Wilde’s Second Coming Out (In These Times)
Aug 28th, 2005 by Viviane
by Doug Ireland
The Secret Life Of Oscar Wilde
By Neil McKenna
Basic Books · $29.95
When first published in England two years ago, Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde won universal critical acclaim. The praise was more than deserved, for this stunning piece of investigative historiography reveals for the very first time how Wilde was a militant precursor of the modern gay liberation movement long before his famous speech from the dock in defense of “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Making use of hitherto unpublished and unconsulted documents, diaries and letters, this extraordinary book—just published in the United States—also gives a new and revealing portrait of Wilde’s sexuality that supercedes all previous Wilde biographies. Moreover, McKenna’s book gives us, at long last, a definitive account of the political cover-up of the homosexual scandals within England’s ruling and royal elites that motored Wilde’s prosecution and trial.
The commonly accepted view is that Wilde discovered his homosexuality after he had already been married and produced children, when he was seduced by his young friend Robbie Ross. It is this version popularized in Brian Gilbert’s sympathetic 1997 film, the Oscar-nominated Wilde (starring the openly gay British actor Stephen Fry, in a subtle portrayal, as Wilde). The film was based on Richard Ellmann’s admiring, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography—valuable, but now made outdated in many ways by McKenna’s book.
In his carefully documented work, McKenna demonstrates beyond doubt that the truth is quite different. By the time he married in 1884, Wilde had already lived for several years with a male lover he’d met in 1876—the society portrait painter Frank Miles. A handsome man two years older, Miles in turn would introduce Wilde to the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, “a notorious sodomite, with a penchant for ‘rough trade,’” on whom Wilde “would base the character of Lord Henry Wotton, the corrupting prophet of strange sins” in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Wilde later recounted the day of what he called his “sexual awakening” to his friend and confidant Frank Harris (1856-1931). A writer, editor, journalist and womanizer, Harris authored My Life and Loves, a monumental autobiographical portrayal of the underside of Victorian sexuality that created a scandal in both Europe and America when published in the ’20s. (more…)
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