Maybe it’s me. Maybe I am a manic depressive, or some sort of easily identifiable misery guts, but even though I was successful in buying the gay magazine this time, I do not feel great now that I have it. It presents a gay paradise. One of the articles quite specifically talks about money, and how the big corporations have worked out that tolerance means profit, but I find that worrying, don’t you? There is no honesty and no integrity there; everything is dependent upon the vagaries of the market, and so any hope of politicisation is lost.
All of the bigger corporations are straighter than straight can be, and you can bet that at the tables of the top boardrooms homophobia is rampant. The pink pound only generates a certain amount of money; it is not the same as trading in arms, or pharmaceuticals; they are richer pickings. It just worries me that gay men can be targeted very easily, that they can be miked for their money while the consumer express rushes ahead, but dropped just as easily should the need ever arise.
You will know nothing of the world wars that dominated the twentieth century – the only real events that happened. Persecution of homosexuals ran alongside persecution of other minority groups, and control of the population at large was absolutely merciless. Dreadful times. People being killed. You were locked up and your life was in tatters because you were discovered; in the second world war thousands of gay people went to their deaths.
Recently we have witnessed the treatment of prisoners in another battle zone (there are always battle zones, from your day to this), and a part of the ritual humiliation inflicted upon prisoners is gay related. If they are not gay then they have to act gay, be sexually assaulted, be ridiculed as effeminate; if they are homosexual, well, you can imagine. It is frightening. It does not seem very far away.
So that within the pages of the magazine the wild hedonism of holiday resorts, the fashion tips and the designer outfits, the pretty boys putting their bodies on display, all seem to be intermeshed with a legacy and a present day reality that are extremely disturbing.
Of course it all keeps relating back to how men are, how men behave, how men interact with the world around them.
These gay magazines are really exactly the same as their straight counterparts; masturbatory fantasy images of lifestyles and of people that the camera has rendered beautiful for an instant. You should see what has happened to photography; now it trades in its own lies quite blatantly. We are presented with a false version of reality, and all sorts of consumable distractions proliferate to help us forget that outside of our tried and tested bubble of delight a real world is in operation, and it is one that exists in the realms of fear, of killing, of persecution.
Oh, I am a little morose today – but who wouldn’t be? I was given a lukewarm cappuccino and a stale Danish pastry this morning, and overcharged for the privilege.
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.
I may be overreacting! I may be wrong! But somehow, I do not think so.
Where is the cheapest seed? Africa. I think I am right I thought for a moment that it might be South America, but undoubtedly, after the rape and pillage of the nineteenth century, after the economic exploitation of the twentieth century, after all of the disgust that still lingers on into the twentieth century, the twenty first century, the racism, the inequality, the presumption of superiority by the former colonial powers, the cheapest seed in the world comes from Africa.
Men – sacrificed.
Women – I do not want to think of the women, because the fate that was dealt to them is beyond thought.
I know you never visited Africa. I know that to you Africa was simply a continent to be raped, stripped of any value that might be perceived, reduced to a nothingness of scrubland and desert. I acknowledge the noble history of African descent, the civilisations that have pre figured that of the Western domineers, the superiority of races that have preceded my own.
Oscar, my dear, your whole Victorian exercise was so ill placed. And you did not know it! Ha ha! As they say. Ha ha!
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!
Really the only safe form of exercise is perambulation – a short walk of a mile or two around the streets, bringing you down to earth and back on to solid ground. You would have no vision of what is to be encountered on such an expedition, so let me explain.
Cars, everywhere there are cars – the modern form of transportation, not dependent upon horses at all! I know in your time it would have been a wonder to see a horseless carriage, but now they are so common that everyone, and everyone’s heterosexual wife (homosexual boyfriend’s too) has one. Speeding from place to place, on errands both urgent and utterly frivolous. It has created an ecological disaster, to the point where now, only a century or so since you left us, we have managed to pollute the very air that we breathe. Yes, Oscar, we have found ways to kill ourselves off, to poison the atmosphere itself, to over-produce all of the nonsense that our modern society seems to desire, to the point of absolute destruction.
There is a level of conscience trying to creep into the argument, and many many people are aware that these are the consequences of our collective action, but very little is done in actual terms to counter it. You see, Oscar, cars have become big business, ensure high profit margins, and literally fuel multifarious industries around the world that provide wages to lift people from poverty, and fat salaries for the fat cats (as they are known) who sit at the top of the tree, fiddling (and here is an allusion that you will recognise) while Rome burns! So, on any walk (and walkers are in the minority) there is a constant encounter with cars, parking, manoeuvring, starting and stopping, slowly choking both the passers by and the occupants of the vehicles themselves.
Then there is litter. Everywhere litter. Packaging discarded on to the roadside, and all of the unwanted and valueless detritus of modern living simply tossed on to grass verges, into gutters, and trodden underfoot. We seem to have so much, and this is argued as the apogee of Western civilisation, that everyone has an endless choice of everything that they could possibly desire, but that in having so much we simply throw away all the excess, all the safeguarding, that brings us food ready made, products as instantly consumable. On any walk you literally have to pick your way along the pavements to avoid treading into what other people have decided to discard. Often small objects, but sometimes furniture, or large boxes, even, as mentioned above, cars! Everything just dumped on the roadside, so that now, in this losing battle, we pay taxes to employ people to make some effort to clear it all up! There are some virtuous souls who go out and pick up the litter of their own accord, not paid to do so, but out of civic responsibility, but not only are they in the minority, they also unwittingly become part of the problem. If I were the sort of person to throw rubbish on to the street then I would continue to do so secure in the knowledge that someone else will pick it up for me.
The real problem is the excesses of capitalism, something in its infancy when you were with us, still glorying as you were in the vestiges of Empire. You see in your day the wealthy and powerful kept themselves to themselves and went into the world feeling that they were rightfully exploiting those whom they encountered; nowadays access to wealth and privilege is there for the taking for everyone (broadly speaking, although the argument is actually more nuanced, which I will no doubt come on to, at a later date). Now everyone is exploited by everyone for profit, and the level of exploitation centres around the most basic of urges: food, sex, survival. Vast fortunes are made by pumping the populace with fat, sugar and salt, in various forms; by offering them sexual excitation and titillation, in various forms; and by playing upon their vacuous attempts to survive as a race, through out of control reproduction rates and population explosion. The overarching philosophy is one of: “things will get better”, but not that “things can be great now”. Humanity seems to be locked in a fruitless cycle of aiming for improvement, for longevity, for betterment, but tomorrow, or in the time of sons and daughters, at some point in the not so distant future. It reminds me of religion: you might suffer on earth but you will be rewarded in heaven, or, only death will bring you release!
In that respect not much has changed since your time, and this is becoming a theme of my letters to you. Nothing changes. Superficially everything seems different, but in actual fact the wealthy and privileged carry on doing as they see fit, exploiting the masses in any way that they can in order to bolster up their positions. Those masses consume everything that is thrown their way, both killing themselves and reproducing to keep the whole edifice in place, and at the fringes, which you will recognise, which I am sure you saw all too keenly, the destitute queue for handouts.
That is what I noticed on my walk today. The affluence of big houses with well kept gardens and polished cars, and down the back streets, a queue of people waiting for the church door to open, so that they could pick up a parcel of food.
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.
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 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!
Letters to Oscar Wilde 