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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Letters to Oscar Wilde 