>>The Victorian prohibition of homosexuality -- including love of
>>comely boys, aristocratic as well as working-class -- eventually led
>>to Wilde's conviction ("acts of gross indecency"). Wilde was then
>>sentenced to two years of _hard labor_ in a London prison, which
>>practically killed him:
>
>It was his own damn fault.
A left-wing lawyer, however, should not blame the victim. You must defend your client single-mindedly, whether or not he acted wisely.
>He shouldn't have prosecuted his erstwhile lover Alfred Douglas's
>dad for defamation for calling him an invert or whatever delicate
>word the the old fraud used.
If there was any crime on Wilde's part, it was a crime of passion, falling for a beautiful & yet heartless boy, who practically bullied Wilde into filing a libel suit because he wished to use the lawsuit to retaliate against his cruel & domineering father. And to think that Lord Alfred Douglas failed to visit Wilde in prison!
You are quite right, though, to call the Marquis of Queensberry (an unintended irony!) the "old fraud." The Marquis apparently could not even spell. On 28 February 1895, Wilde arrived at his club, the Albemarle, and was presented an envelope containing the Marquis of Queensberry's calling card, on the back of which was scrawled: "For Oscar Wilde Posing as a Somdomite [sic]." BTW, the Marquis' ill-bred antic took place after _months_ of a campaign of harassment that he had conducted against Wilde.
>He was, of course, an invert; everyone knew it, and no one except
>Douglas' dad really cared.
Did everyone? What did the fin-de-siècle British _know_ about Wilde, sexuality, & "sexual identities"? And did they care? What did they care about? All interesting questions.
In "a plea of justification" in the libel trial, the Marquis of Queensberry and his lawyers had to establish that the offending statement -- "For Oscar Wilde Posing as a Somdomite [sic]" -- was both "true" _and_ "published for the public benefit," according to the 1843 Criminal Libel Act (6 and 7 Vict. I, c. 96). Ed Cohen explains in _Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities_ (NY: Routledge, 1993):
***** Since the contested statement did not actually accuse Wilde of "sodomy" -- or of _being a sodomite_ -- for which a strict standard of legal proof (i.e., proof of penetration...) would have been required, the defense sought instead to show that Wilde was the kind of person -- or at least that he had (re)presented himself as the kind of person -- who would be inclined to commit sodomy. In support of this personification, the plea of justification tried to shift the legal focus on sodomy away from its traditional status as a criminally punishable sexual _act_ so that it became in the defense's construction a defining characteristic of a type of sexual _actor_ (the "sodomite")....
...Yet even if the court was inclined to agree that by incorporating the residual meanings ascribed to the older sexual offense ["sodomy"] within their indefinite use of emergent legal category ["acts of gross indecency," based upon the reduction of an individual to his alleged "sexual identity" -- the "kind of person" who is by nature inclined to proscribed acts] the defense had legitimated the "truth" of the statement that Wilde had "pos[ed] as a sodomite," the Marquis of Queensberry was still required to demonstrate that the publication of the statement was for "the public benefit." In order to satisfy this condition, Queensberry's plea of justification shifted its concern from Wilde's sexual to his literary practice. Claiming that "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was a man of letters and a dramatist of prominence and notoriety and a person who exercised considerable influence over young men," the plea charged
that the said Oscar...Wilde in the month of July in the year of Our Lord One thousand eight hundred and ninety did write and publish and cause and procure to be printed with his name upon the title page thereof a certain immoral and obscene work in the form of a narrative entitled "The Picture of Dorian Gray" which said work was designed and intended by said Oscar...Wilde and was understood by the readers thereof to describe the relations, intimacies, and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits, tastes, and practices.
Here, Wilde's text becomes the pretext for the assertion that his sexual practices were relevant public knowledge.... (pp. 127-128) *****
Four issues were at stake, from a political point of view:
1. Whether a literary text can be used as evidence of criminality on the part of its author.
2. Whether a literary text can corrupt youths morally & sexually.
3. Whether Oscar Wilde is "a kind of person" who by nature is inclined to certain proscribed acts, with "unnatural habits, tastes, and practices" naturally entailed by his "sexual identity."
4. Whether 1, 2, & 3 & knowledge thereof were for "the public benefit."
What is of interest, in terms of the history of sexuality, is 3. Before the Victorian era, a trial like Wilde's could not have taken place, for in the pre-Victorian past there was no "common sense" that there was such a thing like an "abnormal sexual identity," a "kind of person" by nature likely to commit certain "unnatural" acts. In the anti-sodomitical periods before Wilde's, it was understood that "sodomy" was a _universal_ temptation, with _everyone_ capable of committing it; now, however, a new understanding of sex emerged: _not everyone_ is inclined for "sodomy" -- only an _abnormal minority_ of "homosexuals" are. (Recall the works of Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, John D'Emilio, etc. here.) The trials of Oscar Wilde played no small part in the consolidation of this new ideology of sexual normality & abnormality based upon so-called "identities."
>Btw Wilde was prosecuted by Sir Edward Carson, an ancestor of a high
>school friend of mine, later a Village Voice rock writer. --jks
It's a small world after all. Were you ever a part of an upper-class queer circle when you were at Cambridge?
Yoshie