lifestyle

Definitions are collapsing

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

At the risk of repeating myself (and Lord knows, Oscar, some of the things you said have been repeated through the generations ad nauseam), I would like to enlighten you further about the linguistic and categorical changes that have occurred in attempting to define the differences that supposedly exist between individual sexed human subjects.

Now there’s a mouthful, but it is a challenge to offer you any informed social interchange without an attempt at definition. Goodness knows I will fail, but at least let me put in place some pointers.

Everyday life in this twenty-first century era presents levels of differentiation each of which compete for recognition. There are, as I have already informed you, the metrosexuals. I have, by the way, met only a few of them, charming, usually young, men who style their hair, pomade their bodies, dress in the latest fashions, use the ‘hippest’ and ‘coolest’ forms of linguistic construction and verbal intonation, and who waver between a slightly feminised but rigidly adhered to heterosexuality, and a ‘curiousity’ about homosexual expressiveness. I have seen them in every urban setting, town and city, but like all tribes they stick to their own, by and large, and only let the older gent in if he is literally a father, or a boss, or some revered cultural persona with whom it is trendy to be seen. You would have done very well with them, and would probably know them as ‘dandies’, or even as ‘aesthetes’, as you and so many of your friends were known in your own time. They are the culturally accepted sub-division of gender performance that is currently allowed to feel that they have social influence; in truth they are just the latest peacock version of the dominant class – usually straight, usually white, usually men.

The lesbians and the gays, the bisexuals, transgendered, transvestite, and queer individuals, the intersexed and the asexual beings who are now known in many circles by the acronym LGBTQIA (where there does seem to be a ‘T’ missing) are also very much in evidence, and, I am glad to say, becoming more and more vocal in their demands for recognition – and that on something of a global scale! In many settings, and in many individual cases, gone is the need to hide away and never make manifest the preferences of the homosexual subject. Now there is the chance to self-proclaim, whatever the consequences (and I cannot stress enough that at times and within certain constituencies those consequences can be dire). I must say that all of these groupings that have come into my sphere of being have been absolutely wonderful – generous, spirited, positive and above all, relatable!  I count myself amongst their number! I am ‘one of them’ (which of course at one time was a pejorative term, but now is a banner of liberation and freedom fighting).

You would place yourself amongst their number too, dear Oscar, and in all honesty I find it astounding that everyone does not so align – after all who actually is 100% anything? My own favourite point of definition is ‘queer’, which is a vague and blanket term which can incorporate a myriad possibilities across all genders and all sexes, and defy any attempts at confinement or restriction. Most of the young people one sees can adequately fit the bill, at least in what is termed ‘Western democracy’. Although, truth be told, one can go anywhere in the world, enter any social setting, and one will find that youngsters push at the boundaries of sexed and gendered definition, play with the rules of personal performance, adopt different lifestyles and readily strike a pose!

Unfortunately in my advanced stage of life very few of them want to give me the time of day.  There is, alas, a much understated point of prejudice: ageism! It has crept in through the course of the twentieth century, probably as a result of the emergence of youth markets, and the consequent privileging of youth oriented cultural norms. It is something else that you would not recognise, Oscar;  the aged now are rarely to be engaged with, but are herded together in a sort of twilight existence of near mania and dementia and largely left to rot.  They live in communities of nostalgia and rigid conformity (and the queer, I fear, is barely tolerated). A few of the young are paid a pittance to administer drugs to them and to serve them their slop, but other than that inter-generational contact is limited to the family, and then only piecemeal.  For the likes of you and me, Oscar, it is very difficult to get them to notice.  In that sense I suppose little has changed, except that I imagine a certain readiness to learn from the older folks of your time, a sort of reverence for age which may be my own fantasy and have nothing to do with your lived experience.  I expect in many ways you just felt taken advantage of, and I am sure the renters, on the whole, were wily sorts, laughing at you behind your back.  A shame – all that we have to endure in the search for a little … love?  Appreciation?  Notice even?

Nowadays the young, if not in person, certainly in discussion, all ‘play with gender’.  Girls look like boys and boys look like girls, their fashions, hairstyles, cultural pursuits, all entirely interchangeable.  It’s been going on for years!  Generations even!  There are those who do not seem to notice that grandparents are the ones who started all of this – flower power, rock and roll, experimentation with substances and states of mind, to produce an array of possibilities of being.  I know you will have seen something of this – the hallucinogens, and the smoking of imported vapours, the alcohol of course, that great staple through the ages, keeping the peasantry drunk! 

You, and your wife (which always seems absurd to say, because a gay man today does not usually take a wife, unless he wants a visa or a passport, even though many a married man, just like you, dear Oscar, is secretly gay) experimented with styles and fashions that have gone on to redefine sexed definition, and I am sure that there were denizens where men paraded in female attire, and women similarly in male dress.  Why it has been reported that your male brothel keeper, a certain Mr. Alfred Taylor, was very fond of ruffles and bows, lace and ribbons and crinolines, so I assume you were no stranger to such displays.  But I do get the impression that in your own time you could tell who was who, where they stood in the social order, and certainly their gender, even if it were an assumed one. There was cross-dressing, dear, we’ve always known there were cross-dressers through time, and probably everywhere.  But I get the impression that in your day there were a set of clear signifiers at play – short hair and long hair, trousers and dresses, mustachios and rose blushed complexions – or so we are led to believe!  Now we have an apparent interchangeability, and on occasions one really has to look twice, just to check, and on some marvellous and mind-boggling occasions one is none the wiser!  I do so enjoy it when I carry on walking and do not know who has crossed my path, girl or boy! There’s a lot of fuss about it, but you know me, Oscar, each to their own!

Now I know you had your own fair share of boys in makeup, powder and rouge, boys with vaseline at their lips, and a good array of muscle bound young women, strong and swarthy from their labour, but I get the impression, with a good degree of hindsight, that distinctions were made clear, that definitions were in place.  Maybe I am wrong.  Maybe you would disagree with me, and argue that as much interchangeability occurred in your own era, but in any case there really was not so much fuss being documented about it.  There was very little visibility. Now we have subjects who define their own sense of self in the face of social definition, who take sides, who oppose each other in their multifarious expression, and who parade their difference.  It is a very public spectacle, with no attempt to hide, and visible everywhere.  It is out on the streets and not behind closed doors, which in one sense is a good thing because people have confidence, are sure of themselves, can express their sense of being, but on the other hand collapses entirely our long-held and culturally shared notions of certainty itself.  Which I must say I support wholeheartedly.  It feels like a long overdue shaking of the foundations!  I suppose any such moves were quietly brushed under the carpet when you were around.  To my mind everything is so much better, with a more apparent distribution of possibilities, within reach for us all – even if it has led to a certain level of tribalism, even dubious allegiance, and a backlash – such a public backlash.

Although, and I can see a steely gaze overcoming you, Oscar dear, the current of hetero-normativity continues to hold its sway.  When pressed many young people are, on the whole, ‘straight’;  that is, except for the few of them who are open about being ‘gay’. Most are ‘men’, or are ‘women’, most hold on to the nomination ‘white’, or ‘black’, even ‘rich’, or ‘poor’. Precious few (and I do mean the most precious of the few, the gemstones in the rock face) embrace their multifarious components. There are recent and popular statements like: “it is our sameness that outweighs our difference”, or: “we are all more alike than we are different”, but still, when pressed, and in official censa, difference defines.

Let me explain it to you, Oscar:  the strict dichotomy remains in place, an absolute adherence to the binary divide, which argues that there is male, there is female;  there is heterosexual and there is homosexual;  some are gay, some are straight (just as they are black or white, or rich or poor).  Very many cling to the idea of being heterosexual, and not homosexual, although I am coming across a few who self-declare as bisexual, who flirt and experiment, and in their youth are willing to try anything.  The allegiance to absolute points of definition has created a universe of unjust proscription, where most people find it almost impossible to reside all of the time.  Most people are all too aware that they have traits that could be deemed both male and female, that their heterosexuality is mirrored by even the most tacit acceptance of homosexuality, that even locked within opposing states adherence to the same is itself defined by the other – there cannot be one without the other. 

It is true to say that there is an undercurrent of indecision, that when pressed there are those who will admit that there was once a time, that I did dip my toe, that it entered my consciousness. I went with the flow, they will say, but under duress it is, in most cases, the norm that repeatedly wins out.  Just as you would expect, Oscar.  You know all the stories!  At boarding school I fell in love with my best friend for a whole term but I am happily married now!  I may be in love with a man but I can still father a child!  I will establish myself in the straight world, enjoy all its opportunities, and then, if the fancy takes me, I will declare myself gay!  You just would not credit the subterfuge, Oscar – or maybe you would, maybe you were living it too!  How is Constance, and the boys?

Those who come to declare themselves gay, or even mixed, are outnumbered ten or twenty to one.  That there is anyone who so identifies is something of a miracle, but still they are kept in the minority!  It is a happy miracle that there are any at all, I would say, but it still does not go far enough.  There is at least an acknowledgement of being, and a broader, forced acknowledgement that all of the old categorisations are fractured, are teetering, are on the brink of collapse!  That such possibilities exist has been long fought for, and has had to overcome, in part, the legacy created by you. But still there is a distance to go. I cannot help feeling that it is the firmly held centre ground that has to be rocked, rather than the peripheries. That definition itself is the problem, endlessly trying to define, to categorise, to lock in a box and throw away the key. If I am gay does that mean that I am not straight? If I am straight does that mean that I am not gay? If I am man does that mean that I am not woman? If I am woman does that mean that I am not man? White? Black? Rich? Poor?

My own richness of mixture may not be so apparent to you, but it makes me such a tasty, zesty, sugar and spice fruitcake that you should welcome me to any tea party.

Oh, Oscar, come back and make us laugh about it all! If only you could take away the seriousness of it all with a frivolous barb!

If only that were possible – dear, dead, and shovelled into history Mr. Wilde!

I remain,

Your friend, and mine,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Provincial

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

How are you? How is your ornate hole in the ground? We miss you, and after all this time we would be missing you anyway, however the hand of fate had dealt the cards! Would you have any friends? Would anyone want to associate with you now? The louche, the play actors, the homosexuals?

Suffice it to say that you would not recognise a homosexual nowadays even if you fell over one;  no green carnations to give us away!  Oh there are people who will tell you, who will state it bluntly to your face, those who cross gendered boundaries as a declaration of their difference, who will kiss each other in public just so that everyone is left in no doubt at all. But this is only acceptable in certain environments, at certain times, and can still cause outrage across the globe.  There are many who will self-declare, will ‘come out’, as is the modern parlance, who will stand before their families and societies and say to the world:  I am gay, do with that as you see fit!  They are either welcomed or rebuffed, with those who are welcomed able to flourish and grow within the confines of acceptance, while those who are rebuffed look forward to a more uncertain future. 

It also very much depends upon where one is lodging, what part of the country, (what part of the world!), what sort of conglomeration, even what political state!  The metrosexuals proliferate in the Capital, with their bars and their clubs (almost gentlemen’s clubs – although no-one behaves like a gentleman). There are ghettos of gay activity at specific junctures within the Western world (which is not entirely true, because the Eastern world of pillow boys and sleeve servants, of eunuchs and bachabaze, still struggles on in the midst of Western global corporate domination).  These ghettos are paralleled in smaller cities and larger urban centres, but once you hit the median range, then the clock is abruptly turned back, and every decade you have not lived through of gay development and homosexual liberation is adequately exemplified in the small towns, villages, settlements and communities that populate the globe. 

Places just like Chortleton, where I currently find myself.  Here you see the middle-aged queens with poodles named ‘Vita’ and ‘Sackville’, and ‘West’, and gaggles of dirty looking young things exposing kneecaps and thighs and badly shaven midriffs, and the pierced and the tattooed sub-genre of cosmopolitan gays in kilts and suspenders dancing the night away!  They are in the gay club.  The one gay club set against the myriad bars and halls and discotheques that cater to the straight world.  Rarely are they out on the streets.  Maybe once a year (literally one day in a year – ten times a decade) on a parade, whistling and yelling, and genuinely appearing to be happy. But mainly either hidden away, or visible in the company of young women, or alone, subdued, walking swiftly with closed expressions and pursed lips.

Of course the gay community does now, even in Chortleton, band together, become married couples, mirror each other in looks and activities, but – and I hate to say it – grow to be just as locked into their interdependent world as the straight couples that proliferate everywhere.  As in your day, everywhere you look there is the promotion and the acceptance of the straight world, and the gays are not allowed to stray too far from it.  So they have their mortgages, and their jobs, and their trips to the supermarket, and their children by adoption or by surrogate, and essentially everything just trundles on the way it is supposed to within the dominant order.

Of course I am simplifying – forgive me.  Of course anyone who steps out of line also has to endure very public displays of disapproval and condemnation, or very private moments of disappointment, of rejection, and hurt. The echoes of your treatment are not hard to hear.  That is, sad to say, the way in which I, and the world at large, still sees you; the public pillory, the attempted defence of being different, the sidelong glances, the verbalised taunts, and the unspoken assumptions of the passers-by. How times have not changed!

Chortleton, as a fairly minor settlement, is lucky – there is a gay club!  Or, more rightly, there is a gay-friendly club. Gay people are tolerated and given a corner to gather in, so they can be kept under a watchful eye. That’s the only problem with the concept of the ghetto – you know exactly where to go if you want to get them.  Go to a smaller place, Oscar dear, and it’s still men in old macs receiving brown paper packages through the post, nudists in their own homes, on their own, with pet Alsatian bitches.  You see, class has gone, and so has breeding;  now it’s a case of capital, and if one has the filthy lucre then anything goes, and if one doesn’t then there is simply nothing to be done – apart from a spot of prostitution when young, and gin and jeopardy for the old. 

Oh yes, the panthers are still around to be feasted upon!  Oldest profession and all that.  The legal constraints of your time, damning in their execution, forbidding any acts of fornication not sanctioned by marriage, have been replaced by provisions that allow for the selling of flesh within proscriptive terms, and strictly age limited.  You, my dear, my dear Oscar, have already been reassessed by the revisionists, and would be classified as criminally perverse for paying youths now seen as underage, locked up as a paedophile celebrity, hunted and hounded as a pervert.  That’s the truth of this day and age, and it would not be wrong.  I have to say that corrupting the young, teaching them their value in terms of the bought and the sold, reducing them to commodities, and influencing their psychic development in ways that only serve to shatter their sense of self, their integrity, their pride, was an ill service on your part.  Because you did honestly believe that your pleasure was paramount, that whatever you wanted was all that mattered, and that others – all others, were at your literal disposal.  So, it does have to be said, stated bluntly.  So sorry, Oscar dear.  Through time our friendship has thus been clouded, but I will not abandon you, will not give up on you.  You were also able to bring joy – to millions, through eons!

There is a school of thought that would argue that you are no longer relevant – a dandy of a bygone age justly criminalised for the procurement of underage rent boys, and condemned to history as an example of perversion.  But of course you live on in your many guises and you are everywhere to be found in the modern age.  Countless numbers of men, if such we must call them, for I believe some of them can be women too, have a predilection for the beauty of youth, the power of virile masculinity, the development of young souls.  Countless numbers who think like you but do not act the way you did – and some who are even worse! 

It cannot be doubted for a moment that such a typology has been in existence throughout history and across civilisations, stretching through the ages both recorded and unrecorded, manifest in all societies, across continents, carried with the winds of human development.  You, my dear Oscar, and I do remain faithful to you, just about, just happen to be the prime example weeded out at a particular time for public consumption and enjoyment.  And how you were readily consumed and enjoyed – much in the way homosexuals have been and still are constantly consumed and enjoyed.  Witty, urbane, cultured, with a smart turn of phrase and a wry cackle, just hinting at the actualities of a shared existence:  an appreciation of young men; an interest in their development both physical and mental;  a desire to help them grow, to give them the benefit of your wisdom, to support them, encourage them, be surrounded by them.  Oh, and of course they come forward  We all know that they have been coming forward through the millennia, unendingly, willingly, sometimes desperately in need of nurturing hands, of intellect.  Of course there are those who take advantage of this, but there are also those who do not.  There are those who walk into such situations with their eyes wide open, determined to profit, easy about the extent of such arrangements.  Oh yes, Oscar, just as in your day, the glad eye and the gurning chops still carry meaning.  The young men batting their eyelids, twisting their lips, pouting and preening, who now, in this age, in this society, can establish arrangements with older benefactors, can make, or at least supplement, their living by making their bodies available for a little dalliance;  it is a phenomenon from Niagara to Vladivostok, from Seoul to Sydney, in every city around the globe – Tirana, Lisbon, London, Beijing – anywhere and everywhere! 

As in your day a certain echelon of society – and let us reaffirm that this is a society ruled by capital on a near global scale – can enjoy this, indulge this, jet from venue to venue participating, unrolling the banknotes, presenting the store cards and the credit cards with no heed for censure or intervention.  I would correct myself, Oscar, it is exactly the same as in your day, but now legally proscribed, socially accepted, with agencies of state turning a blind eye, snickering behind outstretched palms, keeping reality under wraps.  Some little scandals emerge periodically, in the hegemonic way, just to titillate the masses and let them see that if they too reach the heights of wealth and power then they too can participate in the sort of lifestyle where anything goes, where bunga bunga parties are a reality, where sex is for sale – oh, and Oscar, if it is young men that you desire, then there are plenty.  For the price of a Rolex watch – or its cheap facsimile! 

You did the same.  Your little gifts of silver, your financial largesse, because, let us not forget, within this unequal economy which has existed for so very long, the little that you dispensed was a lot for those on the receiving end.  It is exactly the same now.  Exactly the same.  Those on the receiving end simply have no conception of how you lived, can only look in awe and wonder at the ease with which you were able to move through the world, feted and praised, wildly successful and wealthy beyond their imaginations. So that tossing coins their way became a part of the whole picture, a part of what was going on.  So it is now.  No doubt.

There was a park in Chortleton where we used to congregate, night after night, always a motley crew, but also always a bit of an array;  young men who would do ‘it’ for nothing, or a bed, or a drink and a supper, or maybe, rarely, for cash.  Rustlings in the bushes.  Condoms on the children’s swings.  Why, I was told that one night the police arrived on a periodic raid, and trees started whispering, and bushy groves zipped up their flies, and men flocked through the wrought iron gates to make their rapid escape.  One man went there every night with a dog’s lead, and if the police did stop him he’d start hissing:  ‘Sukie! Sukie!’ in a stage whisper, as if he had lost his beloved pet!  Gossip was that at one time he had a young constable on all fours in a lavatera in the Autumn of the millennium – one hundred years, almost to the day, after your own sad departure.  I remember all the gossip more than the action.  Bomber jackets with the collars turned up against the cold, blue jeans and monkey boots, dead quiet, the sweep of car headlights, hurried conversations, deals struck.  A sort of celebration!

Honestly Oscar, you would not know it, but I cannot claim that anything much has really changed.  Nobody gets hard labour anymore (not in Chortleton), that has changed, but the un-subtleties of being overlooked for promotion, of being sidelined in your opinions, being suppressed within the media, or disregarded when your needs become public – all are forms of censure and punishment.  I am writing to you, Oscar, because there is no one else to write to!  I have to address the dead because the living do not want to hear.  The living want to hear their version of things, their interpretation of life, all couched in safe, and very straight conformities, not dare to edge away from the accepted norm.  

Nobody gets publicly pilloried, it is true, if it is not an affront to be castigated on social media, to be laughed at and pointed at in social interchange, to be the butt of jokes. There is a whole strand of humour that goes unchecked, evolves, is self-mocking and self-deprecatory, having to set oneself up for ribaldry.  The media presence of homosexuality is largely one of fun and entertainment, an opportunity to laugh at, rather than along with. No career comes to an end because of homosexuality, but plenty are stopped, progress is hindered, people are quietly disavowed, or not hired at all.  Although that latter is not quite true. Politicians disappear, princes get married, and the proletariat practice a time and a place for that sort of thing.

I’ve attached some flowers because I thought they might please you. There is so much to say, because so much has changed – even photographic techniques. But also, there is so much you would easily recognise. The same levels of subterfuge and skull-duggery permeate the shifting echelons of power, and people scramble to the top of the pile as best they can, doing what they have to do in order to survive. Orderliness has gone; nobody knows why they are here any more, and they have no set place, no hierarchical position. Except that they do. 

Sorry, Oscar, I may be starting to ramble – but the injustice of it all just makes my blood boil, and then my blood pressure rises, and then my brain ticks over too fast and the words – the words – they just tumble out! 

I’ll write again soon. 

Your friend, 

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Everyone’s gay friend

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

You know of course that you were a friend to many, and an enemy to many more!

You had good friends, and arch enemies. Robbie Ross, dear Bosie, Constance … they all stood by you through thick and thin, always defending you, and more significantly, your take on how life was being lived and how it could be lived.

It is what is attractive about you – that you were able to verbalise and bring into being an entire aesthetic, a philosophical standpoint, a challenge to the orthodoxies of your day!

Your enemies, led by daddy to your lover, the much piqued Marquess of Queensbury, were able to whip up quite the storm, and appeal to mob politics. It has to be said that he introduced some element of thuggery, the outraged heterosexual male, forced to defend his view of society by fair means or foul! The sensationalist press, the easily cajoled witnesses, the public at its largest – there was simply no way back!

But now, with all the time that has passed, with the tip into the decades of the twenty first century, the witty and outrageous, camp and erudite, softly spoken and sibilant homosexual has become not only every girl’s best friend, but an object of ribald affection to many a successful male. Dictated by the times, it has to be said. And only in particular societies, it also has to be said. Don’t worry, dear Oscar, your fate would still be sealed in many parts of the globe – you might even be lynched (a suppressed desire, I would hazard a guess, of your own Victorian age)!

To those girls who love you – you are the acceptable male, good with fashion advice, and cutting in your remarks. They can have a laugh with you, whether refined by your learning, or simply the crude observations of everyday existence. You are just …. so funny!

With the boys, as you always have done – you flirt with their unstable masculinity, praise them to the hilt, give them the recognition that much of the world refuses to acknowledge in them. You make them proud to be as marvellous as they are, inside and out, mentally and physically, the pride of vibrant and hedonistic youth!

But of course, dear Oscar, the piercing eagle eye of uninformed disapproval, of ill-informed incomprehension, the lack of imagination, the stalemate of social opprobium still renders impossible your absolute acceptance. You can be a laughing stock at best, and the incarnation of evil at worst.

Happy days!

Happy unchanging days!

Though the march of history rumbles on, some things always seem to stay the same!

Some political theory called hegemony, I believe ….

I remain,

Your friend, and mine,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Wish you were here.

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I wish you could be here now!  I wish it were possible to have you here by my side so that you could see all that has ensued since your much publicised demise.  

You have become a by-word!  

You are not only the very definition of urbanity, of wit, of classical learning, the first celebrity of the modern age;  you are now a pervert, too louche for your own good, a sinner, a product of depravity, made to suffer in full public gaze, and through history, for your lack of moral standing.  

You fell from grace!  

You fell from that blissful state that the right-minded and the quietly-behaved occupy with such smug hypocrisy – which your work of course, which still lingers on, parodies so well.  

Your work is standing the test of time, plays still performed, poetry in print, even the words of your own legal defence archived for posterity.  People know who you were, and know who you are, and if they do not there are endless reference points for them to consult:  biographies, essays, academic papers, audio recordings, articles, speculative prose, photographs, films, artworks, statues, monuments … and letters. It makes me wonder if you have really left us at all!

You certainly made an impact, entered common parlance, found a place in popular consciousness, and have been variously revered and condemned for well over a hundred years, the entirety of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty first!

With each revision of your memory, each revisiting of your canon, insights are added, new perspectives unearthed, and you sail triumphantly from age to age always a touchstone for … for what?  

For good, and for bad.  

You pivot that particular binary divide – the good and the bad.

I am writing to you as an adulant, and as a co-conspirator.  I admire your work, and your stance on social mores, and I see you as a figure with whom I can associate, to some degree, as I also feel entirely misunderstood and wrongly classified by the spirit of these passing ages. I am, like you, not quite straight down the middle, peaking and pushing at the perimeters – and so open to attack!

You are nominated as the first ‘homosexual’, the first to be classified as such in the public eye, criminalised, pathologised, psychologised, and medicalised throughout your own age and well into mine.

The love, that great love, that love through ages and across continents, traversing millennia and cultural boundaries … and that dare not speak its name, not clearly, not just one word … love, uncompromised, appreciative, valued, accepted, tolerated, positive, and forward-looking.

I hold it for you, and all who are anything like you, and for myself too. 

Now, it seems, in certain circles, there are no more homosexuals!  It is no longer the descriptor of choice!

Apparently we are now in the era of metrosexuals (who are either people who enjoy sexual trysts on underground trains, or those who experiment sexually in cities), and of gays (not always so very happy, but strident, loud and proud, fighting, quite rightly, for better treatment and the improvement of human rights); of the sexually ambivalent, the vers, the gender-queer, the gender-fuck, the non-binary, the human, the human beings.

I am glad we have moved on somewhat.

I did always think that the simple classifications were always problematic – that age old cliché of heterosexual and homosexual, that attempt at rationalising a state of being that set itself, supposedly, against what was, supposedly, the norm. Those norms are toppling now, let me tell you!  The general belief that there are static ways of being set throughout time and across societies is slowly losing favour.

Now there are acknowledgements of difference, moves towards acceptance, and a tentative celebration of variegation – in all its multiplicity.  Everyone is having to get to grips with the reality that we are simply not all the same, whilst in essence being but one!  The gradual collapse of division, however it may be nominated.

You would love it, Oscar, the levels of confusion, the misunderstandings, and the endless ramifications of political correctness, which try to navigate their way around phraseologies, manifestations, proclamations of being.

Oh, this slowly evolving cultural transformation would benefit from your acute eye, your razor sharp wit, your wordplay and poésie, bursting the champagne bubbles of pretension!

I will write again soon, and remain,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.