Did Oscar Wilde Set Back Gay Rights?
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AS GLBT PEOPLE, or at least those in Europe and North America, have approached the mountaintop and can at last cast their eyes on the promised land of true liberation, we are in the process of redefining our identities, which also means reexamining our histories. Perhaps the seminal event in the definition and fate of the modern “gay movement” was the late 19th-century disgrace and tragic end of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s two trials made homosexuality a public moral, social, and political issue in Europe and the United States, and provoked widespread conservative reactions against homosexuality across two continents. Did Wilde’s wavering and reluctant but ultimately open defense of his sexual orientation promote or retard the cause of GLBT rights? Was Wilde a liberating figure comparable to Lincoln or Martin Luther King or did he set back the “movement” as it would be defined today?

In a recent issue of this journal (Sept.-Oct. 2005), I reviewed a fine new study of Wilde’s sexuality, Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (Basic Books, 2005), which emphasized the conflict between Wilde’s platonic defense of ideal male love and the reality of the often predatory behavior that led to his conviction. It must be remembered that Wilde’s legal trials took place only because he sued the irascible father of Lord “Bosie” Douglas, the teenager with whom he was having a flamboyant relationship. In a note left at his club, Douglas senior had called Wilde a “somdomite,” misspelling but not misidentifying a crime of which Wilde was undoubtedly guilty, according to the legal definition, having committed sodomy hundreds of times at that point. His sexual tastes ran to working-class boys and the teenage children of friends, some of whom had been entrusted to his care. Forcing these facts upon the public, an inevitable outcome of his lawsuit, given the context of the times, was bound to brand homosexuality as essentially perverted in the public mind.

The Wilde debacle—he served a torturous term in prison, then exiled himself to France, where he drank himself to death—so transformed the emerging discussion of homosexual rights that it’s difficult to tell what would have happened if he hadn’t pressed his hopeless prosecution. On the one hand, Wilde put the issue of gay rights on the agenda of every socially progressive industrial country. On the other hand, he ensured that homosexuality itself would be perceived by the public as something to be stamped out ruthlessly.

That homosexuality emerged as a public issue in this way was not inevitable. There’s no arguing that homosexuality in the 19th century was a different social phenomenon than it is today; but before Wilde, the attitude toward it was ambivalent, with a tendency to regard it as a purely private matter. Napoleon had legalized homosexuality in France early in the 19th century, and even an affair such as the torrid relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud provoked more titillation than outrage in the popular press. In England, sex between boys in the “public schools,” which is where the English governing classes were educated, was the rule rather than the exception. Even adult same-sex relations were generally tolerated during the Victorian era, however grudgingly, so long as they were carried out in private and didn’t lead to public scandal. This rule applied even—or especially—to the highest circles of English society. In the more socially conservative United States, loving relationships between men clearly existed and had achieved a vocabulary of their own by the time of the Civil War, as recorded by Walt Whitman in his poems, and as documented in letters written during and after the War. Meanwhile, the  “Boston marriage” had achieved the status of an acceptable social arrangement for two women who chose to live together rather than marry a man.

Wilde’s downfall changed all that: the private and the personal suddenly became the public and the political on two continents. Wilde forced the issue of homosexuality by “speaking its name” in public for the first time, so that public opinion had to decide whether homosexuality was a good thing or a bad thing. Alas, the circumstances of Wilde’s case as it played itself out in court did not make for a public relations triumph leading to swift public acceptance of homosexuality.

To blame Wilde for forcing the issue may be slightly unjust, however; discussion of homosexuality was already in the air and arrived from another route: medical research. As early as 1886, Krafft-Ebing in Germany had published his massive case study of “abnormal” sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualis, which, while treating homosexuality as a disease, had informed gay people that many others like them were out there. It also stimulated Magnus Hirshfeld to embark on his sustained efforts to demonstrate that homosexuality was a variant of “normal” sexual behavior and development. Freud was moving towards the position that homosexuality was not a disease at all. But in the wake of the Wilde scandal, these developments had little impact on the public consciousness, which began to harden around the position that homosexuality was a condition that needed to be cured or an affliction that ought to be suppressed.

I concluded my review of Neil McKenna’s book as follows:

Wilde’s decision to risk conviction in court did the gay culture no good in the short run. … The results of Wilde’s trial—and the lurid sexual practices they exposed—reversed the halting progress towards greater tolerance and made any progress on the legal front politically impossible. It’s tempting to wonder whether there wasn’t a way that someone of Wilde’s genius and social standing could have managed the crisis so as to advance, rather than set back, gay and lesbian emancipation. On the other hand, as the first public homosexual since Classical times, he gave the world a way to be openly gay. He bequeathed what would be called a “gay sensibility” or “camp” to the wider culture. In his last days, he told his old friend George Ives, “I have no doubt we will win, but the road is long and red with monstrous martyrdoms.” Here, as in other matters, Wilde would prove to be prophetic.

IT USUALLY TAKES a scandal of some kind to cause forbidden things to enter the public consciousness—scandal followed by popular outrage followed by ridicule of that outrage. (Wilde’s dramatic coming out featured all three.) That being the case, one could argue that projecting homosexuality into the public discourse could only have happened in this way, through scandal, and someone had to do it; thus Wilde performed a great service for all future gay people. Some have argued that he intentionally provoked his martyrdom as a liberating gesture of self-sacrifice, but this seems to be going too far. Wilde seems to have believed until relatively late in the game that his celebrity and social connections would protect him from disaster. And the best evidence suggest his actions were taken, not to make a public statement, but against his own better judgment, at the relentless insistence of Bosie Douglas, to wreak revenge on the latter’s father. Only in this sense can Wilde’s provocative lawsuit be seen as a romantic or self-sacrificing action. He was not an intentional martyr, though once he realized he was to be destroyed, he spoke out in court for the cause of the love that dare not speak its name. But the effect of his noble sentiments was overwhelmed by the voluminous and tawdry evidence of his actual behavior.

Perhaps the most ambiguous of Wilde’s legacies to the gay liberation movement was his insistence, both in his work (notably in The Picture of Dorian Gray) and in his life, that to be a homosexual was ultimately and inevitably a tragic fate. Positive images of homosexual relations were available in his time—Whitman’s celebrations of manly love, advanced psychoanalytic thinking, celebrations of male romance in French poetry, and political liberation movements rooted in a revived awareness of the central role of same-sex love in ancient Greece and in the Renaissance—but these were not the images on which Wilde chose to base his experience. Because Wilde chose a very different life plan and brought it to the public’s highly sensationalized attention, it may well be argued he bears much responsibility for the image of homosexuality as predatory and doomed that came to dominate literature, journalism, and movies until the final third of the 20th century.

Two works in the century’s first third epitomize the available models for homosexuality in this era: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1911), about an elderly gentleman who’s played straight all his life, growing foolish and finally dying from the stress induced by his violent attraction for a young boy he sees on the beach; and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), about a girl who becomes a lesbian because her parents cruelly raised her as a boy. Books continued on this trajectory as the century wore on: Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) and Fritz Peters’ classic Finistère (1951) come to mind (though Vidal saw fit to change the bleak ending to a more upbeat one after Stonewall).

Plays and movies followed the same script: for example, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (a drama followed by a sanitized movie version in 1961) portrayed a female schoolteacher who’s destroyed by the mere rumor of a lesbian relationship. In his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo identified many sly movie references to homosexuality. But these were available mostly to the already initiated. Even Tennessee Williams portrayed Brick as driven to destructive drinking by his love for a dead football buddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and, in Suddenly Last Summer, had the homosexual Sebastian murdered and devoured by a horde of Mexican boys, a predation facilitated by his mother.

As a teenager in the 1960’s, conscious of my romantic feelings towards other men and eager for information on male love, I found relief only in Mary Renault, but ancient Greece was unavailable to me in daily life, and her lovely historical novels fed into my sense that gay love was only available long ago and far away, and only as a very noble and abstract melding of hearts and minds. The popular contemporary portraits painted by brash gay authors retained the Wildean curse. John Rechy’s City of Night (1963) presented a brilliant description of a hustler preying on older gay victims. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) put forth that the way to love men was to become either a drag queen or a closeted butch rapist on bennies. And who would want to be a guest at the birthday party depicted in The Boys in the Band (produced as a play in 1968, as a movie in 1970)? These were not images to inspire confidence that one could live happily and honorably as a gay person.

Why were the ways to be loved by another man all so sad, violent, predatory, or self-destructive? Aside from some pulp fiction (much of which was very well done) directed specifically at urban gay communities, these were the dominant contemporary literary models for how to be gay before Stonewall. Wilde’s self-immolation has to bear some responsibility for this legacy. It’s unlikely that he intentionally martyred himself for gay rights. But Rosa Parks probably didn’t set out to change history either when she refused to give up her seat on that bus. A stubborn, instinctive refusal to be denied one’s basic humanity lay behind both actions.

Michael Hattersley, a freelance writer based in Provincetown, is a frequent contributor to this journal.