Just to let you know that I have not forgotten you.
The genger battle of our age is no longer solely about sexuality but increasingly about transitioning from male to female, or vice versa. There are now, in certain countries, protected rights to choose gender, and the more I research into it the more apparent it is that some level of choice has always existed. It is about whether or not one accepts the interplay of gender stereotypes as they exist within any given culture or whether one subverts or challenges those self same stereotypes.
The debate also undermines the definitional stance that many cultures assign to gender as a concept, something I am increasingly coming to question. Oppositional definitions and binary polarities seem to me to do a disservice to the potential of whole human experience. It seems to me that the possibility of merging opposition would be preferable, and that losing the pretence of clear cut definition would serve humanity better.
The daily assault of the mass media has already come upon me, as it is absolutely unavoidable in this modern age. I believe that you had newspapers to read, and even some black and white pictorialised magazines to consume, and that in the major cities young lads would stand on street corners and yell out the headlines in order to attract the purchasing of these organs. I believe that may have been the sum of the media. Apart from the theatre performances for which you were so famed, only accessible to the chattering classes, who would then chatter about the contents of the plays they saw upon the stage. Nothing more. Nowadays barely a moment goes by without mediated stories assaulting the populace from all angles, most pointedly now in the palm of one’s hand, as the mobile telephone ‘pings’ its unending importance, bringing us all what is termed ‘the rolling news’. It seems to be of significance for our culture to note that something is happening all of the time!
The peculiar thing is that once one sits back from it, mutes all of the noise, even ignores its insistence, that nothing really seems to be happening at all. There are endless sensationalised fusses made about supposed advancements in human achievement, both negative and positive, with details pored over and ‘evidence’ presented, but none of it really seems like very much at all. Man (or woman, or to my mind, human personage) climbs yet another mountain, and another one, and another one. It is as if humanity has to prove that it can overcome hurdle after hurdle that is set before its way – much of which, it has to be said, is self-imposed. We will defeat climate change (something that we, apparently, caused); we will restore the earth’s resources (all of which we greedily consume); we will conquer any threat to life that comes our way (even though we are the greatest threat to human life, over and over again). It is that last mentioned quality which hits me so hard the more that I think about it; the fact, dear Oscar, that it is ‘over and over again’.
These supposedly grand achievements dominate the headlines, relay to us all the victories and the conquests, the heights that we are able to scale, the grandness of our being, as a race, as a human race. I cannot help thinking that it is in our smallness that we are actually greater, far greater, and under-reported, under-represented, and under-recognised. Kind gestures; smiles; encouragement; the old person diligently avoiding the purchase of plastic; the young person deciding never to own a car; kisses; concerns; delivering shopping; singing a song, under one’s breath, on a bus, on a train; generosity which means sharing a meal, dropping a coin into an outstretched hand, buying a coffee with no requirement for payback; writing to a condemned man, a man condemned by history, martyred, remembered with reservation, and pledging,
You did not reach a ripe old age yourself. It is a great shame that your treatment at the hands of the judicial system basically contributed to the foreshortening of your life, so that you reached only your 46th birthday. I for one am sorry that this was the case. In fact in your age, the late Victorian age, life expectancy for men was not too dissimilar from the age that you reached, although the prevalence of infant mortality skews somewhat the recording of accurate death rates. Nevertheless, lives on the whole were not long, and certainly not as long as they have come to be all these years later. Now it is common to hear of people living until they are over 100 years old, at least in the West, where not only medical advancement, but also economic plenitude, ensure that many are well cared for into their dotage.
What happens to them though is a different thing altogether, and comes to be slightly alarming. In the countries you inhabited, in Ireland, the UK, France, and even America that you visited, it seems to be the case that the aged are not treated with veneration, but are more often than not parcelled off into care homes, to be kept out of the way, and to lead quite restricted lives. Any health issues become the dominant issues of existence, and since the medics have plied these people with drugs for half of their lives, very often there is the onset of dementia, and of Alzheimer’s disease, taking their toll upon any quality of life. Through this age of the pandemic of Covid 19 the very aged are kept isolated completely from the rest of society, even from their loved ones, in efforts to keep them alive and well (something which of course fails because these people are already old and frail). I must say, Oscar, I do find it bizarre that such efforts are made to keep people who are at the end of their lives going, celebrating the fact that 96, 97, 98 year olds keep on living within their peculiar rest home scenarios, while young people are sent out on to battle fields, are put in dangerous positions everyday, sometimes losing their lives pointlessly. Cars still zoom around cities, polluting the very air that we breathe, mass production of plastics persists, choking natural resources like waterways and seas and oceans, landfill sites become poisoned deserts where certain members of humanity have to eke out a living – and yet, where there is privilege, where there is plenty, keeping a few doddering old folk going beyond any version of a natural end is the priority.
Now I know I am being controversial, and that one day I may well be one of those ancient crones, but I pray to the memory of you Oscar, that should I find myself in such a position I will be fit and healthy and compos mentis. From my standpoint, as it is, in the present, I cannot think of anything worse than a gang of experts making decisions for me and choosing to keep me going no matter what state of being I may be in.
Oh, and it does have to be said – being very very old and very very gay may be a mix that is difficult to endure – unless of course I happen also to be very very well and very very rich too!
The wind is blowing today. I expect you listened to the wind from inside your cell, as well as witnessing it in all its fury within society. I find it is beginning to irritate me.
It is irritating me not because there is anything particularly unusual about it, not because it is a more terrifying wind than there has ever been, and not because it is destructive, or incessant, or creeping in between the gaps of the buildings I inhabit; it is irritating because I am allowing it to be.
I think of nagging children who pester and cajole, but who of course give up entirely if one does not accede to them; of pet dogs who want to be stroked, to be played with, to be the centre of attention, but who slope off to sleep if one does not participate, waiting at the sidelines until one is ready for them. I think also of my amounts of money, that flow in and out of my life, of the anxiety that accompanies them. When there is much, I worry about the amount disappearing, and when there is little, I worry that I will not have enough; all absurd, pointless and absurd.
Like you Oscar, as is evidenced in the works that you left behind, there are very many things that irritate me, and I have to acknowledge that I am very easily irritated. The banalities of a class system which oppresses not only those who are oppressed but also the oppressors, who have to conform to set standards, who live in shabby gilded cages, working within the narrow confines of their pretended respectability. The denial of natural love, of all the many loves that have dared not speak their names, the ways of being between peoples that are gentle, and friendly, and giving, the loves that radiate in small scope from those at the touchline watching the absurdities of action. All of the mothers, all of the siblings, all of the quietly watchful, holding hands and caressing, putting their loved ones to bed with kisses across the eyelids; the many loves that are not sensationalised, and which continue, beneath the surface, barely acknowledged. Even those that involve desire, regulated, careful and caring, a man with his arms around the shoulders of his closer than close buddy, and a young woman kissing her girlfriend goodbye.
It just seems to me, Oscar dear, that irritations are largely invented, and allowed to fester, and if they are truly real they can be addressed. But if they are the buzzing of the bees, the singing of the birds, the crashing of the waves, the howling of the winds, the touches of a friend, the embraces of a lover – then they do not need to be any more than you and I, and we and they, allow them to be.
Of course I know that what you chose to do – to stay and face the music, to own up to your approach to life and aim to justify the ways in which you chose to live – became a cause célèbre that has come to influence the ways in which more modern societies have developed. I know that by being steadfast you did uncover a side of your world’s mores that could be objected to, that probably needed reform – that in being addressed has put right some wrongs and opened up alternative ways of being. Nevertheless, I am being slowly persuaded that so much of what ‘hits the headlines’ and becomes the touchstone of an age is in actuality a lot of fuss about nothing. It just seems to take history for that to be the case, and the generation and popularisation of sets of ideals that go against whatever it was that caused the ultimate umbrage at the time.
You see Oscar, you did, in hindsight, sort of invite disaster, and a huge amount of pressure to be heaped upon you – so much, it might be argued, that it was impossible to behave in any way that might be deemed rational. You steadfastly held your position, and although that may be seen as laudable, the price you paid was so high as to deny you existence at all! Did that have to be the case? And did it have to be the case that your legacy of martyrdom still sticks like a mal odeur even around the modern depictions of the homosexual? I think of the century of suffering that has been enacted since your too early departure from the planet, the inevitable fight for freedom of expression, the fiery street protests, and the battles that were fought with words, and with rocks, and bricks, and cricket bats. It may have all been inevitable, but I do just wonder. I do just wonder if not inviting disaster might also have been an option; that you could have exited to Europe and used your mightiest of weapons, your pen, to argue for a more just society where there would not be persecution – which also had a ring of inevitability about it, as all societies were advancing in the greater sense, and still are around the globe, and ‘old’ ideas become replaced with ‘new’ ones, and democratisation, such as it is, for now, seems to hold some sway. Do you really believe that without your humiliation and suffering there would have bee no gay liberation? Somehow I think it would have been different. I worry that the taint of your treatment lingers even in the face of the most advanced developments. I worry that I need to worry, and that is both the point of this letter, and what I most ardently wish to subvert and deny.
All may not be so well with the world, and all of us carry some worldview where we know of instances where there are injustices and misdemeanours, but it is also true that all is also well with the world, because flowers do continue to grow and bloom – even green carnations! I know as well as you did that I can provoke disaster, that I can invite pressure into my life, that I can cause a stir, worry myself silly, pick and probe and prod and upset everyone who surrounds me, but I do wonder to what end? To get my own way? To be right about whatever it is that I wish to undertake? To try to mould the world in its entirety to my point of view? It all seems rather foolhardy, Oscar dear, when it is obvious that humanity loves humanity, and always will. The differences and the factions and the fights and the oppositions are so few and far between compared to the commonalities of being: the air that we all need to breathe; the water that we all need to drink; the sustenance that we can engender for ourselves, in all its forms, for our mutual well-being.
I am doing my utmost not to invite pressure into my life, Oscar, without compromise and with a sense of being true to myself and my world. I wonder what your life would have been if you had been able to do the same.
You undoubtedly could not see beyond your own sense of entitlement, your own pursuit of pleasure, and that is why you were unable to see how your lifestyle would impact upon the world around you. It is rather surprising, given that you were actually very astute at reading the mores of your day, as reflected in your writings; you could see very clearly that the world you inhabited was full of contradiction, was a place of secrets kept and secrets held and secrets sometimes made public in order to bring down others. I am sure that to some no small degree you actually participated in such activities, and that your ribald wit was ever ready to lampoon those whom you held in disrespect, or whom you saw as threatening your position of preeminence. I wonder if you have any regrets, Oscar, and suspect that your response would be that you have none. A strange blind spot, not seeing how things would unfold, when it was very obvious that the world was turning against you – and even you must have recognised that! I suppose this is why history has accorded to you the moniker of ‘victim’, of ‘martyr’, no less, as if the nomination of cultural sainthood somehow atones for the sins of your age – not your sins, but the sins of your age.
It is, as I have said before, much the same now. Now it is possible to get completely lost in the trivialities of the everyday, the pursuit of recognition, the need to make oneself important, the pursuit of endless diversion and the promise of unending pleasure, to satisfy the most basic of lusts and wants and perceived needs, and to miss entirely what is actually going on. In fact it is quite evident that such tactics can be used to hoodwink entire populations into regimes of control, where diktats are the order of the day, where the room for freedom of thought and freedom of expression are slowly eroded – because – we believe we can say what we want, but in actuality we are only saying what we are allowed to say! We live in an age of endless choice, but I have often thought to myself is there really any choice? Just because we can have a red car or a blue car does that mean that we can operate without a car at all? Is there really a choice, or are we all just slaves to whatever system is the order of the day? And if we are presented with real choices are we able to see them clearly, without our own stubbornness, our willfulness, standing in the way; or, more pointedly as is today’s experience, without the endless proliferation of ‘choices’, of ‘alternatives’, diverting us subtly, or not so subtly, away from any notion that real choice actually exists at all?
One would think, Oscar dear, with examples like your own to look back upon, that there would have been some sort of advance in thinking, but alas there is not. Oh, and I know that there is an argument that without your own ‘noble sacrifice’ there would have been no recognition of the plight of the homosexual, that the start of ‘gay liberation’ would not have occurred, and that there would still be persecution of sexual minorities, but really, is that valid? Is it the case that there have to be real levels of suffering before the world at large works out that persecution of anyone is not such a good idea? I am thinking of issues of race and religion, of caste systems, of slavery, of skin pigmentation, of difference however it may manifest itself. Does it really have to be that only after decades, centuries, lifetimes, millennia – that we as a human collective will realise that beating up on the other simply perpetuates the very suffering that in another breath we are all so adamantly against?
I leave you with that little poser, Oscar – from one poseur to another!
I get the impression that despite the absolute censure of the society around you, your imprisonment, your public castigation, your personal degradation, you did not change so very much. I think you believed that you were right in what you thought, and that your actions, however they may have been interpreted, were just. I am sure that you thought that the world around you was wrong, and that you were right.
We all do. We all hold on to fundamental beliefs that we have been conditioned to accept, or that our personal circumstances have drawn us towards, or that our society dictates. The vast majority of us tend to accede to the dominant sets of opinions, to go with the flow, not to question in any fundamental way what we have been taught and what we have learned, in the very broadest of senses. It has made me think that we hold on to belief systems that are the dominant order, even when they are doing us no good, even when they are set against our growth, our potential, our reaching of our zenith. So, if we were citizens of Ancient Rome, we would believe that slavery was acceptable, needed, simply the norm; we would ‘go to the games’ and expect to see bloodshed, to witness death, a pantomime of murder played out before us. If we were eunuchs at the court of Imperial China we would accept that our manhood was removed, that our opportunities to procreate would disappear altogether, that our lives would be about administrative service. If we did not accept these things then we would be cast out from these societies. In the England of the nineteenth century you, dear Oscar, had to accept that your behaviour with the ‘rentboys’ was seen as scandalous, was unacceptable to the world in which you moved so easily, was the ruination of your reputation, your career, your liberty. Whether these things are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is only the decision of the age; if they are deemed ‘wrong’ then there is a price to pay.
This has made me reflect upon change that is personal, the decision to alter one’s diet, to give up a bad habit, to shift one’s perspective. It seems to me that this is so very difficult because there is a deep-rooted fear that change itself will bring uncertainty, and uncertainty throws into chaos the long-held beliefs that make up a being. If I believe that being a ‘good’ person means that I will be rewarded, or can reward myself, with sugary treats, then I am actually doing myself a disservice as I ‘pile on the pounds’, compromise myself with the possibility of diabetes, put my heart under strain; when that is the dominant belief then rewarding oneself with an apple or an orange seems to go against the grain, take away the very belief that I may see myself as ‘good’. To give up smoking cigarettes when one sees oneself as the contemplative coffee shop visitor, veiled and wreathed with foul scented smoke, thinking through, with crossed brow, one’s place in the world; when one is the professional cook, ladling on cream, slapping around pounds of butter, producing celebratory cakes (because there is no celebration without a cake). It makes my head hurt, Oscar, even to start to think about it all.
You see, Oscar, I see very clearly my faults, as I am sure you did too; it is whether I actually want to do anything about them, to change the essence of my being, that becomes the central question.
I hope this letter finds you well; I hope that in the midst of your prison of misunderstanding you get some pleasure from the letters that I send to you. Thank you for taking the time to read them; I appreciate my voice being heard.
I was out walking, just taking some air, with no real purpose and no direction, just ambling along, looking around me, taking it all in. It struck me how much there is to take in. It struck me that I live within absolute abundance, and that everywhere there is the teeming and the multiplicity of humanity, with its impact on every horizon. That in itself made me appreciate all that humanity is able to do, without judgement, seeing the homes and the thoroughfares, the protections from the elements, shelters simple and elaborate, walkways and byways and mountain paths.
Of course we tread upon nature, the natural world, the world that grows and flourishes around us despite our every intervention. It struck me that though we tread on nature, nature very quickly treads back, filling our paths with its plants, finding all the nooks and the crevices where it can seed, multiplying endlessly. I noticed that no matter how I was feeling small trees would continue to bud and shed their almond shaped leaves, pale and yellowing in Autumn, green and piquant in Spring, and that blossoms would open, infusing the air with scent both strong and subtle. There would be wind and energy, flight and function all around me, whether I took the time to see it and to sense it or not. There would be so much of it going on that I would not be able to encompass fully its impact, not through sight, or touch, or smell – there would always be an endlessness from times I knew nothing about and into times I will not experience. A cold day, a warm day, just the vibrancy of it all whipping around me, caught in still tranquillity, lost in a windy squall.
I am, like you Oscar, beset by all the problems of the world, that weigh themselves upon my shoulders, that keep my head bowed and my vision small; just looking, without effort, just letting the world in, put all that away.
I wanted to send you a piece of writing – just to see what you think. It follows ….
Your friend,
Algernon B. Duffoure.
Billy (the Kid).
Thirteen (going on fourteen), with dribbles on his chin.
With cold snot falling (like honey) from his nose.
Which he wipes on the elasticated cuff of his jacket.
A jacket too big.
Because it is a man’s jacket which he stole from a bus shelter.
Sometime ago.
Seven p.m.
Seven p.m. and Billy is in position, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his head bent, his right foot pressed flat against the wall behind him, his left leg extended to act as anchor.
Seven p.m. and the wind howls through the city streets.
‘Got any money, mister?’
… comes the call.
‘Got any money?’ (for a poor homeless kid. Hungry kid …. he thinks, but does not say).
With the wind beating mercilessly against him, which would have ruffled his untidy hair if it had not been clamped within a baseball cap, the peak turned to one side, making his face look skewiff (or was it his expression?)
Seven p.m. and the chimes of the great clock are lifted and borne throughout the metropolis, tolling the end of a working day, a workaday, an everyday.
Seven p.m. and the iron grilled door of the ‘Club Mon Ami’ swings open (next to Billy, to his right), like an arm extending in welcome, as if to curl and close around shoulders, as if to hold in an embrace, as if to lead on to the dancefloor and whirl into a waltz, a jive, a slick fandango.
And the music starts up
Slow moving music to fill the empty bar, to waft around the tables, to pervade the enclosed and steadily controlled atmosphere, to mix with the whirr of fan heaters and air conditioners, to start again the nightly interplay, the nightly interaction, the night of revelry and devilry to which ‘Mon Ami’ must bear witness.
Billy watches passers by, and calls to them as they pass by:
‘Got any money?’
Thirteen, with nowhere to go, not to a flat cramped and empty, and smelling of damp.
Where his mother sleeps by day.
Where his mother entertains by night.
Her cries like pain.
(She would not be there now, would not be there for hours, and were she there he would rather avoid her, would prefer not to be that part of her life hidden behind the dividing curtain, with eyes dark accustomed that can see through rents and tears those strange contortions, those frantic manipulations, those brazen bare assed thrusts and throes which bring in the daily bread. Grunts and groans and calculated moans (on cue) to soothe him into sleep.
Better the streets.
Better the city lights.
Better the hope for a hamburger, the craving for a ‘Coca Cola’, the meeting with friends, and the larking, the marauding, the troublemaking.
Better an adventure he did not know than tha monotonous predictability he knew too well, which smelt so warm and close, which sounded so wet and clammy and clam-like, which quickened his breathing along with their breathing, and caused him to masturbate guiltily.
Not old or wise enough to consider her plight.
Big Ben took up his position at the door to the Club, glanced at Billy, set his arms folded across his bulky chest, his legs slightly apart, his thick potato head square upon his shoulders, and imposed.
Right on the street.
Right next to Billy.
(He flicked a wrapped strip of chewing gum over to the kid, who caught it without a smile, slipped off its silver coating, devoured it with peppermint in his nostrils).
Passers by looked into Ben’s ugly face, then swung their head away, and walked away, and put their thoughts neatly away, into enveloped, filed and sealed storage, unwilling to know what they knew.
Those passers by who milled along the pavements of the street, bustling together, battling against the wind, dragging their problems behind them, like so many screaming children, like so many sacks of clay. People weighed down with problems. Problems imposed upon them.
(Problems (they have) imposed upon them(selves)).
Wandering this way and that way with their destinations fixed, or uncertain, or unknown, with their faces long and isolated, untouched by each other, faces with nobody’s cares but their own. They filled the length and breadth of this street, this long and curving street which wound through the heart of the city, a mighty river of cars and pedestrians, of bicycles and policemen, of articulated lorries and linking chains of tourists, a never-ending flow of activity, with its tributaries like arteries pulsing more life into it, from its shops and its ffices, from its bars and its locales, both its daytime and its nighttime caught between, within the buildings, surging along the roadway with the stale air of congestion and the dim light of dusk.
‘Got any money, mister?’
‘Yes’, (said the thin man, the thin man hurrying by, brushing by).
‘Give us some’.
‘No. Why don’t you get off home?’ (said the thin man, looking away, anywhere away).
‘Need some money for me bus fare, don’t I?’
‘Really?’ (said the thin man, stopping to look not at the boy, but at the man near him).
Scan the form of Big Ben (the biggest Ben), his crumpled suit with stretched stitching, his cauliflower ears, his eyes within their creased up sockets, bloodshot, his lips curling, his teeth showing … (and see nothing, see him not, see the path being trodden to lead YOU away).
Billy looks after the thin man, the sleek man, the groomed man, with his manicured nails gleaming clear nail varnish, with his fingers tugging at a flap of dry skin on his upper lip, with his vague and distant air, his unreal, other-worldly air, and spits after him.
The sound makes the man look back and see phlegm land.
He sidles on.
( … and he persuades himself, with rational thought, that sooner or later the kid, that obscene and objectionable street kid, that urchin, will wend his way back to calm respectability, and will be put to bed between crisp cotton sheets, and will be kissed goodnight, and will sleep, with sweet dreams).
Billy, the Kid, with his fly half undone, gaping with Superman’s underpants.
Billy looks around him for his next victim.
… like flies to a running sore, they come, and they go, and he jingles coins in his pocket.
Big Ben grunts his approval.
This haunt, this favourite haunt of young Billy, sheltered beneath the overhanging office blocks (which surge giantesque into the night sky, cool and rigid phalli), with the Club to his right, ‘Mon Ami’ to his right, with a corner to his left, whither he may scamper should the police decide to swoop.
(Policemen who knew he was there but who turned the other cheek, on the whole, like Christians, on the whole.)
And the waste ground behind the concrete pristine facade, where derelict small houses offer themselves for exploration, where tramps congregate and burn their litter fires, where couples court (where prostitutes take their clients and boys wait), men in the throes of their ecstasy too preoccupied to watch their wallets or their cameras or their coats or their hats (or their trousers, sniggered Billy to himself, Ben catching the snigger and watching him, watching the gleam in the gleeful eye, the memory burst like a firework, a memory of a man in socks and an erection screaming blue murder after Billy), and women with their handbags ripe for the pucking, like prize plums, fat with cash, unless they wore the garish make-up of the pro and kept their bags firmly slung around their wrists, as his mother always did, her mind on the money.
Men walk in.
Leather shining and mustachios bristling.
To the Club ‘Mon Ami’.
… voices enveloped by the pulse of the music …
… eyes alert to the dimming light …
Cut off.
In an instant.
From the world which turns its slow and even course around them, which carries on as if without them, which clocks on and clocks off with ageless repetition and does its best to disregard their secret enclave.
Not to know about them.
In the sanctity of the Club ‘Mon Ami’, small club, mon ami, tiny at the side of the thoroughfare, hidden in the folds of the city ( a city so vast that no vantage point can give a view of it in its entirety), they seat themselves at a table and wait for the night to progress.
The night which descends upon the street outside as if tugged by the unceasing winds.
The night which fares in street lamps, which crackles statically into life at the flick of a switch, at the flick of Big Ben’s wrist, who with one careless motion sets ablaze the pink neon sign above the door, the sign which heralds the promise ‘Mon Ami’, ‘Mon Ami’ large and penetrant upon the horizon, ‘Mon Ami’ glaring down to the people, to all of the people, below.
Which bathes the boy’s face in a pink flush.
Billy with the tender pink tinged flesh of fresh meat.
… mon ami.
He waits around here often (if not always he, then someone like him) waits for the other kids whom he knows will come and join him, waits for the men, amongst the swaggering men (with socks down their trousers), those with their collars turned high, looking furtive, glancing from side to side before they enter the Club, who can be stopped, regaled, who can be forced to part with some cash on the words (spoken or intended):
‘Don’t worry mister, your secret’s safe with me’.
Billy the source of this (and much more) knowledge.
Billy the Clever Dick.
Standing in the evening air watching the world go by.
Staring blankly.
At the people who cannot approach.
Those with rolled newspapers and rolled umbrellas and coats buttoned close and snug.
Those who do not see him but who walk with their heads in the clouds convincing themselves that all is right with the world.
(And if they did chance to glance his way then he would poke out his pointed and curling tongue, or hold aloft two fingers, and they would glance to the floor, would pretend not to notice him, that he was not their concern, not their problem – like the people on the underground whom he would stare at unflinchingly, his gaze determinedly unswerving, who would hide behind magazines, or watch their reflections in the window, or would busy themselves reading advertisements displayed above his head, intent upon denying his existence).
When Billy grows up he wants to be the Invisible Man.
Winning adherence to any set of convictions is difficult to achieve, particularly if the desire is to sway public opinion away from the norm. The norm of course becomes the dominant form, and this whether or not it is the best or most effective way of achieving harmony in relations between all subjects. Skewed of course and always subservient to the will of controlling forces.
Now it may well be that love between the nations and the peoples of the world is preferable to war, but if it is not promoted and exemplified then it is war that will win out. I am very sorry to say. Any level of influence to the alternative grows only very slowly and is dependent upon responses from the masses.
Love between actual individuals, love not influenced by gain and control, is even more difficult to achieve. Love between men that is love and not the need to dominate and control is a greater challenge still. When we are all wrestling with our demons.
Perhaps this is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ – an actual concern and union with the other, until there is no separation of being.
Thank you for all your gifts, Oscar, not least your ability to provoke thought.
Letters to Oscar Wilde 