, or pharmaceuticals; they are richer pickings. It just worries me that gay men can be targeted very easily, that they can be miked for their money while the consumer express rushes ahead, but dropped just as easily should the need ever arise. 

You will know nothing of the world wars that dominated the twentieth century – the only real events that happened. Persecution of homosexuals ran alongside persecution of other minority groups, and control of the population at large was absolutely merciless. Dreadful times. People being killed. You were locked up and your life was in tatters because you were discovered; in the second world war thousands of gay people went to their deaths. 

Recently we have witnessed the treatment of prisoners in another battle zone (there are always battle zones, from your day to this), and a part of the ritual humiliation inflicted upon prisoners is gay related. If they are not gay then they have to act gay, be sexually assaulted, be ridiculed as effeminate;  if they are homosexual, well, you can imagine. It is frightening. It does not seem very far away. 

So that within the pages of the magazine the wild hedonism of holiday resorts, the fashion tips and the designer outfits, the pretty boys putting their bodies on display, all seem to be intermeshed with a legacy and a present day reality that are extremely disturbing. 

Of course it all keeps relating back to how men are, how men behave, how men interact with the world around them. 

These gay magazines are really exactly the same as their straight counterparts; masturbatory fantasy images of lifestyles and of people that the camera has rendered beautiful for an instant. You should see what has happened to photography;  now it trades in its own lies quite blatantly. We are presented with a false version of reality, and all sorts of consumable distractions proliferate to help us forget that outside of our tried and tested bubble of delight a real world is in operation, and it is one that exists in the realms of fear, of killing, of persecution. 

Oh, I am a little morose today – but who wouldn’t be? I was given a lukewarm cappuccino and a stale Danish pastry this morning, and overcharged for the privilege. 

Is it worth it?

My warmest regards,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Virtually

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Another thing that is missing from this age when opposed to yours is the evidence of the leisured classes. Now, everybody gets some leisure, some few hours in the day, or few weeks in the year, when they can kick up their heels, bathe in the sea, eat expensive foodstuffs, not be engaged in the workaday. At a certain age they stop work altogether, and then the heel-kicking, if not compromised by the illnesses that result from lifetimes of excess, becomes a permanent feature (except that they are then too old, too out of condition, to enjoy it).

The trouble is that this leisure time really becomes the release of a pressure valve to so very many. Inappropriate behaviour, usually fuelled by drink and drugs, becomes the commonplace. All very ugly, dear. No sense of style. Because to accommodate the newly minted leisured classes, the holidaying hordes, everything has had to be cheapened. There is no quality workmanship any longer, but things are mass produced and mass consumed, flimsily put together so that they will break or spoil or be lost forever with the slightest of pressure. This age is known as a throwaway age, and the sad thing is that even people are thrown away.

Great masses are involved innocently in insurrections and uprisings, and within the consumer paradise of the West bodies are interchangeable, people are hired and fired, dated and dumped; there are those who live and die on the streets. You refer to them as ‘street arabs’, which is faint enough praise for those whom history forgets, just a part of the morass that may not have been there at all. Who remembers those who lie unrecorded, who were not feted and celebrated, who lived the nondescript lives of the many?

I don’t know why I am in such a philosophical mood. I mentioned the virtual world to you in my last letter, and it is there that you see people and things simply being chewed up, and then spat out. Fleeting glimpses of people who do not matter. The gay world has found a significant place on the internet, and I think it is interesting that as their presence in the real world is so marginalised, that it is in the virtual world, a world of their own creation, that they find such strength of presence.

But all of it is enslaved to the dollar; all of it is commercial, and about selling things that nobody really wants or needs. Actual people are a significant commodity. They give of their time, or of their minds, or of their bodies (bodies figure very highly in the gay world), but in a second can be dismissed, can be lost forever, or stored in some download archive, to exist in spaces that will never be seen and never understood.

I find it amazing, Oscar, but this virtual world is more attractive than the real world, and my guess is that multitudes escape there every single day.

As always, my love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

…but not a-changing enough!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

I have failed to buy a gay magazine.

I keep setting out with my intention clear, knowing where I am going and what I am going to do when I get there, and yet there is some expected judgement and condemnation that stops me buying what I want! I am almost ashamed at the level of my cowardice. I am a man alone; I trot along with a little fluffy dog at my heels; I have a certain affected timbre in my voice, a certain expression, a way of looking, and yet to be upfront on the streets of Chortleton Spa, to march into the largest newsagents in the town and pick up the gay magazine seems beyond me. And why? Well, we have undergone changes in the law, so that sexual acts undertaken by all people over the age of sixteen are now legal, but still popular memory, and much of popular culture, classifies homosexuality as perverse and unwanted. Of course this is not the case across the board; there are streets and ghettos, clubs and cafes, where being gay is seen as the norm (although it must be said that it is a certain sort of gay that is the norm, mainly the under 35, white, and broadly middle class – oh, and ‘straightacting’!), but not really in Chortleton Spa. Here the majority of people do not openly know or acknowledge anyone who is gay, although among the younger crowd to have a gay friend is a fairly trendy thing, and there are knitting circles and flower arranging societies, even charity shops, where the older gay may find a home. Really! No notion of pride! The politically and seriously minded, happy and healthy homosexual needs to look elsewhere than provincial towns, to the real venues of the metropolis, or to the virtual world of the online community. We now have a virtual world which rubs in some sort of parallel to the real world, one which we access electronically. Yes, I am sure it sounds like gobbledegook to you, but believe me, it is really catching on. And the result is: you do not have to exist in the real world at all if you do not want to. There are hordes of eager young things available ‘online’ (as it is called!) to satisfy your every desire – all at a price, of course. Everything is at a price. Capitalism is the biggest fashion accessory of them all.  Everywhere.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

The times they are a-changing?

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Well, this is some measure of how much times are attempting to change!

I tell you that it is now possible to purchase a magazine (or two, or three) which promotes the homosexualist cause in the high streets and commercial thoroughfares of every major town and city throughout the land! Yes, cheeky chappies with their shirts off gurn down from magazine stands, and shelves in newsagencies, and entice you to part with cash so as to learn about the delights of a subculture which at your time, as you know too well, m’dear, was kept well and truly under wraps.

It may be the result of political awakening, it may be the result of social change; more likely it is capitalism, pure and simple, noticing through gritted teeth that male subjects who live alone and cavort only with their own kind have excess monies at their disposal. It is known as the phenomenon of the Pink Pound. Pink, because it has to be feminised in some way (these are, after all, men who act like women; let’s be clear. liberalism only ever goes so far).

Even, I might add, in the ultra conservative Chortleton Spa, overwhelmingly home to the middle classes whom you have lampooned so well in your oeuvre, Oscar dear! Yes, not only a place to take the waters, but also where gay magazines can be bought.

I find though that you need some guts to buy them in a place like Chortleton. There is the whole palaver of walking into the store trying not to behave in any way differently to anyone else, as if buying such a periodical were as commonplace as taking ‘Yachting News’, or ‘Dog Groomers Weekly’. It should not be so, but you just know, as a homosexualist subject, that such a purchase is going to prompt mental notes and imperceptible reaction. You did not live long enough to witness the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in Germany (the 1930s, dear), and I was not born early enough to witness it either, but I get a sense that in the early days it was probably something like this.

Of course one ends by unwittingly drawing attention to one’s real intention, as one is forced to bend to the lowest shelf (such magazines used to be on the highest, on a par with pornography, but are now relegated to the depths of ‘Autobarter’, and, God forbid, ‘Fashion for Men with Aplomb’). Gay magazines are moderately priced, but not cheap. That is something to do with the currency and availability of the ‘pink pound’ (what fun it would be if it were the ‘shimmering guinea’ or the ‘star-spangled ducat’, but no, as I note above, it has to be made womanly for the sake of popular consciousness). It is currently in excess to many a homosexual (who are friends indeed of the equally ubiquitous ‘pink credit card’), and available to any money grabbing upstart, straight or gay, big business or the smallest of small fry, who may want to lure it away from you. Why, I’ve had straight and thug-like barmen swivel their hips, grab their crotches, and lick around their teeth and their lips for a decent tip; everyone, in this era, is a slut for cash.

Anyway, naturally, the shopping emporium is staffed either by shiftless and sullen schoolboys, vaguely amused and mainly astute schoolgirls, or older, formidable, deep bosomed matrons, who silently tut and inwardly disapprove as they delicately manhandle the magazines one is purchasing. The schoolboys, for their part, are untouched, and outwardly do not look you in the eye (although we are told reliably, and repeatedly through the decades now, that ‘masculinity is in crisis’; there is no evidence of this in their matter-of-factness, and their cool dispassionate demeanour); they do not falter, they act ‘cool’. The schoolgirls look full on, catch a smile, exchange a grimace, make an almost audible wish for a gay friend or a gay dad who would be fun, understand their obsessions with boy bands, advise on nail polish; they are untroubled, just doing a job, generous in spirit. The matrons assume the guise of Rosa Klebb, or some other mythical Nazi (so, sorry, dear, that they are on my mind today – there must be some residue of similarity between the two eras that I am responding to). They do just as they are told. They could be shovelling bodies. ‘I was just doing my job, your honour, honest!’ There isn’t any warmth there.

But maybe I am wrong.

Maybe they all have gay sons, and empathise like crazy.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure