The Truth is Never Pure

And rarely simple

The truth is never pure and rarely simple. –Oscar Wilde

In 1895, famed author Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of being gay, and it killed him.

Born in Dublin to a prominent Irish family in 1854, Wilde was educated at Trinity College and Oxford before becoming one of the most popular playwrights of the time in London. He’d performed his aristocratic familial obligation by marrying a highborn woman and impregnating her twice to fulfill the requirement for “an heir and a spare.” If he’d kept the gay stuff on the down-low, his dalliances would have been permissible, a benefit of being upper class. Homosexual acts were a criminal offense, but normal rules of society didn’t apply to men of his station. Unfortunately for Oscar, his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, preferred to be out and proud.

While Wilde was not overly discreet, Alfred flaunted his sexual orientation like San Francisco in June. Alfred hadn’t done his duty of marrying and having children, because ew, girls. Alfred’s dad, John Douglas, who held the title of Marquess of Queensberry, was not impressed. John was one of those “manly men.” If you’re familiar with “Queensberry Rules” of boxing, he’s the one who sponsored their creation. The Marquess was a brutish conservative who relished punching men’s faces, not kissing them.

As parents are often wont to do, he blamed the lover, not his own child. Queensberry threatened to “thrash” Wilde for his relationship with his son and made a public accusation of sodomy against the writer. Oscar retaliated by making the ill-advised decision to prosecute the Marquess for criminal libel. Of course, truth is a defense against libel, so John hired private investigators to confirm Oscar’s homosexuality. And find them they did, bringing evidence that Wilde had engaged in sex acts with at least a dozen men. The libel charge was dropped, and instead Wilde found himself facing prosecution for “The love that dare not speak its name,” a line from a poem Alfred wrote. Oscar’s friends advised Wilde to flee to France. He refused, preferring England’s bad weather and worse food. The first trial was a mistrial. In the second, Oscar was found guilty of “gross indecency” and sent to Pentonville Prison to spend a couple of years making big rocks into little rocks (actually it was mostly walking a “penal treadmill” used to power a mill for grinding corn or pumping water). He served his time, which wore on his fragile health, then fled to the mainland the day of his release. He died in France three years later at the age of forty-six.

Seems pretty fucked up, right? The criminalization and persecution of homosexuality has long been a blight upon our history, and there are still nations where it carries a penalty of death. England wouldn’t decriminalize it until 1967; the country’s prosecution for homosexuality and subsequent chemical castration of Alan Turing, a war hero whose decryption of German codes during the Second World War played a critical role in the Allied victory, led to Turing’s suicide in 1954.

There is more to the Oscar Wilde story. The truth is rarely pure.

Wilde was known for saying “I can resist everything except temptation.” Lord Alfred, who would later marry, procreate, and convert to Roman Catholicism to pray away the gay, introduced Oscar to the underground world of gay prostitution, who could not resist. Wilde solicited a series of impoverished boys as young as sixteen. He lavished them with expensive dinners, gifts, and cash. Some of the boys worked as prostitutes, others were just poor and desperate. After fleeing England, Wilde was known to have sexual relations with a fifteen-year-old in Italy named Giuseppe.

In the modern legal system, Oscar could face more prison time now than in 1895. Not for Giuseppe—the current age of consent in Italy is fourteen—but hiring a prostitute in present-day England aged sixteen or seventeen, regardless of gender, is punishable by up to seven years’ incarceration. Under current morals of fucking, we’d proclaim Wilde was prosecuted for the wrong fucking thing.

With this additional knowledge, Wilde appears both victim and villain. How do we judge such villainy through a modern lens? Legality isn’t it, because lots of horrible things have been legal, such as, uh, slavery! Add to this that in a number of U.S. states it remained legal for a man to rape his wife until 1993. The Canadian government was stealing Indigenous children from their families and putting them in Residential Schools to “kill the Indian in the child” until 1996. Oh, and right now an octogenarian might be rubbing slippery bits with a fourteen-year-old and the Italian government would say that’s just peachy.

Back in London, where aristocrats had the privilege of being quietly gay but for commoners it was far more difficult, Wilde saw no issue with using his wealth to purchase the bodies of boys in desperate circumstances. The indisputable facts of homosexuality as natural and prevalent among all human societies for the entirety of our history, as well as among many other species, were ignored. Wilde’s crime wasn’t about the age of the boys, but their gender. What’s more, Londoners didn’t care about the future of a talented playwright who might have made many more artistic contributions to the world had his life not been cut short. English society was too myopic to imagine that tolerance and inclusivity could be a boon rather than bane.

There are no universal laws that can be ascribed to humanity. Homo sapiens are a multi-millennium N=1 experiment skewed by an endless array of cognitive biases. Will and Ariel Durant, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their historical works, explained, “Most history is guessing; the rest is prejudice.” And as a middle-class cis-hetero white guy, I am prejudiced up the posterior orifice. The two historians also proclaimed, “History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves.”

History is full of deeds both noble and despicable. Along with slavery, there is self-sacrifice. Some were motivated by greed, others generosity. Many dedicated themselves to the art of killing, while some put their focus toward curing. There have been grave mistakes and greatness, confrontation and cooperation. Early in the twentieth century Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet history serves not just as warning, but encouragement. Humanity is not endless suck. We’ve done some inspiring shit.

In 2020, prior to the U.S. presidential election, there was a popular meme in the image of a bumper sticker spreading across social media that proclaimed, “Sweet Meteor of Death 2020.” It implied humanity is hopelessly evil, and an asteroid should just do Earth a favor and snuff the semi-sentient meat sacks infesting every corner of it like a pernicious contagion. But we’re not all bad. Our dastardly deeds were not often committed because people decided Let’s do evil. Rather, they were adaptive. We committed these sins again and again for what we believed were good reasons; there was a natural selection to them. Except “sin” doesn’t exist. It’s just a bullshit concept we made up. The laws of physics, as an example, involve real, provable, repeatable science; laws that govern society are just some stuff we decided and had the ability to enforce. Although laws and morals and rules of behavior vary over areas and eras, what we think is and is not evil is in a constant state of flux. It depends on what you can get enough people to buy in to.

Alas, it is an ongoing challenge to get humans to agree on much of anything on what makes for a just and moral society, but I have hope for us that we are learning.

Speaking of learning stuff, don’t forget to get my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down at JamesFell.com/books.

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Image: Oscar Wilde (left) and Alfred Douglas