Paradise Regained Of all the indignities suffered by Oscar Wilde after his 1895 arrest—the public humiliation, the two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol, exile in France after his release—we haven’t talked about the heartache of losing his library card. It turns out his reading card for the British Museum Reading Room was revoked when his legal troubles erupted. Thus it is heartening to know that the British Library has reinstated his library card after 130 years. In a ceremony that only the Brits could pull off without looking hokey, the reinstated pass was presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, a Wilde scholar and biographer. Describing the symbolic restitution as “a lovely gesture of forgiveness” by which his grandfather would have been touched, he hastened to add that Oscar would probably not have accepted the blanket pardon enacted in 2017 for the 50,000 to 100,000 men convicted of “gross indecency” over many decades: “Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love,” so there was nothing to pardon! One final question: given that Wilde was in no position to return any borrowed books after the arrest, is it safe to assume that any outstanding fines for late books were forgiven?
Those Best-Laid Plans “Nobody represents anything,” pronounced Nan Goldin in these pages many years ago; everyone is an individual. In that spirit, kudos to Vivian Jenna Wilson on her debut performance at L.A.’s “Save Her” fundraiser in June, where @Vivllainous crushed it with her dramatic dancing and song. But the fact that Vivian is the progeny of Elon Musk makes it impossible not to read a little something into it. We won’t rehash Elon’s politics, but matters of paternity are more interesting. The best guess is that he has fourteen children, most or all of whom were conceived artificially to ensure that they’d be male. This army of sons appears to be part of his ultimate mission (world domination?), so the arrival of Vivian as a trans woman could carry any number of lessons. Vivian’s performance was on behalf of a legal defense fund for immigrants facing deportation, a cause that’s right down there with transgender rights in Elon’s priorities.
News Flash: Marriage Equality Lowers Divorce Rates! As we mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, lgbtqNation.com reminds us that ten years ago a key argument against marriage equality was that it would cause heterosexual divorce rates to surge. The logic was convoluted, but they needed to show that gay marriage actively harmed marriage as an institution. Same-sex marriage, they claimed, “will entrench an understanding of marriage that elevates adult fulfillment over children’s needs.” But since parents often stay together solely for the kids, the demotion of “children’s needs” will release parents (i.e., fathers) from any such concern, and off they’ll go. So, here we are ten years later and—wait for it—divorce rates for straight couples are significantly lower than before (from 9.8 per thousand in 2012 to a mere 7.1 in 2022), a statistic that probably has nothing to do with same-sex marriage.
Haters Gonna Hate A story widely reported in the UK concerned the felling of a very old, solitary, almost sacred tree near Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, the site of marriages and memorial services and countless photo ops. Two men were caught after clever sleuthing and have fessed up, offering no explanation beyond that they did it for the fun of it. The judge sentenced Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers to an unusually harsh 51 months in prison for the sheer cruelty of their deed. In due course it was learned that only nine days earlier they’d been arrested for a hate crime—a physical assault on a gay man accompanied by anti-gay slurs at a rest stop—but the Cumbria Police had declined to bring charges due to “insufficient evidence.” Two unrelated crimes, but why doesn’t it surprise us that the same two guys who got off on killing a beloved tree also enjoy attacking the occasional gay person?
