observations

The life we lead …

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

How far away your world seems, and yet how very near. I read about you in history books, I consult biographies, I view the films that commemorate your life, your contributions, and of course the infamy of your trial, punishment, the aftermath, and I am struck by the parallels that still exist today.

It is true to say that the rise of social media – which is very much in the hands of the people – allows a form of self expression hitherto unheard of, and that within those realms it is perfectly possible for young gay men – men who would have been those you would have known, men who would have been you – a level of communication with the world at large that has until now been impossible. This means that we receive a competition for attention, and that we can choose what to view in the face of all the realities around us.

So, for instance, it is possible to watch ‘TikTok’ videos that affirm gay experience, make of it a positive, create a dynamic where there is acceptance, tolerance and love – where there is also fun, and enjoyment, and where all the varieties of youthful gay expression find platform. You can exist in a world where this is all you see, because there are so many of them, they are short and sweet, they send a message of hope and of solidarity, and they allow serious points, and trivial points, to be addressed with a candour that is refreshing, and zesty, and undeniable within their sphere of influence.

Equally, there is the opposite, just as powerful, with just as many followers and adherents, and these opposing forces do battle to try to dominate dominant discourse, to become the argument which wins out in popular consensus. I do not know if either of them actually ever wins out, or whether they are avidly and momentarily consumed to bolster burgeoning identities, lost to the sands of time, noticed fleetingly to confirm, or to subvert, a world view, and then reality, and mundanity, become the playgrounds in which they are to be lived out. It is like looking through holiday brochures, and then having to walk home in the rain.

I feel such affinity with the creators, and makers, and stars of these short videos, admire their wit and ingenuity, want them to be right in their assertions that being gay is the best thing in the world, that there are strides ahead to be taken, that understanding is everywhere, that love wins. And I think of you, dear Oscar, the great wave of popularity on which you sailed for many a year, and the parties, and the associations, the rendezvous, the trysts, that you enjoyed, seemingly unendingly. So very precarious, the assumption of rights, rights of passage, rights of representation, rights of being. All bound within legal strictures that can shift and alter, be inclusive, be exclusive, through time, from place to place. Gay people have fought for changes in national laws; others can do the same.

Perhaps tolerance and understanding will become the bywords of human advancement.

I do hope so,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Pandemic!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

A miserable day of rain and cold in Chortleton, not helped by the fact that we are in the midst of a global pandemic!  Yes!  Coronavirus – Covid 19, or so it is called.

You died, my dear, before the Spanish Flu of 1918, so you may not know what I am referring to, although I suspect that airborne respiratory diseases have been around forever, come in varying strains and levels of severity, so there may well have been something within your lifetime that was a cause for concern.

Of course in this era there is a popular belief that we will be able to defeat any illness that comes our way with mass vaccination programmes, and to some extent that has been proven by the almost total eradication of certain ailments through these means, but so far no one has come up with a vaccine strong enough, or effective enough, to defeat this one.  The whole world is therefore and as a consequence on red alert!  All sorts of measures are in place almost everywhere one goes to try to curb the transmission rates between individuals, because it is by breathing, coughing and spluttering over each other that the disease it seems is most efficiently transmitted.  No laughing matter, I can tell you, as thousands upon thousands of people around the world have succumbed to the virus and their lives have come to an end.

There are those who are completely swaddled within their own homes refusing even to see the light of day, and there are those who are entirely blasé about the whole affair, pretend that it is not happening, or that it cannot get to them, or that they will with no doubt be able to fight off all of the symptoms easily and robustly.  There are those who are completely and utterly paranoid, and those who are completely and utterly deluded.  I cannot be crass about it though, Oscar dear – apparently the forces of evil turn against anyone who dares to question either one way or the other, so one is left to one’s own devices and to one’s own musings, and a need to protect oneself above all else.  

In that respect the life of the older gay male is actually something of an advantage – nobody wants to know you anyway, so there is little chance of social interaction, the young keep their distance, more frightened of the spectre of old age than the possibility of infection (in most cases they seem able to fight it off quite easily), and of course living alone, or in a couple, means one is limited to intercourse only with a known other, or indeed with the self.  Little trips to the shops, wearing a mask, and speedily, are well within the capabilities of the early retired gay male, who can snicker and guffaw in secret (because of the face mask) at almost any even vaguely amusing happenstance that might occur!

Party people do have to beware – whatever kind of party one may be referring to;  events that are ‘super-spreaders’ seem to take their toll!

I’ll keep you posted, Oscar dear,

But until then,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

What we know …

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

We live under the impression that things were more basic, less refined, more brutal in your time, but if you could see the levels of brutality that exist in this day and age, Oscar, you would be horrified. You see, we know all about everything nowadays, whereas I think in your time it was far easier not to know; we are bombarded with hard facts moment by moment, when in your time you were dependent upon word of mouth and the printed word to learn about anything. In that respect at least I think you probably had an easier time of it. There is no real possibility of living in blissful ignorance these days, except that, and this is the strangeness of it, the sheer incessant nature of reportage, of updates, of information, makes it impossible to take it all in, so that actually much is simply filtered away, not prioritised, unmarked in its effect. Often the most terrible tragedies are reported in news reports, and are then quickly brushed aside because some more humorous story is given significance. So maybe it is the case that blissful ignorance is in fact the normal state of being, even as we are being saturated with information.

You knew what your knew; we do not seem to know what we think we know.

I will write again,

Your friend,

Agernon B. Duffoure.

The Wait

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

We’re you always waiting for Bosie? And all the others?
It seems to be the prerogative of youth to keep the older and the more learned waiting for them to deign to find the time to make a call, meet an assignation, keep a date.

Of course I was just like them myself when youth was on my side, but now, alas, I must be the one who does the waiting and has to practice patience and must be understanding and accommodating. I wonder if such attributes do come with age, or if they are forced upon us by the emergence of a circumstance which makes of us dependent. I could of course just get on with my own life, but the hankering for the presence of youthfulness, the magic the young bring with them keeps me hooked like an addict!

Take care, Oscar dear,

Your friend and ally,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Eternality

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I have a feeling in this modern era that I am more of a Bosie than an Oscar.  Over indulged and flighty, everything at my beck and call, able to pick and choose and reject and dismiss – to ‘like’ and, of course, to ‘un-like’.  Oh, I wish you had encountered the internet!  Where an ‘influencer’ can die and be mourned by millions, while many other millions never knew that such a person ever existed!

I have a feeling that you were actually very set in your ways, and that despite the reprimand of imprisonment, of public humiliation, of loss of career and income, you actually carried on as normal, selecting youthful companions across France and the other denizens you visited once you were in your retirement.  Very strange thing about retirement; you may stop one thing but you carry on doing all of the other things that have been the compulsions of living.  I do think there was an element of compulsion in your character, Oscar, because you seem to have had to keep on doing what you always had done, like some irresistible urge, some ongoing defiance in the face of censure and opprobrium, an obsession lived out in your own real time.  

Almost addictive.  

We think we know all about addiction in this twenty-first century, because we have invented drugs and formed habits that have become utterly all-consuming.  I think it is probably the case that much of the planet is now drug dependent, and where people think they are not, they only have to look to the ingredients of the foodstuffs that we are all forced to consume, to the levels of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol that have become the staples of virtually the entire globe, to realise that we all keep on returning to the same substances, the same stimulants, to regulate not only our waking hours but our dreaming ones too.

None of it was unknown to you, Oscar, and I would hazard a guess that you indulged in various illicit substances throughout your lifetime.  After all, there may not have been the multiplicity of chemical concoctions that we have now at our disposal, but your Victorian age was notorious for gases and potions, acids and poisons, that were mind altering in their effects.  Even before your time!  Samuel Taylor Coleridge springs to mind, Kubla Khan, Xanadu, the ‘pleasure dome’ of heady intoxicants transporting the romantic mind.  I expect it has all been going on throughout the millennia, the ancient world with its nymphs and satyrs, its gods and demi-gods, the mysticisms of the Orient, water pipes, and hashish, and transcendental meditation, the yogis of the Indian subcontinent, the dream-time of Australia’s originary folk.  A part, it might be argued, of the human condition.

The problem, of course, is that such behaviours encourage a stepping away from the established norm, a re-evaluation of that established norm, and very often a subversion of its intent and its effect.  In collision with that other part of the human condition which seeks regularity, order, compliance, rules and proscribed regulation.  You know, we all know, all about all of that.  I wish you had not been made to suffer because of it;  as I wish those of today were not made to suffer because of it too.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Home

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Please see below a collage I have made for you.

You will see how complicated our age has become, the questions that are now under consideration, how we have moved from poor you and poor Bosie to political condemnation, to ongoing imprisonment, even death. In our world, just as in yours, some ways of being are not allowed, and people are made to suffer if they practice anything outside the status quo.

I do not want to tell you that everything is bad and pessimistic; it is possible to drink champagne and get drunk, to have sex and dance and parade through the streets, to live a blameless life with freedoms to express yourself – you just have to be aware that this is not true everywhere and that there are limitations – just as there were for you.

You had a marvellous time with your boyfriends and your parties, with Bosie’s devotion and the friendship of others – your dear Robbie buried with you, John Grey who turned from you – moments of happiness preceding … you know what they for you were preceding.

I believe it is possible to live your life openly, to reach a ripe old age, to be respected, to have a good time, to be a part of everything – somewhere in the world. Maybe in some part of America – the land of the free – which you visited and enjoyed I understand – just not everywhere.  In truth America is also problematic – everywhere is ever so slightly problematic, if you are gay.  South Africa, they say, is good in this modern era, and some European states – like Norway … it should of course be possible simply to stay at home – wherever home may be.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure

Me, myself and I

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feast with panthers.

Your good friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Catching Up!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I am wondering how to address you after so long, what to say, how to communicate the world we are now in to the world that you inhabited ….

In many ways – in awful ways – it is exactly the same; people are still persecuted for their passions, for their loves, for their stolen moments and primal urges, for having a good time, for giving into their nurture or their nature.

In some ways things have changed: there is an identity, a way of being which allows for a certain level of intimacy between loving souls – proscribed ways – controlled ways with levels of control varying across the globe, dependent upon social mores and social understanding. There are ways of being that permit the holding of hands, some kissing, and behind closed doors an absolute of congress, whatever that may be. There was always a locking of eyes, a long held recognition, a fleeting engagement – through millenia. An understanding. I wonder if now the new proscriptions limit and inhibit, set parameters which cannot be breached, dictate a state permitted.

Variance is still not encouraged.

There are laws and there are rituals, and dependent upon where you find yourself on the surface of the globe, in whose company, how observed, how interpreted, you can live as a free sexual entity, or you can die in trying to attain and express that freedom.

I love what you were trying to do; it is as difficult now to try to do what you might want to do as it ever was for you.

Your loving friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

This n’ that

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dearest Oscar,

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.

Hey ho,

Much love,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Workaday days

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

Have I told you anything of the world of work? 

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. 

Of course it is impossible. 

Most have to be drones. 

Only a few can be queens!

Your friend and constant support,

Algernon B. Duffoure.