Posted on 08/27/2005 5:00:27 PM PDT by tbird5
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Making use of hitherto unpublished and unconsulted documents, diaries and letters, this extraordinary book—just published in the United States—also gives a new and revealing portrait of Wilde’s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 The film was based on Richard Ellmann’s admiring, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography—valuable, but now made outdated in many ways by McKenna’s book.
(Excerpt) Read more at inthesetimes.com ...
I love wilde's works. A catholic convert on his death bed. I find this upsetting. Is it tue.
Whitman (then in his 60s, with a flowing, white beard), Wilde wrote that there was “no doubt” about the great American poet’s sexual orientation—”I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,” he boasted. !!!???
However, Oscar Wilde was one of the most humorous writers I ever found.
****
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. -- Wilde
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
"Friends stab you in the front."
LOL........ "True friends stab you in the front."
'It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.'
I love that one.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0010.html
a really great article about the relationship Wilde and some of his contemporaries had with Catholicism. It's a real shame that most current discussion of Wilde doesn't mention this. Wilde's witty deathbed quip "Either the drapes go or I do!" seems to be more well-known than his deathbed conversion. But Wilde was a complicated figure - not fitting neatly into the category of "gay hero" - and to acknowledge that fact certainly ruffles the feathers of some folks today.
The German term Uraniester, or “one who practices Uranian love” in English, predates Ulrichs by decades. The term was in common use in the homosexual underground of Vienna in the early 1800's and stemmed from the Greek muse Urania who was adopted by the homosexuals of that city in that era as their “patron saint”.
The gay German poet Johann Mayrhofer wrote Uranias Flucht (“Urania’s Flight”), a poem that begins with a gay bashing and ends with the bashed couple holding hands in a temple dedicated to the purest same-sex love. (I use the term “pure” here to link it to the ancient Greek sensibilities that Mayrhofer believed in.)
The poem was set to music by the equally gay Franz Schubert in 1817 and is one of his very worst songs. One senses the composer going through the motions here. Either he did not get Mayrhofer’s point or he set it to music to get his lover Mayrhofer off his back. The setting of Uranias Flucht marked the end of Schubert’s relationship with Mayrhofer for some years.
Poverty didn't exist before industry, ya know.
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