![]() The civil trial not only humiliated Wilde in the eyes of a homophobic Victorian public, but instigated a further criminal trial for gross indecency. There was a fatal hole in Wilde’s case – he was a sodomite, and Queensberry could prove it. Wilde’s friends told him to leave the case well alone, but, pushed by an impetuous and jealous Bosie, who hated his father, Wilde sued. ![]() Queensberry, having two homosexual sons whom he regarded as having been corrupted by ‘snob queers’ such as Wilde and then–prime minister Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, was obsessed with homosexuality. Wilde’s public image – an educated and charming raconteur, married with children – clashed with his private life, and while the conflict could hold for a few years, it wasn’t long before the inevitable happened.Īfter clashing with Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde was left a calling card from the Marquess accusing him of being a sodomite. They began to host wild sex parties with young working-class men, who they paid to fuck (or get fucked by). The two lovers drank and partied together and became the subject of scurrilous rumours. Besotted with the young poet, Wilde fell in with Bosie’s lifestyle and indulged his demands. Their tempestuous affair pushed Wilde’s homosexuality from the realm of flirtatious literary innuendo into that of reckless public identity. In Wilde he found his ideal older lover and benefactor, whose work and plays he had already praised in Uranian journals. Bosie was an archetypal twink, popular and athletic, who cared more about his writing and activities in the new ‘Uranian poetry’ movement, which idolized pederastic relationships between older and younger men, than his studies, which he never completed. Wilde and Bosie first met in 1891, when Bosie was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Wilde’s alma mater, Magdalen College, Oxford. That boy, a petulant and cruel son of the British aristocracy, was Lord Alfred Douglas, known by his affectionate nickname ‘Bosie’. But at the core of Wilde’s story is his love for a terrible young man, a love that drove him close to madness and sparked the wildfire of events that led to his ruin. For that, conservative forces succeeded in destroying him. Wilde was one of the first men in British society to give a creative form to a sexuality that barely yet understood itself, let alone was understood or discussed by straight people. It’s right and proper that we remember the role Wilde played within an otherwise staid and repressive Victorian culture, as well as the important, pioneering work he did describing, in public, a form of same-sex desire that otherwise lay hidden and criminalised on the margins. Less than a decade after he had reached the heights of literary stardom, Wilde was dead. Upon release, he fled into exile, living in penury under an assumed name. ![]() Sentenced to two years of backbreaking hard labour, Wilde was spat at by strangers as he was transported via train to jail. Yet within five years, Wilde’s reputation, and his health, were destroyed. England regarded this sparkling Irishman with a combination of fascination, admiration, and horror, but no one could deny he was becoming a titan of the national culture. He had successfully published works of prose and collections of poetry, and was preparing his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for publication, a masterful account of a Faustian bargain dripping with desire, vanity, and corruption. For a decade he had been the talk of London, a literary wit who pioneered the fashion and philosophy of aestheticism. In 1891, Oscar Wilde’s star was on the rise.
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