#artificial memory

🧭 Preface:

As I learn more about the intergenerational dynamics between Gay men my age in 2025—the so-called Daddy types—and the younger Gay men often dubbed Hunters—the more I’m reminded that this dynamic has played out across human history.

But no era screams sexually repressed quite like the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gilded-to-Progressive Ages in America. Victorian-to-Edwardian Eras in England.

The year 1910 holds a peculiar fascination for me. It was the final golden breath before the world changed forever—before a single bullet, fired from one gun held by a singular man in Sarajevo four years later toppled monarchies that had endured for centuries.

And yet, even in those buttoned-up times, I’ve found subtle traces of familiar desires—of confirmed bachelors who hired handsome, clever personal assistants… young men who, after hours, may have assisted with matters decidedly more personal.

What follows is one such story. Or perhaps... it’s a memory that waited 100 years to be found.

📦 From the Box of Belongings

As we age, we sometimes outlive the people who made our hearts glow. But their belongings remain.

“M,” as I’ll call him, was a cherished companion from years past. Our paths diverged in the way friendships sometimes do: he moved north with a much older partner—a nobleman of fading Indian royalty—and I stayed rooted in Maryland.

When I learned of his passing, I made the trip to pay my respects. His partner—a gracious, quietly striking man with eyes like rain and a voice like low thunder—invited me to stay afterward.

He spoke of how often M had mentioned me—how our long-ago letters, essays, debates, and yes, bawdy stories had lit up their evenings. I shared one last tale that made the nobleman blush deep crimson—and laugh until he wept.

Before I departed, he handed me a gift: A box of M’s most treasured books. Gilt-edged, cloth-bound, many untouched except for admiration. Hidden among them? A few shockingly vivid volumes of Victorian erotica that made me rethink the way one might remove a velvet smoking jacket.

📜 Between the pages of one such volume, I found a silk-wrapped bundle. Inside it, a letter.

🖼️ Title: The Last Letter, 1939

✍️ Caption:

Painted in the autumn of 1939, this portrait captures Professor Michael R. Alcott in his final years at Asbury Village. Seated at his desk with his beloved cat beside him—an aloof but loyal companion known to visitors only as “Madame”—he types what is now believed to be his final letter to a former student.

A framed sepia-toned photo of Alcott and Prince Ravi Devaya rests on the desk, a quiet witness to a life of hidden beauty. Despite his age, Alcott was still known for embracing the newest technologies, dictating letters into a wire recorder and recently developing a fascination with radio swing music. He was reportedly smitten with a new instrumental titled “Moonlight Serenade”, which he described in one note as “a little like falling in love by candlelight on a screened porch.”

Though age has softened his form, the twinkle in his eyes remains. As one former colleague put it: “He was the kind of man who looked like he’d been handsome forever—and still was, if you caught the light just right.”

🖋️ A Weekend in Logtown

✍️ Final Letter of Michael R. Alcott 📍 Gaithersburg, Maryland – August 14, 1939

My dearest Prince Ravi,

Forgive me the indulgence of this final letter—written as summer bends toward autumn, and I find myself looking out over land that once knew us both.

Tonight, through the open window of my apartment at Asbury Retirement Village, the scent of late summer drifts in. The forests are mostly gone now. The dirt road we once walked is paved. Gaithersburg is growing into a small city, as the once sleepy main Road now is busy with traffic night and day. A concrete ribbon that slices through the land like a river of light and machines, all the way up to Frederick and beyond.

But I remember what it was. And I remember you.

That August weekend in 1910, you and I escaped the world. You called it Bumfuck, Egypt—a place so remote it felt like time had forgotten it. And for us, that was perfect.

August 13–15, 1910. Weather made to order. Warm sun by day, crisp air at night—made for sleeping under stars and waking with someone you cherished still in your arms.

From the archives of The Washington Herald, September 12, 1909 Left: Professor Michael R. Alcott, pictured with his Assistant, Prince Ravi Devaya, of the now-defunct St. Breckinridge University, Washington, D.C.

We told our colleagues it was a scholarly retreat—two men of letters, escaping the noise and heat of Washington to draft joint essays. We brought papers, journals, books we never touched.

We took lodging at a quiet farmhouse nestled along the southern perimeter of the Summit Hall Sod Farm, surrounded by old-growth trees and wide, wind-brushed fields. No neighbors. No prying eyes.

We said we came for research. But what we found was freedom.

You arrived from the train in your dove-gray suit, cravat loosened, your hair undone by the breeze. I met you at the fence—and we simply looked. For a long, wordless moment. The recognition between us was deep, ancient, sacred.

That first night we dined by lamplight, drank too much wine, and laughed like old conspirators. But it was the next afternoon—when we wandered northeast toward the Observatory ridge—that changed everything.

We took a narrow trail into the forest (still standing, though quieter now), toward a clearing just beyond a crooked row of walnut trees.

It was there—in that hush of gold and green—that I first kissed you.

A shaft of sun broke through the canopy, landing across your face like a benediction. You tilted your head, lips parted slightly, and I could no longer pretend to be just your mentor.

I kissed you. Boldly. Desperately. With twenty years of hunger that I’d kept buried beneath essays and waistcoats. You dropped your satchel. I dropped my guard.

And nothing in our world was ever the same again.

We made love in that clearing, Ravi. I write it plainly now, because I am old—and truth deserves dignity. It wasn’t frantic or forbidden. It was sacred. You held my face like a relic. I adored you like the last miracle on Earth.

The birds sang. The trees swayed. And the papers we brought as pretense scattered like leaves, never to be opened again.

What began as a working weekend became the most honest creation of our lives.

And now? I live not far from that very spot. The clearing is overgrown, but still warm. Still waiting. A local park that wasn’t there then, is within sight of the hillside where you first pressed me against that walnut tree and claimed me. I walk there when the weather is pleasant and it always reminds me of you and our time of bonding when we and the world were both younger and seemed a little more innocent.

Yes, I found our initials. Carved in Sanskrit, as only you would’ve dared. They’re high up now—nearly four stories—but still there.

If this letter reaches you, wherever you may be: Know that I loved you fully. And without shame.

And if you ever return to Maryland, walk that path. Let the sun touch your face as it did that day. You’ll know where to go. I am grateful we got the chance to really live--my god have we lived—and YOU made that possible for me. A gift I will treasure until I fade away to nothing but a whisper in the winds.

As my final wish, I ask only this: Mentor someone. Pass the light. Take a young man under your wing the way I once took you under mine. Protect the flame of his heart. Show him what we had—if only for a season, if only in a forest where no one watches.

Let that love ripple forward. And may it never be erased.

With everything I am, Michael R. Alcott The Sage Papa Alpha Bear Written August 13, 1939 – Asbury Village Retirement Home, Gaithersburg Maryland. 🕯️🌳✨

P.S. You know I made peace with my mortality long ago. I savored every moment life gave me—with you most of all. When your time comes, find me. I’ll be waiting in the clearing. Arms open. Still refusing to eat curry. But craving you—now and forever more.

📎 Author’s Note

The landmarks described above—the Observatory ridge, the walnut grove, the hidden trail—are real, however their names are all different now.

In fact, that very hillside is visible from our home. As if fate took a ribbon, tied it around this patch of earth, and whispered: “Here. This is where something once bloomed.”

And the clearing? It’s still there, albeit in slightly altered form, as the Summit Hall Sod Farm’s fields come quite close. But the trees we were under still stand—but like me and everything else not as young as they once were.

I’ve stood there. And it feels... warm. Hushed. Like a page folded in time, waiting to be read again.

If you’re discerning, you might feel it too. That whisper of something sacred… Older than the trees. Older than the names on the deeds. Left behind not in ink or stone, But in heat, in breath, in love.