There have been plays, films, reenactments, & books have come about the Oscar Wilde trial, or rather 3 trials of Wilde & his utter destruction, but I had been considering what happened to the other players who swelled the scene in his drama after I did a post on his birthday earlier in the month.
The main character would need to be Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover & betrayer. A great deal happened to Douglas & after the spotlight, he made very little of his life. When he was young, Douglas was considered the handsomest young man in England, & his photographs seem to agree. He had a golden classical quality. He came from an important family, prestigious in England for hundreds of years. Yet his father was vindictive, unhinged & rather stupid. Alfred Douglas was petulant, narcissistic, vindictive, & a superb poet.
Wilde referred to Douglas by his childhood name- Bosie. When he was young, Douglas was a strong but undercover activist for the homosexual rights. He ended his life as a fervent & grotesque homophobe. The life of Lord Alfred Douglas is a lesson in self-loathing & hatred. Even today, after all the progress & smart thinking, the most repugnant Republican, religious, righteous homophobes are very often gay.
After Wilde's death, Bosie converted to Catholicism, renounced homosexuality publicly. He married, had a son (who ended up in mental hospital) & continued his hunt for homosexuals that could be tried & jailed.
Douglas is one of the greatest sonnet writers after Shakespeare, although the form was archaic during his lifetime. The new poets on the scene, T.S. Eliot &Yeats were introducing 20th century poetic freedoms. His most noted poem, written during the time that he was Wilde’s boy toy, was a proclamation that homoerotic love was heroic.
'My name is Love.'
Then straight the first did turn himself to me.
& cried, 'He lieth, for his name is Shame
But I am love & I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy & girl with mutual flame.'
Then sighing said the other, 'Have thy will,
I am the Love that dare not speak its name.'
The Wilde & Douglas entanglement occurred when Wilde was 40 & Douglas was 25. The pair had been spotted around London in cafes & theatres holding hands & kissing. Young Douglas would spend money on even younger boys & gambling & expected Wilde to contribute to his tastes. They often argued & broke up, but would also always ended up back together. Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, was a totally unstable man & a boxing aficionado. The standard boxing rules of the present day are credited to him.
The Marquis was pushed over the edge by reports that his son was being buggered by Wilde. Since libel laws were strict, he could only accuse Wilde of being a sodomite "or pretending to be one." He left a note to Wilde on a tray at his club, making this accusation, spelling sodomite, "somdomite”. Wilde retaliated, suing the man for libel against the advice of his circle, who anticipated that Queensberry's defense would be to prove what he said. The Marquis did just that, providing 4 rent boys to testify against Wilde.
The case was quickly dropped. Then the courts charged Wilde as a sodomite. The very famous Wilde was given a chance to leave the country, but he chose to stay, feeling invulnerable & to look good to Douglas, who left for France when the Wilde trial began & was never implicated. Wilde was sentenced to 2 years hard labor, & left prison a broken man. During the trial, he spoke of the love of one man for another as the highest form of love, not saying that his experiences were sexual. But, the rent boys gave their testimony. During the trial Douglas described Wilde as "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350". Douglas added that he intensely regretted having met Wilde & having helped him with Wilde’s translation of Salome which he described: "a most pernicious & abominable piece of work".
Wilde died a few years after leaving jail. His brother & his wife had passed away before him. Wilde's time was spent miserably, attempting to get funds from friends & fans. While in jail he had written De Profundis, an attack on Douglas & on homosexuality, which he described not as a high form of love but as an insidious disease.
Douglas became a devout Catholic & ferociously turned against everything he had championed. He hated homosexuals, birth control, Jews, & in particular Robert Ross, Wilde's first & most devoted lover, whose ashes were finally interred next to Wilde's.
Douglas made a hobby of initiating lawsuits for libel, using the courts to reinforce his conventionality & make distance from those he considered sinners. In a case brought by Winston Churchill in 1923, Douglas was found guilty of libeling Churchill & was sentenced to 6 months in prison. In his final years, Douglas was poor & alone. From his writing at the end of his life, he did seem to allow himself to make peace with the memory of Wilde. He said in his book- Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up: “Sometimes a sin is also a crime (for example, a murder or theft) but this is not the case with homosexuality, any more than with adultery.” He died in 1945, at 74 years old.
Try 1997's Wilde with openly gay Stephen Fry as Wilde & Yummy Jude Law as Douglas.
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