Note: This piece is re-airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show. Click here to listen to the entire show.
(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)
History is a messy business.
After all, it does involve human beings.
I have not thought this until now — specifically when I read the 2017 biography titled Oscar’s Ghost, The Battle for Oscar Wild’s Legacy by Laura Lee by Amberly Publishing in England.
The book covers some new territory. It portrays the struggle for literary control over Wilde’s estate.
But the first one hundred and fifty pages or so were about the events of Wilde’s life — event that led up to the struggle over his writing by the two men in his life.
This was fortunate for me because (in full disclosure), I had not read any of the previous biographies about Wilde. Here’s the short version. Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, went to college in England, married a woman as custom dictated, became a well-known writer, discovered he was gay, fell hopelessly in love with a younger man named Lord Alfred Douglas and went to jail for that love in 1895. He was then released from jail in 1897 and in 1900 died penniless.
It was interesting to read that the well-known line — “the love that dare not speak its name” — was a line of poetry written by Lord Alfred Douglas that was used in the court case against Oscar Wilde. It was equally fascinating to read that when Oscar spoke of his devotion to Lord Alfred Douglas (nicknamed Bosie) in the courtroom that the attendees of the trial applauded. This is proof that people (at least some of them) are always more enlightened than the laws that govern them.
Oscar was found guilty and went to jail. In prison, he wrote what is arguably his best work titled De Profundis (Latin for “from the depths”), a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. We have this work because Oscar handed it to his good friend and literary executor Robert Ross who was also his occasional lover.
The long-essay did not portray Lord Alfred Douglas in a good light. After all, Douglas was the reason that Oscar had gone to jail and lost everything. Nevertheless after Oscar’s release from jail the two men reunited and for a short time lived in Naples. After Oscar died an untimely death from a rare disease in 1900, Lord Alfred Douglas learned of the existence of De Profundis and that it was written as a letter to him. Because of this, he considered it his personal property and went into a litigious rage.
The two men knew of Oscar’s involvement with each other and for a while they were good friends. The enmity that grew between them after Oscar’s death was unfortunate. But we do have Robert Ross to thank for establishing Oscar Wilde’s legacy.
In the conclusion, the author notes how fast things have changed:
“In March 2014, same sex marriage became legal in the UK. A little more than a year later it became the law of Oscar Wilde’s native Ireland. In January 2017, Wilde was posthumously pardoned, along with 50,000 other gay men who had been convicted under a law that no longer exists. It can only be hoped that we are finally entering an era when men who love men can, indeed, be dead to all sense of shame.”
To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.
Janet Mason, author 