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.