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 ….
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.
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.
How appalled you would be at the brazen behaviour of the young men of our time. They do like to show off their bodies at every available turn, and some of the websites in the virtual world, well, they leave nothing at all to the imagination!
That young men can be persuaded to pleasure themselves in front of a camera seems almost inconceivable, but they do it seemingly without batting an eyelid, and for hardly any reward, or so I have been led to believe. Of course the images made are hawked around all over the internet, so that the same young man will appear in exactly the same poses on a number of sites, but that in some way accentuates the brazenness of the activities in the first place.
I suppose it could be argued as a laudable liberalisation, when in fact all it really provides is an easy access of exploitation, both of the models displaying their wares, and of the punters who sign up and pay their subscriptions. I suppose it alleviates that boredom and isolation of provincial existence, and I would love to know how many households in Chortleton Spa receive such material. It must be a very profitable business, because a plethora of sites are advertised if you can be bothered to look (which I must confess, dear Oscar, I simply cannot be doing with – there are, after all, other things).
I saw a marching band of the Boy’s Brigade last Saturday, and it actually sent a chill up and down my spine. I thought they had been disbanded years ago, but there they were, beating their drums and blowing their cornets, and generally displaying a pseudo militaristic bearing which was much less than attractive.
I kept my distance, I can tell you.
They looked like the sort who could be commanded to be a persecutory rabble to the likes of me – like the Nazi Youth in Germany before and during the Second World War (something from which you were spared – but I am sure there were many thugs, and certainly blackmailers, who were out for your blood and dollar).
Given the record of the twentieth century for warfare you would think that preparation and killing of gullible young men would have stopped, but of course it has not. There are still theatres of war this very day, and the young (mainly men, although women are now equally recruited) are being sacrificed to some supposedly greater glory that is very ill-formed.
The pornography and the battlefields are very similar scenarios. The cheapness of flesh and of life, and at the very cheapest are the lives of talented young men who are not nurtured with love, and certainly not to love.
Oh, there is an ongoing and largely unspoken condemnation of Greek love still prevalent; it is not to be encouraged, and still largely to be ridiculed, and not accounted for within the upper echelons of power.
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.
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.
At this very moment in the United Kingdom there is much debate about the Gender Recognition Act – and I know, Dear Oscar, that such a thing would be inconceivable in your time. I know that your age was wrestling with the implications of the ‘Woman Question’, but let me tell you things have moved on apace since then. We do now have the legal recognition of women, their rights, their position in society, and we do now strive for some level of equality between the sexes as they have been defined (there are many who would scoff at that, both in terms of its appropriateness and its efficacy!). But now – and it is most exciting – has emerged the idea that gender does not have to be fixed, in fact never really was, that it is all just a convenient construct for categorising people, and that it can be subverted and even overthrown.
I tell you, the most exciting people are living right now!
Female to male, male to female people now exist; those who do not align with any particular gender also; and those who nominate as ‘genderqueer’, who exist outside of the established order, and who use the pronoun ‘they’, rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’. Oscar, you would love it, stirring the pot to such a degree that swathes of the population are starting to react, with earnest debate in parliament, with screaming attacks and defences in the media, and, sadly, actual bodily harm, even murder of particular subjects in particular places. In the United States of America (which I know you visited. dear Oscar), transsexuals, as the gender warriors are increasingly coming to be known, can be hounded and killed!
It is truly a social revolution.
At the heart of the debate is the central question: am I to be defined by the state around me, or am I able to define myself? Can I live my life openly and unhindered in whatever way I choose, in gendered terms, or do I have to be labelled and categorised and positioned by the societies that surround me? Do I have to be a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’, or can I simply insist upon being ‘myself’. I know you would be right there in the thick of it. It tears asunder all of our assumptions and presumptions about how we think we have to be, what we think we have to do, and how we feel we need to organise our lives and our worlds – and in those respects offers an unlimited freedom of being.
Of course it does get terribly muddied conceptually by the actual world in which it is evolving, with headlines and doggerel mocking and deriding ‘men in dresses’ (priests and bishops, one has to counter), ‘bearded ladies’ (don’t all humans sprout hair?), wavering sexualities and unfixed unions, but I cannot help feeling that we are living through something enorme, my dear, simply enorme.
After all, when you were last with us women did not have the right to vote in public elections – and now they most certainly do, with all that has come with it. You would not recognise the society in which we are living, although I suspect that you would still be endlessly amused. I am, Oscar. Both amused and terrified and worried for my dear people who want to break the boundaries, stand outside of the fence, be who they want to be! The repetition of form, the desperate attempts to cling to certitude – when everything changes, constantly, whether we like it or nor! This is the battleground!
Really the only safe form of exercise is perambulation – a short walk of a mile or two around the streets, bringing you down to earth and back on to solid ground. You would have no vision of what is to be encountered on such an expedition, so let me explain.
Cars, everywhere there are cars – the modern form of transportation, not dependent upon horses at all! I know in your time it would have been a wonder to see a horseless carriage, but now they are so common that everyone, and everyone’s heterosexual wife (homosexual boyfriend’s too) has one. Speeding from place to place, on errands both urgent and utterly frivolous. It has created an ecological disaster, to the point where now, only a century or so since you left us, we have managed to pollute the very air that we breathe. Yes, Oscar, we have found ways to kill ourselves off, to poison the atmosphere itself, to over-produce all of the nonsense that our modern society seems to desire, to the point of absolute destruction.
There is a level of conscience trying to creep into the argument, and many many people are aware that these are the consequences of our collective action, but very little is done in actual terms to counter it. You see, Oscar, cars have become big business, ensure high profit margins, and literally fuel multifarious industries around the world that provide wages to lift people from poverty, and fat salaries for the fat cats (as they are known) who sit at the top of the tree, fiddling (and here is an allusion that you will recognise) while Rome burns! So, on any walk (and walkers are in the minority) there is a constant encounter with cars, parking, manoeuvring, starting and stopping, slowly choking both the passers by and the occupants of the vehicles themselves.
Then there is litter. Everywhere litter. Packaging discarded on to the roadside, and all of the unwanted and valueless detritus of modern living simply tossed on to grass verges, into gutters, and trodden underfoot. We seem to have so much, and this is argued as the apogee of Western civilisation, that everyone has an endless choice of everything that they could possibly desire, but that in having so much we simply throw away all the excess, all the safeguarding, that brings us food ready made, products as instantly consumable. On any walk you literally have to pick your way along the pavements to avoid treading into what other people have decided to discard. Often small objects, but sometimes furniture, or large boxes, even, as mentioned above, cars! Everything just dumped on the roadside, so that now, in this losing battle, we pay taxes to employ people to make some effort to clear it all up! There are some virtuous souls who go out and pick up the litter of their own accord, not paid to do so, but out of civic responsibility, but not only are they in the minority, they also unwittingly become part of the problem. If I were the sort of person to throw rubbish on to the street then I would continue to do so secure in the knowledge that someone else will pick it up for me.
The real problem is the excesses of capitalism, something in its infancy when you were with us, still glorying as you were in the vestiges of Empire. You see in your day the wealthy and powerful kept themselves to themselves and went into the world feeling that they were rightfully exploiting those whom they encountered; nowadays access to wealth and privilege is there for the taking for everyone (broadly speaking, although the argument is actually more nuanced, which I will no doubt come on to, at a later date). Now everyone is exploited by everyone for profit, and the level of exploitation centres around the most basic of urges: food, sex, survival. Vast fortunes are made by pumping the populace with fat, sugar and salt, in various forms; by offering them sexual excitation and titillation, in various forms; and by playing upon their vacuous attempts to survive as a race, through out of control reproduction rates and population explosion. The overarching philosophy is one of: “things will get better”, but not that “things can be great now”. Humanity seems to be locked in a fruitless cycle of aiming for improvement, for longevity, for betterment, but tomorrow, or in the time of sons and daughters, at some point in the not so distant future. It reminds me of religion: you might suffer on earth but you will be rewarded in heaven, or, only death will bring you release!
In that respect not much has changed since your time, and this is becoming a theme of my letters to you. Nothing changes. Superficially everything seems different, but in actual fact the wealthy and privileged carry on doing as they see fit, exploiting the masses in any way that they can in order to bolster up their positions. Those masses consume everything that is thrown their way, both killing themselves and reproducing to keep the whole edifice in place, and at the fringes, which you will recognise, which I am sure you saw all too keenly, the destitute queue for handouts.
That is what I noticed on my walk today. The affluence of big houses with well kept gardens and polished cars, and down the back streets, a queue of people waiting for the church door to open, so that they could pick up a parcel of food.
I went along to an exhibition at Chortleton Manor College today, and simply had to write to tell you all about it. A singular part of that dubious tradition of public schools in what is now called the United Kingdom (probably Great Britain in your day, but not so ‘great’ now!): an ex-country pile converted into a fee paying boarding school some time in the eighteenth century, desperately holding on to its vestiges of privilege and standing. How the British love to pretend that things are still the way they were!
Of course, as minor public schools go, it is doing rather well, attracting a lot of foreign money, I believe; seems to specialise in the oriental student, and the Asian princeling, among all the solid, upright, and oh so British members of its community. If you have enough money, you can attend, that is about the sum of it – although connections do help, and family history, and being a part of the exclusive club. All about ‘rubbing shoulders’, although low on the national stage – not exactly an Eton, or a Rugby, or a Winchester.
It is a place that echoes and reverberates to the marching of its war dead (you have missed both of the ‘great’ wars of the twentieth century, Oscar, (more greatness that the UK has to contend with!) and a jolly good thing too – such squandering of youthful manly beauty). There seems to be something of a cult of hero worship for the sacrificed – all strong young men led by the nose into slaughter, with little regard for their individual plight. Almost as if it were to be expected; born to die. It still goes on today; preparing young men to obey orders no matter how absurd those orders might be, even at the cost of life itself, for usually vain-glorious outcomes. The college reveres this tradition.
Today was ‘A Feast of Fickle Craftsmanship’. You see in this day and age, Oscar, anyone who does anything that is remotely manual is seen as ‘artisan’, is celebrated for doing something other than pushing buttons, guiding machinery, or shuffling electronic documents. Strange to say that what you would have seen as ordinary and not worthy of much comment, is now held in the highest regard and given a rarity value far outstripping its actual worth. It happens in every sphere. Mechanisation has taken over the world, and so if somebody actually does something it is deemed worthy of note, and celebrated.
I cannot help thinking, and you would concur, that the craftsmen themselves would have been finer to inspect than the wooden objets d’art and pieces of extraordinary furniture, that they have been able to produce. Upright young men, well educated, but supported, usually by dreaming parents, to step away from the pressures of the everyday, and to create in woodsheds and outbuildings pieces of art with a functional quality. Such is the level of decadence nowadays that all sense of practicality has gone. Doors open with hidden handles, lights are concealed to illumine surreptitiously, angles are softened or made more acute, and what is valued everywhere is the reality of pieces of wood, with actual grains, gleaming beneath what I am sure is a polypropylene (you wouldn’t understand – we have pursued chemistry to the point of self-annihilation) varnish.
Basically, even the real is subsumed beneath the fake. You see, Oscar, there are no servants anymore who would be willing to polish lovingly the wood of a bureau, or who would encourage dust simply to roll off – not even to settle in the first place! And the tools of this craft are now so far advanced that I believe you can programme in your design and they will cut all the angles required, follow the grain of the wood, buff and polish to an extent that now exceeds what is purely humanly possible. The work reflects the privilege from which the craftsmen stem; things that look a little different, have poor functionality, but exist for show, for showing off. You would love it, I am sure. A chest of drawers that looks like an egg with room for three pairs of socks and a pen, secretly unlocked with a feather shaped key – what more could be desired.
I got the impression that most of these craftsmen, and definitely many of the visitors, were ‘old boys’ of the College itself. That this was a sort of self-perpetuating bubble of existence, feeding itself with extravagance and distraction. You could tell from the way they comported themselves; they had that air of being in control, and of being right, which comes from a public school education – of entitlement. There was no room for criticism at all, and the polite hushed tones, the church-like atmosphere excluded all of those who might laugh, or mock, or take umbrage. And everything was so expensive – huge amounts of money being asked for desks and chairs and cupboards and chests of drawers. More than a month’s salary for most of the populace for something that ought to be practical but now had become a whimsy.
Oh, and there were nudes of course – wooden statuettes for corner displays and alcove decor – ghastly exemplifications of imagined womanhood, wearing pointed stiletto heeled shoes and nothing else, like weird trophies, pert and fulsome! Oh, and also a black man, with a penis bigger than his head, in a kneeling position with his arms outstretched. Disgusting. Something to take home and own and put on display in risque cabinets for others to envy and admire. Really, it was all too absurd, but easy to play the game of being a connoisseur of fine furnishings, opening drawers and cupboard doors, and muttering ‘resin’, ‘burr walnut’, ‘acanthus leaf’ to my companion. What struck me was that you would have been quite at home there, even after all these decades since your earthly departure. You would, I am sure, have noticed nothing unremarkable, and approved in some level of complicity with all that was on display. Apart from the updating of music systems and electricity supplies, and security measures, you would have wandered around seeing and registering only things, and people, whom you already knew.
There was all the smiling and fawning of the over polite punters, and the ‘busy-bodying’ of female curators. A rude young man, not good looking, took money on the door, and everyone wandered around reverently, treating all objects with wonderment and surprise, and speaking to nervous artists with no clear intention to buy. Much had been sold, the place reeked of money and privilege, and of a world that had advanced in no way since you were here. The old boys, as they always did, had gone off to make their fortunes in the colonies, or in the City, and now they were back to indulge ‘taste’. You have to laugh at the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, because that is exactly who these people were. One or two of them may be Viscount this or Baron that, but in actual fact they were just people with money – not so rough trade – out to make a splash. You would have eaten them up like so many anchovies, and I would have enjoyed the show. But I wonder how much you would have rocked the sleepy boat; as feeding frenzies go, this was a table at which to gorge. I get the impression that you were something of a gourmand, not able to say ‘no’, or ‘enough’, or ‘I won’t’.
With love to you, Oscar, for reminding me, again, of human foible, for all that you were, and all that you are.
At the risk of repeating myself (and Lord knows, Oscar, some of the things you said have been repeated through the generations ad nauseam), I would like to enlighten you further about the linguistic and categorical changes that have occurred in attempting to define the differences that supposedly exist between individual sexed human subjects.
Now there’s a mouthful, but it is a challenge to offer you any informed social interchange without an attempt at definition. Goodness knows I will fail, but at least let me put in place some pointers.
Everyday life in this twenty-first century era presents levels of differentiation each of which compete for recognition. There are, as I have already informed you, the metrosexuals. I have, by the way, met only a few of them, charming, usually young, men who style their hair, pomade their bodies, dress in the latest fashions, use the ‘hippest’ and ‘coolest’ forms of linguistic construction and verbal intonation, and who waver between a slightly feminised but rigidly adhered to heterosexuality, and a ‘curiousity’ about homosexual expressiveness. I have seen them in every urban setting, town and city, but like all tribes they stick to their own, by and large, and only let the older gent in if he is literally a father, or a boss, or some revered cultural persona with whom it is trendy to be seen. You would have done very well with them, and would probably know them as ‘dandies’, or even as ‘aesthetes’, as you and so many of your friends were known in your own time. They are the culturally accepted sub-division of gender performance that is currently allowed to feel that they have social influence; in truth they are just the latest peacock version of the dominant class – usually straight, usually white, usually men.
The lesbians and the gays, the bisexuals, transgendered, transvestite, and queer individuals, the intersexed and the asexual beings who are now known in many circles by the acronym LGBTQIA (where there does seem to be a ‘T’ missing) are also very much in evidence, and, I am glad to say, becoming more and more vocal in their demands for recognition – and that on something of a global scale! In many settings, and in many individual cases, gone is the need to hide away and never make manifest the preferences of the homosexual subject. Now there is the chance to self-proclaim, whatever the consequences (and I cannot stress enough that at times and within certain constituencies those consequences can be dire). I must say that all of these groupings that have come into my sphere of being have been absolutely wonderful – generous, spirited, positive and above all, relatable! I count myself amongst their number! I am ‘one of them’ (which of course at one time was a pejorative term, but now is a banner of liberation and freedom fighting).
You would place yourself amongst their number too, dear Oscar, and in all honesty I find it astounding that everyone does not so align – after all who actually is 100% anything? My own favourite point of definition is ‘queer’, which is a vague and blanket term which can incorporate a myriad possibilities across all genders and all sexes, and defy any attempts at confinement or restriction. Most of the young people one sees can adequately fit the bill, at least in what is termed ‘Western democracy’. Although, truth be told, one can go anywhere in the world, enter any social setting, and one will find that youngsters push at the boundaries of sexed and gendered definition, play with the rules of personal performance, adopt different lifestyles and readily strike a pose!
Unfortunately in my advanced stage of life very few of them want to give me the time of day. There is, alas, a much understated point of prejudice: ageism! It has crept in through the course of the twentieth century, probably as a result of the emergence of youth markets, and the consequent privileging of youth oriented cultural norms. It is something else that you would not recognise, Oscar; the aged now are rarely to be engaged with, but are herded together in a sort of twilight existence of near mania and dementia and largely left to rot. They live in communities of nostalgia and rigid conformity (and the queer, I fear, is barely tolerated). A few of the young are paid a pittance to administer drugs to them and to serve them their slop, but other than that inter-generational contact is limited to the family, and then only piecemeal. For the likes of you and me, Oscar, it is very difficult to get them to notice. In that sense I suppose little has changed, except that I imagine a certain readiness to learn from the older folks of your time, a sort of reverence for age which may be my own fantasy and have nothing to do with your lived experience. I expect in many ways you just felt taken advantage of, and I am sure the renters, on the whole, were wily sorts, laughing at you behind your back. A shame – all that we have to endure in the search for a little … love? Appreciation? Notice even?
Nowadays the young, if not in person, certainly in discussion, all ‘play with gender’. Girls look like boys and boys look like girls, their fashions, hairstyles, cultural pursuits, all entirely interchangeable. It’s been going on for years! Generations even! There are those who do not seem to notice that grandparents are the ones who started all of this – flower power, rock and roll, experimentation with substances and states of mind, to produce an array of possibilities of being. I know you will have seen something of this – the hallucinogens, and the smoking of imported vapours, the alcohol of course, that great staple through the ages, keeping the peasantry drunk!
You, and your wife (which always seems absurd to say, because a gay man today does not usually take a wife, unless he wants a visa or a passport, even though many a married man, just like you, dear Oscar, is secretly gay) experimented with styles and fashions that have gone on to redefine sexed definition, and I am sure that there were denizens where men paraded in female attire, and women similarly in male dress. Why it has been reported that your male brothel keeper, a certain Mr. Alfred Taylor, was very fond of ruffles and bows, lace and ribbons and crinolines, so I assume you were no stranger to such displays. But I do get the impression that in your own time you could tell who was who, where they stood in the social order, and certainly their gender, even if it were an assumed one. There was cross-dressing, dear, we’ve always known there were cross-dressers through time, and probably everywhere. But I get the impression that in your day there were a set of clear signifiers at play – short hair and long hair, trousers and dresses, mustachios and rose blushed complexions – or so we are led to believe! Now we have an apparent interchangeability, and on occasions one really has to look twice, just to check, and on some marvellous and mind-boggling occasions one is none the wiser! I do so enjoy it when I carry on walking and do not know who has crossed my path, girl or boy! There’s a lot of fuss about it, but you know me, Oscar, each to their own!
Now I know you had your own fair share of boys in makeup, powder and rouge, boys with vaseline at their lips, and a good array of muscle bound young women, strong and swarthy from their labour, but I get the impression, with a good degree of hindsight, that distinctions were made clear, that definitions were in place. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe you would disagree with me, and argue that as much interchangeability occurred in your own era, but in any case there really was not so much fuss being documented about it. There was very little visibility. Now we have subjects who define their own sense of self in the face of social definition, who take sides, who oppose each other in their multifarious expression, and who parade their difference. It is a very public spectacle, with no attempt to hide, and visible everywhere. It is out on the streets and not behind closed doors, which in one sense is a good thing because people have confidence, are sure of themselves, can express their sense of being, but on the other hand collapses entirely our long-held and culturally shared notions of certainty itself. Which I must say I support wholeheartedly. It feels like a long overdue shaking of the foundations! I suppose any such moves were quietly brushed under the carpet when you were around. To my mind everything is so much better, with a more apparent distribution of possibilities, within reach for us all – even if it has led to a certain level of tribalism, even dubious allegiance, and a backlash – such a public backlash.
Although, and I can see a steely gaze overcoming you, Oscar dear, the current of hetero-normativity continues to hold its sway. When pressed many young people are, on the whole, ‘straight’; that is, except for the few of them who are open about being ‘gay’. Most are ‘men’, or are ‘women’, most hold on to the nomination ‘white’, or ‘black’, even ‘rich’, or ‘poor’. Precious few (and I do mean the most precious of the few, the gemstones in the rock face) embrace their multifarious components. There are recent and popular statements like: “it is our sameness that outweighs our difference”, or: “we are all more alike than we are different”, but still, when pressed, and in official censa, difference defines.
Let me explain it to you, Oscar: the strict dichotomy remains in place, an absolute adherence to the binary divide, which argues that there is male, there is female; there is heterosexual and there is homosexual; some are gay, some are straight (just as they are black or white, or rich or poor). Very many cling to the idea of being heterosexual, and not homosexual, although I am coming across a few who self-declare as bisexual, who flirt and experiment, and in their youth are willing to try anything. The allegiance to absolute points of definition has created a universe of unjust proscription, where most people find it almost impossible to reside all of the time. Most people are all too aware that they have traits that could be deemed both male and female, that their heterosexuality is mirrored by even the most tacit acceptance of homosexuality, that even locked within opposing states adherence to the same is itself defined by the other – there cannot be one without the other.
It is true to say that there is an undercurrent of indecision, that when pressed there are those who will admit that there was once a time, that I did dip my toe, that it entered my consciousness. I went with the flow, they will say, but under duress it is, in most cases, the norm that repeatedly wins out. Just as you would expect, Oscar. You know all the stories! At boarding school I fell in love with my best friend for a whole term but I am happily married now! I may be in love with a man but I can still father a child! I will establish myself in the straight world, enjoy all its opportunities, and then, if the fancy takes me, I will declare myself gay! You just would not credit the subterfuge, Oscar – or maybe you would, maybe you were living it too! How is Constance, and the boys?
Those who come to declare themselves gay, or even mixed, are outnumbered ten or twenty to one. That there is anyone who so identifies is something of a miracle, but still they are kept in the minority! It is a happy miracle that there are any at all, I would say, but it still does not go far enough. There is at least an acknowledgement of being, and a broader, forced acknowledgement that all of the old categorisations are fractured, are teetering, are on the brink of collapse! That such possibilities exist has been long fought for, and has had to overcome, in part, the legacy created by you. But still there is a distance to go. I cannot help feeling that it is the firmly held centre ground that has to be rocked, rather than the peripheries. That definition itself is the problem, endlessly trying to define, to categorise, to lock in a box and throw away the key. If I am gay does that mean that I am not straight? If I am straight does that mean that I am not gay? If I am man does that mean that I am not woman? If I am woman does that mean that I am not man? White? Black? Rich? Poor?
My own richness of mixture may not be so apparent to you, but it makes me such a tasty, zesty, sugar and spice fruitcake that you should welcome me to any tea party.
Oh, Oscar, come back and make us laugh about it all! If only you could take away the seriousness of it all with a frivolous barb!
If only that were possible – dear, dead, and shovelled into history Mr. Wilde!
Letters to Oscar Wilde 