Gay Icons Of The Past #4: True Friends Stab You in the Front

[PeterRS]

He was a writer, a playright, an aesthete, bon vivant, dandy and absolute master of the pithy epigram. The title of this article is one. Even better known is, "I can resist everything except temptation!" He was also gay - although not initially so. For a time, he was the toast of London and its high society matrons and their rich friends. Eventually leaders of that society were to turn on him with a viciousness more suited to a violent criminal. He was disgraced, tried in a court of law, found guilty, imprisoned and died in exile.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde came into this world in Dublin in October 1854. After a stellar success at the universities in Dublin and Oxford, he moved to London. With his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversation, Wilde quickly became one of the best-known personalities of his day, much sought after at soirées given by the great and the good. Following a brilliantly successful lecture tour of the USA and some time in Paris, he married and had two sons. He spent some years writing essays and novels before turning his talents to the theatre where he enjoyed even greater success, especially with his last, "The Importance of Being Earnest", now considered his masterpiece. Even if you have not seen the play, almost certainly you will have seen this very short clip from the 1952 movie version with the incomparable Dame Edith Evans uttering arguably Wilde's most immortal line. The formidable Lady Bracknell has just been told that her ward’s paramour was not born in a hospital or even a bed. He was found in the lost luggage department at Worthing station in - 

Another of Wilde's epigrams ends, "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." It was to prove prophetic. In 1886 aged 32 he was seduced quite deliberately by a 17-year old Canadian Robert Ross and they entered into an intense relationship. Their friendship was to last for the rest of Wilde's life, but five years later another young gay friend was to sow the seeds of his downfall. He was introduced to the dissolute, bored young Lord Alfred Douglas, known to his friends as Bosie. They started a relationship and soon Bosie was to become the love of his life. Through his connections, Bosie introduced Wilde to London's low life and the male brothels which he soon began to frequent.

Bosie's father was the Marquis (sometimes spelled Marquess) of Queensberry, a man's man who had drawn up the Queensberry rules used in the sport of boxing. Well aware of Wilde's gay reputation, Queensberry was incensed on learning of his son’s relationship. Unable to find Wilde when trying to warn him never to see his son again, he left his name card at Wilde's club, adding "For Oscar Wilde, ponce and somdomite (sic)." 

Wilde should have let the matter pass, but proud and vain as he was, he sued Queensberry for libel. He lost. Within hours Queensberry counter-sued - and won. In court a succession of private detectives hired by Queensberry exposed all the detail of Wilde's promiscuity with young men and boys. Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labour. 

His place in society forever lost, on his release he moved to exile in France where he died in Paris aged 46, the faithful Robert Ross at his side. His remains were eventually interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Here he was in the company of such luminaries as composers Chopin, Rossini ("Barber of Seville") and Bizet ("Carmen"), pop singer Jim Morrison of The Doors, authors Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust, artists Seurat, Pissarro, Delacroix and Corot, and perhaps most appropriately of all, the Irish revolutionary William Lawless. Wilde may not have fomented revolution, but through his manners, his openness and his writing he came to present a complex problem for the establishment of the day. By failing to play by their rules, he ensured his own downfall. The establishment always won.

Not that Queensberry was a paragon of virtue. He was an arrogant, unpopular brute of a man whom no-one liked. As an atheist, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Queen  – he called it Christian tomfoolery – and so was not permitted to take his seat in parliament. He particularly disliked the Prime Minister, a fellow Scot, the 5th Earl of Rosebery. Rosebery was certainly bisexual if not homosexual and always surrounded himself with handsome young men. Queensberry called him a “snob queer”. For some years Rosebery’s circle had included as his Private Secretary Queensberry’s eldest son and heir, the Earl of Drumlanrig. Queensberry will certainly have been aware of the strong rumours of a homosexual affair between his son and Rosebery, and this may well have fed into his anger towards Wilde's relationship with his third son, Bosie. Then tragedy struck. Drumlanrig died with a single gunshot to the head, a suspected suicide. Soon Queensberry underwent a lengthy period of mental decline, a result of syphilis. He died after a stroke aged 55 a year before Wilde’s own death.

In 2012, Wilde was in the first group to be inducted into Chicago's Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and many of its personalities. In 2017 he was one of up to 50,000 homosexual men given a posthumous pardon by the British government under what has become known as the Alan Turing Law. It is surely another of Wilde's epigrams that is the most suitable epitaph for a man who is one of history's true gay icons: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."