Author's Introduction
- The Oscar Wilde Temple first opened in 2017, in the basement of the Church of the Village in Greenwich, New York. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.3.3, on a sign below him. Directly behind Wilde is a large neo-Gothic stained glass window of Jesus, drawing an association of martyrdom between the two men. On the walls there are also pictures of LGBTQ figures who were similarly persecuted: Alan Turing, Harvey Milk, Marsha P Johnson. The artwork was created by David McDermott and Peter McGough.
- This is a depiction of Wilde that we are all familiar with: as a flamboyant aesthete and gifted writer, a witty provocateur who is supposed to have told customs officials in New York, ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius’, who wrote sparkling plays and splendid children’s books. He might have married the writer Constance Lloyd, but this was clearly a smokescreen to conceal his true sexuality, for he had numerous affairs with men, from Robbie Ross to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s blossoming talent was destroyed by a cruel Victorian public who vilified him for his homosexuality and flung him into prison, causing him to die in poverty and misery in a Parisian bedsit a few years after his release. Subsequently, over the past 50 years, Wilde has been adopted by the LGBTQ movement as a secular saint, the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man.
- But is Wilde’s story as simple as this? Is this a fair representation of his life and sexuality? Wilde was, after all, a man of contradictions. Shortly before he died, he confided in Jean Dupoirier, the proprietor of the Hôtel d’Alsace, that: ‘Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple.’ In ‘Biography and the Art of Lying’ (1997), Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, points out that Wilde’s life is not one that ‘can tolerate an either/or approach with logical conclusions, but demands the flexibility of a both/and treatment, often raising questions for which there are no answers.’ Those who have attempted to mould Wilde to their own agenda, simplifying his complexities, have soon found that ‘he turns to quicksilver in their fingers’.
Author's Conclusion
- Ellmann saw Wilde’s shift from female to male lovers as a ‘reorientation’. I would argue that a more accurate term to describe Wilde’s sexuality was that he was bisexual. Interviewed in Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa (1995), the academic Jonathan Dollimore reflected similarly: ‘My feeling about Oscar Wilde is that he was certainly bisexual, and there is a sense in which I do deplore that representation of Wilde as living entirely in bad faith in relation to his wife.’ However, gay theorists have resisted this more complex and nuanced examination of Wilde’s sexuality. Take these words from the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, interviewed in Outweek magazine in 1991: ‘I’m not sure that because there are people who identify as bisexual there is a bisexual identity …’ The interviewer goes on to summarise that: ‘In questioning whether bisexuality is a potent identity, Sedgwick points to historical figures the gay and lesbian community claims as lesbian and gay (Cole Porter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde) – who would actually be classified as bisexual,’ to which Sedgwick concludes: ‘But the gay and lesbian movement isn’t interested in drawing that line.’
- The trouble with Sedgwick’s argument is that it reinforces a simplistic homo/hetero binary. The result is that – as Steven Angelides points out in A History of Bisexuality (2001) – ‘bisexuality… is unthinkable outside of binary logic’ and hence becomes erased. However, this diminishment of bisexuality was characteristic of the era. From the 1970s onwards, bisexuals have historically found their sexuality ignored or dismissed, and had to fight for decades for the ‘B’ to be included in LGBTQ. Bisexuality has frequently been seen as a phase or situated ‘on the fence’, where the sitter will inevitably come down on one side or the other, or deemed as a dilution of a cause; lesbian feminists in the 1980s were suspicious of bi women who were seen as ‘sleeping with the enemy’ and, in 1985, the London Lesbian and Gay Community Centre banned bis because their lesbian members felt threatened by bisexual men. During the AIDs crisis, bis were frequently scapegoated, depicted as the bridgeway between two sexual populations, passing the disease from gay to heterosexual and back again.
- Because bisexuality has been mischaracterised as a sort of ‘no man’s land’, where it has always been harder to fight a cause, Wilde’s sexuality was inevitably simplified. The binary story of Wilde as an innocent persecuted gay man versus a cruel heterosexual public is a more potent one, particularly given the alarming rise in LGBTQ hate crimes this century. In 2016, the arts organisation Artangel organised a public reading in Reading Prison of De Profundis – the letter Wilde wrote while incarcerated – with luminaries such as Ralph Fiennes, Lemn Sissay and Maxine Peake reading sections aloud. When interviewed, one of the directors, Michael Morris, noted that, in some countries, being gay is still illegal: ‘We want people to be mindful of that oppression and persecution.’
- This is certainly a good reason to remember the horrors of Wilde’s fate. However, to accept that Wilde was bisexual does not mean that his gay inclinations are halved or half-hearted, or that his tragedy is diluted. It does not diminish the cruelty of Victorian society in condemning him to spend two years in a dark, freezing cell, his mind suffering a slow shattering, his genius going to waste simply because he did not conform to their narrow idea of what sexuality should be. But it does acknowledge that he was a much more complex figure than the misleading caricature that theorists’ agendas and social causes have slowly shaped him into.
Author Narrative
- Sam Mills is a novelist/nonfiction author. Her books include Chauvo-Feminism (2021), The Watermark (2024) and Uneven: Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality (2025). She is also managing director of the publishing house Dodo Ink. She lives in London.
Notes
- This is an interesting and balanced paper, though the balance is rather tendentious in that the author is promoting bisexuality. But it's good to see Wilde being treated fairly objectively rather than as a gay icon.
- There are sundry references to "Ellmann (Richard) - Oscar Wilde" which I ought to read one day.
- There are a few - mostly sensible - Aeon Comments, which I've read.
- I doubt I'll take this any further, but I probably ought to have a Note on Sexual Identity as a sub-Note to Narrative Identity, to which this relates. See also Oscar Wilde.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "Oscar Wilde is an icon of gay liberation from secrecy. But his life and his sexuality were not so simple – nor so binary"
- For the full text see Aeon: Mills - Requeering Wilde.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)