As the above-mentioned request comes to me not from a follower but indirectly through common responses to the post of a third party – Tumblr communication can be frightfully confusing sometimes – I’m not sure if this will reach its intended audience.  Tagging it thoroughly will hopefully resolve that problem.  This will probably be another of my intolerably long posts, one wherein I (informally) discuss the cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde, simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst things to happen to gay men in British history.  I’ll try to keep the random literary references to a minimum, but as I’m always more comfortable talking about literature than about history some will be unavoidable.  If I do bring up literature I’ll try to stick to Maurice as that was the subject of the common post.

Oscar Wilde is known through his plays, one novel, and multitude of quotable one-liners as the preeminent voice of the “art for art’s sake” decadent movement of the late Victorian period.  However, his more immediate legacy was hardly as glowing.  Though he took the standard bourgeois step of marrying and even having two children, he also had sexual relationships with a large number of men.  His more regular lovers, like Robert Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas, were also members of his intellectual circle, and it was the father of the latter who eventually got Wilde into trouble.  Through a series of multiple court cases in 1895, what began as a libel case against Douglas’s father resulted in Wilde being convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labor.  Abandoned by his family, broke, and effectively exiled in France, he died three years after being released from prison.

If the term “gross indecency” sounds absurdly vague, that’s because such was the intention.  Sodomy (here, anal sex) was punishable by death in Britain until 1861, when the penalty was reduced to life imprisonment.  A piece of legislation in 1885 called the Labouchere Amendment introduced the term gross indecency as a means of prosecuting anything that could broadly be considered as sexual behavior between men in instances where sodomy would be difficult to prove.  Wilde was convicted under this law and received its maximum penalty.  The Amendment was kept in place until 1967, and later punishments were sometimes even worse: computer scientist Alan Turing was infamously chemically castrated, for example.

Though Wilde’s trial obviously had nothing to do with the defining of gross indecency, it aligns with the efforts of early psychologists to define homosexuality (a term that doesn’t appear until the 1860s at the earliest) as a – potentially treatable – mental illness.  The title character of Maurice trying to hypnotize the gay away is fairly tame compared to some other proposed treatments, like electroshock therapy.  Uncomfortable as it is to think of now, though, conceptualizing sexual orientation as a state of being and feeling instead of simply an action did allow, decades later, for it to become a form of positive identification and the basis for a publicly visible community.

Wilde’s unintended contribution to this was the nature of his trial, which was widely publicized and brought considerable attention to the existence of (male) homosexuals to an extent never really seen before in the early modern world.  That newfound visibility, and the broad application of “gross indecency.” made being a gay man in Britain considerably more difficult.  I say “Britain” because, as several of Wilde’s former associates acknowledged by fleeing the country in the wake of his arrest, several other nations were comparatively safer for gay men.  This is why Maurice’s hypnotist suggests that he move to France – France decriminalized sodomy back in 1791.  For those who stayed, though, relationships became much more dangerous.  I believe that this is why the movie version of Maurice has Risley arrested and put on trial, as it provides this historical context for an audience that wouldn’t have needed it when Forster wrote the novel.

In addition, having Wilde’s personal life dragged into the public contributed to cultural perceptions of gay men, for better or worse.  While his works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and is-or-isn’t-it-all-one-big-gay-joke The Importance of Being Earnest are stillwell regarded for being about as subtextually homoerotic as was legally feasible, Wilde and his social circle of equally flamboyant aesthetic decadents are more or less responsible for the exaggerated stereotype of the campy, limp-wristed queen; such caricatures were in existence before the trial, but like everything else the court dragged the flamboyance of his lifestyle before the public eye.  One can only wonder if the sexuality of someone like, say, American poet Walt Whitman had reached a similar level of infamy – imagine the go-to stereotype for gay men being a rugged, bearish masculine man like him instead!

Anyway, I know I’ve gone on longer than even I really intended, so I’ll just run through quickly two more of Wilde’s lasting contributions that I think are culturally interesting.  One is “the love that dare not speak its name,” a euphemism that first appeared in 1894 in one of Douglas’s poems but was later described in considerable (and, at the time, illegal) detail by Wilde during his trial.  He made the explicit connection to Greek pederasty; despite the fact that not all of Wilde’s relationships followed the pederastic model, he held it up as an ideal probably as a way of defending himself on intellectual grounds (i.e. “The Greeks did it, and educated individuals greatly respect their culture and work.  Ergo, it must be acceptable and anyone who disagrees is an uneducated philistine.”).  Bringing up the Greeks likely only made things worse in the long run, as it made this argument untenable and called attention to the reality that ancient Greek models don’t really suffice to describe the feelings of men who want to pursue committed homosexual relationships more in line with modern heterosexual models.  Notably, all that comes up in some form in Maurice, particularly when one compares Maurice and Clive’s relationship to that of Maurice and Alec.

On a final and less damning note, Wilde has helped characterize St. Sebastian as the unofficial patron saint of gay men.  The saint’s martyrdom (tied to a post and shot with arrows) has received multiple homoerotic artistic depictions dating back to the Renaissance, and largely because of this Wilde used the name as a pseudonym during his last years.  As a Catholic myself (and one, moreover, who tends to view religion much as Wilde seemed to – as an element of cultural identification more than as a belief system), I have half-seriously and half-tongue-in-cheek taken St. Sebastian as one of my patron saints.