gay

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.

Me, myself and I

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

There were some people who liked you and supported you even in your darkest days, either because they were the same as you, or because they sympathised with you, or because they found a way to position themselves in opposition to the established norm. The vast majority, however, did not support you at all, their reasons being that you were unnatural, perverse, uncommon, alien, other to themselves. There was what is called ‘moral opprobrium’.

I do not know where I would have positioned myself had I been there at that time.

I may have believed all of the salacious gossip that was made public through the newspapers, and decided that the voice of that moral opprobrium was correct, and that your existence was against nature, and that you were too strongly against ‘God’s will’ (and it would not have mattered which God I may have been referring to – they all seem to have had a problem with you – apart from the deities of the Ancients, whom you knew so well, and promoted for your own ends).

I may have been caught by the auspices of the time, the expectations of the society which surrounded me, and which dictated a ‘correct’ path, a way of living from which no-one was supposed to waver (and so found a wife, as you found a wife, had some children, as you had children – in fact I remember this pressing in upon me in my own time – the family requirements, the social law).

I may have condemned myself to a lonely path of fetid academia with its rules and rigmaroles, or turned to the Church with all of its proscriptions, embraced a faith which showed me the way forward, lived out my life as I seem now to live out my life, in quietude and reflection, not making my presence felt, not speaking to the world and not responding when the world speaks to me. I may have developed an illustrious career, a set path of noticeable progression or obvious failure which could be pinned upon me as a point of definition, to make me known, make me understood, and distance me as far as possible from anyone like you.

But of course, like most people, to some degree, I am like you. On occasions I like to show off and be noticed, be regarded as witty and entertaining, make people smile, hold up a mirror to absurdity, make people laugh. I like to dress up, to make known my good fortune when good fortune comes to me, to lament my losses in a way that evokes sympathetic understanding, be proud and fearless, stand tall and broad and unassailable. I like the company of others like myself, and I am driven by primal urges at root, the very spark of being, the need to indulge passion, experience pleasure, set forth the serotonin, enhance my feelings, move in the fast stream, in high definition, in three dimension, fly, speed, gorge myself, dream and desire.

Feast with panthers.

Your good 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.

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.

…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

Gender Recognition

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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!

Your friend, and mine,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Social Acceptance

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

You would think that since you were around things might have changed! There is now all sorts of terminology which would be unfamiliar to you, so let me try to explain.

In the parlance of today you would be classified (which you were not in your own times) as ‘homosexual’ (in a strangely diametric opposition to ‘heterosexual’), ‘gender-fluid’ (there are some images of you presenting as a woman, and of course many as a man), ‘queer’ (in that you subverted the sexualised economy of your day), ‘gay’ (again opposed diametrically to ‘straight’), ‘cis-male’ (born with the characteristics and outward signifiers of masculinity), ‘white’ (there is no hint of any other racial component in your genetic make up), ‘privileged’ (you were not poor, not ever; real poverty would not have afforded you rich friends), and, in all probability, effete (with a hint to the effeminate).

All of these things brought about your absolute condemnation in social and even political terms, but nowadays there would be some level of spoken, and even statutory acceptance. There would be the brazen face of social acceptance made visible across all media, and yet woven into the fabric of that acceptance questions would be raised, moralisms promoted, both subtle and unsubtle judgements cast. And the great organs of states, legal systems, statutory regulations, and of course levels of social opprobrium, often not needed to be uttered at all, kept behind closed doors and lace curtains, would still marshall your progress through life.

Oscar, you did find a place within your society which you occupied with brilliance for a short while. Now too you would be able to achieve something similar, but so much has had to be fought for, so much petitioning, challenging, arguing, and still doors are kept firmly closed, access to the table denied, your place at the party proscribed within limited confines. For you, I know, it was actual confinement; but do not think for a moment that there are not places in the world where a worse fate would await you.

I pray for you, dear Oscar, as I pray for all the others.

Your friend, and my own,

Algernon B. Duffoure.